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?”
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.”