“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.