Godspeed Read online

  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 se
e 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?"

  CHAPTER 8

  At midnight I stood on the front porch of our house and stared across the quiet lake.

  "Go to bed, now," Mother had told me a few minutes before. "You've had a full day. You need your sleep."

  She was probably right, but I knew it would be pointless to lie down. Not with the inside of my head still running wild. Instead I went outside. Mother and Doctor Eileen must have been almost as wound up as I was, because when I left they went on talking to each other as though I did not exist.

  Godspeed Base.

  "If you admit that the Godspeed Drive once existed," Doctor Eileen had said, "then logically Godspeed Base had to exist, too, somewhere in the Maveen system."

  "Why?" I asked.

  "Because every machine needs repairs sometime. The Godspeed ships must have had a place in each star system, somewhere they could go for refitting or maintenance work. And the Base wouldn't have disappeared when the ships stopped coming here."

  "Why did they stop coming?"

  "Nobody knows. I've heard scientists say that the whole Godspeed Drive system contained the seeds of its own destruction, something to do with the nature of space and time, and it should never have been built. I've heard religious leaders say that the isolation of Maveen and the Forty Worlds is a punishment for our sins on Erin. And of course, I've heard a thousand times that there never was a Godspeed Drive, that it's only an old legend." She looked directly at Mother. "You can point out to those people that humans clearly didn't evolve on Erin, and ask how we got here. But you won't get anywhere. Because most of them don't believe in evolution, either. Any more than they'll believe that what Jay has sitting in front of him is important."

  I had a suspicion that Doctor Eileen was taking a dig at Duncan West, without mentioning his name. In any case, it was obvious how she regarded all such people. I stared at the little plastic wafer, switched off now on the table. We still didn't know why anyone would kill for it. But if it had come from Godspeed Base, that seemed to make it important enough to Doctor Eileen, if not yet to me.

  "Do you think that Paddy Enderton had been to the base?" I asked.

  "I doubt it. There would have been other evidence."

  "There is." I told them about the telecon, and the little direction finder that he had given me.

  "I'd like to take a look at those tomorrow," Doctor Eileen said, casually condemning me to another blood-chilling climb up the water tower. "But I mean more direct evidence. If he'd actually been there, he'd have come home with proof. And he'd not have kept that a secret when he reached Erin. But from what you've told me, he was convinced that he knew where Godspeed Base was. And he was definitely planning a trip there. That's why he wanted you take him to Muldoon Port, before he collapsed. And those other men knew that he knew. That's why they came after him yesterday."

  I still had a basic question. "If the Godspeed ships don't come here any more, why is Godspeed Base so important?"

  "Jay, you can ask more questions than any sane woman can answer," Mother said sharply. "Go to bed."

  But Doctor Eileen was answering: "Because there's a chance that a complete Godspeed ship, with a full Godspeed Drive, is sitting out there at the base. It would have been there as a backup. Otherwise a Godspeed crew would have risked being stranded if the ship they came in was destroyed, or if there were major problems with the Godspeed Drive."

  If she had wanted to choose words to guarantee that I would be unable to sleep, she could hardly have done better. Two months ago, exploration of the Forty Worlds with the spacers had been my great dream. Now Doctor Eileen was telling me that somewhere out there, within reach of our ships, might be something to take us to the stars.

  But mother was saying again, "Go to bed, Jay. Eileen and I have other things to talk about."

  I picked up Paddy Enderton's device and left the room. A minute later I was outside, staring across at the distant lights of Muldoon Port. My thoughts about it had changed since yesterday. Enderton had wanted to go there. The men who had hurt Mother and killed Chum had left by water. They were spacers. Chances were, they had gone to Muldoon. The spaceport was the road out, the way to the Forty Worlds, and now to Godspeed Base.

  But the men had left without the information that they came for. That was in my hand, locked away, waiting for someone to find the key.

  Voice-activated, Doctor Eileen had said. Well, I had a
voice, as good as anyone else's.

  I went back indoors and up to my bedroom. But not to sleep.

  It took a few minutes to get to the place where I had been stuck earlier, with a single flashing green spark that I could move around among the other lights of the display.

  If I had to choose words that would make a display do more than just sit there, what would they be?

  "Godspeed Base." No response.

  "Godspeed. Godspeed Drive. Godspeed crew. Forty Worlds. Paddy Enderton. Er, information. Data. Position. Location. Input. Output."

  Nothing. Either the device was as stupid as it seemed, or I was missing the point.

  I sat and frowned down at the innocent-looking little wafer. Stupid, stupid. Unless . . . Suppose, just suppose, that it was the other way round? Suppose that I was dealing with something very smart?

  Then I ought to be asking questions or giving commands, instead of offering one word at a time that it would not know what to do with.

  "I want access to data associated with the display that is now being shown."

  The response was immediate. An open box appeared in the air below the main display. To its left-hand side glowed three words: First Data Level. The box itself was empty.

  "That doesn't tell me anything!" I protested. "I want to know more. Tell me something else about the display."

  Nothing new appeared.

  I talked on and on, without being able to produce any change in what I was seeing. It was only when I ran out of things to say that I realized that the voice commands and the flashing point of green might be related. At the moment, the green spark sat in an empty area of space. If the problem was that I was asking for information about nothing . . .

  I pressed zero, to freeze the moving set of colored lights. Then I used the controls to move the flashing green spark to coincide with one rustily glowing point.

  At last!

  The open box was no longer empty. It contained a word, Liscarroll. Beneath that were six nine-figure numbers. Five of them changed not at all, or slowly in their final digits, but the sixth one changed all the time, increasing steadily.