And then, as hot food appeared from serving hatches in the wall, she sat down next to me—and promptly began to ask questions of her own. The others stayed to eat, listen, and make comments to each other. Apparently I was accepted for the moment as Mel’s prize.
The food looked fine, but it tasted subtly different from anything on Erin or the Cuchulain. I was too starved to be choosy, and in any case the girls seemed to find nothing odd about it. So I ate and ate, and talked and talked. There was plenty to explain: about Erin and the Forty Worlds, about why we had come here, about Danny Shaker and the cutthroat crew of the Cuchulain, about the Godspeed Drive and the search for Godspeed Base.
That last bit stopped them cold. It was clear that they had never even heard of a Godspeed Drive. The chance that this worldlet was Godspeed Base, with a starship somewhere inside it, dropped suddenly to zero. They didn’t even seem interested in the idea of a star drive.
But when I told of Paddy Enderton’s discovery of the scoutship with two dead women on board, the room went completely silent.
“Our people,” Mel Fury said at last. “They left Home to try to find another world with people on it. The controller didn’t want them to go—there had been others, you see, and no one had ever come back. They were the last big ones. But they were determined. And they couldn’t be stopped by us, because they were the oldest. Well, now we are.”
That made no sense at all, but every minute less and less did. I wasn’t just tired at this point, I was exhausted, and with lots of food inside me and the adrenalin level ebbing, no amount of excitement would keep my eyes open much longer.
“You are the oldest?” I made a final effort. “What about your parents?”
But I didn’t get an answer, because at that moment Sammy came hurrying into the room.
“There’s no way of closing the access points permanently,” she said.
“So someone could get in any time?” Mel Fury asked.
“Normally they could.” Sammy gave me a self-satisfied grin. “But the access points remain closed automatically when it’s raining outside. So I asked for the longest surface rain the controller can give us. We’ll have it for six full revolutions of Home.”
I closed my eyes and tried to translate that to a time I was familiar with. My brain would not cooperate—and when I tried to open my eyes, they too refused to obey. I was ready to collapse. And suddenly hands were lifting and carrying me out of the room. I was finally placed face-up on a soft surface, my new clothes were loosened, and my pockets emptied. A dozen hands touched all over my body, and I heard whispers and giggling.
I went on with my hopeless mental struggle to convert six revolutions of Paddy’s Fortune to something I understood. The best I could manage was to decide that it sounded like a long time.
My last thought was an odd sort of satisfaction. I might not be safe, not really. But if the murderous crew of the Cuchulain were still searching for me, out on the surface, they were being soaked by steady rain. I knew how much they would like that.
Serve them right.
Doctor Eileen told me to describe anything I saw that was unfamiliar. Well, here is a fact I learned since I left Erin: When you are at home and things are quiet and something new comes along, you can describe it pretty well; but when everything around you is new, you won’t take it all in no matter how much you want to.
So I’ll just have to do the best I can.
I opened my eyes with only the vaguest idea of where I was, or how much time had gone by since I passed out. Then I lay for a few minutes idly rubbing and scratching myself. Only after a satisfying scratch did two thoughts come drifting into my head.
First, the crew of the Cuchulain, no matter what, must never be allowed to suspect that I had vanished beneath the surface of the planetoid. I was beginning to realize exactly what they would do if they found Mel and the other girls.
Second, I had to meet the controller. The girls inside Home seemed to accept his—or more likely, her—word as law.
The room I was in contained its own bathroom. I used that and came out casually fixing my pants—then finished in a big hurry when I saw Mel Fury sitting on the bed I had just left.
“How did you know I was awake?”
“Monitors.” She pointed up to the ceiling.
I recalled my very personal scratching, and wondered how much she had seen. And were there monitors in the bathroom, too? But that gave me an idea. “Is there any way to see what’s happening outside, up on the surface?”
“Not directly. The controller must have sensors, but I don’t know how to use them.”
The controller again. That was where I had to start. I wanted all my questions about Paddy’s Fortune answered, but it was not the most urgent thing in the world. Top priority was to make sure that the crewmen didn’t find a way in. A close second was to send a message to Doctor Eileen, telling her all that had happened and warning her.
“Can you take me to meet the controller? Right now?”
“Well… if you really have to.”
“I do.”
She stared at me a little oddly, as though a meeting with the controller was to be more shunned than sought. But she led the way out of the room—and into mystery.
Paddy’s Fortune was the worldlet that the Cuchulain had found its way to, and I continued to think of it that way. But Home was really the inside of that worldlet, a series of concentric habitation shells that honeycombed the interior. As Mel led me toward the middle of Home, I lost my grip on reality. I smelled peculiar odors like burning feathers and molten metal, heard horrible (to my ears) music coming out of nowhere, saw a thousand gadgets so unfamiliar I could not even guess their use, and at every turn I watched little blond heads poke around corners, stare at me, and then vanish. They were the other residents in Home. But on the plus side Mel had the time to answer enough questions to satisfy some of my personal curiosity.
For example, Mel and Sammy and the other big girls all turned out to be exactly the same age: fifteen years and two months. No one on Home now was older than that, not since the scoutship left with its pair of nineteen-year-olds. But there were plenty of younger children: ten-year-olds, and six years, and one year. Exactly fifteen of each. It seemed to me that I had seen every one in the past half hour.
“But parents,” I said. “And who looks after the babies?”
Mel Fury didn’t answer in words. She changed her path down the long corridors and moving ramps that spiraled toward the center of Home, to take us past the wombs, creches, nurseries and schoolrooms.
I stared in through viewing windows, to where little mechanical figures like cleaning robots hustled back and forth, feeding and changing and teaching. Not a human in sight, except for the babies themselves. At Mel’s insistence, I inspected an array of fertilized eggs, each with its etched label and in its low-temperature bath.
“They’re all girls!” I said.
She nodded, but she seemed embarrassed. “Well, they are, but they don’t have to be. There’s frozen sperm, loads of it. It doesn’t occupy more than a few cubic millimeters of storage, so you won’t see it.”