Godspeed

by Charles Sheffield

  "I know that better than anyone." Shaker didn't raise his voice, but his tone became more intense. "Hold your distance, Joe Munroe, and listen to me."

  The floor above my head sounded with a sudden clatter of heavy boots. I was in agony. What was going on up there? If only I could see.

  "Think, before you threaten me." It was Danny Shaker again. "Wasn't I the one who said we needed something more than the usual trip out, something profitable enough for us to afford a complete refit? Didn't we all agree on that, long before we left Erin?—back even when Paddy Enderton was aboard with us. Didn't you agree with it, and drink with me to fame and fortune?"

  "You had the golden tongue, and you know it. Promising us fortune, more money and women than we knew what to do with—"

  "Not women, Joe. I never said one word about women. That came from Paddy, and your own ideas about what he'd found. No, what I promised you was simple: triple wages, guaranteed, and a shot at something more valuable than anything on Erin. I said we'd have a shot at the Godspeed Drive."

  "Godspeed Drive!" There was contempt in Joe Munroe's voice, and again Doonan and O'Rourke were muttering in agreement, louder than before. Even without seeing them, I could sense the swing in mood.

  "Aye, you heard me, the Godspeed Drive," Shaker said. He lowered his voice, so I could only just hear him. "You don't understand, even now, what that drive would mean to anyone who had it. All of you, I want you to think about it for a minute. Imagine this: Instead of the poor old Cuchulain, staggering along through space for months at a time, you'd have a ship that could whip across the whole Maveen system in seconds. From Erin to Antrim, like that. "I heard him snap his fingers. "And more than the span of the Forty Worlds. If you couldn't find what you wanted here, you'd be able to take a hop to another star, and find it there. With that sort of power, think about what it would bring to you and me and the rest of the crew. We wouldn't just do well on Erin. We'd control the supply of every rare material. We'd make every other ship in the system obsolete. We'd own the whole Forty Worlds, and everything in them. You talk about wanting women? People would find you women by the hundred—by the thousand—and push them at you, for a sniff at the sort of power we'd have. All of that, and more. It can be ours—it will be ours, once we get to the Godspeed Base. That's my goal now, as it has been all along: Find Godspeed Base, and lay our hands on a ship with the Godspeed Drive."

  I thought it was a great speech, but it didn't work.

  "Which we'll never do." It was a new voice, and so wheezy and throaty it could only be Robert Doonan. "I don't know where it is and what it is, this hellhole you dragged us to, but I know one thing. It's no more your damned 'Godspeed Base' than I'm the Skibbereen Whore. As for that rotten kid, the one who gave us the coordinates to come here and has had us running all over in the rain and mud for the past two days until we're ready to drop . . . if ever I set eyes on him again, I'll slit his skinny throat."

  Doonan stopped, but only to start coughing.

  "I hate to say this, but Joe and Robbie are right." It was Pat O'Rourke, his deep voice rumbling. "This can't be the Godspeed Base. Couldn't ever have been. We've been talking, the three of us, and we agree you've done us wrong. It's time for a change. A change of leader."

  There was a long silence. I strained my ears, and heard no more than air pumps and the background hum of electrical equipment.

  Something was going to happen, I just knew it. But what?

  "So it's come to that, has it?" said Danny Shaker at last.

  "It has," Pat O'Rourke replied, and the other two murmured assent.

  "Well, I'll tell you something, Pat. I'm not a man to stay where he's not wanted. We'll go on back to the Cuchulain, and you and the rest can pick your own chief. But while we're doing that, I'm going to give all of you a few things to stew on. First, I never said this had to be Godspeed Base. Think back, and you'll recall what I did say. This was a place that we had to go to, because it could lead us to find the Godspeed Drive. It was, and if we just keep going, I say it will. Second, you'd better decide who's going to do the hard thinking for you when it's not my responsibility."

  "We'll manage." But Munroe didn't sound too confident.

  "You will? Then start with this one, Joe Munroe. You've been looking for a world full of women, a place to make you all rich. How? You'll have your fun with any women you find, that I believe. But women can't make you rich if you leave them out here in the Maze. Are you proposing to ship a load of them away on the Cuchulain ?—you, who was the first to say that even one woman on board brought nothing but bad luck. No? What, then? Are you proposing to set up some sort of pleasure camp out here in the middle of nowhere, where other ships will come for a bit of bought fun? I could organize that sort of thing, yes, and make it work. But are you sure that you could? Just how are you going to become rich? I can answer that question, and see a dozen ways to turn women in the Maze into real wealth on Erin. But can you, Joe?"

  There was a long silence, until finally Danny Shaker continued: "And even that's not the whole story. You see, there's something else you don't know, something that happened when you were off on this last run around on the surface—a chase, you'll remember, that I told you before you left was going to be a big waste of time and effort. I walked a little way to see what conditions on the ground were like, but I stayed close to the ship. And guess who was waiting here for me when I got back."

  I heard Shaker's footsteps approaching. The hatch above my head was suddenly lifted, and Danny Shaker's face appeared in the opening. "Come on out, Jay," he said. "There's a few people who'd like to talk to you."

  * * *

  The way the crewmen reacted to my appearance, I thought I was going to be murdered on the spot. Only surprise kept them fixed where they stood.

  "Jay's been down there cleaning up the lower hold," Shaker said. "Everybody's favorite job." And then to me. "Here. Show the lads this, and tell them what you told me."

  He was holding out the navigation aid. I took it with hands that trembled.

  "This world," I said. "Paddy's Fortune—it isn't Godspeed Base, and there's no Godspeed Drive here. But you have to come here first, because this"—I held out the navaid—"gives directions as to how to get to the real Godspeed Base from here. If we hadn't come here first, we wouldn't know where to go next."

  What I said was true, and I prayed they would not ask for too many details. Danny Shaker made sure of that.

  "And now tell us all why you're here at the beetle, Jay," he said. "Explain why you came to see me."

  I turned to face Joe Munroe, Robert Doonan, and Patrick O'Rourke. They towered over me, every one of them. What I was going to say sounded preposterous, but I had no choice. I had to assume that Danny Shaker knew what he was doing.

  "I want to join Captain Shaker and the rest of you," I said. "I know I'm young, but every one of you started young. I'm tired of being told what to do every minute of the day by Eileen Xavier, and I'm tired of being treated like a kid. I'm not a kid. I'm sixteen years old. I know how to work this"—I turned on the navaid, set up to show as a sample a shimmering three-dimensional display of the Maze—"and no one else does, in Doctor Xavier's group or in yours. I can be useful, and I'm willing to work hard on anything that Captain Shaker tells me to do."

  "Or he would have been," Shaker said softly. He was not talking to me at all. "Except that you lads will have a new chief, as soon as you get back to the Cuchulain. I don't know if Jay Hara will feel the same about working for him." He stared around vaguely, then headed for a seat by the control panel. "Well, that's going to be your problem," he said as he settled down. "That, and deciding how any women you do happen to find will give you more profit than an hour's fun. Me, I'll go back to being a simple crewman, and glad to do it. There's nothing takes the heart out of a man more than doing his level best for everybody, and then being spit on by the same people he was trying to help."

  I couldn't believe he could be so relaxed, because the anger on the f
aces of Pat O'Rourke and Robbie Doonan had to be obvious to anyone. Then I saw that they were glaring not at Shaker, but at Joseph Munroe.

  "There, Joe Munroe," said Pat O'Rourke. "Now you've done it. Didn't I warn you we might be going off half-cocked? Do you think you're the man that can lead us all to fortune? Because if you do, I'll tell you something: It'll be a cold day on Tyrone before Patrick O'Rourke will follow you."

  "I never said I'd be leader." Munroe was as nervous as he was angry. "Robbie, you can vouch for that. All I said was we needed a change. And that was before we heard all this from the chief." He turned to Shaker. "You can see it from our point of view, can't you? We didn't have all the facts you had, all we knew was, we seemed to be going nowhere. Now we've heard the plan, everything's different."

  "Not different from where I'm sitting." Shaker had his back to the other three. "I've heard my competence questioned—aye, and had a gun raised against me, when everyone here knows I'm a man who never carries a weapon."

  "Joe didn't mean it, Chief." Pat O'Rourke moved around the cabin, so he could see Danny Shaker face to face. "He was just being hasty. You've said yourself that's his biggest fault."

  "And one I admit to," said Joe Munroe. "I'd never have fired that gun, Chief, you know that. If you could find a way to forget it, and all we said about needing a change—"

  "I can't. I told you, go find somebody else to do the worrying."

  "There's nobody else," Robert Doonan wheezed. "An' it's worse than that, Chief. If we go back and tell the others on the Cuchulain what we did to you, they'll stuff us out the airlock."

  Danny Shaker was leaning back in his chair, arms folded, staring up at Pat O'Rourke. "Tough. You should have thought of all that before you started. But I'm a reasonable man. I can't forget what's happened, but I'm willing to give it one more go. Only I'll tell you something: If I stay on as chief, there'll be no more threats of violence to me. And I'll not stand any talk of cutting Jay's throat, either. He's the one who gives us our best shot at something more than we've ever had, the Godspeed Drive, and he wants to come over to our side. I'm saying I've accepted him as one of ours. You three had better do the same."

  There was a general murmur of agreement and relief. "I'm sorry, Jay Hara," said Joe Munroe—a more insincere apology I never heard. "Sorry about what I said. You're crew now, as good as the rest of us. If I can help you with anything, let me know."

  "For a start, you fellows can show him how to pilot this beetle," Danny Shaker said. "He's been itching to have a go since first he set eyes on one. Pat, why don't you sit here and give him a bit of a runthrough on the controls. And while you're doing that, I'm going to send a message to the Cuchulain. We need a meeting with Doctor Xavier, and I'd rather have it up there than down here."

  He grinned at me. "Time you learned to fly, Jay, if you're going to be a spacer. Ready for a lesson?"

  I nodded. But it occurred to me that I had just had a lesson, and one more important than flying a cargo beetle.

  CHAPTER 22

  I had my spaceflight lesson while we were still on the surface of Paddy's Fortune: a short one, and more theory than practice, but enough to convince me that Mel and I could have been in space for days before we reached the Cuchulain. The cargo beetle in the hands of Danny Shaker or Pat O'Rourke seemed trivially easy to fly. It was anything but. Half the computer and navigational aids shown on the control panel were actually missing or out of action. When it had been a choice of cannibalizing equipment for the Cuchulain or for the beetles, the big ship had won every time.

  Pat O'Rourke showed me the basics for seat-of-the-pants navigation and flight without instruments. I would like to have continued at the beetle controls, but once Danny Shaker finished his conversation with Eileen Xavier he wanted a rapid passage back to the Cuchulain. At the time I thought it was their talk that provided the urge for speed. Later, I decided that a stronger motive was probably Shaker's lack of confidence in Mel. He didn't know her well, but he was certain of one thing: She had to sit in the dark until the beetle was safely docked at the Cuchulain and we had a chance to smuggle her aboard.

  I wondered what would happen to Danny Shaker if Mel were discovered by one of the crew members. Then it became obvious. Shaker would tell them that I had brought her aboard, unknown to him, while he was away from the ship. Whether the crew were angry or not, he would not be blamed.

  I was ordered out of the pilot's chair before liftoff and left reluctantly, convinced that now I really knew how to fly a cargo beetle. I was desperate to prove as much to Shaker and O'Rourke, but I was not offered the chance.

  There was nothing else for me to do until we reached the Cuchulain, and I retreated to an out-of-the-way spot near the cabin wall. After a few minutes I reached in my pocket for the book I had taken from Walter Hamilton's body. I had been carrying it around all this time, but without much thought as to what was in it.

  I was not much better informed after half an hour of leafing through the electronic pages. I had not realized that the little book had such enormous storage, and without a road map I was pretty much hunting blind. The first two thousand pages were the result of Hamilton's patient screening of every available record, on Erin or off it, for references to the Isolation. A global data search showed me that the Godspeed Drive was mentioned dozens of times, but never in solid detail. No one who made the old records had ever actually seen the drive. What did emerge from my rummaging, clearly and directly enough to horrify me, was the devastating effect that the Isolation had produced on Erin. Walter Hamilton in his search had visited hundreds of deserted towns and villages across the planet, looking for old records. Once each had been a thriving settlement. Now most of them were derelict ruins. The population of Erin had once been more than a billion people. Today it was one thirtieth of that, and shrinking.

  I wondered about the drive that powered the Cuchulain. It was clearly not a Godspeed Drive, although according to Danny Shaker it dated back to before the Isolation. I did a general search on the word, "drive," and was offered a dozen different varieties. Apparently there were cargo drives, planet-to-orbit drives, ship drives rated for humans, hundred-gee drives for urgent unmanned shipment only, low-gee drives for bulk cargo, and a perplexingly named "Slowdrive." The last one was described as experimental and unique to the Maveen system, but it was hard for me to see why anyone might find a use for something that went especially slow. The electronic book also offered three-D images of the Slowdrive. As I rotated them they outlined a round-cornered cube, a little bit flattened, with underneath it a set of rings of different sizes, placed one above the other so that they formed a blunt cone with its thick end attached to the cube. The written description of the drive was beyond me. I tagged the whole "Slowdrive" entry with a high-level pointer, to draw my attention to it again when I had more time, and glanced over to the control panel.

  We would dock at the Cuchulain in a few more minutes—and I would have a meeting with Doctor Eileen that I would rather not think about.

  I skipped to the last part of the record. Walter Hamilton had swallowed his initial disappointment on arriving at Paddy's Fortune, although he had rejected it at once as a possible site for Godspeed Base. I could almost hear his disdainful sniff as he plowed through the head-high vegetation. But then the scientist had taken over, and in spite of himself he had become fascinated by the biology of the worldlet. Before he died, it was quite apparent to Dr. Hamilton that not only was the world itself an artifact, but the present ecology must be sustained by something other than a natural biological balance.

  In another half day he would have been thinking in terms of access to the interior of Paddy's Fortune and the control mechanisms that ran the little world. If Sean Wilgus had not been such a bloodthirsty fool, Walter Hamilton might have led the crew to what they were seeking.

  I closed the book. The right person to have this was not me, it was Jim Swift. He was also the logical person for the new navaid, because of the data on the Godspeed Drive
that the controller had loaded onto it. The problem was that without help from Mel neither I nor Jim Swift might be able to read those data.

  I hoped I wouldn't be there when Jim was told what had happened to Walter Hamilton. He had described Hamilton as pompous and conceited, but all the same the two had been friends for many years. I found myself thinking that it simplified matters that the person who had killed Walter Hamilton was himself dead. Was that how real spacers dismissed a killer's death, as natural vengeance?

  We were docking at the Cuchulain, and the automatic procedures from the mother ship had already taken over. I felt a series of unsettling changes of direction. Danny Shaker seemed immune to them as he walked across to where I was sitting.

  "I told the crew that I'd be showing you how to lock the beetle in hull storage. So we'll be the last ones off. I'll also be giving you bigger than usual quarters, until you get used to living spacer-style."

  There was no wink or change of facial expression, but I knew exactly what he was saying. As soon as the others were gone he and I would smuggle Mel Fury aboard. Mel would occupy the same quarters as me, and it would be my job to make sure she was not discovered until we had a plausible reason for a passenger's presence—or until we had found a Godspeed Drive. After that, the crew of the Cuchulain would be so exultant they would not care if Danny Shaker had on board a hundred passengers.

  Like everything that Danny Shaker did, the docking and crew disembarkation went without a hitch. As soon as Pat O'Rourke, the last to leave, had gone, Shaker glanced across to me. "Time to get Mel out, and safe into quarters. I'll go and bring her. By the way, I hope she has no special food requirements?"

  "No, she eats whatever we—" I stopped in horror. "How did you know?" Danny Shaker frowned down at the deck. "You should ask, when did I know. That's a harder question to answer. The first hint was when you had been outside on the surface, and I kept Mel in the beetle with me. I asked you when you came back what you had learned inside Paddy's Fortune. You didn't know what Mel had said, and you were so keen to avoid that question, you pulled out the navigation aid right away and told me all about the Net and the hardware reservoir. That struck me as a desperate act. You had something to hide. Mel had admitted that there were females inside Paddy's Fortune. Yet when I told you I was going to discuss later what Paddy's Fortune contained, you never once asked me to do it. I could tell from your face that you didn't want to hear about it. I started thinking, female, and after that there were a dozen clues."