CHAPTER 2
"So far as I know, Jimmy Grogan never came back to our house. He had stayed only that one night, but from my point of view he was an important visitor. He awoke my sense of curiosity. It was after his arrival that I noticed how Uncle Duncan always disappeared when other men came to see Mother, and how he popped up again at the house as soon as they left.
"And of course, it was from Grogan that I first heard the word that started this whole thing: Godspeed.
Mother's spacer visitors kept on coming, never more than one man at a time, sometimes a guest every couple of weeks, sometimes no one for half a year. They stayed as little as a night, and as long as a week. As I grew older I became more and more keen to talk to them and ask them about things "out there." But I was thwarted. For when I reached my tenth birthday, Mother, as though deliberately preventing me from asking questions of her guests, sent me off to old Uncle Toby's house in Toltoona whenever a visitor arrived. I was not allowed to return home until the man had gone. "You're growing up, Jay," was all the explanation that mother or Uncle Toby would ever give me.
Well, over the years I picked up information about space and the Forty Worlds anyway, but it was in such little bits and pieces that I'm often not sure just what I learned when. That doesn't matter, because Doctor Eileen told me I could set things down any way that I wanted to. I'm going to take her at her word, and tell what I knew—or thought I knew—by the time that I was sixteen years old, and Paddy Enderton rolled onto the scene.
Mother and the house and Lake Sheelin, and the town of Toltoona farther along the shore, had been my childhood world. Then I learned that it was one tiny piece of a great universe. We lived on the western shore of Lake Sheelin, which is long and narrow and extends much farther to the north of us than to the south. A person on foot could start from our home, walk around the southern end of the lake, and in three days reach the spaceport. The same journey by the northern route would take twelve days or more. And a journey around the whole great globe of Erin, if a man or woman could find a way of crossing great seas that would swallow up Lake Sheelin and not even notice it, might take a thousand days.
It was a shock to me to learn that there were aircraft able to make that round-the-world trip, moving so fast that the sun was always overhead, in a single day.
And Erin was just the beginning. Our world was one of many that circled our sun, Maveen. Moving outward, we were the sixth of twelve worlds before a great planet, Antrim, swept the space around it clear, to form the Gap. Well beyond Antrim lay the narrow band known as the Maze, where floated worldlets so numerous and chaotic in orbit that they had never been tagged and named. Then came another gas giant, Tyrone, and finally the twenty-four frozen and lifeless bodies of the Outer System completed the Forty Worlds.
For the spacers out beyond Tyrone seeking the particular light elements that were so rare on Erin, that was all. But once, ten generations ago, there had been the Godspeed Drive. Travel to the far-off stars, and commerce between them, had been an everyday event. Until one day, quite suddenly, no more ships from the stars had arrived in the Maveen system.
It may sound odd, but having learned so much, my interest was less in the Godspeed Drive than it was in the space travelers who risked their lives on and around the Forty Worlds. The Drive, if it had ever existed, was long-dead history—Mother, when I asked her, denied that there had ever been any such thing; Uncle Duncan and many other people said the same. But the spacers were here, real, undeniable. They were today, they were excitement. I could not have Godspeed. But I could have space.
When I reached my fifteenth birthday, I was at last allowed to use our little sailboat that sat on the jetty downhill from the house. The rules were simple: I must stay close to shore, I must never venture out in anything but light breezes, and I must never sail after dark.
If I am going to be as honest as I know how in telling everything that happened, here is a good place to begin. I broke those rules, all three of them. But I did not do it when I was at the house, with Mother there to keep an eye on me.
When she had a visitor on the way, and I was ready to be packed off to stay with Uncle Toby, I always asked if I could go to Toltoona by water, sailing along close to the shore of Lake Sheelin. Provided that the weather was good, Mother would agree. Then I would be out of her sight for anything from a day to a week, and old Uncle Toby, blurred of vision, hard of hearing, and unsteady on his legs, was happy enough to see me away early in the morning, and back as late as I pleased.
I gradually learned by trial and error what I could and could not do on the lake. The ideal situation was a strong and steady breeze from the north. That would allow me to sail right across Lake Sheelin without tacking, and come back the same way. I thought that I could be at the eastern shore in two hours and home again, when I chose to come home, in two more. That would give me most of the day to be where I wanted to be: at the Muldoon Spaceport.
On my first trip across I was too nervous about what I was doing, and too worried about my return, to enter the port itself. I hove to just offshore, ate my lunch, and stared at a baffling complex of buildings. There were scores of them, and I could not guess what they were for. What I most wanted to see, of course, was a launch or a landing, close up, but there was never a sign of one. After an hour and a half of goggling at everything, and pretending to be fishing or busy with my boat whenever anyone came down one of the jetties where the cargo boats were moored, I reluctantly headed back to Toltoona. I arrived at Uncle Toby's house, to his annoyance and mine, with most of the day to kill.
On my next visit I was much bolder. With no signs telling me to keep out, I moored my boat at the end of a jetty and went ashore. One of the first things I came to was a board showing a layout of the whole Muldoon Port. It had been placed there for the convenience of people from the lake cargo vessels, but it served me just as well. I stood there until I had a general feeling of where everything was. Then I started walking. The rest of the day was like a dream.
The great launch circles were my first target. Even from a distance I had seen the sky towers and the communication systems surrounding them. Invisible to me were the open grids beneath their bases, awaiting the surge of energy that would power landings and take-offs. After a few uncertain minutes I moved close to the guarding fence. I watched and waited for a long time, and finally realized what I ought to have deduced from my own experience: The launch activity happened close to sunset. All I would see now were preparations.
I moved on, to the monster domes of the maintenance shops. I did not dare to go in—there were too many people whose job seemed to be only to watch what others were doing—but I hovered at the hangar doors and thrilled to the sight of the repair men swarming over the bowl-shaped ferry ships, each as big as our house. I stared in fascination at the glittering cushion plates being fixed underneath them. They could be removed after launch and left in high orbit, whenever a ferry ship was needed for use farther off in space. To most people those cushions might seem no more than big round concave dishes, but because I knew their purpose I thought I had never seen anything so beautiful.
On that visit I hardly noticed the dents and scars and patches and the mended metal seams. It certainly never occurred to me that ships so battered on the outside might be no better within.
But one of the men near the door finally had his eye on me, and was starting to edge in my direction. I had done nothing wrong, but I felt guilty, and walked away toward one of the huge, metal-roofed rooms that served as combination marketplace and restaurant.
I went in, and saw more spacers in the next thirty seconds than I had dreamed existed.
They lounged at tables covered with food and drink, or stood leaning on bare walls. And they were talking, talking, talking. The whole room buzzed with spaceman chatter. I wanted to hear every word.
Except that the heads turning casually to glance at me did not move away. I was conspicuous, not because of my age—there were dozens of boys no older than me, serving food and drink—but because of my dress. Everyone else was either twice my age, or wearing the service uniform of white coat and blue tight pants.
More people were staring at me. It was time to leave. I walked quickly out of the restaurant and retreated to the shore, determined to talk Mother into making me a white coat and blue pants when I got back.
When I got back. There was the hitch. I had lost track of time, and I had also not allowed for the fact that the wind usually dropped in the late afternoon to a light air. I set sail for the west shore, but the boat crept along, hardly creating a ripple in the still lake water.
That is how I came to see my first close-up space launch.
Darkness had fallen across the lake almost before I left the jetty. I had no problem with my destination, because Toltoona was a sizable patch of lights on the other side. But when I was no more than a tenth of the way across the lake, there was suddenly light behind me. A strange violet glow lit my white sail, and everything in the boat changed to peculiar and unnatural colors.
I turned. A ship was going up, balancing on top of a violet column of light. The ascent was slow, almost stately. I was close enough to see the return beam, a thin stream of matter that I knew was moving at close to the speed of light. It was a paler blue, and its line followed exactly back into the center of the power laser. A faint crackle of ionization carried to me across the water.
And suddenly the boat was picking up speed. I could not tell how much was natural wind, and how much I was feeling a byproduct of the huge energies being generated and dissipated back at Muldoon Port. But by the time the launch was complete and the violet beam had vanished, we were finally moving at a decent speed. Two long hours later I was tying the boat up alongside one of the Toltoona wharves. I sneaked up the hill, on into Uncle Toby's house the back way—and learned that he was not nearly as blurred in vision or hard of hearing as I hoped.
"And where in the name of Kevin do you think you've been?" he asked, when I was hardly in the door.
And then, before I could say a word, "And don't you be giving me any of your made-up stories, either, Jay Hara. You've been away across the lake, you have, and that in the dark. And poor Molly worrying herself sick about you."
"Mother knows I've been away?"
"And why else would she be worrying? She was here earlier. She wants you home as soon as you can get. And how do you think I look, with never a word to offer her as to where you were, or when you might be back?"
"How did you know I'd been across the lake?"
"Where else would a boy be, who eats and drinks and sleeps space, and has a boat? Did you have dinner, then?"
"No. I've had nothing since before lunch."
I was expecting food, or at least sympathy. But Uncle Toby sniffed and said, "Well, that's your own fool fault, isn't it? Dinner has been and gone. Get on home now—and not in the boat. Along the road."
"But Mother has a visitor. I thought he was going to be at the house for three more days."
"He is. This is different. Home you go, Jay. If you're lucky, Molly might give you something to eat when you get there."
Uncle Toby had my little backpack all ready to go. I started out for home. It was cloudy and pitch-dark, but there was no chance of getting lost. The lake was on my right hand, the embankment on my left. The road ran from Toltoona to our house, and ended just beyond it. There was hardly ever any traffic. I walked briskly, because it was late autumn, and the nights were already turning cold.
My head was filled with visions of Muldoon Port and that nighttime space launch, and the memory of the sail back to Toltoona through ghostly darkness. I doubt that I gave one thought to Mother's odd change of mind, suddenly wanting me home even though she had a guest staying with her.
And once I arrived home, and had a chance to talk with Paddy Enderton, it seemed the most natural thing in the world that Mother should want me there with her.