And then lights came on all around us, and I found myself standing in a big room whose walls, floor and furnishings looked like nothing more than the internal partitions and fixtures of the Cuchulain.
We were “inside.” Mel Fury, filthier than ever—I saw new streaks of mud on his backpack and clothes and skinny white arms and legs—was heading for the door of the chamber. I had no choice but to follow. But as the door slid open at our approach, I couldn’t help wondering: Was I going to be any better off here than wandering the surface of Paddy’s Fortune, pursued by Danny Shaker and his cutthroat helpers?
Chapter 19
The first thing I saw beyond the door was as familiar in a way as anything could be; when Mel Fury and I went into the next room I found myself facing two filthy, straggle-haired stick figures.
One of them was me.
The whole opposite wall was metal, shiny and flat enough to be a good mirror. My reflection’s face was a mask of mud interrupted by red scratches and welts, and my arms and legs showed through rents in my pants and jacket. I was in worse shape than Mel.
He did not stop to stare but gestured to the right, where the wall held a matched set of doors.
“It’s a real pain,” he said, “but we have to do it before we’ll be fed dinner. Better get it over with. Take the one next to me.”
He went through a door and closed it behind him. After a moment’s hesitation I went through a neighboring one. I found myself in a little cubicle without windows or furnishings. There was an exit door at the opposite end, and a hatch by my right hand with two handles set above it.
What was I supposed to do next? The door in front of me resisted my push, so after a few moments I turned one of the handles. Before I could move, jets of hot water were hitting me from all sides. I yelped in surprise and turned the handle the other way. The water jets cut off at once.
A shower; except for the controls it was not much different from the low-gravity units on the Cuchulain. The hatches below the controls ought to dispense clean clothes and take away dirty ones.
I emptied my pockets. Walter Hamilton’s book was damp, but it was designed to work in all weathers. And if Paddy Enderton’s computer had been able to survive a night of snow and slush in the bottom of the boat by Lake Sheelin, a brief wetting was unlikely to hurt it. I put them both on a shelf high above the level of the water jets, and stripped to the skin.
Three minutes later, laved in streams of hot water and then dried in the jets of warm air that followed, I felt ready to lie down on the floor of the cubicle and go to sleep. I also felt ready to cry, something I had not done since I was nine years old. It had been a terrible day. Only the conviction that cocky Mel Fury would mock me if I wept kept me dry-eyed.
I finally opened the hatch and placed my wet and filthy clothes inside it. They dropped out of sight, and I had a worrying minute until new ones rolled out of a slit in the hatch’s rear. The clothes were clean, the same light-grey that Mel Fury had been wearing, and by some mystery they were exactly the same size and style as the ones that I had removed, even to being a little bit short in the legs. But there was no sign of shoes. My old, soaked ones had gone, and for the moment I would have to go barefoot.
I retrieved the book and computer from the shelf and looked unsuccessfully for some way to comb my wet hair. At last I gave up and pushed it back off my forehead with my fingers. While I was doing that, the door in front of me opened by itself.
When I went through and saw what was in the room beyond, I had one of those strange moments in life when about eighteen thoughts at once hit you so fast and chaotic you don’t know which came first.
I saw Mel Fury waiting for me, clean and dry and newly dressed—and barefoot—in the middle of a big low-ceilinged room with bright yellow walls and half a dozen doors. Without the coating of mud and grime, his face was pale, as though he had never been out in the sun. I realized that he really hadn’t, compared with me, because Paddy’s Fortune was so far away from Maveen. Around Mel stood a dozen other people. They were all about the same age, all dressed the same, and every one as skinny and pale as Mel. At first glance they looked identical, though I later realized they were all very different. Every one of them was staring expectantly in my direction.
I said people. But then I realized it was not just people. They were females. And not just females. Girls. More girls than I had ever seen in one place in my whole life.
And—at last—I caught on. Mel Fury, now that she was cleaned up, had to be a girl, too, though her hair was close-cropped where the others wore theirs long. I had been fooled by that, but even more by the fact that when I met Mel she was dirty and wild and energetic, running uncontrolled through the jungle growth of Paddy’s Fortune. Girls didn’t do that! Girls were delicate and protected and pampered. Girls were never exposed to any risk of being injured.
And then my other seventeen thoughts came roaring in. Paddy’s Fortune. I never had been able to swallow Doctor Eileen’s idea that Paddy Enderton would have a scrap of interest in Godspeed Base or a Godspeed Drive. But women—or girls who would soon be women—that would be interesting indeed, and worth a fortune, too, if Enderton could play it right. Up on the surface of the world at this very moment were crewmen who shared completely Paddy’s point of view. I had heard them talking aboard the Cuchulain. Except maybe for Danny Shaker, whose thoughts remained a mystery to me, there was no doubt what each one of them was after: Women. And the crewmen above our heads were searching and scouring the planetoid for anything out of the ordinary. One of them, sooner or later, was sure to find himself standing on the access point. When that happened…
“That circle we stood on,” I burst out. “Up on the the surface. Could anybody stand on it, and be carried down here?”
All the girls were staring at me. I had never received so much concentrated attention in my whole life. But Mel Fury answered quickly enough.
“Only humans,” she replied. “Not animals. The sensors won’t respond for them. And you have to stand still for at least half a minute before anything happens.”
“Can it be locked in position? So it won’t work.”
Mel caught on to the reason for my question even if no one else did. She turned questioningly to the tallest girl in the group, who said “I can ask the controller.” But she went on staring at me, and didn’t move until Mel added, “It could be urgent, Sammy. There are other people outside Home. Dangerous people—I saw someone killed. We have to try to close the access points.”
That started a general buzz of excitement. As the tall girl hurried out through one door I was surrounded by everyone else and swept away through another. They all started to talk at once, asking me questions as we went to another room with tables and chairs all around the walls. I had a thousand questions of my own. But everyone had to wait, because Mel Fury pushed me toward a chair, sat down next to me, and said fiercely, “Let him breathe, will you. And eat. He hasn’t had any food for days.”