“True.” I didn’t know what he was getting at, but he sounded so relaxed it was difficult to stay scared.
“But they don’t, Jay. Why don’t they? I’ll tell you why, it’s because they don’t dare. You see, all that nonsense about me and my poor dead brother—Stan was killed in the same accident where I was injured, the one where I came close to losing my arms—it’s not just that I permit nonsense like that to be muttered all around the ship, and all around Muldoon Spaceport. I encourage it. I like Tom Toole to tell people I’m a monster. That way anyone, like maybe Sean Wilgus, who has a mind to take on Danny Shaker, will think twice before he actually starts anything. Here’s a great truth for you, Jay: Authority doesn’t come from a piece of paper, or the way that you behave; it’s all defined by the way that others behave toward you.”
He stood up.
“We ought to be going. I talked to Doctor Xavier, not more than half an hour ago, and promised that I would be down shortly.”
I still hesitated.
“Look,” he said, “I happen to think that Doctor Eileen Xavier is one very smart woman, and I believe that you do, too. When you and I get over there, why don’t you talk to her about all this dead-men’s-arms stuff, and see what she says?”
“I already did.”
“You did? Well, what did she tell you?”
I was silent for a few moments, until Danny Shaker stared at my face and started to laugh. “Didn’t buy it, did she?”
“No, she didn’t.” I took a wild shot. “Did you ever hear of a man called Paddy Enderton?”
It produced a reaction, but not one that I was expecting. Shaker looked thoughtful, and said, “Black Paddy? I certainly did. I know him well. He used to be navigation officer of the Cuchulain. How did you ever hear of him?”
“He stayed with us for a while—me and my mother.”
“How’s old Paddy doing?”
“He’s dead.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.” Shaker frowned down at me. “But you know, I’m starting to put things together. Paddy Enderton—Paddy’s Fortune.”
“How did you know it was called that?—the world, I mean, the one we’re near.”
“Why, from Duncan West. He called it that name a couple of times.”
So much for total secrecy. But Danny Shaker was continuing, “As I say, this all begins to make some sense. You’re probably going to hear bits and pieces anyway, from other crew members, so you might as well hear the whole thing from me. I wasn’t being totally honest with you a moment ago. Paddy wasn’t just the navigation officer for the Cuchulain; he also deserted the ship. Under very odd circumstances.”
Shaker sat down again, and patted the bunk beside him. “Sit down, Jay.”
I did, and he went on, “We were out in open space, eight months ago, when suddenly our radar picked up an artificial signal. An odd one, too, not like the usual identification for a Forty Worlds vessel. We headed that way—anything unusual can be valuable. It didn’t respond to our messages, so when we got close enough Paddy Enderton took off in one of our cargo beetles. Alone. He reported back that it was just a little ship, not the sort of thing that was designed for long interplanetary travel, and he would try to board it.
“He managed to dock, and he went inside. That’s when things turned strange. He called on a standard communication frequency, to say that he was aboard a two-man scoutship, and the crew were both dead. But it wasn’t a two-man crew at all, he said; it was a two-woman crew. If you know anything about the rules, written and unwritten, for women in space, you’ll realize that what Paddy was telling us was just about impossible.
“After that there was a twelve-hour radio silence. Just about the time that I was ready to call Paddy and tell him to return with or without the scoutship, its drive went on at high acceleration. There was no chance at all that the Cuchulain could catch it, even if we’d been all powered up and ready to go. We never heard one more word from Paddy Enderton. I thought at first that he’d been carried off in some sort of accident that turned on the drive. But when we finally arrived back at Muldoon Port, months later, we learned that he had been through there. He had gone to ground somewhere, no one could tell us where. We decided that Paddy must have found something valuable on board the scoutship, and wanted to keep it all for himself. But there was no reason to think that the ‘something valuable’ might be out in space—until now.”
“What do you think it is?” I was intrigued in spite of myself.
“Well, it’s supposed to be something on Paddy’s Fortune. That’s clear enough. The crew think it must be women. That’s partly because Paddy Enderton said he found two women on the ship he stole, and partly because that’s what spacer crews think about half the time—make that three-quarters of the time—while they’re out in space. But you ask me, what do I think? Well, I prefer not to speculate. Not when you and I can be over there to see for ourselves in an hour.”
I was ready to go, and not just because his words were making me more and more curious to see Paddy’s Fortune at first hand. It had also occurred to me that I couldn’t be more under the control of Danny Shaker and the crew of the Cuchulain, no matter what happened. And if he indeed took me down to be with Doctor Eileen and Duncan West and our two scientists, I would be much safer there than I was here.
Maybe Danny Shaker knew that’s how my thoughts would run. Certainly, he did not say one more word about women or Paddy Enderton while I was eating, or grabbing a little bag of necessities in case I had to stay down on the worldlet for a day or two. We boarded a cargo beetle. Then he looked at me and past me, and said, “In case we need extra muscle-power for any reason.”
Behind me, four more men were crowding through the beetle’s little port. Patrick O’Rourke, Robert Doonan, Joseph Munroe, and Sean Wilgus. I could understand that the first two made sense, but I wondered if Shaker wasn’t inviting trouble by taking Wilgus and Munroe. They were the ones who had been openly critical of him only a few hours earlier. Was Shaker doing it deliberately, to point out to me and to them that he was completely confident of his authority?
Either way, not one of them said a word when they were inside the beetle, though Joe Munroe gave me a very hard stare, as though to say, what the devil are you doing here?
I did plenty of staring of my own. Not at the men, but at what they were carrying: guns, and deadly looking knives.
Danny Shaker saw me flinch. “Something wrong, Jay?”
“The weapons. Why are you taking those with you?”
“For exactly the same reason that Doctor Xavier and your friends took theirs, at my recommendation. When you are heading for a place that supports life, and you don’t know what you might encounter, you don’t take risks. Paddy’s Fortune may be dangerous.”
“But Doctor Eileen is already over there. She must know that’s not true.”
“Ah, I forgot that you’d been out of the loop, so to speak, for a few hours. When we talked with the doctor, she didn’t say that at all. I’ll tap us into the Cuchulain data banks while we’re on our way across, and you can listen for yourself.”
It was a strange experience, to hear Doctor Eileen’s voice in my ear describing their approach to Paddy’s Fortune, while the little world itself grew steadily before my eyes. The recording put her about ten minutes ahead of us, so that when we still had twenty kilometers to go she was already describing their flight low over the translucent shield, seeking an entry point. By the time we got there, she was describing the touchdown on the real surface. Her actual recording had included video, but I was getting only sound, so what I heard was not too satisfactory. But it was clear from Doctor Eileen’s words that they had emerged to stand on a tiny world with very low gravity, a perfectly breathable atmosphere—and vegetation denser than anywhere on Erin except right at the equator.