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Which was exactly what I had been saying, from the moment she came on board the Cuchulain. I could tell from the way Mel said “Doctor Eileen” that she had been added to the list of Eileen Xavier worshippers, and Doctor Eileen’s word was sacred. Even so, the way Mel had jumped out at me didn’t suggest great caution. Suppose some crewman had come in right after me?

“Mel, I want you to carry Walter Hamilton’s gun around with you. Just as a precaution.”

She pulled a face. “I hate guns. I’ll think about it. Where is it?”

“Back in my quarters. I’ll give it to Doctor Eileen, and ask her to pass it on to you. Where is she?”

“Gone to get Jim—you know, Dr. Swift.”

I didn’t like that, either. Jim Swift used to be my buddy, but from the familiar way she dropped his name, he was now hers.

“I have to find the doctor,” I said. “At once. She and I are urgently needed in the main control room.”

It was designed to impress, but it didn’t work.

“Phooey,” Mel said. “If they want you urgently, it’s to make tea. What happened to your voice? You sound husky and creaky, like one of the crewmen.”

“My voice is fine. And I am a crewman.”

“Playing at being one is more like. Listen, Jay. I’ve been working on the navaid with Jim Swift—he’s really sharp—and we’re coming up with something that may be terrifically important. Remember the ‘Slowdrive’ that you tagged in Walter Hamilton’s notebook? Well, I cross-referenced it in the navaid—”

“You can tell me about that some other time. At the moment I’m busy. I must find Eileen Xavier, and I must take her with me to the main control room.”

And I swept grandly out, before Mel could say another word.

All right, so I was miffed, and what I did was stupid. But I couldn’t forgive her that crack about making tea, and not being a real crew member—maybe because I suspected it was true. So although I felt sorry that Mel and I hadn’t had a real chance to talk, I didn’t go back. Instead I found Doctor Eileen and headed for the ship’s bridge.

I really wanted to talk, to tell her what had been happening. The trouble was, she didn’t choose to listen. She wanted an audience of her own, so she could ramble on with her worries. If I had changed, Doctor Eileen had changed, too, in the few months since we lifted off from Muldoon Port. I had always thought of her as old, but old like something that has always been around and will be around forever. Now Doctor Eileen looked tired, peevish and depressed.

“The Net, eh?” She laughed, but it was a harsh, barking cough without any humor in it. “The great hardware reservoir. Well, maybe. I’ve talked enough to Mel to know that Paddy’s Fortune was set up as a self-sustaining biological reservoir. What comes next?”

“The Needle, The Eye, Godspeed Base—and a Godspeed Drive.”

“You think so? It’s great to be young. You know, Jay, I’ve thought a lot since we left Erin. About space, sure, but about Erin, too, and what we are. I used to think of the Isolation as some sort of pure accident, something that couldn’t have been prevented. Now, I’m not so sure. I don’t think that humanity before the Isolation was just one big happy family. Maybe at one time, during the early, sublight colonization. But then I think that the people who developed the Godspeed Drive came to regard themselves as special, superior to planetary colonists and settlers. The Godspeed Drive was so powerful, it made them feel like gods themselves and they wanted to keep it that way. They left the colonies ignorant. And we’ve stayed ignorant. They placed their supply and maintenance facilities deep in space. No one on Erin knew how the drive worked. No one knew that Paddy’s Fortune even existed. No one would know it today, if Paddy Enderton had gone overboard that night on Lake Sheelin.”

“You think the people with the Godspeed Drive stopped coming to the Forty Worlds on purpose?

“Oh, no. That wasn’t planned. I’m sure there was a monstrous accident, a catastrophe of some kind. But Erin wouldn’t be in the mess it’s in today if the group who controlled the Drive hadn’t wanted to feel superior. It’s a story as old as history, from water control to drug prescription to access to space: The people with the treasure want to keep the keys of the treasure-house to themselves. What they never dream is that one day they might not be around to use them. So they don’t plan for that.”

Talking about the past, Doctor Eileen sounded like a defeated woman. Maybe Duncan West had it right: Live in the present. If you started to dwell on history, you would find a thousand ways to make yourself miserable.

We entered the control room, and what was revealed on the displays there was enough to halt Doctor Eileen’s brooding.

The big screen showed a shape like a round balloon made from fishing net. The individual loops of the net were triangular, and at many of the nodes I could see a “knot,” a little point of light. It was the Net. Was it also the hardware reservoir?

“Take a look, Doctor,” said Danny Shaker. He was busy at the console, but apparently had eyes in the back of his head. “No wonder our first look was just with low-frequency radio. All the radiation shorter than a few kilometers went right on through. But the long wavelengths were right to interact with the mesh and give a return signal.”

That was the first hint I had of the size of the Net ahead of us. If those tiny individual loops of the balloon were kilometers across, then each point of light at the nodes…

Doctor Eileen pointed to a smaller display mounted next to the big one. It showed a single node at high magnification, a silver point of light expanded to a grainy, lumpy half-sphere. That could be an empty cargo container, a manufacturing facility, even a ship. The surrounding gossamer threads that formed loops of the net were cables or tubes, tens of meters across, running from the partial sphere and anchoring it in space.

Soon I could see something else. The object on the screen was not complete. Jagged break lines ran across the blunt end. At the node floated no more than a shattered remnant, a broken fragment of a complete structure.

As I stared, the display flickered. It changed to show a pair of thick partial rings, battered rust-colored doughnuts intertwined and floating in space. Another flicker, and before I could see any detail on the doughnuts they too were gone. The image had changed to a loose cluster of small objects. Most of them had the familiar bowl-backed shape of a cargo beetle. They were loosely connected by cables almost too thin to see, and when I looked closely I could see individual differences. One lacked its lower half, another had been sheared in two across the center, the upper dome of a third had a great hole punched through it.

Another flicker. I was gazing at a rough partial sphere, like the first object we had seen but even more battered. It was less grainy in appearance. The Cuchulain was still approaching the space structure, and the high-resolution imagers were steadily improving the quality of the pictures.

“It’s a junk yard.” I spoke in a whisper to Doctor Eileen. She had lost her dejected look. “This can’t be the hardware reservoir.”

“We’ll see,” Danny Shaker said over his shoulder. “We’re making an inventory now. So many nodes, the first look has to be automatic.”

“So many nodes” was an understatement. I tried a quick count and gave up after half a minute. Hundreds, maybe thousands. This mess couldn’t be Godspeed Base. It would take a long time just to visit each node on the Net.