Godspeed (34 page)

Talking about the past, Doctor Eileen sounded like a defeated woman. Maybe Duncan West had it right:
Live in the present.
If you started to dwell on history, you would find a thousand ways to make yourself miserable.

We entered the control room, and what was revealed on the displays there was enough to halt Doctor Eileen's brooding.

The big screen showed a shape like a round balloon made from fishing net. The individual loops of the net were triangular, and at many of the nodes I could see a "knot," a little point of light. It was the Net. Was it also the hardware reservoir?

"Take a look, Doctor," said Danny Shaker. He was busy at the console, but apparently had eyes in the back of his head. "No wonder our first look was just with low-frequency radio. All the radiation shorter than a few kilometers went right on through. But the long wavelengths were right to interact with the mesh and give a return signal."

That was the first hint I had of the size of the Net ahead of us. If those tiny individual loops of the balloon were kilometers across, then each point of light at the nodes . . .

Doctor Eileen pointed to a smaller display mounted next to the big one. It showed a single node at high magnification, a silver point of light expanded to a grainy, lumpy half-sphere. That could be an empty cargo container, a manufacturing facility, even a ship. The surrounding gossamer threads that formed loops of the net were cables or tubes, tens of meters across, running from the partial sphere and anchoring it in space.

Soon I could see something else. The object on the screen was not complete. Jagged break lines ran across the blunt end. At the node floated no more than a shattered remnant, a broken fragment of a complete structure.

As I stared, the display flickered. It changed to show a pair of thick partial rings, battered rust-colored doughnuts intertwined and floating in space. Another flicker, and before I could see any detail on the doughnuts they too were gone. The image had changed to a loose cluster of small objects. Most of them had the familiar bowl-backed shape of a cargo beetle. They were loosely connected by cables almost too thin to see, and when I looked closely I could see individual differences. One lacked its lower half, another had been sheared in two across the center, the upper dome of a third had a great hole punched through it.

Another flicker. I was gazing at a rough partial sphere, like the first object we had seen but even more battered. It was less grainy in appearance. The
Cuchulain
was still approaching the space structure, and the high-resolution imagers were steadily improving the quality of the pictures.

"It's a junk yard." I spoke in a whisper to Doctor Eileen. She had lost her dejected look. "This can't be the hardware reservoir."

"We'll see," Danny Shaker said over his shoulder. "We're making an inventory now. So many nodes, the first look has to be automatic."

"So many nodes" was an understatement. I tried a quick count and gave up after half a minute. Hundreds, maybe thousands. This mess
couldn't
be Godspeed Base. It would take a long time just to visit each node on the Net.

I was still staring when I felt a slap on the back—Tom Toole, grinning all over his face.

"Here we are, Jay," he said. "Didn't I tell you? We're all going to be rich—rolling in money."

"Rich? It's all junk." But as I spoke I realized that the atmosphere in the control room was like a celebration. Crew members were laughing, shaking hands, and hammering their fists on the walls.

"The hell it is!" Tom Toole, in his enthusiasm, reached his arm around his enemy Doctor Eileen and gave her a squeeze. "I've been making trips to the Forty Worlds for half my life, and I've never seen the like of this. Many a time, come Winterfall, the lads and me would go home with nothing to show. Not this time, though. Look at that!" He pointed to the display, where a twisted cylindrical hulk hung in its retaining network of tubes. "Even if it don't work—even if it's
empty
—it's valuable materials. Every one of the things out there is money. Give me a scavenger ship, a decent crew, and half a year in this place, I'd go home Lord of Skibbereen."

Doctor Eileen had become caught up in the mood. She was laughing at the antics of tubby Donald Rudden, bouncing up and down in place until his belly and jowls rippled.

Then I saw Danny Shaker. Ignoring the noise around him he sat at the controls, quietly and carefully making some fine adjustment. I followed his glance to another and smaller screen. At first I saw only a reduced version of the whole net. Then as I moved to stand by Shaker's side I realized that he was performing a controlled zoom, arrowing the display toward a central region of the field.

That center was not empty. Delineated in space, unattached to any point of the network, a slender sharp-ended feature was appearing. I cannot say I saw it, because nothing was visible. I deduced its existence because something was occulting the background field of stars.

"The Needle," Shaker said softly. I could not tell if he was talking to me or to himself. "First the Net and hardware reservoir." He glanced across to the screen showing the results of the node scan, and from his expression he didn't share the crew's enthusiasm. Displayed at the moment was an object like a smaller version of the
Cuchulain,
except that something had snapped it across the column of the cargo hold and twisted the two halves until the flared drive unit sat next to the living quarters. "Reservoir, Net, and Needle. So where's the Eye?"

"The Eye of the Needle," I said. "In the center . . ."

Under Danny Shaker's control, the imaging system was already creeping along the invisible line of the Needle, beginning at one imagined end and scanning steadily toward the other.

I strained my eyes, willing photons to appear and signal the existence of a Needle's Eye. The display offered only a line of cold, starfree darkness from one end to the other.

Danny Shaker sighed, lifted his hands from the controls, and turned to me. For one second I saw tension on his face. Then he gave me a smile.

"Not so easy, eh? Needle, but no Eye. Here." He stood up and gestured to the chair. "Try your hand, Jay. I need a bit of young man's luck."

I didn't think I was particularly lucky, but nothing in the Forty Worlds could have kept me out of that control chair. Three minutes of experiment gave me the hang of it, controlling the movement of the display and the degree of magnification of the zoom.

I moved out to one end of the Needle, and worked my way steadily along it. I saw nothing—but at one point I imagined a hint of a bit more nothing than usual.

"Look at the star field." I halted the display. "I think an extra area is being masked out. Can you change the brightness and pick up fainter background stars?"

Shaker said nothing, but he leaned over and pressed one button. The intensity of the display increased. Thousands of added stars and galaxies filled the screen.

It was easy to see it now. The spike of the Needle, delineated against a deep space backdrop, was thicker at one point. There was a bulge, a broadening of the smooth line. I zoomed as far as the system would go, and still saw only blackness.

I was ready to resume the scan along the Needle, disappointed at my failure, when Danny Shaker leaned over my shoulder.

"Not too fast, Jay. I don't see anything either, but let's try another part of the spectrum. Run us through the wavelengths, ultraviolet to deep radio."

Maybe he thought that was a straightforward request, but it was beyond me. I moved out of the way and watched Danny Shaker exercise another brief command sequence.

"Hard U/V," he said. "No return signal. Same for the visible, full absorption there and in the near infra-red." He was explaining aloud for my benefit. "Let's try thermal. Nothing there either—"

"Wait. Stop it there."

I had seen something. Black on black, a deeper shade of shadow. The whole line of the Needle was dark—but I sensed that one part was darker than the rest.

"That's a thermal signature," Shaker said. "Let's take a look at actual temperatures. Show me where." He touched another set of keys, and a cursor appeared on the screen. He moved it a little way off the point I indicated.

"Not there," I said. "A bit more over to the right."

"I know. We need this for comparison." Numbers appeared below the cursor. "I'm querying at different wavelengths. The background shows a maximum at sixty micrometers, fifty-two degrees absolute. That's about right for ambient, the temperature of a radiating black body this far from Maveen. So this part of the Needle is absorbing shorter wavelength solar energy perfectly, and emitting it as long-wave thermal radiation. Now for the real test. We ask for the temperature as we go, and see what happens. Show me where."

Under my direction the cursor began to move, creeping to the center of the darkest area. The region below the cursor began to fall—and fall again.

"Thirty-seven. Thirty-two." Shaker was repeating the values to himself. "Twenty-four. Fifteen. My God, how much lower? Eleven, seven—can't go much farther. Five. Four. Three."

The cursor was at the exact center of the dark region, and the numerical display below it had steadied to a constant value.

"Two point seven degrees," Shaker said softly. "How about that, Jay."

"What about it?" It meant nothing to me.

"That point, right where the cursor is sitting, is at the temperature of the cosmic background radiation. How can we observe the background, but not see the stars?" Shaker stared around the room, where the crew still showed high excitement. Finally he was showing signs of that excitement himself. "The answer is, you can't see background without stars, not in any normal region of space. So that's no normal region of space."

He leaned back in his seat. "It's the Eye, Jay, right there. That's where we have to go, through the Eye of the Needle. That's where we look for Godspeed Base. That's where we find the Godspeed Drive."

CHAPTER 26

" 'Hardware reservoir' is too charitable," Doctor Eileen said. She, Jim Swift and I were by the display, watching an endless array of ruined space structures that came and went on the screen. Her first enthusiasm had faded, and now she sounded nervous and gloomy. "
Graveyard
would be a better term. And by the look of it the heap of junk we're traveling on knows just where it belongs. It came to the right place."

The
Cuchulain
was hobbling toward the black unknown of the Eye, slow as a Lake Sheelin thaw. We were not hurrying for two reasons: caution, and because we had no choice. The engines of the
Cuchulain
sounded as though they were on their last legs. For the past half hour a steady vibration had shaken the whole ship, enough to keep your teeth on edge. At any other time, Danny Shaker would have ordered the drive turned off for maintenance. Today he ignored it. All his attention seemed fixed on the circle of darkness.

Except that he must have been aware of what was going on behind him, because he said, "You claim the glass is half-empty, doctor, but I prefer to think it's half-f. The
Cuchulain
isn't in great shape, but it did exactly what it had to do: It brought us here."

"To a junkyard. Are you suggesting that you can make a working vessel out of that sort of thing?" Eileen Xavier pointed to where a dismembered drive unit hung close to a mangled cargo stem.

"If I had to. It wasn't so different from that a few years ago, putting a ship together from bits and pieces so we could limp home. With injuries, too, and crew deaths, to make everything that much harder." Shaker laughed, as though injuries and deaths were the most natural thing in the world. "But we're facing nothing like that this time. We're well off. That's Godspeed Base ahead of us."

"Or something," Doctor Eileen said. "I hope you know what you're doing, flying straight for that thing."

"No more than you do, Doctor. But spacers are paid to take risks. Tell me if you want to stop, or if you want to play it supersafe. If you like you can leave the
Cuchulain,
hang around in a cargo beetle, and watch while we go in."

He had one eye on Eileen Xavier as he spoke. I was sure that he really knew what he was doing, and that he was just testing her feelings. But suppose she reacted wrong? If she didn't want to continue, after coming so far and so long . . . Worst of all, suppose that she made
me
stay behind and out of danger, the way she had when we reached
Paddy's Fortune.

I decided that it didn't matter what she wanted. I was crew now, and I would go with the ship.

"Physicians aren't trained to take risks," Doctor Eileen said. "Especially with people's lives. I want an expert opinion on this. Dr. Swift?"

Jim Swift hadn't spoken since he came to the bridge, apart from an appreciative "Mmm," when he saw the Eye. But he had been studying the black pupil as we neared it, and making calculations.

Now he said, "I doubt if my thoughts are any different from Captain Shaker's. The Luimneach Anomaly?"

Danny Shaker nodded. "That's how I'm thinking."

"The what?" asked Doctor Eileen.

"Luimneach is one of the frozen planets, ninth one out beyond Tyrone." Jim Swift looked at Shaker. "Not much that's valuable there, as I recall."

"Volatiles. But nothing you can't find a lot closer to Maveen. Nothing worth hauling."

"The Luimneach Anomaly is something—I'm not sure what to call it—in orbit around the planet. It's a black region, just like that one." Swift pointed to the screen. "Same size, too, according to my estimates."

"And—inside the Anomaly?" Doctor Eileen glanced from one man to the other.

Danny Shaker shrugged. "Not a thing. I've never been inside myself, but I know people who have. There's nothing there."

"Which is why it's so frustrating," Jim Swift added. "Some people even claim the Anomaly is a
natural
feature, a quirk in space-time. I never bought that explanation myself, and now we have proof that it's not true. If we don't take anything else back with us, this makes the whole trip worthwhile."