Read Godspeed for Free Online Page B

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.
    It was the time, snow or no snow, to make a run for Toltoona. When I got back Paddy Enderton ought to have calmed down, especially when I brought to him the "no news" that he regarded as good news.
    I still think it was a reasonable idea. Except that when I opened the door and sneaked out onto the landing, Paddy Enderton was there waiting, standing in his stockinged feet.
    One great hand closed around my upper arm, and the other went over my mouth. He leaned to me, so that his mouth was only an inch from my ear.
    "Not a sound, now, Jay Hara," he said in a growling whisper. "You and I are going to have a bit of a talk. And don't try to fight, or I'll have to hurt you."
    He was hurting me already. But I kept that to myself, as we shuffled along to his room.
    His door opened, and closed again. This time, I was on the wrong side of it.

CHAPTER 5
    Enderton sat me down on his unmade bed and dragged a chair over so that we sat staring at each other, a couple of feet apart.
    "The woman." He had no knife or other weapon, but I knew that with those hands he did not need one. "Who is she, and why did you bring her to my room?"
    I quailed, and told him. I explained that Doctor Eileen Xavier was an old friend of the family, who never mentioned in advance that she was coming to see Mother. There had been no chance to warn him.
    After I had said that I just kept going, blurting out anything and everything I knew about Doctor Eileen. All the time that I was babbling he sat fidgety in his seat, never still. I saw his eyes flickering from me, to the window where the silent snow was still falling, to the locked door, to the odd skeleton of blue struts that faced out across the lake. He was drinking, too, replenishing a dirty glass with colorless liquid from an unlabeled bottle.
    "She saw too much," he said, when I was finished. He wiped his mouth with his grubby hand. "If I thought that she might . . . The question is, will she talk? Where does she live?"
    "South of here, along the lake shore just past Toltoona. Doctor Eileen's not one for talking." Except to Mother, I felt like adding, but instead I said, "What do you mean, she saw too much?"
    He stared at me for a long time, while I hardly dared to breathe. "Well," he said at last. "It's like this, Jay."
    There was a quietness to his voice that I had never heard before, as he went on,