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.They'll be on board the Cuchulain, along with Doctor Xavier.But we are going to be away for a long time, and I always do the final check of supplies and ship condition.That way I can't blame anybody but myself, if we get into deep space and things aren't right."I had been longing to see the Cuchulain since I first heard the ship's name, but there was one more scary experience to go through before I could do that.Only a small part of Upside held an atmosphere.The rest of it, including the access paths to all the deep-space ships, sat in vacuum.With Shaker's help I eased my way into a suit, making the thirty-six point checks that in a few weeks would become automatic: air, filters (dual), heat, insulation, temperature, communication, nutrition, elimination (dual), medication, attitude control (triple), position jets (dual), joints (thirteen), seals (four), and suit condition displays (three).Then came the two minutes while the pumps returned the air of the chamber we were in to the pressurized part of Upside, and I watched my suit's external pressure gauge drop steadily to zero.Soon there was nothing between me and hard vacuum but the thin shell of my suit.Danny Shaker saved me again, acting as though what we were doing was the most natural thing in the world."If you're ever not quite happy with anything while the pressure's going down," he said casually, "all you have to do is press the Restore panel on the wall there.The chamber will repressurize within five seconds.Hold tight, now.We're off."He was actually the one doing the holding.Almost before I knew what was happening he had taken the arm of my suit in his gauntleted hand, and was steering us out of the lock.I had assumed that we would emerge into open space.Wrong again.We were in a corridor no different from the one that had led us to the chamber—except that the external pressure showed as negligible, and the external temperature was a hundred degrees below zero.The final surprise was the Cuchulain itself.It floated in a gigantic open hangar, controlled in its position by gentle electromagnetic fields.Its shape was neither the bowl of the ferry ships, nor the slim needle of an atmospheric flier.Instead I found myself staring at a long warty stick, with a flared cone at one end and a small sphere attached to the other."Drive, cargo area, and living quarters," said Danny Shaker's voice through my suit communications unit.I could see that the ship was far bigger than a first sight suggested.The little sphere showed glassy pinpricks and dark flecks on its sides.They had to be viewing ports and locks."There's no place for cargo," I said."Do you hang it outside?"Shaker laughed, his voice no different in my ears than it had been back on Erin."I sometimes wish we could.The midsection between the drive cone and the living sphere is a flexible membrane around a rigid column.When the Cuchulain is carrying its maximum cargo load, it looks like a big bloated ball with a little pimple on each end.Balancing it for flight can be a pain.But I don't think you'll be seeing it like that on this trip."I ought to have asked myself why he thought that, since according to Doctor Eileen our mission was supposed to be a secret.But I didn't think of it.Instead I said, "How do you land? There's no place for a cushion plate.""Very true.The Cuchulain doesn't land.Ever.This is a deep space ship.""So how do you pick up your cargo?""With the cargo beetles.See them?"And I did, when he pointed them out.Each of the little warts along the axis of the ship was a whole ship in itself, a rounded shell hugging the central column."But they don't have cushion plates, either.""Because they don't need them.The Forty Worlds are a low gravity environment except for Antrim and Tyrone, and those two are gas giants where we never land.Nowhere else has a hundredth the pull of Erin.Lucky for us, or scavenging would be impossible."While I was asking questions—I still had a hundred more—we had been approaching the structure at one end that Danny Shaker called the living sphere.It loomed ahead of us now, twice as big as a whole ferry ship.I could see that its exterior, a uniform cloudy grey from a distance, was a whole patchwork mess of seams and scars and scratches."And not surprising," Danny Shaker said, in answer to my question."The Cuchulain is like the rest of our ships.It's old.Old and beat up.Built long before the Isolation, and been through a lot.""But why don't we build new ones?""Ah, that's a fair question.We'll talk about that when we have a bit more time.All right?"He sounded casual enough, but something made me think that he didn't want to talk to me about that at all until he had first discussed it with Doctor Eileen.With every kilometer that we moved away from the surface of Erin, I had the feeling that the balance between life down on the planet and life out in the Forty Worlds shifted.The Isolation loomed more real and more significant, changing from vague myth to a central fact of survival.Living with Mother on the shore of Lake Sheelin, I had felt myself in a safe, stable world [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]