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ordinary that I could see. He never thanked me, just nodded in a satisfied sort of way. I felt I was taking his money for nothing, but nothing was apparently what he wanted to hear.
    About once a week, when the wind was right, I sailed all the way across to Muldoon Spaceport and docked there. With funding from Paddy Enderton, Mother had made for me the blue trousers and white jacket of junior service staff. Wearing those I wandered nervously into the restaurants, and soon learned that provided I didn't go into the kitchens, no one paid me the slightest attention.
    After my second visit I became bolder. I broadened my travels to include the repair shops and warehouses and, finally, greatly daring, I went into the launch lounge, where never a launch was to be seen during the day, but where the old retired spacers seemed to spend all their time. There, sitting on the outskirts of those groups and saying not a word, I learned more about space and the Forty Worlds than anyone at Toltoona ever dreamed.
    For Mother and Uncle Duncan, the idea that we had once been part of a great commerce between the stars seemed hardly more than a legend. Even if it's true, Duncan once said to me, what does it matter? There's nothing like that now, is there?
    He was right, of course. Our real world was Erin, and, to a lesser extent, the rest of the Forty Worlds.
    But the spacers could not discard the past so easily. They talked, while I listened open-mouthed, about the great deserted structures that floated free in space out beyond the Gap, beyond the gas giant worlds of Antrim and Tyrone, beyond the Maze. Some of the speakers had visited those empty shells themselves. All of them agreed that no technology on Erin, today or in the past, could have been enough to build those monster habitats. The structures had employed, and now were cannibalized for, elements and alloys hardly known in the Maveen system.
    No doubt about it, said the old spacers. Those structures were built using the Godspeed Drive. And somewhere out there, who knew where, there might be a structure that was not deserted and empty. Somewhere maybe was El Dorado, the Pot of Gold at the end of the rainbow, the supply base used by the Godspeeders themselves before, for whatever reason, they ceased to visit the system of the Forty Worlds.
    Which was a great pity, agreed the spacers, because with the Godspeed Drive the stars, even the faint and distant ones, must have been no more than a few days away. The Drive had served ten thousand suns. And the ships at Muldoon Spaceport today, even our best ones, were no more than a faint shadow of the ships that must have wandered the Forty Worlds, a few hundred years ago.
    I had never in my life heard anything half so interesting. After my second visit I spent almost all my time sitting in the launch lounge. It's a good thing that Paddy Enderton had no way to check on me, because there could have been armless and legless men by the dozen wandering around the rest of Muldoon Spaceport, and I would never have known it.
    My sail home became later and later, as the season moved steadily on toward winter. On my fifth trip across, Muldoon Port was more packed with newly arrived spacers than it had ever been. The place had the atmosphere of one giant reunion party. I could hardly bear to leave, and I stayed there until after dark. But I paid for it on the journey home, when I shuddered and shivered all the way back. It was not just the cold. The squalls that ripped the lake's surface twice came close to capsizing me. By the time that I tied up the sailboat at our home pier, I had decided that this must be my last trip across Lake Sheelin.
    That was a great shame, because for the first time in my life I had money. It was hidden away in a bag beneath my bed. Paddy Enderton was often late now in paying Mother, but never in paying me. Usually it was cash, but sometimes other things—a little timepiece, that showed the passage of hours and days for a place