However, the surface details of the world on the screen were, without a doubt, softened and blurred by something between them and the Cuchulain. And when I stared hard at the limb, where the surface of Paddy’s Fortune showed a half-moon horizon, I could see a thin blurry ring where light from Maveen was scattered back toward the imager on the Cuchulain.
That was the way that the rim of Erin itself had looked from a distance, as sunlight scattered from the layer of air.
Except that Paddy’s Fortune couldn’t have air.
It was too much for me to stand. I left the observation chamber and hurried along to the main control room of the ship. Danny Shaker was there with Tom Toole. They were watching a different viewing screen, one that showed the cargo beetle drifting smoothly away from the column of the collapsed cargo hold, and out into free space.
“Now then, Jay,” said Shaker, “I’m surprised that you aren’t down there to see them off.”
“I was watching—the little world.” (I had almost said Paddy’s Fortune.) “I knew that Doctor Eileen and the others would be flying down to it, so I thought I’d follow their approach. But I can’t understand the way that it looks.”
“Join the club,” Tom Toole said, and he laughed.
“We had the same problem,” Shaker said, “when we made our first observations. You mean the blurred surface?”
“And the way the horizon looks. You told me that a little worldlet—”
“I did. And I still say it.” Shaker turned to the control board, and an image of Paddy’s Fortune sprang up there. “It can’t hold an atmosphere, right? So how can it possibly look like that? I’ll tell you how. There’s a complete translucent shell, extending over the whole world and about a hundred meters above the surface. Artificial, of course, and suspended we don’t know how. Somebody didn’t want the bare surface exposed to space.
“But that’s not the half of it. Come on, Jay, let’s test how good you are at guessing. What’s under that see-through cover?”
“An atmosphere.” It was the obvious answer.
“Too easy, eh? All right, what else?”
What else? Here was a whole worldlet that somebody had gone to the enormous trouble of covering with a layer through which gas could not escape, just so Paddy’s Fortune could have an atmosphere. Why would anyone want to give such a small world an atmosphere? Who or what needs an atmosphere?
“Life! There’s living things, down there under the cover.”
Shaker turned triumphantly to Toole. “Now didn’t I tell you, Tom, that he’d figure it out?”
“But how can you possibly know that there is life?” I said. I had peered at the surface with the best imager on board, and seen no plants or animals.
“I could ask you for one more guess, but it wouldn’t be fair, because there’s instruments on the Cuchulain that you don’t know about yet.” Shaker touched another couple of keys on the control board, and a small inset appeared on the screen. It was a jagged line, rising and falling above a horizontal axis. “That’s what we get when we look at the surface of the world out there with a thing called a spectrometer. It measures how much light comes back to us at a whole set of different wavelengths. Well, we know exactly what’s going in—that’s just the light from Maveen itself. So when we put those two pieces of information together, we can often tell what material we’re looking at. What we find here, and over a lot of the worldlet’s surface, is something called a chlorophyll signature, a curve that tells us for sure that there are plants down there. Chlorophyll means plants.”
“And animals?” I asked.
Now it was Tom Toole who guffawed and turned to Danny Shaker. “He’s got you, Chief.”
“Indeed he does.” Shaker turned off the display. “There could be animals, Jay, and there probably are, even if they’re only single-celled ones. But we’ve seen nothing that’s a unique signature for them, the way that chlorophyll is for growing plant life. We’ll know in a few hours, though. Because Doctor Xavier promised to send us a message back. She knows we’re as curious about it as she is.”
It was all right for him to say that, and act as calm as could be. But I don’t think any of them was as keen to know what was down there as I was.
It wasn’t fair. I felt that it was my world. I was the one on the expedition who had found out that Paddy’s Fortune even existed. Yet now I was the one sitting up here, left behind while the doctor went to look at it.
I told myself, for about the hundredth time, that Doctor Eileen was carrying her feelings of duty toward my mother to ridiculous lengths.
It was going to be another few hours before I learned that the idea of leaving me behind on the Cuchulain had been strongly supported by Danny Shaker.
Chapter 15
One of Mother’s favorite sayings, used whenever she was making me do something that she wanted me to do as opposed to something that I wanted to do myself, was, “The devil finds work for children’s idle hands.”
From what I had been told of history, the devil had even better success with adults; however, it was never any good arguing that point with Mother. And if she had known about what happened next on the Cuchulain, she would have said that it proved she was right.
With Doctor Eileen off to visit Paddy’s Fortune, and the ship’s crew busy at their own work, I was left with nothing to do. For the first few hours I didn’t mind that at all. I took out the little calculator/display unit that had belonged to Paddy Enderton, and I tried to find out more about how it worked. It was something I had been wanting to do for weeks, but I hadn’t dared, because Doctor Eileen believed that the unit was back home at our house by Lake Sheelin.
I hadn’t exactly lied to anyone. When we left, Mother had packed my bag for me. She didn’t include the calculator, though I knew that she and Doctor Eileen had talked about it. I didn’t believe that she had left it out by accident, but at the last moment, when everyone was ready to leave, I nipped upstairs and slipped the little plastic wafer into my pocket.
I told myself that no one had actually told me not to take it with me; on the other hand, I felt uneasy enough about what I had done that I left the unit hidden away, all through our trip out to the Maze.
Now that Doctor Eileen and the others from Erin were finally out of the way, I sat down at the table in our living quarters and started work. What I was after was more information about Paddy’s Fortune. When I had asked for information at the Second Data Level before, nothing had appeared on the display. The assumption we had made then was that it was blank because nothing more was stored about Paddy’s Fortune, and the data bank contained only its coordinate set. But suppose that was wrong. Suppose Paddy Enderton had deliberately hidden additional information about the mysterious worldlet that was supposed to make his fortune? What a coup it would be if I, sitting back aboard the Cuchulain, could come up with more information about Paddy’s Fortune than Doctor Eileen, Jim Swift, and the others, over exploring the planetoid itself.
Pure wishful thinking, I guess, because if Paddy Enderton had stored other data about his worldlet in the little unit he had done it too cleverly for me. After three or four hours that got me nowhere, I was frustrated and irritated. I turned the unit off, hid it away in my pocket, and left our living quarters. I went wandering away along the length of the Cuchulain, heading toward the cargo hold but with my mind still on the little calculator unit. Where had it come from?