I was still staring when I felt a slap on the back—Tom Toole, grinning all over his face.
“Here we are, Jay,” he said. “Didn’t I tell you? We’re all going to be rich—rolling in money.”
“Rich? It’s all junk.” But as I spoke I realized that the atmosphere in the control room was like a celebration. Crew members were laughing, shaking hands, and hammering their fists on the walls.
“The hell it is!” Tom Toole, in his enthusiasm, reached his arm around his enemy Doctor Eileen and gave her a squeeze. “I’ve been making trips to the Forty Worlds for half my life, and I’ve never seen the like of this. Many a time, come Winterfall, the lads and me would go home with nothing to show. Not this time, though. Look at that!” He pointed to the display, where a twisted cylindrical hulk hung in its retaining network of tubes. “Even if it don’t work—even if it’s empty—it’s valuable materials. Every one of the things out there is money. Give me a scavenger ship, a decent crew, and half a year in this place, I’d go home Lord of Skibbereen.”
Doctor Eileen had become caught up in the mood. She was laughing at the antics of tubby Donald Rudden, bouncing up and down in place until his belly and jowls rippled.
Then I saw Danny Shaker. Ignoring the noise around him he sat at the controls, quietly and carefully making some fine adjustment. I followed his glance to another and smaller screen. At first I saw only a reduced version of the whole net. Then as I moved to stand by Shaker’s side I realized that he was performing a controlled zoom, arrowing the display toward a central region of the field.
That center was not empty. Delineated in space, unattached to any point of the network, a slender sharp-ended feature was appearing. I cannot say I saw it, because nothing was visible. I deduced its existence because something was occulting the background field of stars.
“The Needle,” Shaker said softly. I could not tell if he was talking to me or to himself. “First the Net and hardware reservoir.” He glanced across to the screen showing the results of the node scan, and from his expression he didn’t share the crew’s enthusiasm. Displayed at the moment was an object like a smaller version of the Cuchulain, except that something had snapped it across the column of the cargo hold and twisted the two halves until the flared drive unit sat next to the living quarters. “Reservoir, Net, and Needle. So where’s the Eye?”
“The Eye of the Needle,” I said. “In the center…”
Under Danny Shaker’s control, the imaging system was already creeping along the invisible line of the Needle, beginning at one imagined end and scanning steadily toward the other.
I strained my eyes, willing photons to appear and signal the existence of a Needle’s Eye. The display offered only a line of cold, starfree darkness from one end to the other.
Danny Shaker sighed, lifted his hands from the controls, and turned to me. For one second I saw tension on his face. Then he gave me a smile.
“Not so easy, eh? Needle, but no Eye. Here.” He stood up and gestured to the chair. “Try your hand, Jay. I need a bit of young man’s luck.”
I didn’t think I was particularly lucky, but nothing in the Forty Worlds could have kept me out of that control chair. Three minutes of experiment gave me the hang of it, controlling the movement of the display and the degree of magnification of the zoom.
I moved out to one end of the Needle, and worked my way steadily along it. I saw nothing—but at one point I imagined a hint of a bit more nothing than usual.
“Look at the star field.” I halted the display. “I think an extra area is being masked out. Can you change the brightness and pick up fainter background stars?”
Shaker said nothing, but he leaned over and pressed one button. The intensity of the display increased. Thousands of added stars and galaxies filled the screen.
It was easy to see it now. The spike of the Needle, delineated against a deep space backdrop, was thicker at one point. There was a bulge, a broadening of the smooth line. I zoomed as far as the system would go, and still saw only blackness.
I was ready to resume the scan along the Needle, disappointed at my failure, when Danny Shaker leaned over my shoulder.
“Not too fast, Jay. I don’t see anything either, but let’s try another part of the spectrum. Run us through the wavelengths, ultraviolet to deep radio.”
Maybe he thought that was a straightforward request, but it was beyond me. I moved out of the way and watched Danny Shaker exercise another brief command sequence.
“Hard U/V,” he said. “No return signal. Same for the visible, full absorption there and in the near infra-red.” He was explaining aloud for my benefit. “Let’s try thermal. Nothing there either—”
“Wait. Stop it there.”
I had seen something. Black on black, a deeper shade of shadow. The whole line of the Needle was dark—but I sensed that one part was darker than the rest.
“That’s a thermal signature,” Shaker said. “Let’s take a look at actual temperatures. Show me where.” He touched another set of keys, and a cursor appeared on the screen. He moved it a little way off the point I indicated.
“Not there,” I said. “A bit more over to the right.”
“I know. We need this for comparison.” Numbers appeared below the cursor. “I’m querying at different wavelengths. The background shows a maximum at sixty micrometers, fifty-two degrees absolute. That’s about right for ambient, the temperature of a radiating black body this far from Maveen. So this part of the Needle is absorbing shorter wavelength solar energy perfectly, and emitting it as long-wave thermal radiation. Now for the real test. We ask for the temperature as we go, and see what happens. Show me where.”
Under my direction the cursor began to move, creeping to the center of the darkest area. The region below the cursor began to fall—and fall again.
“Thirty-seven. Thirty-two.” Shaker was repeating the values to himself. “Twenty-four. Fifteen. My God, how much lower? Eleven, seven—can’t go much farther. Five. Four. Three.”
The cursor was at the exact center of the dark region, and the numerical display below it had steadied to a constant value.
“Two point seven degrees,” Shaker said softly. “How about that, Jay.”
“What about it?” It meant nothing to me.
“That point, right where the cursor is sitting, is at the temperature of the cosmic background radiation. How can we observe the background, but not see the stars?” Shaker stared around the room, where the crew still showed high excitement. Finally he was showing signs of that excitement himself. “The answer is, you can’t see background without stars, not in any normal region of space. So that’s no normal region of space.”
He leaned back in his seat. “It’s the Eye, Jay, right there. That’s where we have to go, through the Eye of the Needle. That’s where we look for Godspeed Base. That’s where we find the Godspeed Drive.”
Chapter 26
“ ‘Hardware reservoir’ is too charitable,” Doctor Eileen said. She, Jim Swift and I were by the display, watching an endless array of ruined space structures that came and went on the screen. Her first enthusiasm had faded, and now she sounded nervous and gloomy. “Graveyard would be a better term. And by the look of it the heap of junk we’re traveling on knows just where it belongs. It came to the right place.”
The Cuchulain was hobbling toward the black unknown of the Eye, slow as a Lake Sheelin thaw. We were not hurrying for two reasons: caution, and because we had no choice. The engines of the Cuchulain sounded as though they were on their last legs. For the past half hour a steady vibration had shaken the whole ship, enough to keep your teeth on edge. At any other time, Danny Shaker would have ordered the drive turned off for maintenance. Today he ignored it. All his attention seemed fixed on the circle of darkness.