“We found the ship!” she sang out, while I struggled to make her let go. “We found it, we found it. We’re going home.”
“Doctor Eileen?” Jim Swift didn’t say anything else, but he didn’t need to. I turned in mid-air, to watch Eileen Xavier’s reaction.
She had opened her suit and was standing motionless. Finally she nodded, grudgingly. “We found—something. But I don’t want to raise false hopes. Until you’ve examined it, Jim, I’d better say no more than that.”
My discovery of the Godspace was lost in the excitement. We heard from Mel and Doctor Eileen in bits and pieces as they rushed us through a maze of corridors and open work areas.
They had started out along different branches of the main corridor, just like the rest of us. “But then then they merged,” Mel said, “and we ran into each other again in a few minutes. So after that we stuck together.”
“And found nothing useful.” Doctor Eileen was being extra cautious, to balance Mel’s euphoria. “There were workshops, hundreds and hundreds of them, just like these.” We were passing through a long series of chambers, each filled with mysterious machinery. “But we didn’t recognize anything that seemed significant—”
“—until we got to this point, and saw that. “Mel indicated a spidery structure, cradling a squashed cube that was vaguely familiar. “This is almost on the opposite side of Flicker from where we came in. It’s not that far as a straight-line journey from where we started, but we made lots of detours the first time we came here. When we arrived to this point we had been away over five hours. We were ready to return to the beetle.”
“You mean I was,” Doctor Eileen said. “But while I was making that decision Mel skipped on ahead of me.”
“I thought we might be getting close to exit ports, and I wanted to take a look at just one more chamber. Then I couldn’t resist a peek at the one after that.”
“And the one after that. I was all set to cuss at her, and tell her we were going back. But first I had to catch her. And when I finally did—”
“She was looking at this.”
Mel had timed our progress perfectly, because as she spoke those last words we were emerging into a docking facility. Hanging in a harness at the far end was another flattened cube. Attached to it was a nested set of fat rings, placed one beneath the other to form a blunt cone.
“It’s just the way it ought to be,” Mel went on. “Don’t you recognize it, Jay?”
Where had I seen it before?
“Well, I certainly do,” said Jim Swift. “We’re looking at the Slowdrive, the way it was drawn in Walter Hamilton’s notebook.”
“That’s what Mel said to me.” Doctor Eileen was controlling any sign of emotion. “The question is, Jim, is that really a working ship? Is it something Jay can use to fly us back to Erin?”
A real flight through space. I had shivers at that prospect, but Jim took it calmly enough.
“It’s smaller than I expected.” He moved slowly forward and began to circle the cradled ship. “But big enough for us. If the drive is complete, the way it appears to be, and if the ship has an energy source, to power the drive; and if we can learn to fly the ship, which will be more Jay’s job than mine; and if ‘Slowdrive’ doesn’t turn out to mean so slow that Erin’s a lifetime away…”
He turned to face the rest of us. “I’d have given big odds against, an hour ago. But if we get the right answers to all those ifs, then I think there’s a chance.
“Maybe Mel is right. Maybe we’ll be going home after all.”
Chapter 32
Last night I dreamed about Danny Shaker.
I suppose the location and the circumstances made the dream inevitable: cradled in a launch sector at Muldoon’s Upside Port, drifting in free-fall, waiting for the go-ahead to fly.
Waiting impatiently. Once we received Upside approval to leave, we would be off. Off to the Maze again, out to the woman-worldlet of Paddy’s Fortune.
It was here, less than six months ago, in this very place and awaiting Upside flight approval, that Danny Shaker and his crew gave me the first hint of what life in space might be like.
Jim Swift came by and read what I just wrote. He interrupted me—polite and tactful Jim—to explain to me that I am an idiot. I should not waste one more word on Danny Shaker.
“Forget him,” he said. “And forget his bloody rough-house crew. They’re gone forever. If you’re going to describe anything, pick a useful subject. Talk about our trip home. Talk about the Slowdrive.”
“Yes, sir.”
I will, too. In my own time, and in my own way. But I have a problem. You see, no matter what the learned James Swift may tell me, I can’t absolutely convince myself that Danny Shaker is dead and gone.
I have reasons, even if no one else accepts them—or cares.
The ship that we found with the Slowdrive was simple enough to pilot: far easier than the Cuchulain, even before that became a dying hulk. On the other hand, Jim Swift’s conviction about what had happened to Shaker and his crew made both him and Doctor Eileen nervous and supercautious. They were not about to climb into an unfamiliar ship and cheerily let me switch on the power. Jim wanted to understand the Slowdrive, before we tried to go to Erin or anywhere else.
He started studying, filling pages with diagrams and equations and loading endless files of data in and out of the navaid and the ship’s computer. He was having a great time, and the rest of us were going out of our minds, because Jim would offer no opinion as to how long it might be before he was satisfied that the drive was safe.
Mel and I visited the Godspace chamber half a dozen times in the next three days. Twice Doctor Eileen went with us, but she quickly became impatient and left. Even Mel refused to go with me eventually. Everything in the Godspace was so slow, she said, it was like trying to watch the stars move. She couldn’t stand it. Worse than that, Godspace stretched time. We would spend hours and hours there, but find when we returned to the ship that only a couple of minutes had gone by. Jim Swift would still be halfway through the same sandwich, or staring vacantly at the same knob as when we left.
As a result I made my final visits to Godspace alone. And it was not until the very end that I observed the change.
Every previous visit had been the same: a giant, insubstantial crew drifting slowly around the shadowy cabin, or sitting at an oval table talking and gesturing to each other in five-minute arm movements. It was consistent with Jim Swift’s assertion, that I was seeing no more than a dying record of the moments before the Godspeed drive was turned on and the ship and crew vanished together into nonexistence.
This last time I entered the great chamber and took the usual few minutes, adjusting to the strange light and the distorted scale of things. The difference now was that everyone, including Danny Shaker, was sitting down. It took me a little while to realize what they were doing. Then I dived for the grey membrane, emerged into the corridor, and hurried at top speed back to the Slowdrive ship.
“What’s the panic?” Jim Swift had cleared away his mess of drawings and calculations from the control panel, and he seemed in high good humor.
“The Godspace chamber. You have to see it.”
“For a last look, you mean, before we leave for Erin?” He laughed at my double take. “You heard me, Jay. We’re going home. And more than home, because I finally have the whole picture. The Slowdrive is slow—compared with the Godspeed Drive. But it’s still superluminal, four or five times lightspeed. We’ve got a shot at the stars again. The Slowdrive doesn’t create vacuum distortion, either. It won’t throw us right out of this universe.”