Mel broke the spell. “Well, we won’t find out floating around here. Let’s do it.” And away she went, heading straight for the port.
The Net, the Needle, the Eye, the Godspeed Base: isolated in space, drifting deep within the protective chaos of the Maze. It should have been totally alien. It wasn’t. The port, when we came to open it, was no different from those on the Cuchulain.
I realized that the Cuchulain and every other ship that flew the Forty Worlds drew from the technology that built this space base. But the masters of that technology were long vanished, along with the instruction manuals. No wonder that Danny Shaker and the rest of the spacers had problems maintaining their ships in working order.
Then we were inside, and I had no time for ghosts of the past. We were entering what was clearly a control room. Unlike any control room that I had seen, everything within seemed fresh and unused as a newly minted coin.
Jim Swift didn’t waste his energy marveling. He turned to me. “Do you know how to get air pressure in here? It’s a pain working inside these suits.”
“I’ll see.” I had become our space travel and spaceship expert. Fortunately, the controls here were as simple as those of the cargo beetle. I keyed in a sequence that should seal the lock and provide air, then stood wondering. The equipment looked new, but it hadn’t been used for an age. The seal was complete, and the interior was filling with gas. But suppose that after all this time it had become poisonous or unbreathable?
Mel was beginning to fiddle with her helmet seals. She and Jim Swift had to be the two least patient people in the whole Maveen system.
“Wait a second.”
I checked my suit monitors. It was not quite Erin standard atmosphere, but close to it. If there was trouble it would come from subtle poisonous fractions, beyond the ability of the suit to detect and measure them.
Death before dishonor again. I cracked my helmet open and took a shallow, nervous breath. It didn’t smell right, but I didn’t collapse or go off in a fit. After a few seconds I nodded. “All right.”
Before the words were out of my mouth Jim Swift was wriggling from his suit and heading for the pilot’s chair. “Told you,” he said. “Look at those.”
His voice was triumphant as he pointed to a meaningless array of switches, keys and dials.
“What are they?” Mel was out of her suit, too, hovering right behind him. “I’ve never seen anything like them.”
“Nor have I. But I’ve read enough descriptions, in the old pre-Isolation literature.” He touched one array lovingly. “This is a coordinate selector.”
I looked over his shoulder. “Not like the one on the Cuchulain.”
“No. Because these are for stellar coordinates. You enter other stars as destinations.” He leaned back and took a deep breath. “We’re sitting in a ship with a Godspeed Drive. I’ll only say this one time: Jim Swift, you’re a genius.”
“Mm.” Mel’s tone seemed to offer a second opinion. “So you can fly this ship?”
He turned to glare at her. “That’s a dumb spacer’s job. Jay can do it, or one of Shaker’s tame monkeys. Anyway, even if I could fly it, I’d want to take a good look at everything before I’d think of turning on full power. The Godspeed Drive can be really dangerous. It works by taking liberties with spacetime structure, and that sort of thing doesn’t come free. Remember, something stopped the Godspeed ships from flying to the Forty Worlds.”
Mel nodded and said, “Well, if we don’t fly it, what do we do with it?”
“We loose it from its moorings and haul it back to the Cuchulain. Then we go over the whole ship in detail. After that we make the run home to Erin, before we try anything ambitious.” He turned to me. “You can handle the towing, can’t you, Jay?”
“Well—”
“Good. Let’s get on with it.” Jim Swift turned away from me, placed his hands behind his head, and leaned back luxuriously in the pilot’s chair. “And when Shaker and his crew of incompetents get back from bumbling around in the rest of the space base, I guess we’ll let them examine this ship. Under my supervision, of course.”
Of course.
I started to worry about how I was going to loose those metallic wires that held the ship in place, and how it could be balanced for hauling. I had never done anything remotely like it, and I wasn’t sure where to begin. But at the same time I couldn’t help contemplating—and looking forward to—the prospect of snotty Jim Swift “supervising” Danny Shaker.
Chapter 28
Our trip out from the Cuchulain had been no great triumph of ship manoeuvering. Compared with our return it was a masterpiece. After endless effort I managed to free from its moorings the corkscrew ship—I still found it hard to think of that misshapen object as a home for the Godspeed Drive. More hard labor attached our prize to the cargo beetle. But what I could not do was balance masses, and once we were under way we yawed and rolled this way and that in every direction that I could imagine. Sometimes the hawsers were taut, sometimes they floated slack and then tightened with a great jerk. Sometimes, don’t ask how, the Godspeed ship we were towing flew out ahead of us.
I was not pleased with my performance, and Mel was outright rude. But Jim Swift didn’t say one bad word. He was so full of the idea that we had succeeded. When we got back to the Cuchulain we would be hailed by the others as conquering heroes.
I wasn’t so sure. If the crew of the Cuchulain had found a Godspeed Drive for themselves in their search of the space base, then what we had done was no big deal. If they had found nothing, we had made them look like a bunch of lamebrains. Dr. Jim Swift was a lot older than me, but in my experience you didn’t become popular by showing people what fools they were.
Donald Rudden confirmed my opinion when we called him on the beetle’s communicator, to say we were going to moor the object we were towing alongside the Cuchulain. “Wondered where you’d got to. Found something, have you?” He laughed. “Just as well, because Tom Toole called a while ago. Said they’d come up with nothing. Crew’s all as mad as a pack of Limerick pipers. They’ll be on their way back any time now.”
That gave me one more thing to worry about. I had to get Mel on board the Cuchulain and safely into Doctor Eileen’s quarters before the other party returned. Jim was too full of himself to worry about that or much else, so as soon as I had fought us to a rough docking I left him to gloat. I steered the beetle to the Cuchulain’s cargo region, and Mel and I made a quick run through the interior to Eileen Xavier’s empty rooms.
“Sit tight,” I said as I left her. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
“How long?”
“Don’t know. But hang in. We’ll soon be on our way home.”
I was at last beginning to believe it myself. It’s an odd thing, but when you wait for something long enough you can’t believe it has arrived, even when it does. But Jim Swift, in spite of his uncontrollable temper, was Erin’s top expert on the Godspeed Drive. If he was convinced that the oddity hanging next to the Cuchulain had inside it a device able to bring the stars close enough to touch, who was I to question?
As for his worries about disturbing space-time, I dismissed them. He had been dwelling too much on his own specialty subject. Jim with his space-time obsession was like the Lake Sheelin fishermen, who saw all the whole world in terms of hooks, lines, baits, and nets.