“Mother doesn’t like me to sail far away from the shore.”
“That’s for pleasure. If it was well-paid, though, that would be another matter.”
My reluctance to discuss the idea with Mother must have showed, because he went on, “Of course, I’d be the one asking her. And if you did a little something extra for me now and then, there’d be other stuff coming your way that’s more than wages. Things you’ll like, you wanting to be a spacer. See here. I’m giving you this right now.”
He pulled from his pocket a coin-sized flat circle, like a tiny plate of stiff paper, and handed it across to me. I examined it on both sides, and saw nothing.
“Well?” said Enderton.
“It’s just a flat piece of cardboard.”
“You think so?” He seemed pleased. “Grab your jacket and come with me.”
He led the way outside the house. It was a fine morning of late fall, the temperature hardly risen above freezing. In another week or two winter would arrive dramatically, with biting north winds and soon after that a thin coat of ice along the shallows of the lake. But today we could still stand outside without discomfort.
Enderton stared along the road to Toltoona, and then across the deserted surface of Lake Sheelin. He examined them closely, before he moved next to me and pointed his thick finger at the disk.
“Now, you want to be a spacer and not a fisherman, I know that, but I’ll bet you still like to fish?” He saw my nod. “So let’s say you’re out on the lake, fishing. And suppose you’re still out when it gets dark, and you come across a place where there’s something good on your line every time you stick it down in the water. You’d love to be able to find the same spot again, but there’s not a landmark visible to fix your place. Then you press this.”
His index finger stabbed at a little red patch on one side of the card. So far as I could see, nothing at all happened.
“So now you go away, anywhere you like. Come on.” Enderton started walking along the road. I followed him, swallowing down the last of my sandwich, until we were a couple of hundred paces from the house. There he stopped.
“Now, say that tomorrow night you want to find your way back to that same place. Then all you do is press this.” He touched a blue patch on the opposite side of the card. “And see what you get.”
The front of the card had suddenly changed. Before it had been blank, now it was divided in two by a bright yellow arrow. In the middle sat a number.
“That points the direction you have to go, to get right back where you want to be.” Enderton rotated the card, to show that the arrow turned to point always in the same direction. “And the figures in the middle, they tell you how far you have to go to reach your starting point. You just follow the arrow. Go ahead. Do it.”
I did as he suggested, and found myself led right back to the place were we had started. When I arrived at the right point outside the house, the arrow vanished and the little disk buzzed softly.
I turned the card over. It was thin as a fingernail, and the underside was no more than a repeat of the top. Paddy Enderton laughed, then doubled over with a horrible coughing fit.
“You’ll see nothing there,” he said, when he had recovered. “And don’t try to break it open to look, or it will never work again.”
“I’ve never seen anything like this.”
“Of course you haven’t.” He gave me a leer and a wink. “And no more has anyone else around here. That’s spacer work—and not the sort you’ll find around Muldoon Port, either. But you see how useful it would be, to fix a position in space. And it’s yours. You help me when I need it, and there’ll be more things like this for you. Are we on, Jay?”
He held out his hand. After a few moments I took it. His big black-haired paw swallowed up my whole hand, and I pulled away as soon as I could.
“If Mother says it’s all right to cross the lake, I’ll do it.” Attractive as it had sounded at first, I was having second thoughts. I hadn’t liked Paddy Enderton when I first met him, and gifts or no gifts I decided that I didn’t like him now. “Mother will have to agree.”
“Sure. I’ll square that with her, no problem. But there’s other things, too, that your mother doesn’t need to know about.” He leaned close to me. “You’re going off to Toltoona, right?”
“I should be on the way already.” I glanced at the sun. “I wanted to be back before Mother was up.”
“Don’t worry about that. I’ll tell her that you ran a little errand for me.” He reached into his pocket, and handed me more money than I saw in a good month. “This is for today’s work. Before you collect your boat, take a walk right through Toltoona. Every street of it. How many inns are there?”
“Three.”
“Take a look in each one. You’ve seen plenty of spacers, right?”
I nodded.
“Keep your eyes open for anyone who looks or sounds like a spacer. If you see one, take a good note of him—how he’s dressed, what he’s doing, if he has any scars or strangeness. Don’t tell anyone what you’re doing, and don’t make it obvious. And when you come back, you tell me all about what you’ve seen and heard.”
He gave me a hard push, as though urging me along the road to Toltoona, then just as sharply grabbed my shoulder and pulled me back again. He leaned very close and turned me to him, so that I could see every whisker around his full mouth, and every vein in his bloodshot eyes.
“And there’s one more thing, Jay.” His voice was a hoarse whisper, and his stale breath filled my nostrils. “One more thing to look out for real special. And if you see it, or you hear talk of it, you come right back here at once, without waiting one second for anything. Look for a man with no arms, carrying on his back another man with no legs. The two-half-man, they call him. Anyone says those words, or talks about Dan and Stan, you let me know real quick. And then there’ll be more money for you than you’ve ever seen in your life.”
Just what Paddy Enderton told Mother, I don’t know. But a careful walk through the middle of Toltoona, and a slow sail back against the wind, kept me away from the house until lunchtime. When I hurried in Mother was standing at the stove; she said not a word about my lateness.
Duncan West was sitting with his long legs under the kitchen table. He nodded to me. “Food. A healthy young lad can smell it a mile off.”
Not quite true, but I could certainly smell it now. And I could see it, too, smoking hot and ready to serve. It was my favorite, peppered lake shellfish.
I went across to join Uncle Duncan.
“So, Jay,” he went on. “How’s life for my bold sailor lad?”
As usual he treated me like a six-year-old, and a none-too-bright one at that. Typical, although before I was ten I’d become sure that Mother was a good deal smarter than Duncan West. She didn’t seem to notice, or at least to mind, because he did a lot of repairs around the house and when he was dealing with mechanical things even I admitted that he was unbeatable.
Fortunately I didn’t have to answer, because before I could even sit down Mother was in front of me with a loaded tray.
“Second sitting for you, Jay. Ten more minutes. If you’re going to be an assistant to Mr. Enderton, you can start assisting now. He want to eat in his room. Take this up to him.”
It was another difference from Mother’s usual visitors. Everyone in the past had eaten with her, and usually there had been a good deal of talk and laughter and fancy ceremony.
“Eat in my room, you mean,” I said, not quite under my breath. But she did not respond, and I took the tray from her and hurried upstairs. If it was going to be another ten minutes before I could get anything to eat, I could brief Enderton on what I had been doing.