She stood her ground. “I can’t examine a man who refuses to be looked at. But I’ll tell you this. The weather here is going to get colder and colder for the next four months, and if you don’t seek medical treatment you’re going to be flat on your back before spring arrives. And that’s not the worst that might happen to you.”
He grunted, deep in his chest, and shook his tangled bird’s-nest of dirty hair. “I won’t be here for any four months. And you don’t know the worst that could happen to me. How I feel is my business. Get out of here.”
“Molly Hara knows how to get in touch with me if you need me,” said Doctor Eileen, as she turned and urged me back through the doorway. “Only make that when you need me. If you’ve not spent a winter by Lake Sheelin, you have an experience coming to you.”
The door slammed behind us. The lock went into position, violently. And before either Doctor Eileen or I could say a word to each other, Mother came hurrying along the landing.
“You’ve hit a new low, Molly,” Doctor Eileen said, byway of a greeting. It was as though the two of them were continuing a conversation from an hour before, but Mother just laughed and said, “With that one? Never in this world—or any other. Come on in, and bring your tea with you.”
They went straight into Mother’s room and closed the door, leaving me alone on the landing.
I could have gone downstairs, and back out into the snow. If it hadn’t been for Paddy Enderton, I probably would have done. But his face had been full of anger, and I was afraid that he would follow me outside and blame me for telling Doctor Eileen that he was there. I didn’t want to be alone with him.
I sneaked into my bedroom, the one that used to be the guest room, and closed the door as quietly as possible. Just a few seconds later I heard Enderton’s door open, and his heavy tread on the landing and the stairs.
There was only the one way down. I was stuck. I settled on my bed, ready to stay there until I heard him come back up. It might not take long. Maybe all he wanted was a hot drink, to which he could add from his own supply of liquor. That was his usual breakfast these days.
In the next room, Mother and Doctor Eileen were talking together. That was nothing new, it was all they seemed to do when they met. What was a surprise was the ease with which someone in the guest bedroom could hear every word that they said.
“Fine. Now let’s do the back.” That was Doctor Eileen. “Breathe deep, and slow.”
“You’ll find nothing, you know.”
“I should hope not. You’re healthy enough, Molly. Not that you do much to make sure you stay that way.”
“I eat right.” There was the sighing sound of a long, forced breath. “I get plenty of sleep. And those stairs are more than enough exercise.”
“I’m not talking about that sort of thing, and you know it. I’m talking about that sort of thing.”
I couldn’t see what she had done, but Mother laughed and said, “With that one? I told you, not in a million years. Not for a Pot of Gold.”
“I’m glad to hear it. But it’s a first.” There were a few seconds of relative silence, with only the sound of Mother’s deep breathing, then Doctor Eileen went on, “It’s terribly dangerous, you know, taking on all comers the way you’ve been doing.”
“Don’t be horrible. I’ve never done that. I’m very careful.” Breath. “I’ve only ever had the one accident, and looking back I’m not sure how much of an accident it was. You’d have loved him, Eileen.” Breath. “Anyway, it worked out all right, didn’t it?”
“Better than all right. Unless you’re the odd sort that thinks everybody needs a father. But Molly, I’m not talking that sort of danger, and you know it. What about diseases?”
“That’s why you’re here, Eileen.”
“For the local ailments, yes. But I’m not thinking of them. There’s a thousand viruses to be picked up around the Forty Worlds, and brought back here by the spacers.”
“You think that maybe Paddy Enderton—the man in the front room—”
“Oh, I wasn’t referring to him. What he has sounds like ordinary spacer lungs, aggravated by a bad injury. He’s in awful shape, but I’m worrying about something a lot worse. The viruses I’m talking about, we’ll never have met them before. And you can bet that the nanos available here won’t touch them. If you don’t worry about yourself, you ought to worry about Jay.”
I goosebumped all over, the way you do when you hear your own name and were least expecting it.
“He’s not been sick for years,” said Mother.
“Not in a way that you’d recognize. But Molly, how old is he?”
“Just sixteen. His birthday was last month.”
“Sixteen. Do you see any signs of the change in him?”
“Puberty, you mean? Not yet. But is that unusual?”
“It isn’t.” And now it was Doctor Eileen’s turn to sigh. “I see it all the time in my rounds. Boys who reach sixteen, or seventeen, or eighteen, and don’t mature sexually. But it shouldn’t be like that. And it wasn’t, fifty years ago.”
“I’ve never known it different.”
“Well, I have. I remember it. And I’ve seen the old medical records, too, from a hundred and two hundred years ago. They’re still kept, you know, over in Middletown on the eastern shore. It used to be that most boys reached puberty by the time they were twelve. And did you know there were as many girls born as boys?”
Mother’s reaction to that was of course invisible, but I know the effect it had on me. As many girls as boys. I knew scores and scores of boys, and just three girls. And I hardly knew those three, because instead of going to the local school with us boys they were kept coddled indoors all the time. They were never allowed out, to play or fish or wander along the shore of the lake.
“But why is that?” Mother was saying.
“I wish I knew. It’s something to do with this damned planet, I’m sure of that.”
“I thought you loved Erin.”
“I do. But not enough to make me blind.”
“Why would it start to happen now, and not hundreds of years ago?”
“Because we’re isolated. When there was the Godspeed Drive—”
“Not that again, Eileen.”
“Hiding from the truth won’t make the problem go away, Molly, even if everybody does it. There used to be a steady flow of materials into Erin, from a hundred different worlds. There were plants and animals and food and supplies, arriving here every day. With that, humans and Erin fitted just fine. But we’re isolated now, and have been for centuries, except for bits and pieces coming in from the Forty Worlds. And that’s bad news. Human biochemistry and native Erin biology, I don’t think they fit. Close, but not quite. And it makes me worry for our future, a century or two from now. People used to live a lot longer than they do, did you know that? Thirty or forty years longer. I don’t know if it’s missing trace elements in the food, or diet deficiencies, or toxins, or something in the air of Erin—”
It was an unusually long and serious statement for Doctor Eileen, but I missed the end of it, for the clatter of Paddy Enderton’s footsteps was again on the stairs. I listened carefully. He walked slowly along the landing, then halted. After a long and mysterious pause there came at last the sound of his door opening and closing.
I stood up. Back in Mother’s bedroom, the conversation had turned to the idea that I ought to be made to eat more green vegetables. I made a face at the closed door. I already ate more of them than seemed decent.