He glared at me instead of Mel. “I’ll tell you what. I was brought on this trip because I’m Erin’s expert on the theory of the Godspeed Drive, right? I’ve studied every fact and rumor and half-baked idea to do with the Drive for the past ten years, right? I know what a Godspeed Drive ship ought to look like. But people who don’t know anything about the Drive—like halfwit spacers—have the idea that a ship with a faster-than-light drive must be just like the Cuchulain, only bigger. They associate speed with size. And that’s totally wrong. A ship with a Godspeed Drive won’t need those big, clumsy engines. Because it’s superfast it won’t need living quarters this size.” He swung an arm around, to indicate all the space on the Cuchulain. “And if it’s a backup ship, for use only in emergencies when the usual Godspeed ships have a problem, it doesn’t need a great big space for cargo. It can be small—maybe no bigger than a cargo beetle.”
It sounded logical to me. Surely it would have impressed Doctor Eileen and Danny Shaker the same way.
“Why didn’t you tell them?”
“I would have—if I’d had half a chance.” His voice was rising in pitch and volume. “I got there early. I started explaining to Tom Toole, and then that dummy O’Rourke came at me with a stupid question, and jackass Rory O’Donovan joined in. Before I knew it, there was no end of yelling and screaming.”
I caught Mel’s glance. I bet there was, it said, and I bet I know who was doing most of it.
“Well, I wasn’t going to stand for that. Who would?” Jim Swift stared at us, and we nodded sympathetically.
“You got into a fight?” asked Mel.
“No.” He gave a self-righteous sniff. “I left. The hell with them. If they fly over there and get themselves killed, it won’t be my fault. But I decided to fly a cargo beetle myself, once they were out of the way, and show them I was right in a way they could never dispute.”
“But if you follow them—” Mel protested.
“I wouldn’t follow them. I’d go to the logical place where you’d look for an emergency ship with a Godspeed Drive.” Jim Swift pointed at the display screen, to the tiny third lobe on the space base. “That’s where you’d store a small ship—not in that great stupid balloon at the other end, or in the flickering middle bit.”
“But why didn’t you go?” I asked.
He glared at me, frustration all over his face. “I’ll tell you why. Because I’m not one of your bone-brained spacers, that’s why. I can’t fly one of those stupid, beat-up, crap-heap, space-junk cargo beetles. Half the instruments on them don’t even work!”
“Can you?” Mel swung to stare at me, her eyes wide. “He can’t, but can you? Or have you been boasting to me?”
“I can. I’m sure I can. I know I can.” I felt dizzy and breathless as I turned to head for the staircase. “Come on. Quick.”
Before I change my mind and decide I can’t.
One twenty-minute lesson, weeks and weeks ago. It couldn’t be enough. But I was not about to admit to Mel that I had been laying it on a bit thick. I squeezed my eyes shut and told myself that I was a natural spacer. Hadn’t I heard it from Paddy Enderton, and the same from Danny Shaker?
“Come on,” said Mel’s voice from beside me. “What are you waiting for? Let’s go.”
Death before dishonor. I opened my eyes. I placed my fingers on the control keys. I took a deep breath. And I flew the cargo beetle. Out of the hold, away into open space, our destination the distant blip of the space base’s least significant lobe.
As we moved clear of the Cuchulain—and I couldn’t help wondering what Donald Rudden would make of our sudden appearance—I noticed something that should have struck me from inside the ship. The stars were visible. From the outside, the anomaly had been opaque.
I asked Jim Swift how that was possible, and he started on an explanation that involved one-way membranes and thermalization. He probably thought he was being crystal clear, but before he was half-done I had given up and put all my mind into flying the beetle.
Space felt unbelievably huge, our target supernaturally small and remote. I don’t think our trajectory would have won any prizes for either speed or minimum distance, and it was a few minutes before I was sure that we were going anywhere at all. But we were getting there. The base was growing on the screen. Soon I could see more details in each part, although no matter what I did I couldn’t get a clear view of that middle lobe. It was like trying to see through a dense, patchy fog, details coming and going as you watched. I became convinced that the surface must be more translucent than transparent, like the covering on Paddy’s Fortune.
At last I had to give up staring, because the third lobe was looming ahead. It had its own port, a tiny one in keeping with its overall proportions. But “tiny” was relative. It was quite big enough for the cargo beetle to creep inside. Once we were there we hung stationary, the three of us peering into the lobe’s rounded interior.
We couldn’t see a thing. It was pitch-black inside the ovoid. If we wanted an interior look I first had to learn how to work the external searchlight on the cargo beetle. Its pointing stability mechanism was—naturally—broken. That meant another five minutes of frustration, while I struggled to control a wildly oscillating beam of blue-green light.
Mel Fury and Jim Swift had an advantage over me. They didn’t have the problem of controlling the instrument, so they could spend all their time watching what was in its beam—and giving me confusing and conflicting instructions.
“Stop it right there!” “No, dummy, don’t go that way.” “Back up, you had it right before.” “Swing it farther over!”
I finally got the beam steadied—no thanks to them. What it showed did not look promising. Square in the searchlight floated a fat corkscrew with a distorted bubble attached to its blunt end. Thin wires held the structure in position and threw off metallic reflections.
It was like no ship I had ever seen or imagined. I was beginning to swing the light in search of a more promising target when Jim Swift howled in protest. “Don’t move it, you moron. You have it right there.”
It’s great to be appreciated. I swore I’d get even with him—sometime, but not now. He was already heading for the airlock.
Even for newcomers to suited flight, the trip across to the object gleaming in the searchlight should take no more than a few minutes. We fixed our suit helmets into position, Mel with my assistance. I pumped the interior of the cargo beetle and waited for the pressure to reduce. At the hatch Jim Swift cursed and swore at how long it took. For a change I could sympathize with him. After so many weeks, those last few minutes were the hardest to take.
The object of our attention did not impress me, even when we closed in on it. The corkscrew was just that, a smooth helix with no external features. The deformed oval bubble was hardly bigger than our cargo beetle. A square port occupied almost all one end of it.
No one had spoken a word since we left the beetle. Now, drawing closer to the port, we halted in unison a few yards away. I suspect we were all thinking the same thing. According to everything we knew about the Isolation, this structure had hung in space, unvisited, for hundreds of years. Inside we might find anything—gutted and empty cabins, crumbling equipment, long-dead corpses of a Godspeed crew.