Godspeed

by Charles Sheffield

  With Doctor Eileen off to visit Paddy's Fortune, and the ship's crew busy at their own work, I was left with nothing to do. For the first few hours I didn't mind that at all. I took out the little calculator/display unit that had belonged to Paddy Enderton, and I tried to find out more about how it worked. It was something I had been wanting to do for weeks, but I hadn't dared, because Doctor Eileen believed that the unit was back home at our house by Lake Sheelin.

  I hadn't exactly lied to anyone. When we left, Mother had packed my bag for me. She didn't include the calculator, though I knew that she and Doctor Eileen had talked about it. I didn't believe that she had left it out by accident, but at the last moment, when everyone was ready to leave, I nipped upstairs and slipped the little plastic wafer into my pocket.

  I told myself that no one had actually told me not to take it with me; on the other hand, I felt uneasy enough about what I had done that I left the unit hidden away, all through our trip out to the Maze.

  Now that Doctor Eileen and the others from Erin were finally out of the way, I sat down at the table in our living quarters and started work. What I was after was more information about Paddy's Fortune. When I had asked for information at the Second Data Level before, nothing had appeared on the display. The assumption we had made then was that it was blank because nothing more was stored about Paddy's Fortune, and the data bank contained only its coordinate set. But suppose that was wrong. Suppose Paddy Enderton had deliberately hidden additional information about the mysterious worldlet that was supposed to make his fortune? What a coup it would be if I, sitting back aboard the Cuchulain, could come up with more information about Paddy's Fortune than Doctor Eileen, Jim Swift, and the others, over exploring the planetoid itself.

  Pure wishful thinking, I guess, because if Paddy Enderton had stored other data about his worldlet in the little unit he had done it too cleverly for me. After three or four hours that got me nowhere, I was frustrated and irritated. I turned the unit off, hid it away in my pocket, and left our living quarters. I went wandering away along the length of the Cuchulain, heading toward the cargo hold but with my mind still on the little calculator unit. Where had it come from?

  Paddy Enderton, according to Doctor Eileen, had never visited Paddy's Fortune. Also, according to the doctor, the calculator could not have been made anywhere in the Forty Worlds. That left a real mystery: How had the gadget come into Paddy Enderton's hands?

  It was while I was chewing on that problem, and getting nowhere, that I noticed one of the bulkhead doors, halfway along the cargo column, standing a few inches ajar.

  According to everything that I had been told about shipboard procedures, it was an unforgivable sin for anyone to leave those doors open. They divided the ship into a number of airtight compartments. This limited the damage that could be done by a seal failure, anywhere in the whole structure, to a loss of air in a single part.

  I closed the bulkhead door, carefully dogged it to, and hurried along to check the rest of the cargo column. Everything was in order, all the way to the drive unit. The drive was switched off, because the Cuchulain had been placed in a free-fall orbit that matched the orbit of Paddy's Fortune. I took a few minutes for another inspection of the drive. In spite of all the maintenance work that had been done on it there was a used, battered look to the equipment. How long did Danny Shaker say it had been in continuous use?

  A couple of centuries, at least. So how much longer would it last? Long enough, I hoped, for us to complete our journey.

  And with that thought I became aware of a violent knocking, back along the cargo column. I hurried that way. Before I was halfway there I knew that the sound was coming from the bulkhead door that I had closed.

  I slipped the latch and waited, afraid of what would happen next. Sure enough, the door banged wide and Patrick O'Rourke popped out. He was wearing a suit with its helmet open, and his face was an angry red.

  He glared at me. "Did you do that?"

  It was tempting to play innocent, but I knew it wouldn't work—there was no one else around.

  "The bulkhead was open—I was told it always had to be kept closed. . . ."

  "It never occurred to you that at the end of every long trip, a systematic check is made on all seals? To do that, you have to leave them open, one after another. It's a long job. We were halfway through, and now the whole thing has to be started over. Hours of work. You stupid—stupid—" He stared at me pop-eyed, searching for the worst insult he could think of. "You stupid child. Well, you'll not cause us any more trouble today."

  He grabbed me by one arm and the back of my neck, hard enough to hurt, and pushed me along in front of him.

  "Stop it," I complained. "You don't have to do that, I can walk for myself. Let go of me!"

  But he didn't, not until we were at the living quarters that Doctor Eileen and I and the rest of us from Erin had been assigned. Then O'Rourke opened the door and threw me inside. "Get in and stay in," he shouted after me. "For your own sake. I'm going to have to explain to the chief why my whole maintenance crew is three hours behind in their work. And let me tell you, he's not going to like that one bit."

  The door slammed shut, and was locked from the outside. I rubbed at my neck—O'Rourke had left bruises there. For maybe two minutes I worried about what I had done, and what would be said to Danny Shaker.

  Then I started to feel angry. I couldn't be expected to know about ship's maintenance, or what was done at the end of each trip. So far as I could see, I had behaved perfectly responsibly. The bulkhead had been open, when it wasn't supposed to be. I had closed it, like a safety-conscious passenger—and been blamed, instead of praised.

  I went to the door and hammered at it. A couple of minutes of that was enough to convince me that it was pointless. O'Rourke and his crew were far away along the cargo column, and no one else had any reason to come to our quarters, not when Doctor Eileen and the others were away on Paddy's Fortune.

  I was stuck, until Patrick O'Rourke took it into his head to come along and let me out. From the look of him when he left, that could be many hours.

  I went back to the table and took Paddy Enderton's calculator out of my pocket. But in my irritated and impatient mood working on it appealed even less to me now than when I had left. I put it away again and went wandering around the living quarters. After a few minutes I crouched down next to one of the air duct panels.

  No one on board the Cuchulain could really be locked up. There had to be emergency routes, ready in case the usual ways were blocked. To escape from our living quarters, all I had to do was remove the grille, crawl along an air duct until I reached a point outside the locked region, and push my way out past another air grille.

  Which was, I decided, exactly what I was going to do. I would find Danny Shaker and give him my version of events, to balance out whatever it might be that Patrick O'Rourke was going to tell him.

  I pulled the air grille away from the wall, lay flat, and peered inside. The passageway was about two feet across: big enough for any but the fattest crew member, and high enough for me to crawl along comfortably on my hands and knees. I started out. The duct was cool and pleasant, with fresh air sighing past me as I crawled.

  In less than a minute I had gone far enough to put our living quarters well behind me. Grilles, placed along the wall of the duct every ten yards or so, made sure that I could get out any time I chose. I peered through one. I saw a groundhog's view of a deserted companionway.

  This is where there may be some truth to Mother's saying about the devil and idle hands. I still had nothing to do. It occurred to me that hidden away in the air duct system as I was I could see and not be seen, and hear but not be heard. If I wriggled my way along to Danny Shaker's cabin I might be able to hear whatever Patrick O'Rourke was going to accuse me of doing. When the time came for me to refute what he said I would be ready, point by point.

  It was not easy to judge distances, crawling along as I was in a darkness relieved only by light
scattering in through the air grilles. On the other hand, I could hardly go in the wrong direction. All the crew quarters lay in the same part of the ship, aft of ours. I went that way, taking my time, and pausing every now and then to take a peek out through a grille.

  After a while I knew I was getting close. I could hear voices just ahead. A little farther, sneaking along cautious on my hands and knees, and I could identify them: Connor Bryan and Rory O'Donovan. Two of the general crew and, in my humble opinion, far from the smartest people on the ship.

  In another few seconds I could see them, or at least I could see their legs. They were sitting close together, and they were talking, but not about me or Paddy's Fortune or the Godspeed Drive.

  "Big and fat and pale-skinned," Connor Bryan was saying. "Big chest, big belly, big hips. None of your stick figures for me. I want something blond and buxom and wide enough to wallow in."

  O'Donovan laughed. "That's all right, then, we won't be competing. Give me red hair, nice and slim, with smooth hips and long legs. Sort of like the one we'd have had in that house by the lake—except we had to leave before we could even get started."

  "She wasn't bad. But she was old. Older than me, for a bet. I want something young."

  "She wasn't old. She was middling. Middling can be better—if it comes with lots of experience."

  They were silent for a moment. "But they won't have experience, any of them," Connor Bryan said at last. "If it's nothing but women, with never a man to share out among them for a century, how can any of them have any experience at all?"

  "Dunno," said O'Donovan. "I guess you and me will have to teach 'em." They both laughed, then O'Donovan added in a quieter voice. "If any of it is real."

  "Paddy Enderton was sure of it."

  "Aye, and look what pleasure it brought Black Paddy. Running for his life at the end, then stiff and staring. I wonder if he was lying about everything. It's hard to believe, thousands of women and no men. Sounds like a fairy tale."

  "Doesn't it, though? But we'll find out soon enough. Come on."

  I hadn't taken much notice of the last few sentences, because at the words "Paddy Enderton" I had jerked up and banged my head on the duct ceiling. Fortunately they didn't notice. Connor Bryan was standing up and saying, "Let's go see the chief. He's supposed to be getting reports back soon."

  As they left the room I turned myself so that I could sit crosslegged. Paddy Enderton! They had said the name, when they were not supposed to have heard of him. And they knew that he was dead. Suddenly I realized who that "middling old" red-haired woman might be.

  But all the other talk of women made absolutely no sense. We were billions of miles away from Erin and women. Also, there had been never a word said between Bryan and O'Donovan about Godspeed Base, although that was the whole point of our journey to Paddy's Fortune.

  Maybe the wise thing would have been to head back to our living quarters at that point, and ponder what I had heard. But from their talk it was quite clear that they were going to a meeting with Danny Shaker, and something new about Paddy's Fortune was likely to come from it.

  I examined my palms (grimy), rubbed my knees (a bit chafed, after all the crawling), and pressed on through the air duct system.

  Finding a particular cabin or chamber was much harder than just crawling in one direction. The ducts divided from time to time, and I didn't know which branch to follow. I seemed to go on scrambling around forever, to and fro in the darkness, and after half an hour or so I was tired. I stopped and took a rest. I was ready to give up. That's when I heard faint voices somewhere ahead of me.

  I crawled forward, reached one more branch point, and took the duct in the direction of the sound.

  Even before I got there I could tell that an argument was going on. Voices were raised, and people were interrupting each other.

  "—at the place. What more do we need? We should be down there, not them."

  I recognized the voice. It was Sean Wilgus, a slim, sly-faced man who was unpopular because he acted as though he was superior to everyone. But now there was a murmur of agreement.

  "I have to second that." It sounded like Patrick O'Rourke. "You said, be patient. But we have been patient. And now we're here. What more is there to be patient about?"

  "You've got it backwards." It was Danny Shaker, calm and reasonable-sounding as ever. "You tell me what the rush is. We're not going anywhere. They can't go anywhere without us."

  "So what?" Sean Wilgus again. "They've served their purpose. We don't need them, we haven't needed them since the second day out, when she told you the destination. I agree with Joe, we should have dumped them out the lock right then and there."

  "Right," Danny Shaker said. "Very intelligent. We let them all breathe space, and then when we get to the coordinates she gave us, we find that she held back a little bit of information, and we're sitting in the middle of nowhere with no idea what to do next. It's not like you to be so trusting, Sean. She's old, but she's nobody's fool. Until we actually got here, there was no guarantee she wasn't playing her own game."

  "But we did get here." That was Joe Munroe, surly as always. "After we arrived there was no reason to wait one minute more. But still you insisted we do nothing. You let them go down and explore the woman-world, instead of us. Why?"

  "Use your brain, Joe," Shaker said. "You have it backwards. You should ask, why not let them explore? They're not expecting to find women down there, I told you that. So if they do, they'll surely call back here and tell us. And then we'll act."

  "Maybe we will. And maybe not. Maybe some people here are getting soft."

  There was a dead silence on the other side of the partition. I peered through the grille, but I could see little. The last speaker had been Joe Munroe. From the way that Danny Shaker's voice varied, I knew that he was on his feet and pacing about, as he often did in conversation.

  "Are you by any chance referring to me, Joe?" he said at last. "You ought to know better. I don't shy away from necessary death. But if they don't find what we want—if there's nothing interesting or valuable down there—why, then, we'd be fools to kill anyone. We'll take them back to Erin, get triple pay for winter work like a good, dutiful crew, and go our way."

  "That may be all right for you," Sean Wilgus said. "You've got your own tastes and preferences. You and that bloody boy, you ought to form a mutual admiration society. But what about the rest of us? You drag us away from the women on Erin, with Paddy Enderton's promise of thousands. And now you keep us away from them. We could all be down there. We could maybe be having a woman apiece, this very minute."

  "Ah, Sean Wilgus," Shaker said softly. "I don't like to hear that sort of thing from you. 'Your own tastes and preferences,' indeed. That kind of remark doesn't do you justice. It's a good thing I'm so fond of you, or I might feel tempted to do something about it. But you know I love you—love you as much as if you were my own dear brother."

  There was a deadly silence. All movement in the room ceased.

  "No, Chief." Wilgus's voice rose an octave. "I'm sorry. I misspoke. All I meant was, I wish I could be down there exploring the woman-world—we all feel that way. But I'm not questioning your judgment. None of us are. We never would. Right?"

  There was a mutter of assent.

  "Well, that's good to know." Danny Shaker laughed. He sounded very close. "Because, you see, I'm going to exercise my judgment again, right now, and it's nice to know you won't question it. If you hadn't given me that assurance, Sean, I think maybe you'd want to act differently when I show you—this."

  Before I knew what was happening the grille in front of me was whisked away. A hand reached in, grabbed me by the hair, and hauled me through into the control room.

  "You see, men," Danny Shaker moved his grip to my arms, and pulled me forward to the middle of the group. "When you get right down to it, most things are a question of judgment. So here's a judgment test for you. Suppose that you find a little surprise like this in the air duct system."
>
  He glanced at me and shook his head. "Jay, I told you that you'll make a first-rate spacer, and I stick with that evaluation. But you have to learn a few things first. For example, there's nothing on a ship more important than the air supply system. Anything that changes the air flow pattern, like a foreign body in the duct system, will flag an alarm on the control board, even if it's not dangerous." He gestured to the banks of displays on one wall of the room. "Maybe no one else noticed, but I've been tracking you for an hour."

  He turned back to the watching circle of men. "So, as I say, you find this little surprise, and you ask, how much did he hear? We can't be sure. So what do we do with him?"

  No one spoke. But I looked from face to face, and saw murder on every one.

  So must have Danny Shaker, because he laughed again and said, "Out of the lock, eh, for a bracing whiff of vacuum? Let's think about that for a moment. Suppose we dump him, which is a natural temptation. Then it's no more Jay Hara. And good riddance, you might say.

  "But wait a minute. Once Jay is dead, there's no bringing him back. Now, maybe you can think of cases where a man might be more useful dead than alive—I certainly can. . . ."

  He stood up straight with his arms crossed, absent-mindedly kneading his biceps through his spacer's jacket. There was a kind of group flinch, as everyone around him winced and drew back.

  "But we'll all admit that's a rare event," Shaker went on. "A dead Jay Hara is probably worth nothing to anyone. But a live Jay Hara is a valuable item in negotiation. Why do you think I wanted him here with us, when the others went exploring? What negotiation, you ask me? I don't know, I reply. But since there's no risk in keeping him alive, I'll take the possible value of a live something over the guaranteed zero value of a dead one." Shaker glanced around him. "Now, is there anyone who would like to debate my analysis? Or relate it in any way to my tastes and preferences?"

  There was not a word, not even a murmur of assent.