I turned to scan the other screens. We were still in the middle of the Net. I could pick out dozens of nodes as tiny points of light. Tom Toole had told me that this hardware scrap-heap was hugely valuable, enough to make any scavenge-and-salvage crew rich. If they were alive, and hadn’t been thrown into another universe as Jim Swift believed, the crew might return here—eventually. Maybe an experienced spacer like Danny Shaker could even sort through the junk pile of the hardware reservoir, and repair the battered Cuchulain enough to fly it home. But that sort of work was far beyond our talents. And no one else was going to do it for us.
The four of us were truly isolated. And eventually, when our supplies ran out, the four of us would be dead.
Chapter 31
All over. No hope. No chance of escape. The person who snapped me out of that hangdog attitude was not, oddly enough, Jim Swift, or Mel Fury, or even Doctor Eileen. It was Danny Shaker and his Golden Rule: Don’t give up.
Even before I thought of that I had a personal proof that I was far from dead. Doctor Eileen insisted that as a first priority Jim Swift and I must have our wounds attended to. She swabbed his temple and his closed eye, then tackled his bent and broken nose. I heard the bone crack horribly when she straightened it. His forehead went pale beneath his thatch of red hair, but he didn’t utter a sound.
So then I couldn’t let it show, either, not with Mel looking on. Not even when Doctor Eileen probed far up inside my nose, to do what she called “a remedial septum straightening.”
The inside of my head, from my nostrils to up behind my eyes, caught fire. I thought to myself, I’m not dead yet. Dead people don’t hurt like this. I didn’t cry out, though, but when she was done and had given me a quick injection I muttered that I had to take a look at the Cuchulain’s engines. I fled. When I reached the cargo area I stayed there for a long time. I felt dizzy and sweaty, as though I wanted to throw up but couldn’t.
When I got to the drive unit the monitors gave me the same bad news as those on the bridge. Of five clustered main engines, three would never fire again. The other two were in poor shape, but by using them in short bursts and turning the whole ship between thrusts, I might be able to move the Cuchulain.
The acceleration would be miserably low. I made an estimate. If we used the remaining engines until they both died completely, then coasted all the way to Erin, we would be on our way for seven or eight years.
Could our supplies last so long? I didn’t think so. We had provisioned for a dozen people when we set out, but for a far shorter period. Once we were clear of the Maze, though, we could send a distress signal. With lots of luck we would be heard at Erin’s Upside Spaceport, and a ship might come out to meet us. If it didn’t, the Cuchulain with its dead drive would float by Erin and off to nowhere.
I returned to the control room, to tell the others that we faced the problem of surviving for many years in space.
Doctor Eileen was not there. Instead Mel and Jim Swift were crouched together by the control panel. He had Walter Hamilton’s electronic notebook in his hand, while Mel was holding the little navaid that we had been given on Paddy’s Fortune.
“Just the person.” Jim looked awful, but he sounded full of pep. I wondered what kind of shot Doctor Eileen had given him, and wished I’d had the same.
“Can you fly the Cuchulain again?” Jim asked.
“I think so. But not very well.”
I tried to explain my idea of coasting toward Erin, but Jim cut me off before I got halfway. “Wrong direction, boyo. We’d never make it. If we’re to have any chance at all, we have to go there.”
He was pointing to the dark pupil of the Eye. The last place, it seemed to me, that we wanted to go. It was a dull, glassy black, and it made me think of a dead fish eye.
“Why there?” I said. “Suppose we get in, and the Cuchulain’s engines are too far gone to get us out again? You can’t even send a signal from inside the Eye.”
“It’s the Slowdrive,” Jim said, as though that explained everything.
“You won’t find a drive much slower than what we’ve got now,” I said. I told him about the three dead engines, and the dying pair that remained. “Seven or eight years from here to Erin. If we could last that long.”
“Which we can’t. Doctor Xavier and I have already talked about supplies. No more than two years, and that’s starving ourselves.” Jim Swift had killed my only hope, but he went on cheerfully, “Maybe the Slowdrive, even if we find it, will be no better. But I don’t have enough information to prove that. The evidence is inconsistent. This”—he held up Walter Hamilton’s electronic notebook, and cackled like a madman—“suggests that ‘slow drive’ hardware was in an experimental state when the Isolation took place. And that”—he pointed to the navaid that Mel was holding—“indicates that what it terms the ‘slow option’ should be here, somewhere within the Net.”
“We’ll never find it before the drive dies.” I was staring despondently at the huge array of nodes.
“Not if we look there,” said Jim. “Danny Shaker said there was nothing but bits and pieces at the Net nodes. I know he was a villain, but he was plenty smart when it came to space. So I believe him, there’s nothing useful for us in the Net. That leaves the Godspeed Base itself—inside the Eye.”
“We already looked there.”
“No. Shaker and the crew explored the big lobe, and the three of us found the Godspeed ship in the smallest one. No one ever explored the middle region.”
“The flickery one? You said it would be dangerous.”
He gave me a horrible one-eyed leer, peering like a lunatic owl around the plaster beak that Doctor Eileen had placed on his swollen nose. “You sound like Mel. That was then. This is now. The definition of dangerous has changed. Can you fly us in?”
“Of course I can.” I found the question insulting. Wasn’t I a “natural,” according to no less an authority than Danny Shaker?—wherever he might be.
I had changed, too, and in the last five minutes. It didn’t occur to me that my injection was doing as much to me as Jim Swift’s was to him. But I was certain that I could fly anything, including the collapsing Cuchulain.
How far could I fly it? That was a different question. I didn’t even care. It was flying time.
Here’s my advice: If you have to pilot a ship that you don’t know how to fly, into a situation that you’ve been told is deadly dangerous, first go and ram your face into a wall and break your nose. Then get yourself shot full of drugs. After that you may be out of danger—or at least dead—before you know you’re in it.
When we first went into the Eye I had heard Danny Shaker’s quiet comment: The Cuchulain was slowed in its passage through the membrane. Now, nursing failing engines and surrounded on all sides by dense grey fog, I realized how much Shaker had left unsaid.
The power draw of the drive had doubled, but our rate of progress was slowing—and we were not yet to the Eye’s interior.
I had to make a choice. Keep going, and ruin the engines forever? Or try to pull back?