“But they just used it.” Mel released her hold on Doctor Eileen and seemed unaware of the death grip she had taken. Doctor Eileen began rubbing ruefully at her upper arm as Mel gestured to where the Godspeed ship had been floating a couple of minutes earlier. “We saw them use it,” she said.
“We sure did.” Jim Swift nodded, and winced as he moved his head. “Do you know where they were planning to go?”
“On a trial run,” I said. “Maybe to Erin.” For Mel’s sake, I didn’t add that the second stop would be Paddy’s Fortune.
“Erin can’t be much more than a light-hour away.” Jim carefully touched the end of his nose, and winced again. “A one-light-hour trip is nothing for a Godspeed Drive. But I’ll bet my life that if they set off for Erin, they haven’t arrived there. In fact, I’ll bet that they never arrive.”
“Then where are they?” asked Doctor Eileen. I saw bewilderment on her face.
“That’s the great question of my life.” Jim Swift groped his way forward and sat down in the pilot’s chair. “I could say, they’re in the same place as anyone else who used the Godspeed Drive at the time of the Isolation or since. But that’s not much of an answer.”
“It’s no answer at all,” I said. The control room was overheated, but I had the shivers. If Danny Shaker and his killer crew had not flown to Erin… “Do you mean the Godspeed ship is still around here somewhere, but we just can’t see it?”
“Easy, Jay,” said Doctor Eileen. “We’re all nervous.”
And Jim Swift added, in a curiously satisfied voice, “Easy, all of us. Sit down, and I’ll tell you what I think, and what I know—less of that than I’d like, I’m afraid.”
Eileen Xavier sat down. After a few moments, Mel and I followed her lead.
“I wish Walter Hamilton were here to start this off,” Jim went on, “because some of what I have to say comes from him, and I don’t know how much of that was guesswork. It starts all the way back. Back before the Isolation, before there was a Godspeed Drive. Humans had been spreading through the galaxy, out across the stars. But they’d been doing it slowly, on ships that couldn’t even get close to light speed. We don’t know much about the first colonists of Maveen and the Forty Worlds, but Walter believed that they came to Erin on a multigeneration, culturally homogeneous starship. He claimed to be able to trace most of our place names and family names to a single small region of the original home of human beings.
“I can’t vouch for that, but I do feel sure that the old star travelers did it the hard way, creeping out slowly, star after star, planet after planet. Humanity explored and developed and colonized that way for thousands and thousands of years. Nobody in the Forty Worlds knows how long that went on. Then somewhere, sometime, an unknown young genius discovered the Godspeed Drive.”
“Genius, yes.” Doctor Eileen frowned. “But young genius?”
“Yeah.” Jim Swift smiled, a bruised, lopsided grin. Battered or not, it didn’t take him long to become cocky again. “A young genius, and one who either died young, or wasn’t listened to much after the invention was made. How do I know? Easy. Anyone who makes a huge breakthrough like the Godspeed Drive is going to be young, not old. Great discoveries come from people who aren’t stuck in an old mindset. And I don’t think the inventor was listened to, because any person bright enough to invent the drive would also be bright enough to understand the possible consequences when it was used.
“The Godspeed Drive seems like a perfect something-for-nothing device, the ultimate free dinner. But that’s an illusion. You saw how small the drive unit was in the Godspeed ship that we found. Not a hundredth the size of the Cuchulain’s engines, but with enough power to toss a ship from star to star.
“So where does the power come from? There was no energy source on the Godspeed ship.
“Well, I tried to explain it to Alan Kiernan and the rest of those numbskulls. The Godspeed Drive taps the vacuum energy of space-time, to create a bridge from one place to another. There’s a huge amount of energy available, but the supply isn’t infinite. And it’s not like pumping water from a well, where you have some warning before it runs dry because less and less water comes out and it gets harder and harder to pump. This is more like a solid stone bridge. You can run loads over it for years with never a hint that the bridge is under stress. Until one day, without any warning, the whole thing collapses.
“That’s what happened with the Godspeed Drive—except that I suspect we’re talking not just years of use, but many, many centuries. A period so long that people came to rely on it completely. They forgot that the Godspeed Drive might have its limits. They no longer kept old, slow, multigeneration ships as back-up.
“Then one day the bridge broke. The vacuum energy drawdown passed a critical level. The Godspeed Drive failed, all at once and everywhere. Any ship that tried to cross the bridge fell off into the water.”
“Water?” I said. He had lost me.
“Sorry. That was just a figure of speech. The Godspeed Drive formed a bridge through space-time, a short route from one place to another. And when that bridge collapsed, a ship that tried to use it fell out of space-time itself.”
Apparently he had lost Mel, too. “Fell out of space-time,” she said. “How can you fall out of space-time? There’s nowhere to fall to.”
“I know. But I can’t give you a better description. Let’s just say, the ships left our universe, and went somewhere, beyond the universe we can perceive.”
“But it still doesn’t make sense,” I complained. “I mean, suppose that the drive suddenly stopped working, the way that you say. Every ship with a Godspeed Drive wouldn’t try to fly on that same day. There would be lots of ships left.”
“Of course there would. But you see, this wasn’t a bridge you could look at, and say, hey, it’s damaged, or hey, it’s vanished. No one would know that the bridge had gone. If they were too close when a Godspeed ship tried to make an interstellar jump, they could have been destroyed the way we were nearly destroyed a few minutes ago. But if people weren’t too close, all they would know was that the Godspeed ship had vanished. And that was normal. The ships always vanished when they made a jump. Of course, it would be obvious that there was a problem to the people at the other end, when a Godspeed ship failed to arrive. But if that happened in your system it would just encourage you to send out a Godspeed ship of your own, to learn what the problem was at the other end.
“After a while there were no ships left to send. Every stellar system became isolated. Then you had hundreds or thousands of populated stellar systems, all totally cut off from each other. They might all be in trouble, but they wouldn’t be able to help each other. They weren’t even set up to talk among themselves without the use of the Godspeed Drive. It’s no accident that the word that has come down to us through history to describe the disaster is Isolation. The Maveen system is isolated. But so is everyone else.”
Isolation. Jim Swift could talk theory and see that word in the abstract, but as he went babbling on I stared up at the nearest display screen. It showed nothing but barren space in all directions. I had spent sixteen happy years on Erin and I hadn’t for one moment suspected that I was isolated from anything or anyone—or even in any kind of trouble, except sometimes for skipped chores or homework. Real isolation was here and now: lost in the Maze, without a working ship or the hope of contact with any other humans.