On our way to Upside we had one more new experience, something that none of us Downsiders liked at all. The ferry ship moved along faster and faster, boosted by a series of launch grids spaced around Erin’s equator. But in spite of that increasing speed, the forces on us became less and less. I felt myself easing away from my seat, and I stayed where I was only because we had been strapped down at liftoff.
My stomach wasn’t strapped down, though. It was floating free, and ready to do terrible things.
It didn’t, because with Doctor Eileen’s approval Danny Shaker had given us a drug to quiet our nausea. But it was a close thing, at least for me. I was a full week in space before I got my “space stomach” completely and the occasional fits of dizziness and discomfort of free-fall sickness went away.
But that was a long way in the future. Still, I was better off than some of the others. I heard awful noises coming from Uncle Duncan and Walter Hamilton and Danny Shaker saying cheerfully, “Into the container. Right in front of you!” Apparently the drug was not working for them. I folded my arms across my middle, gripped the restraining straps, and told myself not to look at the others. Instead I stared at a screen showing the field of view ahead of the ferry ship, and resolved not to disgrace myself.
It seemed days before the bulk of Upside was visible ahead and we were closing in for rendezvous. But by that time the worst was over. When we floated into the big entry dock and the doors closed behind us, even Walter Hamilton and Uncle Duncan, as pale and empty-looking as two crumpled paper bags, were able to stagger and float off the ferry ship and through to the interior of Upside. Two station staff members took them at once to a section where gravity was maintained, less than that of Erin’s surface but enough to dispel the feeling of free fall.
Doctor Eileen and Danny Shaker went with them, leaving me alone with James Swift. We sat holding our stomachs and staring at each other warily.
“Well?” he said at last. His face was pale beneath the freckles, an odd contrast to his flaming-red hair. For once he didn’t look angry at everyone in the world.
“I wouldn’t say well,” I said. “But I’m not as bad as I was a few minutes ago.”
“Me too. Poor old Walter. He really didn’t want to come, you know, he’s happiest in a library. But Doctor Xavier talked him into it.”
“I don’t see why either of you came.” That had been on my mind since I met the two of them. “You don’t seem anything like spacers.”
“We don’t!” He glared at me, and his face took on a pinker tone. I realized that other things came along with that flaming mop. “What about you. How old are you?”
“Sixteen.”
“That’s what I thought. You’re just a kid. What are you doing on this trip?”
That gave me a problem. I couldn’t tell him, but also I couldn’t tell him why I couldn’t tell him.
“I’m a sort of trainee. I want to be a spacer when I’m old enough.”
That last part was true enough, and James Swift nodded. He calmed down a little. “I used to think that way myself when I was your age. You’ll change your mind, though, when you’ve met a few spacers.”
I had met more than he suspected, but I didn’t want to disagree with him or let the conversation go anywhere near Paddy Enderton. I switched subjects. “Dr. Swift, I still don’t understand what you do.”
“Call me Jim. We’re not at the university now, and we’re going to be spending a lot of time together.” He held out his hand, something he hadn’t done when we were first introduced, and I felt stable enough to be able to reach out and shake it.
“Be careful how you handle Walter, though,” he went on. “Always call him Doctor Hamilton. He likes to sit on his title, though he’s nowhere near as smart as I am. But why do you say you don’t understand what I do? Weren’t you listening this afternoon?”
And I’ll be careful with you, too, I thought. But all I said was, “I listened. But I couldn’t make sense of any of it. Nor could Captain Shaker.”
We both looked to the door, wondering when Danny Shaker and the others were likely to be back. Until they returned we had nowhere to go and nothing to do.
“You said you don’t teach,” I added. “I never heard of a professor before who isn’t a teacher.”
“I had a few… disagreements. About the right way to deal with students who were idiots.” He glanced away from me. “I think I may be too used to working with specialists. Let me try again on the explanations. You tell me the minute I don’t seem to make sense. Do you know what atoms and electrons are?”
“Of course I do! I may be only sixteen, but I’m not a halfwit.”
“Sorry. Well, the rules that tell how atoms and the things they’re made of behave are quite different from the rules that apply for big objects. Movement from one condition to another, or the transfer of energy, takes place in individual steps.”
“I know that, too. They’re called quanta.”
“Right. You’re ahead of a lot of the people who come to study at the university. Some of them are allowed in when they don’t know anything.” An irritated look, and the face reddening again. “Anyway, quanta just means pieces, and we say that energy and atomic states are quantized. But other things can be quantized. Energy is carried from place to place by things called fields, and those fields are quantized, too. That’s usually called second quantization. And last of all, space itself is quantized. That’s called third quantization.”
“You’ve lost me. You mean space, like space. Like there is out here?” I looked around me, but we were in an interior chamber of Upside and all I could see were walls.
“Yes. Space is quantized.”
“But empty space is just—well, empty. It’s nothing. That’s what the word means.”
“You’d think so, wouldn’t you?” Jim Swift wrinkled up his forehead. “When I sit back and listen to myself, I have to agree with you. Empty space ought to be empty, by definition. We need a different word. Let’s talk about vacuum instead. When you set up the theory correctly, you find that even when a vacuum has no matter in it, it’s not really empty. It has energy, a thing called the vacuum energy. If you could get at the vacuum energy, and use it in the right way, then you might be able to do something else. You might be able to trade energy for movement. You could have very rapid movement, through point to point in quantized space.”
“Can you really do that?”
“Well… no. But that’s what I study, at the university. It’s my specialty. And don’t laugh, but I’ll tell you what I think. And I believe that what I think on this subject is better than anyone ever thought before.” When he was talking about anything but work—and wasn’t busy losing his temper—his voice was easygoing and diffident. But when he was lecturing me, he took on the strangest mixture of arrogance and distant calm.
“I believe,” he went on, “that there was a time, before the Isolation, when people knew how to tap the vacuum energy. And they could use that and third quantization to travel in space. Travel fast, much faster than light. Quantum transitions take no time at all.”
“The Godspeed Drive!” I wondered how much Doctor Eileen had talked, after swearing the rest of us to strict secrecy.
“Exactly. And if that’s true, the big mystery is this: What went wrong? Why did the ships stop coming? Walter tends to be a bit stuffy and arrogant, but he actually knows his subject very well. And he insists that the old records—such as they are—show that everything went wrong instantly. One minute, ships and supplies arriving; the next, nothing. Erin was on its own, struggling to survive and only just making it. No messages, no warnings, no explanations. The spacers sometimes come back and tell us there are strange objects out in the Forty Worlds, things like the Luimneach Anomaly. But their information raises more questions than it answers. Maybe this trip will be different.”