“She wasn’t old. She was middling. Middling can be better—if it comes with lots of experience.”
They were silent for a moment. “But they won’t have experience, any of them,” Connor Bryan said at last. “If it’s nothing but women, with never a man to share out among them for a century, how can any of them have any experience at all?”
“Dunno,” said O’Donovan. “I guess you and me will have to teach ’em.” They both laughed, then O’Donovan added in a quieter voice. “If any of it is real.”
“Paddy Enderton was sure of it.”
“Aye, and look what pleasure it brought Black Paddy. Running for his life at the end, then stiff and staring. I wonder if he was lying about everything. It’s hard to believe, thousands of women and no men. Sounds like a fairy tale.”
“Doesn’t it, though? But we’ll find out soon enough. Come on.”
I hadn’t taken much notice of the last few sentences, because at the words “Paddy Enderton” I had jerked up and banged my head on the duct ceiling. Fortunately they didn’t notice. Connor Bryan was standing up and saying, “Let’s go see the chief. He’s supposed to be getting reports back soon.”
As they left the room I turned myself so that I could sit crosslegged. Paddy Enderton! They had said the name, when they were not supposed to have heard of him. And they knew that he was dead. Suddenly I realized who that “middling old” red-haired woman might be.
But all the other talk of women made absolutely no sense. We were billions of miles away from Erin and women. Also, there had been never a word said between Bryan and O’Donovan about Godspeed Base, although that was the whole point of our journey to Paddy’s Fortune.
Maybe the wise thing would have been to head back to our living quarters at that point, and ponder what I had heard. But from their talk it was quite clear that they were going to a meeting with Danny Shaker, and something new about Paddy’s Fortune was likely to come from it.
I examined my palms (grimy), rubbed my knees (a bit chafed, after all the crawling), and pressed on through the air duct system.
Finding a particular cabin or chamber was much harder than just crawling in one direction. The ducts divided from time to time, and I didn’t know which branch to follow. I seemed to go on scrambling around forever, to and fro in the darkness, and after half an hour or so I was tired. I stopped and took a rest. I was ready to give up. That’s when I heard faint voices somewhere ahead of me.
I crawled forward, reached one more branch point, and took the duct in the direction of the sound.
Even before I got there I could tell that an argument was going on. Voices were raised, and people were interrupting each other.
“—at the place. What more do we need? We should be down there, not them.”
I recognized the voice. It was Sean Wilgus, a slim, sly-faced man who was unpopular because he acted as though he was superior to everyone. But now there was a murmur of agreement.
“I have to second that.” It sounded like Patrick O’Rourke. “You said, be patient. But we have been patient. And now we’re here. What more is there to be patient about?”
“You’ve got it backwards.” It was Danny Shaker, calm and reasonable-sounding as ever. “You tell me what the rush is. We’re not going anywhere. They can’t go anywhere without us.”
“So what?” Sean Wilgus again. “They’ve served their purpose. We don’t need them, we haven’t needed them since the second day out, when she told you the destination. I agree with Joe, we should have dumped them out the lock right then and there.”
“Right,” Danny Shaker said. “Very intelligent. We let them all breathe space, and then when we get to the coordinates she gave us, we find that she held back a little bit of information, and we’re sitting in the middle of nowhere with no idea what to do next. It’s not like you to be so trusting, Sean. She’s old, but she’s nobody’s fool. Until we actually got here, there was no guarantee she wasn’t playing her own game.”
“But we did get here.” That was Joe Munroe, surly as always. “After we arrived there was no reason to wait one minute more. But still you insisted we do nothing. You let them go down and explore the woman-world, instead of us. Why?”
“Use your brain, Joe,” Shaker said. “You have it backwards. You should ask, why not let them explore? They’re not expecting to find women down there, I told you that. So if they do, they’ll surely call back here and tell us. And then we’ll act.”
“Maybe we will. And maybe not. Maybe some people here are getting soft.”
There was a dead silence on the other side of the partition. I peered through the grille, but I could see little. The last speaker had been Joe Munroe. From the way that Danny Shaker’s voice varied, I knew that he was on his feet and pacing about, as he often did in conversation.
“Are you by any chance referring to me, Joe?” he said at last. “You ought to know better. I don’t shy away from necessary death. But if they don’t find what we want—if there’s nothing interesting or valuable down there—why, then, we’d be fools to kill anyone. We’ll take them back to Erin, get triple pay for winter work like a good, dutiful crew, and go our way.”
“That may be all right for you,” Sean Wilgus said. “You’ve got your own tastes and preferences. You and that bloody boy, you ought to form a mutual admiration society. But what about the rest of us? You drag us away from the women on Erin, with Paddy Enderton’s promise of thousands. And now you keep us away from them. We could all be down there. We could maybe be having a woman apiece, this very minute.”
“Ah, Sean Wilgus,” Shaker said softly. “I don’t like to hear that sort of thing from you. ‘Your own tastes and preferences,’ indeed. That kind of remark doesn’t do you justice. It’s a good thing I’m so fond of you, or I might feel tempted to do something about it. But you know I love you—love you as much as if you were my own dear brother.”
There was a deadly silence. All movement in the room ceased.
“No, Chief.” Wilgus’s voice rose an octave. “I’m sorry. I misspoke. All I meant was, I wish I could be down there exploring the woman-world—we all feel that way. But I’m not questioning your judgment. None of us are. We never would. Right?”
There was a mutter of assent.
“Well, that’s good to know.” Danny Shaker laughed. He sounded very close. “Because, you see, I’m going to exercise my judgment again, right now, and it’s nice to know you won’t question it. If you hadn’t given me that assurance, Sean, I think maybe you’d want to act differently when I show you—this.”
Before I knew what was happening the grille in front of me was whisked away. A hand reached in, grabbed me by the hair, and hauled me through into the control room.
“You see, men,” Danny Shaker moved his grip to my arms, and pulled me forward to the middle of the group. “When you get right down to it, most things are a question of judgment. So here’s a judgment test for you. Suppose that you find a little surprise like this in the air duct system.”
He glanced at me and shook his head. “Jay, I told you that you’ll make a first-rate spacer, and I stick with that evaluation. But you have to learn a few things first. For example, there’s nothing on a ship more important than the air supply system. Anything that changes the air flow pattern, like a foreign body in the duct system, will flag an alarm on the control board, even if it’s not dangerous.” He gestured to the banks of displays on one wall of the room. “Maybe no one else noticed, but I’ve been tracking you for an hour.”