Charles Sheffield - Godspeed (novel)

But he had, and there was still power in those great hands. He grabbed the tray from me, and at the same time pushed me easily back into a chair.

“What did you see?” He leaned over me. “Tell it quick.”

I did, but there was not much to tell. I had walked along every street, and into each of the three inns, and nowhere had I seen anything remotely suspicious. There was the occasional sprained ankle, and even a merchant with his arm in a sling, but that was a long way from armless and legless men.

While I talked, Enderton picked up the tray, ate, and grunted. He ignored all utensils and worked with his hands and teeth, cracking the hard pink shellfish cases casually between thumb and finger, then noisily sucking out the tender white meat.

“Good enough,” he grunted when I was finished. “You sure you covered every street?”

“Every one in the town.”

“Here, then.” He fumbled clumsily in his pocket, and seemed surprised when he came up empty-handed. “I’ll pay you later. Tomorrow, I want you to sail across and take the same sort of look at Muldoon Port.”

“If the weather’s good,” I said, “And if Mother says it’s allowed.”

“Mmph.”

That hardly sounded like agreement, but I stood up. I was keen to go back downstairs, and not only because I was hungry. This didn’t feel like my room any more, filled as it was with the smell of stale sweat and liquor.

“She’ll say yes.” But he stood between me and the door, and he showed no sign of moving. He was breathing heavily, and snorting through his nose. “You may not always see them together, you know. Sometimes they do things separate, quite ordinary things. You have to watch out for each of them. Understand? Each of them.”

I finally realized who he was talking about. “What do they look like?”

“Why, like each other. Understand? They’re brothers, and they were a whole lot alike. More in looks, though, than in behavior. But then there’s the accident, see, and one loses his arms, and the other his legs. Understand? Not alike any more. Two years ago, that was, out on Connaught, same place where I got mine.” Enderton rubbed at his twisted rib cage, then turned to pick up a half-empty glass of dark liquid from the dresser. He took a big gulp. “We all three got mangled—and we were the lucky ones. We lived. Understand?”

I said nothing, and he went on with never a pause, “So if you see a man with no legs, that’s Stan. Not too bad, he is, compared with the other. But you come and tell me about it anyway. Understand?”

I understood at least one thing. Paddy Enderton was drunk, dead drunk, more drunk than I had ever seen anyone.

“But if you see the man with no arms,” he went on, snuffling and snorting and rubbing at his tangled beard. “The man with no arms, that’s Dan. And then it’s God help me.”

He put his hands up to cover his face, and I took the chance to edge around him and to the door. I opened it as quietly as I could, but he heard me, and turned around to grab my arm.

He pulled me close, and glared into my eyes. “If it’s Dan, see, then it’s God help me. And it’s God help you, Jay Hara. And it’s God help everybody. Because nothing else can.”

He released my arm. I stumbled backward through the door and almost fell downstairs.

His final words followed me. They were just what I needed to put me off my dinner.

Except that they didn’t, not the way they might now, because at that time I didn’t know what Dan and Stan were. They were just names.

And anyway, the food was peppered lake shellfish. I hadn’t found anything that could put me off that.

Not then. I wonder if I would still eat it, knowing what I do now.

If there’s any place where what I’m saying is likely to get interfered with, I guess that this is it. Because I’m going to be talking about Doctor Eileen Xavier—the same Doctor Eileen who made me start working on telling what happened.

But before I get to that, let me say that before I knew it, Paddy Enderton had been staying with us for over five weeks.

I hated having him in the house, and so I think did Mother, although he demanded little enough as a guest. He did not have his meals with us, or go outside for walks, or even bother to clean his room or wash himself. He wouldn’t let me or Mother in to clean, either. He seemed to do nothing but sit upstairs, cough and wheeze, make strange drawings that were scattered all over when I took him his meals, and stare out across the lake.

But he paid, and he paid well. So every few days I went along the shore to Toltoona, mostly in the sailboat unless the weather was rough, and when I got back I reported to Enderton that there was nothing out of the ordinary that I could see. He never thanked me, just nodded in a satisfied sort of way. I felt I was taking his money for nothing, but nothing was apparently what he wanted to hear.

About once a week, when the wind was right, I sailed all the way across to Muldoon Spaceport and docked there. With funding from Paddy Enderton, Mother had made for me the blue trousers and white jacket of junior service staff. Wearing those I wandered nervously into the restaurants, and soon learned that provided I didn’t go into the kitchens, no one paid me the slightest attention.

After my second visit I became bolder. I broadened my travels to include the repair shops and warehouses and, finally, greatly daring, I went into the launch lounge, where never a launch was to be seen during the day, but where the old retired spacers seemed to spend all their time. There, sitting on the outskirts of those groups and saying not a word, I learned more about space and the Forty Worlds than anyone at Toltoona ever dreamed.

For Mother and Uncle Duncan, the idea that we had once been part of a great commerce between the stars seemed hardly more than a legend. Even if it’s true, Duncan once said to me, what does it matter? There’s nothing like that now, is there?

He was right, of course. Our real world was Erin, and, to a lesser extent, the rest of the Forty Worlds.

But the spacers could not discard the past so easily. They talked, while I listened open-mouthed, about the great deserted structures that floated free in space out beyond the Gap, beyond the gas giant worlds of Antrim and Tyrone, beyond the Maze. Some of the speakers had visited those empty shells themselves. All of them agreed that no technology on Erin, today or in the past, could have been enough to build those monster habitats. The structures had employed, and now were cannibalized for, elements and alloys hardly known in the Maveen system.

No doubt about it, said the old spacers. Those structures were built using the Godspeed Drive. And somewhere out there, who knew where, there might be a structure that was not deserted and empty. Somewhere maybe was El Dorado, the Pot of Gold at the end of the rainbow, the supply base used by the Godspeeders themselves before, for whatever reason, they ceased to visit the system of the Forty Worlds.

Which was a great pity, agreed the spacers, because with the Godspeed Drive the stars, even the faint and distant ones, must have been no more than a few days away. The Drive had served ten thousand suns. And the ships at Muldoon Spaceport today, even our best ones, were no more than a faint shadow of the ships that must have wandered the Forty Worlds, a few hundred years ago.

I had never in my life heard anything half so interesting. After my second visit I spent almost all my time sitting in the launch lounge. It’s a good thing that Paddy Enderton had no way to check on me, because there could have been armless and legless men by the dozen wandering around the rest of Muldoon Spaceport, and I would never have known it.