“No. Just one.”
“Well, did Paddy Enderton tell you that Dan and Stan, the people he was afraid of, were identical twins?” “No. He said brothers. But—”
I realized, at that precise moment, how final death is. I had been about to say, we can ask him and find out. But Paddy Enderton had gone where he could never answer another question from anyone, about anything.
“Look, Jay.” Doctor Eileen was doing her best to take me seriously, but I didn’t think she was succeeding. “If you’re worried about this, there’s one very simple way to get an answer. I’ll ask Captain Shaker about the scar that you saw on his arm. Would you like me to do that?”
I didn’t. Part of the reason was that I hated Doctor Eileen to think I was that much of a fool, but I suspect that as big a reason was that I didn’t want Danny Shaker to think the same thing. In spite of the goosebumps that had run over my body in triple-deep layers when I first saw that red scar, I still could not relate the Danny Shaker that I knew, the man who treated me more like an equal and an adult than anyone I had ever known, to the faceless bogeyman who had haunted Paddy Enderton’s last days.
“No, it’s all right,” I said. “Don’t say anything to Captain Shaker. It was just that Paddy Enderton seemed so scared.”
I was cheating, passing off my own fears as belonging to somebody else. But it satisfied Doctor Eileen.
“Enderton was a dying man,” she said, “probably with a lot on his conscience, and plenty to be scared about if he were at all religious. But I’m quite willing to forget all about this, if you are.”
“I am.”
“So we’ll drop it. Tell me what Uncle Duncan did to repair the drive. You know, at this rate I ought to be charging Captain Shaker for Duncan’s presence on board, instead of paying his fare.”
I would have told her readily—if I had known. But all the time I had been in the drive chamber I had been far too jittery about Danny Shaker’s arm to notice what was being done to the drive itself.
I suspect that I was a big disappointment to Doctor Eileen. I could read her thoughts. She had brought me so far, and had hoped that I might be useful. But ever since I boarded the Cuchulain, I seemed unable to remember the simplest things.
What would she tell my mother when we got back?
After the work on the drive, the flight of the Cuchulain felt smoother. Whether this was real or imagined, I don’t know. But as the days and weeks wore on, and began to seem more and more the same, everyone on board settled into a mood that was both timeless and impatient.
The final stage was the most tantalizing of all. We reached the edge of the Maze, and we knew that at normal rates of deep-space progress we could have been at our target world in a few hours. But at Captain Shaker’s insistence, and with Doctor Eileen’s concurrence, we went creeping along the outer edge of the Maze like a mud-eel along the bottom of Lake Sheelin.
As we moved I saw, through a telescope, a dozen little worlds of whose existence I had first learned through Paddy Enderton’s little computer.
Clareen, Oola, Drumkeerin, Ardscull, Timolin, Culdaff, Tyrella, Moira… Now, instead of being rusty or flaming-red points in a hand-held display that could be extinguished by a poking finger, they were new and whiter points of light. But in a way they were hardly more real or tangible.
Somewhere, a day or two ahead, lay our true goaclass="underline" Paddy’s Fortune. Was I excited? I certainly was—but no more so, I suspect, than the doctor, or than Jim Swift and Walter Hamilton.
The oddest thing was the crew of the Cuchulain. Danny Shaker had as good as told us that his crew didn’t give a hoot for the Godspeed Drive, or the possibility that we might be heading for Godspeed Base. But something was certainly winding them up. I came across Patrick O’Rourke and Tom Toole, heads together, talking confidentially in one of the corridors. They shut up at once when they saw me, but there was no hiding the gleam of excitement on their faces. And not just O’Rourke and Toole. Every hour, it seemed, I came across little knots of crewmen, taking time off their duties to talk together in low voices. Once I even thought I heard the whispered phrase, “Paddy’s Fortune.” But that seemed impossible. Doctor Eileen had never used those words on board the Cuchulain to describe where we were going. I knew that I never had, either.
The only exceptions to the excitement and expectation that filled the whole ship were Danny Shaker and Duncan West. Shaker was as calm, organized, and pleasant to me as ever. It was impossible not to respond to him, and I felt those strange suspicions of mine fading.
As for Duncan, he had been hidden behind his bland, pleasant face for as long as I had known him—which was all my life. He continued to work on ship repair and maintenance, where according to all the crew (except for sullen Joe Munroe) he had been performing miracles. Duncan didn’t seem to care when, if ever, we reached Paddy’s Fortune. He derived his pleasures from immediate results, knowing that another ingenious fix had worked.
Finally, there was no more time for speculation. The word came to Doctor Eileen—I don’t know who told her—that a body had been sighted at the exact location that our coordinate set predicted. It was only a minor worldlet, according to the telescope data, no more than a couple of kilometers across. But it was there, right where it should be.
Of course, we knew no details of the surface or internal composition. But that didn’t matter, because in just a couple more hours the Cuchulain would be parked in a neighboring orbit, close enough for a very good look, and after that a visit.
The plan that we would follow on arrival had been laid out long ago, by Doctor Eileen. Danny Shaker and all his crew would remain on board the Cuchulain. So, to my huge frustration and chagrin, would I. Doctor Eileen told me that she had promised my mother that I would be exposed as little as possible to any unknown dangers, and landing on a new worldlet could certainly provide those.
So Duncan West, Jim Swift, Walter Hamilton, and the doctor herself would take a little humpbacked cargo vessel and fly across to Paddy’s Fortune. Based on that initial exploration, they would either return to the Cuchulain, or send the signal for others to join them. The third possibility, thought of I am sure but never discussed in my presence, was that they would neither return, nor send us a signal. If that happened, I believe that the next decision would have been left with Danny Shaker.
Rather than going along to the cargo area and watching the cargo beetle be launched, I chose to stay in an observation chamber in the living quarters and stare at Paddy’s Fortune through the best image magnification device that I could find.
We were maybe fifty kilometers away from the surface of the little worldlet, a distance that Doctor Eileen, or more likely Danny Shaker, must have judged sufficient to keep us clear of danger. It was still close enough to let me see the details of the surface—such as they were. But what I stared at on the image screen was absolutely baffling, and here’s why.
On the way out from Erin, three or four sessions with Danny Shaker had taught me a lot about the Forty Worlds, and also a good deal about the Maze. I knew that a little worldlet, like the one that I was staring at, could have many things—rocks, light metals, salts, and water. Even carbon dioxide, ammonia, and methane. But those gases would have to be frozen, or trapped in the interior. Because the one thing above all others that no world as small as Paddy’s Fortune could have was an atmosphere. The gravity field was simply too tiny to hold on to gases.