"Look at the star field," Mel said suddenly. "Should it be doing that?"
The Godspeed ship was not moving. But around it, like bright points on some great wheel, the whole backdrop of stars was turning. As we watched, the rotating pattern began to shrink in toward the central axis, to where the ship sat like the quiet eye of a giant whirlpool.
"Inertial frame dragging," Jim Swift said. "And strong space-time curvature. If that effect keeps increasing—"
It did not. The star field blinked back to normal. And in that instant the Godspeed ship was gone. It did not accelerate away, out of our field of view. It did not move, or flicker, or fade. It vanished.
"The Godspeed Drive," Jim Swift said softly. "I've waited all my adult life to see that. But I was wrong about one thing. I was afraid that tapping the vacuum energy would have a permanent effect on space-time structure. Apparently it does not. There's been enough time since the Isolation for an adjustment to take place. We can have—"
I never did learn what we could have, because at that moment Mel screamed and every display in the control room blazed with light. A multicolor pinwheel flared into existence at the place where the Godspeed ship had stood. It grew, in size and intensity, until it filled the screens. Automatic dimmers came into operation, but the intensity of light grew faster than they could adjust. The screens went into overload and darkened in unison.
A moment later, all the lights on the bridge of the Cuchulain went out. I waited in shivering darkness, and felt a wave of nausea sweep over me. Through me. Some force was passing within my body, squeezing and wrenching and twisting and pulling. A moment earlier I had been in free-fall. Now I was hanging in a gravity field that changed direction every split second—up was over my head, then under my feet, now off to one side or another. All around me, loose furnishings flew away to clatter against the walls of the control room. The struts and hull plates of the Cuchulain groaned and whined under intolerable pressures.
If it was terrifying for me, it may have been worse for Jim Swift. I had no idea what was happening, while he knew in detail. And when things finally settled down, my own relief was all personal—it simply meant the end of an awful, head-spinning vertigo.
The control room remained dark, until one by one the overloaded displays crept back into operation. The bridge became lit by faint starlight, enough for me to make out the shapes of the other three people in the room. Mel was clinging white-knuckle tight to Eileen Xavier, while Jim Swift floated upside-down near them.
"What in God's name was that?" It was Doctor Eileen, sounding as queasy as I felt. There is no way of describing what it is like to have some unknown force manipulating the inside of your body.
"Call it space-time's revenge." Jim Swift reached out and grabbed the cabin wall, slowly turning himself until he was the same way up as the rest of us. "That's what I was afraid of. That's what I tried to warn them about—and no one would listen."
"You mean that every time anyone ever used the Godspeed Drive, a region of space near it was affected like that?" I said.
"No, I don't think so. That's what happens now, and has ever since the Isolation. But once it wasn't so. This means that the Godspeed Drive can't be used. Maybe can't be used ever again."
"But they just used it." Mel released her hold on Doctor Eileen and seemed unaware of the death grip she had taken. Doctor Eileen began rubbing ruefully at her upper arm as Mel gestured to where the Godspeed ship had been floating a couple of minutes earlier. "We saw them use it," she said.
"We sure did." Jim Swift nodded, and winced as he moved his head. "Do you know where they were planning to go?"
"On a trial run," I said. "Maybe to Erin." For Mel's sake, I didn't add that the second stop would be Paddy's Fortune.
"Erin can't be much more than a light-hour away." Jim carefully touched the end of his nose, and winced again. "A one-light-hour trip is nothing for a Godspeed Drive. But I'll bet my life that if they set off for Erin, they haven't arrived there. In fact, I'll bet that they never arrive."
"Then where are they?" asked Doctor Eileen. I saw bewilderment on her face.
"That's the great question of my life." Jim Swift groped his way forward and sat down in the pilot's chair. "I could say, they're in the same place as anyone else who used the Godspeed Drive at the time of the Isolation or since. But that's not much of an answer."
"It's no answer at all," I said. The control room was overheated, but I had the shivers. If Danny Shaker and his killer crew had not flown to Erin . . . "Do you mean the Godspeed ship is still around here somewhere, but we just can't see it?"
"Easy, Jay," said Doctor Eileen. "We're all nervous."
And Jim Swift added, in a curiously satisfied voice, "Easy, all of us. Sit down, and I'll tell you what I think, and what I know—less of that than I'd like, I'm afraid."
Eileen Xavier sat down. After a few moments, Mel and I followed her lead.
"I wish Walter Hamilton were here to start this off," Jim went on, "because some of what I have to say comes from him, and I don't know how much of that was guesswork. It starts all the way back. Back before the Isolation, before there was a Godspeed Drive. Humans had been spreading through the galaxy, out across the stars. But they'd been doing it slowly, on ships that couldn't even get close to light speed. We don't know much about the first colonists of Maveen and the Forty Worlds, but Walter believed that they came to Erin on a multigeneration, culturally homogeneous starship. He claimed to be able to trace most of our place names and family names to a single small region of the original home of human beings.
"I can't vouch for that, but I do feel sure that the old star travelers did it the hard way, creeping out slowly, star after star, planet after planet. Humanity explored and developed and colonized that way for thousands and thousands of years. Nobody in the Forty Worlds knows how long that went on. Then somewhere, sometime, an unknown young genius discovered the Godspeed Drive."
"Genius, yes." Doctor Eileen frowned. "But young genius?"
"Yeah." Jim Swift smiled, a bruised, lopsided grin. Battered or not, it didn't take him long to become cocky again. "A young genius, and one who either died young, or wasn't listened to much after the invention was made. How do I know? Easy. Anyone who makes a huge breakthrough like the Godspeed Drive is going to be young, not old. Great discoveries come from people who aren't stuck in an old mindset. And I don't think the inventor was listened to, because any person bright enough to invent the drive would also be bright enough to understand the possible consequences when it was used.
"The Godspeed Drive seems like a perfect something-for-nothing device, the ultimate free dinner. But that's an illusion. You saw how small the drive unit was in the Godspeed ship that we found. Not a hundredth the size of the Cuchulain's engines, but with enough power to toss a ship from star to star.
"So where does the power come from? There was no energy source on the Godspeed ship.
"Well, I tried to explain it to Alan Kiernan and the rest of those numbskulls. The Godspeed Drive taps the vacuum energy of space-time, to create a bridge from one place to another. There's a huge amount of energy available, but the supply isn't infinite. And it's not like pumping water from a well, where you have some warning before it runs dry because less and less water comes out and it gets harder and harder to pump. This is more like a solid stone bridge. You can run loads over it for years with never a hint that the bridge is under stress. Until one day, without any warning, the whole thing collapses.
"That's what happened with the Godspeed Drive—except that I suspect we're talking not just years of use, but many, many centuries. A period so long that people came to rely on it completely. They forgot that the Godspeed Drive might have its limits. They no longer kept old, slow, multigeneration ships as back-up.
"Then one day the bridge broke. The vacuum energy drawdown passed a critical level. The Godspeed Drive failed, all at once and everywhere. Any ship that tried to cross the bridge fell off into the water."
&
nbsp; "Water?" I said. He had lost me.
"Sorry. That was just a figure of speech. The Godspeed Drive formed a bridge through space-time, a short route from one place to another. And when that bridge collapsed, a ship that tried to use it fell out of space-time itself."
Apparently he had lost Mel, too. "Fell out of space-time," she said. "How can you fall out of space-time? There's nowhere to fall to."
"I know. But I can't give you a better description. Let's just say, the ships left our universe, and went somewhere, beyond the universe we can perceive."
"But it still doesn't make sense," I complained. "I mean, suppose that the drive suddenly stopped working, the way that you say. Every ship with a Godspeed Drive wouldn't try to fly on that same day. There would be lots of ships left."
"Of course there would. But you see, this wasn't a bridge you could look at, and say, hey, it's damaged, or hey, it's vanished. No one would know that the bridge had gone. If they were too close when a Godspeed ship tried to make an interstellar jump, they could have been destroyed the way we were nearly destroyed a few minutes ago. But if people weren't too close, all they would know was that the Godspeed ship had vanished. And that was normal. The ships always vanished when they made a jump. Of course, it would be obvious that there was a problem to the people at the other end, when a Godspeed ship failed to arrive. But if that happened in your system it would just encourage you to send out a Godspeed ship of your own, to learn what the problem was at the other end.
"After a while there were no ships left to send. Every stellar system became isolated. Then you had hundreds or thousands of populated stellar systems, all totally cut off from each other. They might all be in trouble, but they wouldn't be able to help each other. They weren't even set up to talk among themselves without the use of the Godspeed Drive. It's no accident that the word that has come down to us through history to describe the disaster is Isolation. The Maveen system is isolated. But so is everyone else."
Isolation. Jim Swift could talk theory and see that word in the abstract, but as he went babbling on I stared up at the nearest display screen. It showed nothing but barren space in all directions. I had spent sixteen happy years on Erin and I hadn't for one moment suspected that I was isolated from anything or anyone—or even in any kind of trouble, except sometimes for skipped chores or homework. Real isolation was here and now: lost in the Maze, without a working ship or the hope of contact with any other humans.
I turned to scan the other screens. We were still in the middle of the Net. I could pick out dozens of nodes as tiny points of light. Tom Toole had told me that this hardware scrap-heap was hugely valuable, enough to make any scavenge-and-salvage crew rich. If they were alive, and hadn't been thrown into another universe as Jim Swift believed, the crew might return here—eventually. Maybe an experienced spacer like Danny Shaker could even sort through the junk pile of the hardware reservoir, and repair the battered Cuchulain enough to fly it home. But that sort of work was far beyond our talents. And no one else was going to do it for us.
The four of us were truly isolated. And eventually, when our supplies ran out, the four of us would be dead.
CHAPTER 31
All over. No hope. No chance of escape. The person who snapped me out of that hangdog attitude was not, oddly enough, Jim Swift, or Mel Fury, or even Doctor Eileen. It was Danny Shaker and his Golden Rule: Don't give up.
Even before I thought of that I had a personal proof that I was far from dead. Doctor Eileen insisted that as a first priority Jim Swift and I must have our wounds attended to. She swabbed his temple and his closed eye, then tackled his bent and broken nose. I heard the bone crack horribly when she straightened it. His forehead went pale beneath his thatch of red hair, but he didn't utter a sound.
So then I couldn't let it show, either, not with Mel looking on. Not even when Doctor Eileen probed far up inside my nose, to do what she called "a remedial septum straightening."
The inside of my head, from my nostrils to up behind my eyes, caught fire. I thought to myself, I'm not dead yet. Dead people don't hurt like this. I didn't cry out, though, but when she was done and had given me a quick injection I muttered that I had to take a look at the Cuchulain's engines. I fled. When I reached the cargo area I stayed there for a long time. I felt dizzy and sweaty, as though I wanted to throw up but couldn't.
When I got to the drive unit the monitors gave me the same bad news as those on the bridge. Of five clustered main engines, three would never fire again. The other two were in poor shape, but by using them in short bursts and turning the whole ship between thrusts, I might be able to move the Cuchulain.
The acceleration would be miserably low. I made an estimate. If we used the remaining engines until they both died completely, then coasted all the way to Erin, we would be on our way for seven or eight years.
Could our supplies last so long? I didn't think so. We had provisioned for a dozen people when we set out, but for a far shorter period. Once we were clear of the Maze, though, we could send a distress signal. With lots of luck we would be heard at Erin's Upside Spaceport, and a ship might come out to meet us. If it didn't, the Cuchulain with its dead drive would float by Erin and off to nowhere.
I returned to the control room, to tell the others that we faced the problem of surviving for many years in space.
Doctor Eileen was not there. Instead Mel and Jim Swift were crouched together by the control panel. He had Walter Hamilton's electronic notebook in his hand, while Mel was holding the little navaid that we had been given on Paddy's Fortune.
"Just the person." Jim looked awful, but he sounded full of pep. I wondered what kind of shot Doctor Eileen had given him, and wished I'd had the same.
"Can you fly the Cuchulain again?" Jim asked.
"I think so. But not very well."
I tried to explain my idea of coasting toward Erin, but Jim cut me off before I got halfway. "Wrong direction, boyo. We'd never make it. If we're to have any chance at all, we have to go there."
He was pointing to the dark pupil of the Eye. The last place, it seemed to me, that we wanted to go. It was a dull, glassy black, and it made me think of a dead fish eye.
"Why there?" I said. "Suppose we get in, and the Cuchulain's engines are too far gone to get us out again? You can't even send a signal from inside the Eye."
"It's the Slowdrive," Jim said, as though that explained everything.
"You won't find a drive much slower than what we've got now," I said. I told him about the three dead engines, and the dying pair that remained. "Seven or eight years from here to Erin. If we could last that long."
"Which we can't. Doctor Xavier and I have already talked about supplies. No more than two years, and that's starving ourselves." Jim Swift had killed my only hope, but he went on cheerfully, "Maybe the Slowdrive, even if we find it, will be no better. But I don't have enough information to prove that. The evidence is inconsistent. This"—he held up Walter Hamilton's electronic notebook, and cackled like a madman—"suggests that 'slow drive' hardware was in an experimental state when the Isolation took place. And that"—he pointed to the navaid that Mel was holding—"indicates that what it terms the 'slow option' should be here, somewhere within the Net."
"We'll never find it before the drive dies." I was staring despondently at the huge array of nodes.
"Not if we look there," said Jim. "Danny Shaker said there was nothing but bits and pieces at the Net nodes. I know he was a villain, but he was plenty smart when it came to space. So I believe him, there's nothing useful for us in the Net. That leaves the Godspeed Base itself—inside the Eye."
"We already looked there."
"No. Shaker and the crew explored the big lobe, and the three of us found the Godspeed ship in the smallest one. No one ever explored the middle region."
"The flickery one? You said it would be dangerous."
He gave me a horrible one-eyed leer, peering like a lunatic owl around the plaster beak that Doctor Eileen had placed on h
is swollen nose. "You sound like Mel. That was then. This is now. The definition of dangerous has changed. Can you fly us in?"
"Of course I can." I found the question insulting. Wasn't I a "natural," according to no less an authority than Danny Shaker?—wherever he might be.
I had changed, too, and in the last five minutes. It didn't occur to me that my injection was doing as much to me as Jim Swift's was to him. But I was certain that I could fly anything, including the collapsing Cuchulain.
How far could I fly it? That was a different question. I didn't even care. It was flying time.
Here's my advice: If you have to pilot a ship that you don't know how to fly, into a situation that you've been told is deadly dangerous, first go and ram your face into a wall and break your nose. Then get yourself shot full of drugs. After that you may be out of danger—or at least dead—before you know you're in it.
* * *
When we first went into the Eye I had heard Danny Shaker's quiet comment: The Cuchulain was slowed in its passage through the membrane. Now, nursing failing engines and surrounded on all sides by dense grey fog, I realized how much Shaker had left unsaid.
The power draw of the drive had doubled, but our rate of progress was slowing—and we were not yet to the Eye's interior.
I had to make a choice. Keep going, and ruin the engines forever? Or try to pull back?
It was really no decision at all. We might not survive within the Eye; we would die for sure if we remained outside.
I ignored the screens and kept my eyes on the status monitors. Both engines were about equally bad. Both of them were red-lining. All I could do was balance them as closely as I could; and when Mel, watching the displays, quietly said, "Coming clear," I knew it before she spoke. The engines were in their death rattle, but in spite of that the Cuchulain's speed was increasing. We were through.
I cut the drive. We drifted on toward the base. If I had stared before at its globular middle section, now I couldn't take my eyes off it.
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