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-full. 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."
"I had in mind a rather more tangible result," Doctor Eileen said drily. "I take it, Dr. Swift, that you don't think it would be too risky to enter?"
He shrugged. "Hey, life's a risk."
From her expression it was not quite the reassurance she was looking for. Doctor Eileen sighed and said, "I must be getting old. All right, Captain Shaker. I see that I am in a minority of one. Proceed. Let's see what we've got."
She was agreeing! We were going in! I could breathe easy again, as the Cuchulain rattled and creaked its way forward. The Eye grew, until it filled the whole display screen with a dense, unrelieved blackness. And then, while I was still waiting for something to happen, Danny Shaker said casually, "The ship is being slowed. We must be passing through the membrane. If this is anything like the Luimneach Anomaly, we'll be out again in just a few seconds."
We entered another one of those periods when time stretches forever. It may have been seconds, but it seemed hours before the screen showed a first ghost of an image, a dim outline like a bottom-heavy figure eight with a tiny extra lobe stuck onto its upper end. As Shaker murmured, "Nearly out," the image brightened and solidified. The middle part flickered and changed randomly before my eyes.
The control room remained silent, until Jim Swift said in a husky voice, "Well, this anomaly's not empty."
"Far from it." Danny Shaker turned to Doctor Eileen. "I can't guarantee that this is Godspeed Base until we take a closer look. But I'll bet my share of this whole venture on it. The big sphere on the bottom end of that structure is just the sort of hangar where you do deep space service on large ships."
"What about the Drive?" I asked.
Shaker nodded. "Where there's a ship, inside a hangar, inside an anomaly, inside a hardware net, then inside that ship you can hope to find . . ."
He didn't finish his sentence. But I finished it for him, inside my head.
. . . a Godspeed Drive.
* * *
The exploring party was itching to be on its way even before the Cuchulain reached the structure. Only a skeleton crew would remain on our ship, because everyone wanted to go. As Jim Swift said, with a perverse logic that seemed shared by everyone, "I'm quite sure it is. But if it isn't, I want to know at once."
So did I, only I had worries of my own. I didn't like that talk of a skeleton crew that would stay on the Cuchulain.
While Jim Swift seemed to be starting an argument with Danny Shaker and Doctor Eileen about the best way to explore the space structure floating ahead of us, I sneaked away to the
top level of the living quarters. I was learning. Out of sight, out of mind. I didn't want to be around when the skeleton crew was picked.
On the upper level I went to find Mel, but apparently she was learning, too. She stayed hidden until I called softly, "Mel? It's me. It's safe."
Then she popped out and was at me like a hurricane. "What are you doing here? Tell me what's happening. First Eileen Xavier—she vanishes, and she doesn't come back. Then it's Jim Swift. Gone. Then it's Duncan West. Where did they go? What are they doing?"
"If you'll shut up for a minute, I'll tell you." I paused, savoring the moment until I thought she was ready to burst, then I said, "We've found it, Mel!"
"The Reservoir?"
"The Reservoir, the Net, the Needle, the Eye, everything. Godspeed Base, and the Godspeed Drive."
"You've been to them?"
"Well, no. But I will have, in an hour or so. We'll be docking any minute. Then a party will go over there."
"But you won't be part of it. You said Doctor Eileen wouldn't let you go to Paddy's Fortune because she thought it might be dangerous."
"This will be different. She only did that because I was standing right in front of her."
I was feeling smug at my own cunning, and it must have showed. Because Mel looked furious, and suddenly I didn't feel so full of bounce. She had been standing right by me, but now she plopped down in a chair. "You've been sitting up on the bridge all fat and happy. And you're going off to find the Godspeed Drive. And I'm trapped here with nothing to do but play Jim Swift's stupid games with the navaid. It's not fair, and I've had it. I've been doing my best to act responsibly, but you're hiding me away forever. When we started out I had no idea it would take so much time."
"No one did. The engines are in awful shape, we've had to travel really slow."
It wasn't much of an answer, and I knew it. Mel was on the boil, and if I stayed around I was going to be the one that got the heat. "I'll go and ask Doctor Eileen," I said hurriedly. "She might be able to tell us something."
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