The weather made my mind up for me. As I sat hesitating, it began to snow again. Within a few minutes the lights of Muldoon Port blurred, then disappeared behind a veil of white.
I reached forward and groped around in Enderton’s jacket pockets until I found the knife. I threw it overboard. Only then did I turn the boat around, reset the sail, and head back for the western shore of the lake.
The lights of Toltoona had also vanished into the falling snow, so I could not tell just where I was heading. It was luck, not skill, that brought me to shore no more than a couple of hundred yards south of the pier that led up to our house.
I eased us along to the jetty and tied up the boat, but even in the best of weather I could not have carried the weight of Paddy Enderton up the path. He had to stay there face down, the snow falling to cover his broad back and exposed head, while I ran all the way up to the house, praying that Mother had not gone off looking for me and that somebody would be there to give me a hand.
She was in the kitchen. So was Uncle Duncan.
“There, Molly,” he said, as I blundered in. “I told you he’d be safe enough.”
“Jay!” began Mother. “I’ve told you a thousand times—” Then she saw my face.
“Mr. Enderton,” I gasped. “He’s really sick. Down by the shore. I can’t lift him.”
When spacer visitors were around, Mother liked to act weak and helpless. She was neither, of course, and now she proved it.
“Unconscious?” she snapped.
“He was, when I left.”
“Right,” she said. And then, without another word to me, “Duncan, we’ll need a blanket, and maybe something to carry him on. I’ll find those. You get the flashlight and our coats. Hurry.”
Mother had taken over. And with that, I became empty and deflated. All I wanted to do was sink down on the floor of the warm kitchen and go to sleep. But I couldn’t, because Mother was hustling me out of the door so I could lead them to the pier.
Paddy Enderton had not moved since I left, and I thought for a horrible moment that he was dead. He groaned, though, when Uncle Duncan straightened him, and he was muttering something under his breath as they heaved him up onto the pier and wrapped him in a blanket. I stood by ready to help, but all I was allowed to do was hold the flashlight. Mother and Uncle Duncan between them carried him up to the house, where they laid him on a couch dragged close to the stove.
His color was awful, a uniform grey pallor except for isolated spots of purple-red flaming on his cheekbones. Mother lowered her head to his chest and remained stooped over him for a long time. Finally she straightened and came to where I was sitting slumped in a chair at the kitchen table.
“I’m sorry, Jay,” she said quietly, “But you have to go out again. We’ll do what we can, but without a physician’s help he’s probably going to die. Whatever persuaded him to go out on the lake in weather like this, with his chest and lungs?”
She was not looking for an answer from me, although I could have given one, and she went right on, “You know where Doctor Eileen lives. I want you to go to her house. Tell her what happened here. Tell her that your mother says it’s urgent, and bring her back with you. Go now, as fast as you can.”
Before I knew it I was pushed out again into the freezing dark, big flakes falling silently on me as I started along the southern road. No one had been this way since the snow began, and in places I sank to my knees in undisturbed drifts. I put my head down and struggled on. One good thing was that the wind was steady and at my back. My eyes and face could at least remain sheltered. But there was little else to comfort me. The day had been exhausting, mentally as well as physically, and I felt ready to drop. After less than a hundred yards I halted and stood panting in the road.
At this rate I would never make it to Doctor Eileen’s house. Sheer fatigue would stop me. If I tried to keep going, the first person along the road in the morning would discover my frozen corpse.
It was the wind, pushing persistently at my back, that gave me the idea that saved my life—and not for the reason that I thought at the time.
It occurred to me that if I left the road and went down the hill to my left, I would arrive at the place where the sailboat was tied up. With the wind at its present heading, it would then be child’s play for me to hoist the sail and allow myself to be blown all the way to Doctor Eileen’s lakeshore house. Even at night, the darkness of the lake and the reflection of light from the snow on shore would be enough to leave me in no doubt as to the land/water boundary.
Before I knew it I had made up my mind. My legs seemed like weighted pendulums as they carried me down the hill towards the pier. Two minutes later I was in the sailboat, scraping snow off the seat and struggling to shake it off the sail. One minute after that the boat was away, gliding smoothly before the following wind.
It had sounded so easy, but real life never seems to work out quite as simple and pleasant as imagination paints it. My hands froze almost at once, so I had to keep one tucked into my jacket and hold the rudder lines with the other. My bottom was the next victim. Sitting for three-quarters of an hour on the bare plank seat of a sailboat, cramped and freezing, was no joke. I felt thawed snow, cold enough to be painful, seeping into the seat of my pants. To add terror to discomfort I had an awful few minutes when I lost sight of the snowy shore. But easing the boat steadily to the right solved that, and once I was past the lights of Toltoona I knew the worst was over. Doctor Eileen’s house came next, and the lights were on there all the time. The only question was whether she was home, or had been dragged out into the blizzard for some other nighttime emergency.
Either way, I knew one thing for sure: Doctor Eileen’s house would be my last port of call for the night.
I was wrong about that too, of course. For the past couple of days, it seemed that every time I thought I knew what would happen next, events took a hundred-and-eighty-degree turn.
Doctor Eileen was home, and despite the lateness of the hour she was up and fully dressed. She let me get only as far as “Mother says it’s urgent,” before she swept me into her cruiser and headed north towards our house.
The good news was that the vehicle floated as quickly and easily over snow as over anything else. The better news was that Doctor Eileen often lived in it for days, so hot food and drink could be produced on the little stove in the rear of the cabin. We were hardly through Toltoona before I was feeling, if not restored, at least human. I answered her questions as best I could, about my aborted trip across to Muldoon Port, about Paddy Enderton’s collapse on the way, about his symptoms, and about my own desperate decision to reach her by water rather than by road.
It was the last answer that produced the most reaction. She had been sitting quietly in the driver’s seat, taking us rapidly but carefully along the north road. I was behind her, paying no attention to anything outside, which from the moment we started had been little more than a whirlwind of white.
“Did I hear you right?” she said. “Did you say that you had trouble walking because the snow was unbroken?”
“Yes. From our house toward Toltoona, no one had been along it.”
“Well, they certainly have now. A number of people. See for yourself.”
The footprints were already filling, but they were unmistakable. Four or five separate tracks led in the direction we were traveling. There was no sign of them returning. I stayed up at the front of the cruiser and watched, convinced that at some point the trails in the snow would leave the road and head away, up the hill or down toward the shore.
They didn’t. They continued, all the way to the path that served the front porch of my own house.