I could see why Eileen Xavier wanted Jim Swift and Walter Hamilton along on the journey. But what had she said to them?
An answer to that question had to wait, though, because Danny Shaker was floating back into the room. “Your colleague is feeling much better,” he said to Jim Swift. “How about you?”
“I’m fine. Where is Walter? I’d like to see him.”
“Come with me.” Danny Shaker turned and floated out again.
Jim Swift followed, much more clumsily. Movement in little or no gravity was obviously going to take some getting used to. For lack of anything better to do I tagged along behind, bouncing now and again off walls, floor and ceiling and struggling to learn the right combination of muscles.
The corridor that we were moving in was long, straight, and featureless, but after thirty or forty meters I began to feel a definite sense of down. My feet didn’t just touch the floor, they pressed on it a little bit.
The sensation of weight steadily increased, until at the end of the corridor we came to a big circular room. It reminded me of a ward in the Toltoona hospital, bare, overheated, and filled with uncomfortable-looking beds.
Walter Hamilton was sitting on one of them, his color much improved from the last time I had seen him. There was no sign of Doctor Eileen or Uncle Duncan.
“Food machines through there,” Shaker said, nodding to a big sliding door. “Are you hungry?”
Walter Hamilton put his hands to his stomach and seemed appalled at the idea, and Jim Swift shook his head and sank onto a bed next to his colleague.
Danny Shaker turned to me. “Jay?”
It was hard to believe, but although my stomach still wanted to float up into my throat, I was suddenly starving. I nodded.
“I thought so. Come on.” And then, as he led the way through the doors, which opened automatically at our approach, “You’re a natural, Jay. You’re going to make a fine spacer.”
When he said that I couldn’t help thinking of Paddy Enderton, with liquor on his breath and his big, sweaty, insincere face pushed close to mine, saying, “You’ll be the finest spacer that ever lifted off Erin.” But there was a world of difference between the two men: Enderton gruff and slovenly, Danny Shaker soft-spoken and precise in speech and movement. I resolved to study the easy, economical way he moved in low gravity, and learn to imitate it.
We reached the machines, and Danny Shaker showed me how to operate them, how to make the food selection and key in the way that I wanted it cooked and prepared.
The food itself was a curious disappointment. It was edible enough, but somehow I had expected that space food ought to be different from the food down on Erin. Of course, it was exactly the same. As Shaker pointed out to me, every morsel of food that I—or anyone else—consumed in space was grown down on the surface of Erin, and shipped up. The only exception was salt. There were huge deposits of that on Sligo, the fourth moon of Antrim, and ton after ton was shipped down to Erin before Winterfall.
“And lucky for us that we can go to Sligo and mine it,” said Shaker. “Because there’s precious little to be found on Erin. Salt is sodium chloride, and sodium’s a rarity back down there.”
“I don’t like salt.”
“Maybe not. But you need it. A human can’t live without it. If we couldn’t get into space from Erin, I doubt there’d be a person alive there now.”
It was something else to ponder. Back home people gave the impression that the things coming to Erin from the Forty Worlds were nice to have, but not really essential. Now I was hearing that Erin couldn’t exist without the spacers.
“Come on.” Danny Shaker had watched me eat, without showing any interest in food himself. “We’ve got work to do.”
“I thought we were ready to leave.”
“We are. Tom Toole and the rest of the crew ought to be up from Erin by now. They’ll be on board the Cuchulain, along with Doctor Xavier. But we are going to be away for a long time, and I always do the final check of supplies and ship condition. That way I can’t blame anybody but myself, if we get into deep space and things aren’t right.”
I had been longing to see the Cuchulain since I first heard the ship’s name, but there was one more scary experience to go through before I could do that. Only a small part of Upside held an atmosphere. The rest of it, including the access paths to all the deep-space ships, sat in vacuum.
With Shaker’s help I eased my way into a suit, making the thirty-six point checks that in a few weeks would become automatic: air, filters (dual), heat, insulation, temperature, communication, nutrition, elimination (dual), medication, attitude control (triple), position jets (dual), joints (thirteen), seals (four), and suit condition displays (three).
Then came the two minutes while the pumps returned the air of the chamber we were in to the pressurized part of Upside, and I watched my suit’s external pressure gauge drop steadily to zero. Soon there was nothing between me and hard vacuum but the thin shell of my suit.
Danny Shaker saved me again, acting as though what we were doing was the most natural thing in the world. “If you’re ever not quite happy with anything while the pressure’s going down,” he said casually, “all you have to do is press the Restore panel on the wall there. The chamber will repressurize within five seconds. Hold tight, now. We’re off.”
He was actually the one doing the holding. Almost before I knew what was happening he had taken the arm of my suit in his gauntleted hand, and was steering us out of the lock. I had assumed that we would emerge into open space. Wrong again. We were in a corridor no different from the one that had led us to the chamber—except that the external pressure showed as negligible, and the external temperature was a hundred degrees below zero.
The final surprise was the Cuchulain itself. It floated in a gigantic open hangar, controlled in its position by gentle electromagnetic fields. Its shape was neither the bowl of the ferry ships, nor the slim needle of an atmospheric flier. Instead I found myself staring at a long warty stick, with a flared cone at one end and a small sphere attached to the other.
“Drive, cargo area, and living quarters,” said Danny Shaker’s voice through my suit communications unit.
I could see that the ship was far bigger than a first sight suggested. The little sphere showed glassy pinpricks and dark flecks on its sides. They had to be viewing ports and locks.
“There’s no place for cargo,” I said. “Do you hang it outside?”
Shaker laughed, his voice no different in my ears than it had been back on Erin. “I sometimes wish we could. The midsection between the drive cone and the living sphere is a flexible membrane around a rigid column. When the Cuchulain is carrying its maximum cargo load, it looks like a big bloated ball with a little pimple on each end. Balancing it for flight can be a pain. But I don’t think you’ll be seeing it like that on this trip.”
I ought to have asked myself why he thought that, since according to Doctor Eileen our mission was supposed to be a secret. But I didn’t think of it. Instead I said, “How do you land? There’s no place for a cushion plate.”