Godspeed (41 page)

I reached out one suited arm and pushed my hand delicately into the darkness. I felt a slight, sticky resistance, but that was all. Unless it was very deep I should have no trouble passing through. I was not sure I dared to try.

The thing that persuaded me to enter the dark eye of the circle had nothing to do with courage. I realized that I was only a minute or two away from the airlock. I was not willing to go back and sit near the cargo beetle for the next five and half hours, then tell the others that my total achievement had been to "explore" less than a hundred yards of blank corridor. I knew how Jim Swift and Mel would react to that confession.

I moved back a few steps along the corridor. It might be difficult to get any traction from the walls or floor once I was within the circle itself. I turned the suit forward impulse to a medium level, built up speed, and plunged feet first into the dark center.

I didn't close my eyes, but I might as well have. The darkness inside was total. It didn't last long enough for my eyes to adjust, and that was fortunate, because before I knew it I was emerging into a light so intense that the suit's visor lagged for a second before it could make a dimming adjustment.

Five seconds earlier I had been in a narrow corridor. Now I had emerged into a chamber so big that portals like the one from which I had emerged were no more than dark pinpricks on the distant walls. For a moment I thought that the interior itself was empty, except for flickering regions of light and dark. Then I realized that the interior patterns of dark and light formed moving shapes.

Familiar shapes. I recognized one that was far away from me. It was the figure of a man, gigantic and insubstantial. He was hundreds of feet high, but no more solid than a pall of light-grey smoke from a bonfire. Through him I could see the far wall of Flicker.

Given that first reference point I began to make sense of the nearer objects, and at last of the whole scene. On the right-hand side I was looking at a ship's living quarters, with a crew moving around within. And on the left side, spreading all the way to the edge of the great chamber . . .

I peered, and puzzled. This was hard to make out: the shadow of an immense band of light, curving around on itself again and again. But I could not see any place where it closed. It formed a huge, hazy spiral, twisting away into space.

As I followed the turning band back from right to left, I made the final connection. This was not merely a crew and a ship. It was a crew in a ship with the Godspeed Drive. I had been looking at the corkscrew rear portion, drawn in luminous fog. And this was not just
any
crew.

I stared at the closest of the gigantic, lumbering figures. From my position close to its midriff I could not see the face, surmounting a huge body and diminished by distance. But at the level where I hovered I could see a dark band around the midsection. Stuck into it was a foggy white cylinder, thirty or forty feet long, with a bent handle. Like a pistol. Like Walter Hamilton's pistol. Tucked into a belt. Duncan West's belt.

As I stared another shape drifted past the static figure of Duncan, creeping forward with slow, hundred-yard strides. The hair was a dark cloud tied behind the head. Giant hands, bigger than cargo beetles, crossed a prodigious chest and gripped the biceps of arms each longer than the
Cuchulain.

It was Danny Shaker. According to Jim Swift, Shaker and his whole crew had vanished forever, thrown into another universe by the power of the Godspeed Drive. Yet they walked in front of me now. I could not make out individual faces, but I thought I recognized Donald Rudden's ponderous bulk, a hundred times as large as life, and the cloudy swirl of Tom Toole's carroty-red hair.

I watched and watched, unable to take my eyes off the silent action before me. The crew of the
Cuchulain
were as slow as they were big. Each giant step took an age, each mouth gaped and closed in what I recognized at last as a pattern of glacial speech. I used my suit controls, and found that I could float toward—and through—anything in the chamber. For a long time I hovered right in front of Danny Shaker's face, trying and failing to observe the glint of life in the fog of his grey eyes. On his scale my suited figure would be no bigger than a large beetle. There was no sign that he had any awareness of my presence.

I moved with him, hypnotized, studying his face as we crept backward and forward across the ship's cabin. The rest of the crew was now sitting at a table talking, ten eternal minutes to each sentence. Shaker stood aloof. I decided from his actions that as usual he was worrying about the ship. He went and had a long conversation with a seated giant whom I took to be Patrick O'Rourke. From my point of view it was a perfectly silent discussion. Even with my suit amplifier as high as it would go, all I heard was a deep bass rumble like distant avalanches in the mountains far west of Lake Sheelin; far above it was the hiss of air within my own suit. At last Shaker headed off toward a different part of the chamber.

The sight of his destination, a shadowy wall filled with spectral dials, at last made me consider my own situation.

I queried my suit for the time, and could not believe what it told me. Close to five hours had passed since I had left the cargo beetle.

I took a last look at the crew. It should be safe to leave. At the rate they were going, they would sit and chat for another couple of days.

I headed back to the beetle and arrived there bursting to tell the others what I had seen. No one was present, not even Doctor Eileen, for all her threats about being late.

I went inside, replenished my suit's air supply, and settled down to wait. Four hours later I was still waiting. In that time I had made half a dozen trips as far as the corridor branch point, but seen and heard nothing. In my sixth hour of waiting, when I was absolutely convinced that there had been a major disaster and I was alone in the space base, Jim Swift arrived at the cargo beetle.

He slowly opened the visor of his suit and nodded a greeting.

"What happened?" I asked. I couldn't believe he was so casual.

"Not one interesting thing. Chamber after chamber of experimental equipment, all the way across to the other side of Flicker. No sign of any ship. I hope somebody else had better luck."

"Where have you
been?
You're six hours late."

"Eh!" He scowled at me. "I'm not late—I'm a few minutes early."

"You've been gone for nearly twelve hours."

"Nonsense." He started to query his suit, then changed his mind and pointed to the control panel of the beetle. "Six hours since I left, within a couple of minutes."

The panel chronometer agreed with him. I queried my suit. It reported a time six hours later than the beetle's clock. I stared at Jim Swift.

"What's wrong, Jay?" he said. "Seeing things?"

"Hearing things. Listen." I played out the time again, at external volume.

"I hear it." He shrugged. "But it's wrong. What have you been doing that might have ruined your suit's clock?"

"I've been—I've seen—"

"Don't babble." He scented something interesting, so he was more sympathetic than annoyed. "Start at the beginning, and take it slow. What happened when you left here?"

I explained everything: the dark membrane, my passage through it, the world-sized spherical cavity beyond, and the Godspeed ship with its gargantuan crew.

"No," he said, when I described the dimensions of the chamber. "I traveled miles in the interior of Flicker, and there's no room for anything like what you're describing. You say everyone was enormous, and they moved in slow motion?"

"I timed a blink of Danny Shaker's eyes. It took nearly a minute."

"That's what you measured. But when you returned here, you believed that you had been gone for six hours. Isn't it obvious that you were really away only a few minutes?—just the time it took you to travel along the corridor to the membrane, and then after you returned through it, the time to come back here."

"I spent a long time inside—"

"You
thought
you did. And as far as you are concerned, that is valid. You, and your clock, were speeded up, by a big factor—a hundred or more. And I'll bet you were only the same fraction of your real size, too, for a consistent change in space-time scale that preserves light-speed. Jay, you found a Godspeed space. A
Godspace.
A place where people can do
experiments
in an alternate spacetime. It's fascinating, but it won't help us go home."

"What about Shaker and the crew? They didn't vanish into another universe, the way you said. They're still here, inside Flicker. I saw them."

"No, you didn't. What you saw is some kind of fading record in Godspace, a trace of what was happening to Shaker and the crew at the time when the Godspeed drive was turned on.
Nothing
in that chamber takes place in normal space and time. If you'll take me there, I'll prove it."

He headed for the hatch. Before I could close my suit visor and follow him we were interrupted. The lock was operating. As soon as its cycle was complete, Mel popped through. Right behind her was Doctor Eileen, saying before she was fully into the cabin, "I know, I know, don't tell me. Six hours and fifteen minutes. It doesn't matter."

Because
she
was the one who was late. But it certainly didn't matter to Mel. She grabbed my hands. Before I knew what was happening she had spun us up and around the cabin. She didn't have complete free-fall control, and we bounced together off walls and ceiling.

"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.