CHAPTER 7
I slept through all the next morning and the early part of the afternoon. So in spite of Doctor Eileen turning up her nose at the idea of anybody passing on "hearsay" to posterity, that's all I can offer for the day, at least until I was sitting in the Xavier kitchen working my way through a stack of sorghum cakes and scrambled phalarope eggs.
Uncle Duncan lolled opposite me, yawning and stretching and complaining of lack of sleep. It seemed he had finally gone back to our house in the middle of the night, bringing with him a vet—the nearest thing he could find to a physician without going all the way to Toltoona. What they encountered at the house had left them baffled: the whole place ransacked, Paddy Enderton dead on the floor, Mother vanished, and the building deserted.
Rather than heading out again into the snow, they built up the fire and stayed there for the rest of the night. The intruders had not returned, and finally Duncan had decided to make for Doctor Eileen's.
Mother was not much more helpful. Four men had burst into the house without warning, while she sat alone with Enderton's body. The sight of him lying dead on the floor had sent them into a rage.
"They could hardly believe it," she said. "The biggest one went across and kicked the body and swore at it, as though Enderton had died just to annoy him. Damned Black Paddy, he called him. He searched Enderton's clothing, then he set the other three to ransacking the house while he questioned me. I did my best to act innocent. Said Enderton was just a lodger who had the upstairs room, and hardly ever came down. I was vague about everything, and I acted dumb as I knew how."
"I'll bet you did," Doctor Eileen said. She had already been out all morning on a call, and was getting ready to go out again. "We'll need a full description."
"I'll give you one, but it won't help unless I see them again. I'm sure they were spacers, every one, but there was nothing out of the ordinary about any of them."
"Nobody with no arms, or no legs," I said, and felt myself blush when Duncan West stared at me as though I had lost my mind.
"I tried to get them to say what they were after," went on mother. "But that didn't work."
I started to open my mouth again, ready to mention the telecon still sitting high on the water tower, but Mother quickly disposed of that possibility.
"Whatever it was they were after," she said, "it must have been no bigger than your hand, because of the places that they were looking. And when they couldn't find anything they got more and more annoyed. They started to smash things at random. That's when they knocked me about a bit, too, just to take it out on somebody. Then they moved upstairs and tied me down. I think they were getting interested in other options for me when the big one said forget it, the boss was waiting and he'd told them go easy on the redhead woman."
"Lucky for you," said Uncle Duncan.
"Oh, I don't know." Mother smiled at him, but she had her eye on Doctor Eileen. "I think in another five minutes I could have had a couple of them at each other's throats."
"Or slitting yours," Doctor Eileen said. "Molly, you're plain incorrigible. Come on. I'll give you and Jay a ride back to the house. We'll pick up a few strong men in Toltoona, to stay with you and make sure there's no more trouble."
I glanced out of the window. There was a clear blue sky, and outside the snow was melting fast. "I've got to take the sailboat back home," I said. "I might as well do it now, and get it over with."
"All right," Mother said mildly. "But no heading off across the lake again. 'Clean your room,' has a whole new meaning today. I wouldn't like to think you were trying to skip housework."
As the other three left the kitchen I realized that she was right. I was avoiding going home. But it was nothing to do with housework. It was the thought of Chum, casually slaughtered and skewered to the front porch. No matter what Paddy Enderton had done, and no matter what the others wanted from him, they didn't have to do that.
I had lost my appetite. I washed the dishes, put on my coat, and headed for the place where I had tied up the boat. My whole water journey and final arrival last night seemed like an awful dream. It was surprising to find everything just as I had left it, the sail still not properly furled, the seats and the bottom of the boat covered in snow.
Before I could sail home, the boat had to be cleared. I took a square of wood and began to use it as a makeshift shovel, scraping snow into heaps and dumping it overboard into the black lake water.
I had been at work no more than two minutes when I came across the rectangular wafer of black plastic. It was sitting in the bottom of the boat, just where it had dropped from Paddy Enderton's hands.
* * *
Mother's orders had been explicit: Go home, and at once. But no command in the universe could have stopped me from sitting down in the bow of the boat and staring at Enderton's little sealed device.
It was thin, hardly more than a plastic card, and at first sight the front was plain. Upon a closer look I could see dozens of faint depressions, each one the size of a fingertip. I pressed them tentatively, one after another and then in pairs.
No result. But just last night there had been that strange display of moving points of light.
What had Enderton done? I struggled to recall, and quickly realized that I had no idea. It was not that I failed to remember, it was that he had operated in the dark, and until the lights actually appeared all my attention had been on the knife that he had just put away.
I fiddled with the thin rectangle of plastic for another minute or two, pretty much at random, and at last gave up. I jumped out of the boat and stood on the pier. There I paused.
Doctor Eileen Xavier was no longer at the house. She had taken Mother home. The question was, would she stay there for a while, long enough for me to catch her if I started now? Or if not, was she likely to come back to the Xavier house before she headed off again on her rounds, and so make it worth my while to hang around here a bit longer?
All too often in the past couple of days my fate seemed to have been determined by the wind. Now it was blowing steadily, pushing the boat's little pink pennant like a pointing finger to the north.
Towards home.
I tucked the plastic rectangle in my jacket pocket so I would not be tempted to fiddle with it any more, unfurled the boat's sail, and was on my way.
It was perfect sailing weather, clear and crisp and with a following wind that was just right. The only sound was clean lake water, lapping at the bow. On another afternoon I would have reveled in every moment. Today I could not enjoy it at all. I felt dreadfully dejected, for what I'm sure anybody else would have said was quite the wrong reason. Mother had been gagged and beaten. Paddy Enderton was dead. Our house had been invaded and almost demolished.
But the only thing on my mind was Chum. When I got home I would have to pull out the knife that pinned him to the planks of the porch, carry his body away from the house, and bury him.
The picture in my head was very vivid: four men, frustrated and furious as they rushed out of the house into the snow. Chum, convinced that the whole world was friendly and anyone running must be playing a game, gambolling across to greet them. The men's jerk of surprise, the curse, the vicious thrust of a knife.
At least it would have been quick. With luck he had died before he understood what was happening. But that was little consolation.
I patted my pocket as the boat came close to the dock leading up to the house. If this had been what they were after, one thing I knew for certain: They would not get it from me—
—if I could help it. That qualification came into my head as I started up the path. My footsteps slowed.
In a few more steps I would be in full view of the house. There was no sign of Doctor Eileen's cruiser out by the road. In all likelihood she had been and gone and Mother would be safely inside with her tough-guy guards, beginning the long job of cleaning up the mess.
But suppose that they weren't? Suppose that Mother and Doctor Eileen had not arrived yet, and last night's attackers had returned and were lurking inside waiting for me?
And what I was carrying.
I back-stepped a little way along the path, then dropped to one knee. I was at Chum's favorite burrow, a hole that he had carefully dug out and furnished with dried leaves.
I pushed the rectangular plastic card into the round hole. Then I recoiled as my fingertips met cold, wet fur.
Chum's body. And no one outside the family knew about his burrow.
I stood up, still holding the rectangle of plastic, and ran for the house. When I was twenty yards away a window went up with a sound like a gunshot. Mother's head poked out.
"Jay! I thought I told you to come straight back here. Get inside."
I halted. "Chum—"
"I took care of him. I put him in his burrow. If you want him somewhere else . . ."
"No." I couldn't bear to look at her, though she had only been trying to help. "He's home now. He can stay there." I stuffed Enderton's black wafer into my pocket and hurried into the house. The kitchen drawers and cupboards were closed again, and the mess of the previous night had been cleared up. Three men from Toltoona were sitting at the table playing cards. I knew them. They were all big and broad and self-confident, and they nodded at me casually.
"I didn't touch your room yet," mother said. "I thought you'd prefer to do that yourself. Come on."
I followed her, waiting until we were at the top of the stairs before I spoke.
"Mother." I kept my voice down to a whisper. "I've got it—the thing that the men were looking for last night."
She halted at the door of the guest room and glanced back to the stairs. For the first time in my life, I had the feeling that Mother was frightened.
"Go on into my room," she said. She followed me and closed the door after us. "Now, what do you say you've got?"
I pulled out the innocent-looking piece of molded black plastic, and told her where it came from. She took it from me, turning it over and examining each side.
"He made it work last night," I said. "He made it show a lot of lights in the air. But I don't know how to do it. What is it?"
"I'm not sure." Mother sat down on the bed. Her room, like the kitchen, was back to normal. She began to press the surface of the black oblong, placing her fingertips into its shallow depressions. "If I had to guess, I'd say it was never made on Erin—or anywhere in the Forty Worlds. That means it must be very old, from the days before the Isolation."
It was strange to hear her talk that way. "I thought you said there never was a Godspeed Drive."
She glanced up, all the while pressing the concave areas on the wafer. "Oh, that's just me agreeing with Duncan. He says there never was one. But if you ever went over to the big museum in Roscommon, you'd not doubt that we came here from another star, a long time ago, and that goods and people were coming to and from Erin for hundreds of years. Until one day, suddenly, it all stopped."
"Why don't you take Uncle Duncan over to Roscommon with you, and show him?"
"Because he won't take the time to go. He says, and I half agree with him, what's the difference? There's no Drive now, and we have to get on with our lives without it. I don't dwell on the past much myself, but there never was a man like Duncan West for living in the here and now. That's why I like him. He's all in the present."
"Where is he?" It had suddenly occurred to me that he was not in the house.
"He left, as soon as he was sure that I was safe home and protected. He said it had been chaos yesterday, but he still had to earn a living."
All the time we were talking, Mother had been studying what she was holding, and pressing in different places with various combinations of fingers. "There!" she said with satisfaction. "That's got it."
I leaned over. There was no sign of the beautiful three-dimensional display of lights that I had seen in the boat, but the dark surface showed a glowing set of numbers and open round spots. "What did you do?"
"Turned it on. It was just power-protected, against being turned on by accident. To activate it, you have to press here, and here, and here, all at the same time. See."
Three of her fingers moved down in unison. The display vanished, leaving dull black plastic. A second later the glowing numbers reappeared as she pressed down for a second time.
"But what is it?" I asked.
"I'm not sure, but I think it's probably a calculator. Anyway, it's hard to believe that this is what the men last night were searching for. Here." She handed it to me. "I'd say that with Paddy Enderton dead, you have more right to it than anyone."
She stood up. "Now, I want you to sort out your room and the front bedroom, and get them as far as you can back to normal. Anything that belonged to Mr. Enderton, you keep separate. Put it out on the landing. When you've done most of the job and feel that you need to take a break, see if you can get the calculator to work."
"It wasn't a calculator last night." But as I said that, I realized that all I had seen was a display. A strange display, sure, but what I was holding could be a calculator—or just about anything else. I had no idea what it was.
"Do you think that Uncle Duncan could make it work?" I asked, as mother opened the door to my room.
"You can ask him, but I doubt it. Whatever it is, it's surely micro-electronics. I think it needs more than the knack."
The knack.
It described Duncan West's gift very well without at all explaining it. He was known all around the southern end of Lake Sheelin, where he made a living, and a good one, fixing mechanical things that were not working right. I had seen cars towed over to our house by their cursing or despairing owners, and driven away an hour later in perfect running condition after Duncan had fiddled around inside their engines.
It was not always so quick, though. I have known him sit down with a broken clock after dinner at our house. The next morning, when I got up, the kitchen table would be covered with screws and cogs and bearings, and Duncan would still be sitting there. As Mother said, he lived in the present, so that made him hardly aware of time. Eventually, maybe by mid-afternoon, everything would go back together, to the last tiniest screw, and when Duncan left he was carrying a clock that worked perfectly.
I wished for a bit of the knack myself, as I sat by the window and pondered the mystery of Paddy Enderton's accidental legacy. Mother had said to clean up my room first, but I of course ignored her. The lure of the black plastic card was too great. Turning it on and off was trivial—when I had been shown how. Making it work as a calculator was not much harder, once I found the pressure points that corresponded to the arithmetic operators.
But that was surely not all it did. A whole triple row of blank circles were unaccounted for. So I went on working, if that's the right word for the unsystematic (and unproductive) poking and pressing and pondering that I did in the next few hours.
Mother looked in on me once, and saw me sitting there amidst unimproved chaos. Oddly enough, she went away again with not a word.
The breakthrough came at last, but I think I should be given no credit for it. There's an old story about monkeys writing all the world's books, if they stick at it long enough. That's more or less what I did. I finally pressed a sequence, no different to my mind from a hundred others that I had tried; suddenly the wafer vanished, and the air in front of me was filled with minute points of colored light.
I stared at them, while I desperately tried to recall exactly what I had done. At the same time, I realized two things. First, this was not the same display that Paddy Enderton had conjured up in the boat last night, because these lights were not moving, and second, although the glowing surface of the little plastic rectangle was faint and dim compared with the bright points surrounding it, I could still see numbers.
It was a bad moment. On the one hand I had to be sure that I remembered the operating sequence, and could produce the same result again; on the other hand, I was afraid to turn off the display in case I could not get it back.
What I should probably have done is go and get Mother and show her that, even if I could not re-create the display, it was real enough.
What I actually did was turn off the power.
Then I spent an agonizing thirty seconds until I had repeated all the necessary steps and a volume of space around the black plastic filled again with points of light.
I did it all over again, three times, and wrote down the sequence. Only after that was I able to pay attention to the lights themselves.
They formed a ragged cluster in space, a thick doughnut shape rather than a sphere. I tried to count them. When I reached a hundred I gave up, but I decided that the total had to be more than four times that. I reached my hand in toward one of them, very gingerly, and felt nothing. When my finger came to the space occupied by a light, the bright point simply blinked out of existence. It came back when I pulled away.
Mother sometimes says I'm colorblind, but technically speaking I'm not. I'm just not very good at matching colors in clothes, because that's the most boring thing in the world. But examining the colors of Paddy Enderton's display was the most interesting thing in the world, and I distinguished twenty separate hues ranging from deep violet to blazing crimson. The most common color was orange. Maybe a third of the points ranged from a dull near-brown ember to the heart of a glowing wood fire. The only color that I did not see anywhere was green.
I found a piece of paper among the mess on the floor, and wrote down my estimate of the fraction of the total for each color. It was fascinating, but I could not help feeling that here came the busy monkeys, all over again. I was working hard, sure, but there was no plan to what I was doing.
It was time for more systematic experiments. I reached forward and pressed a number on the input pad. Suddenly the display was no longer static. The points began to move at different speeds, the middle ones a little faster than the outer ones. Like tiny glittering beads on invisible wires, they slid around a common center.
More pressing of numbers showed that I was controlling only the speed of movement of the display. Pushing "0" froze everything, pressing "1" moved the lights almost too slow to notice, and "9" revolved the whole pattern every few seconds. Two digits pressed one after the other increased the speed more, faster and faster, until ninety-nine produced a blurred torus of light. Any third digit was ignored.
So much for the numbers. What about the blank circular spots?
I reached forward, then gasped when I realized that Mother was in the room, standing just at my shoulder.
"Well done, Jay," she said. "You were quite right, and I should have had more faith in you. Come on downstairs now and get some food in you. You can do this again later." She said nothing about the fact that my room was in as big a mess as when I came into it, or that I had not even been into the front bedroom where Paddy Enderton had been living.
"It's not just a calculator," I said.
"No. Or at least, not like one I've ever heard of before. I want Eileen Xavier to see this. She promised to drop by later. Come on." Mother led the way to the kitchen.
I ate there. Something.
That's no reflection on Mother's cooking. My brain was still upstairs, and my fingers itched to be back pressing on the plastic wafer. Anyway, the three men that Doctor Eileen had recruited in Toltoona talked so much, and about such boring things—ways of preserving meat, mostly—that anyone's brain would have wanted to escape. They were nice to have around for protection, I suppose, but I gained a new appreciation of Mother's preference for spacers. Even Paddy Enderton, dead dirty Black Paddy, had found more to talk about than salting and smoking and drying and pickling.
The afternoon had flown away, and the sky was already darkening when I sneaked back upstairs. I felt a new pressure on me when I again turned on Enderton's calculator/display/what-have-you. If Doctor Eileen was coming to the house, I wanted to be able to say more than "I don't know" to all the questions that she would be sure to ask.
The hardest question was one that I had already asked myself and not been able to answer. If this was what the four men had been searching for, why was it important?! could see it as an interesting gadget, more like a toy than anything, but surely not something for which anyone would threaten and torture and kill.
I brought up the display, set it to run in one of its slower-moving forms, and began to explore the effects of the three rows of open blanks.
I found a way to use them at last, something it would have been very easy to miss. For with a static display, or one where the points of light were moving too rapidly, I doubt that I would ever have noticed it.
You had to be looking at the display at the same time as you pressed an area in the middle of the three blank rows. Then if you were watching carefully you would see an extra point of light appear, a clear, green spark that was different in color from everything else. It also sat stationary, within the other points of the doughnut-shaped cluster.
By tedious experiment I learned that pressure on other blank areas could move the green star around in any direction. Up, across, forward, back.
And so what? said the skeptical part of my mind. Big deal. You've got a calculator, and a display. Now what about something that interacts with the display?
That didn't seem to exist. I froze everything by pressing zero, then brought the green glow to coincide with a point of bright orange. The spark of fire vanished, but nothing else at all happened.
I sighed, and muttered to myself, "I'll never get this."
And at that moment the green star changed, from a constant glow to a flashing point.
It was a triumph of sorts, but it sure didn't feel like one. For having come so far, I could go no farther. The green point flashed and flashed and flashed, taunting me to make it do something. And I could not.
I talked, I gestured, I pushed and squeezed and probed at the surface of the wafer. I did all of them together. The display obstinately refused to respond. It seemed to be challenging me to make it react.
And at that high point of frustration, Mother brought Doctor Eileen upstairs.
Like Mother, Doctor Eileen was much kinder to me than I felt to myself. I was nowhere near answering the basic questions of device function, but she listened to me as I described everything I had done, and watched as I worked the input and the output display.
Finally she said, "Voice activated, for a bet."
"You mean it should respond to what I say? I tried that."
"I believe you. But I think you don't know the right key words." Doctor Eileen turned to Mother. "Molly, what Jay has done so far is terrific. But we are going to need professional help, spacers and historians. I don't know what we have here, but I'm sure it's not of the Forty Worlds."
"You mean it's from before the Isolation? That's what I told Jay."
"I mean more than that. The technology came from somewhere else, sure it did. But look at the unit." We all stared together, as Doctor Eileen went on, "Look at the condition of it. That's not two or three hundred years old. It's new. It came into operation within the past year or two."
"But that means . . ." Mother paused, and for the second time in one day I saw in her an emotion that I had never seen before.
"If it is new," she went on, "and it's not our technology, then there must be more in the Maveen system than the Forty Worlds."
"That's right." And now there was something in Doctor Eileen's voice, too, an excitement that I had never heard before. "Molly, I think the thing Jay is holding, whatever it is, and however it came here, is enormously important. It was made in Godspeed Base."
And now it was Mother's turn again, her bewildered voice saying, ever so faintly, "Godspeed Base? But Eileen, there never was a Godspeed Base. Was there?"