Paddy Enderton, according to Doctor Eileen, had never visited Paddy’s Fortune. Also, according to the doctor, the calculator could not have been made anywhere in the Forty Worlds. That left a real mystery: How had the gadget come into Paddy Enderton’s hands?
It was while I was chewing on that problem, and getting nowhere, that I noticed one of the bulkhead doors, halfway along the cargo column, standing a few inches ajar.
According to everything that I had been told about shipboard procedures, it was an unforgivable sin for anyone to leave those doors open. They divided the ship into a number of airtight compartments. This limited the damage that could be done by a seal failure, anywhere in the whole structure, to a loss of air in a single part.
I closed the bulkhead door, carefully dogged it to, and hurried along to check the rest of the cargo column. Everything was in order, all the way to the drive unit. The drive was switched off, because the Cuchulain had been placed in a free-fall orbit that matched the orbit of Paddy’s Fortune. I took a few minutes for another inspection of the drive. In spite of all the maintenance work that had been done on it there was a used, battered look to the equipment. How long did Danny Shaker say it had been in continuous use?
A couple of centuries, at least. So how much longer would it last? Long enough, I hoped, for us to complete our journey.
And with that thought I became aware of a violent knocking, back along the cargo column. I hurried that way. Before I was halfway there I knew that the sound was coming from the bulkhead door that I had closed.
I slipped the latch and waited, afraid of what would happen next. Sure enough, the door banged wide and Patrick O’Rourke popped out. He was wearing a suit with its helmet open, and his face was an angry red.
He glared at me. “Did you do that?”
It was tempting to play innocent, but I knew it wouldn’t work—there was no one else around.
“The bulkhead was open—I was told it always had to be kept closed.…”
“It never occurred to you that at the end of every long trip, a systematic check is made on all seals? To do that, you have to leave them open, one after another. It’s a long job. We were halfway through, and now the whole thing has to be started over. Hours of work. You stupid—stupid—” He stared at me pop-eyed, searching for the worst insult he could think of. “You stupid child. Well, you’ll not cause us any more trouble today.”
He grabbed me by one arm and the back of my neck, hard enough to hurt, and pushed me along in front of him.
“Stop it,” I complained. “You don’t have to do that, I can walk for myself. Let go of me!”
But he didn’t, not until we were at the living quarters that Doctor Eileen and I and the rest of us from Erin had been assigned. Then O’Rourke opened the door and threw me inside. “Get in and stay in,” he shouted after me. “For your own sake. I’m going to have to explain to the chief why my whole maintenance crew is three hours behind in their work. And let me tell you, he’s not going to like that one bit.”
The door slammed shut, and was locked from the outside. I rubbed at my neck—O’Rourke had left bruises there. For maybe two minutes I worried about what I had done, and what would be said to Danny Shaker.
Then I started to feel angry. I couldn’t be expected to know about ship’s maintenance, or what was done at the end of each trip. So far as I could see, I had behaved perfectly responsibly. The bulkhead had been open, when it wasn’t supposed to be. I had closed it, like a safety-conscious passenger—and been blamed, instead of praised.
I went to the door and hammered at it. A couple of minutes of that was enough to convince me that it was pointless. O’Rourke and his crew were far away along the cargo column, and no one else had any reason to come to our quarters, not when Doctor Eileen and the others were away on Paddy’s Fortune.
I was stuck, until Patrick O’Rourke took it into his head to come along and let me out. From the look of him when he left, that could be many hours.
I went back to the table and took Paddy Enderton’s calculator out of my pocket. But in my irritated and impatient mood working on it appealed even less to me now than when I had left. I put it away again and went wandering around the living quarters. After a few minutes I crouched down next to one of the air duct panels.
No one on board the Cuchulain could really be locked up. There had to be emergency routes, ready in case the usual ways were blocked. To escape from our living quarters, all I had to do was remove the grille, crawl along an air duct until I reached a point outside the locked region, and push my way out past another air grille.
Which was, I decided, exactly what I was going to do. I would find Danny Shaker and give him my version of events, to balance out whatever it might be that Patrick O’Rourke was going to tell him.
I pulled the air grille away from the wall, lay flat, and peered inside. The passageway was about two feet across: big enough for any but the fattest crew member, and high enough for me to crawl along comfortably on my hands and knees. I started out. The duct was cool and pleasant, with fresh air sighing past me as I crawled.
In less than a minute I had gone far enough to put our living quarters well behind me. Grilles, placed along the wall of the duct every ten yards or so, made sure that I could get out any time I chose. I peered through one. I saw a groundhog’s view of a deserted companionway.
This is where there may be some truth to Mother’s saying about the devil and idle hands. I still had nothing to do. It occurred to me that hidden away in the air duct system as I was I could see and not be seen, and hear but not be heard. If I wriggled my way along to Danny Shaker’s cabin I might be able to hear whatever Patrick O’Rourke was going to accuse me of doing. When the time came for me to refute what he said I would be ready, point by point.
It was not easy to judge distances, crawling along as I was in a darkness relieved only by light scattering in through the air grilles. On the other hand, I could hardly go in the wrong direction. All the crew quarters lay in the same part of the ship, aft of ours. I went that way, taking my time, and pausing every now and then to take a peek out through a grille.
After a while I knew I was getting close. I could hear voices just ahead. A little farther, sneaking along cautious on my hands and knees, and I could identify them: Connor Bryan and Rory O’Donovan. Two of the general crew and, in my humble opinion, far from the smartest people on the ship.
In another few seconds I could see them, or at least I could see their legs. They were sitting close together, and they were talking, but not about me or Paddy’s Fortune or the Godspeed Drive.
“Big and fat and pale-skinned,” Connor Bryan was saying. “Big chest, big belly, big hips. None of your stick figures for me. I want something blond and buxom and wide enough to wallow in.”
O’Donovan laughed. “That’s all right, then, we won’t be competing. Give me red hair, nice and slim, with smooth hips and long legs. Sort of like the one we’d have had in that house by the lake—except we had to leave before we could even get started.”
“She wasn’t bad. But she was old. Older than me, for a bet. I want something young.”