She was probably right, but I knew it would be pointless to lie down. Not with the inside of my head still running wild. Instead I went outside. Mother and Doctor Eileen must have been almost as wound up as I was, because when I left they went on talking to each other as though I did not exist.
Godspeed Base.
“If you admit that the Godspeed Drive once existed,” Doctor Eileen had said, “then logically Godspeed Base had to exist, too, somewhere in the Maveen system.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because every machine needs repairs sometime. The Godspeed ships must have had a place in each star system, somewhere they could go for refitting or maintenance work. And the Base wouldn’t have disappeared when the ships stopped coming here.”
“Why did they stop coming?”
“Nobody knows. I’ve heard scientists say that the whole Godspeed Drive system contained the seeds of its own destruction, something to do with the nature of space and time, and it should never have been built. I’ve heard religious leaders say that the isolation of Maveen and the Forty Worlds is a punishment for our sins on Erin. And of course, I’ve heard a thousand times that there never was a Godspeed Drive, that it’s only an old legend.” She looked directly at Mother. “You can point out to those people that humans clearly didn’t evolve on Erin, and ask how we got here. But you won’t get anywhere. Because most of them don’t believe in evolution, either. Any more than they’ll believe that what Jay has sitting in front of him is important.”
I had a suspicion that Doctor Eileen was taking a dig at Duncan West, without mentioning his name. In any case, it was obvious how she regarded all such people. I stared at the little plastic wafer, switched off now on the table. We still didn’t know why anyone would kill for it. But if it had come from Godspeed Base, that seemed to make it important enough to Doctor Eileen, if not yet to me.
“Do you think that Paddy Enderton had been to the base?” I asked.
“I doubt it. There would have been other evidence.”
“There is.” I told them about the telecon, and the little direction finder that he had given me.
“I’d like to take a look at those tomorrow,” Doctor Eileen said, casually condemning me to another blood-chilling climb up the water tower. “But I mean more direct evidence. If he’d actually been there, he’d have come home with proof. And he’d not have kept that a secret when he reached Erin. But from what you’ve told me, he was convinced that he knew where Godspeed Base was. And he was definitely planning a trip there. That’s why he wanted you take him to Muldoon Port, before he collapsed. And those other men knew that he knew. That’s why they came after him yesterday.”
I still had a basic question. “If the Godspeed ships don’t come here any more, why is Godspeed Base so important?”
“Jay, you can ask more questions than any sane woman can answer,” Mother said sharply. “Go to bed.”
But Doctor Eileen was answering: “Because there’s a chance that a complete Godspeed ship, with a full Godspeed Drive, is sitting out there at the base. It would have been there as a backup. Otherwise a Godspeed crew would have risked being stranded if the ship they came in was destroyed, or if there were major problems with the Godspeed Drive.”
If she had wanted to choose words to guarantee that I would be unable to sleep, she could hardly have done better. Two months ago, exploration of the Forty Worlds with the spacers had been my great dream. Now Doctor Eileen was telling me that somewhere out there, within reach of our ships, might be something to take us to the stars.
But mother was saying again, “Go to bed, Jay. Eileen and I have other things to talk about.”
I picked up Paddy Enderton’s device and left the room. A minute later I was outside, staring across at the distant lights of Muldoon Port. My thoughts about it had changed since yesterday. Enderton had wanted to go there. The men who had hurt Mother and killed Chum had left by water. They were spacers. Chances were, they had gone to Muldoon. The spaceport was the road out, the way to the Forty Worlds, and now to Godspeed Base.
But the men had left without the information that they came for. That was in my hand, locked away, waiting for someone to find the key.
Voice-activated, Doctor Eileen had said. Well, I had a voice, as good as anyone else’s.
I went back indoors and up to my bedroom. But not to sleep.
It took a few minutes to get to the place where I had been stuck earlier, with a single flashing green spark that I could move around among the other lights of the display.
If I had to choose words that would make a display do more than just sit there, what would they be?
“Godspeed Base.” No response.
“Godspeed. Godspeed Drive. Godspeed crew. Forty Worlds. Paddy Enderton. Er, information. Data. Position. Location. Input. Output.”
Nothing. Either the device was as stupid as it seemed, or I was missing the point.
I sat and frowned down at the innocent-looking little wafer. Stupid, stupid. Unless… Suppose, just suppose, that it was the other way round? Suppose that I was dealing with something very smart?
Then I ought to be asking questions or giving commands, instead of offering one word at a time that it would not know what to do with.
“I want access to data associated with the display that is now being shown.”
The response was immediate. An open box appeared in the air below the main display. To its left-hand side glowed three words: First Data Level. The box itself was empty.
“That doesn’t tell me anything!” I protested. “I want to know more. Tell me something else about the display.”
Nothing new appeared.
I talked on and on, without being able to produce any change in what I was seeing. It was only when I ran out of things to say that I realized that the voice commands and the flashing point of green might be related. At the moment, the green spark sat in an empty area of space. If the problem was that I was asking for information about nothing…
I pressed zero, to freeze the moving set of colored lights. Then I used the controls to move the flashing green spark to coincide with one rustily glowing point.
At last!
The open box was no longer empty. It contained a word, Liscarroll. Beneath that were six nine-figure numbers. Five of them changed not at all, or slowly in their final digits, but the sixth one changed all the time, increasing steadily.
I found my piece of paper, and wrote Liscarroll. Then I said, “Give me the second data level.”
If there is such a thing as too little information, there is also such a thing as too much. Words began to stream through the open box, line after line of them. I read, with little understanding:… primary assay obtained as extrapolation of surface spectra, composition as mass fraction: hydrogen, 0.44; helium, 0.20; lithium, 0.00; beryllium, 0.01; boron, 0.00; carbon, 0.06; nitrogen, 0.05; oxygen, 0.08;fluorine, 0.01; neon, 0.00…
The list went on and on. I did not attempt to write everything down, but instead moved the green pointer to a new light. This one was of pale amber. I said, “First data level.”
The box emptied. And refilled.
Corofin was the first word. Below it, as before, were six new nine-digit numbers, five of them again close to unchanging and the sixth steadily increasing.
I had learned my lesson, and I did not ask for any second data level. Instead I began to move the green point systematically through the display, recording the names that popped into the open data box. Kiltealy, Timahoe, Moynalty, Clareen, Oola, Drumkeerin…