Godspeed Read Online Free PDF Page B

that was clearly not Erin, or a tube that I could place on my skin and see the pattern of veins and sinews and even individual cells, deep inside.
    It would sadden me to give up more of these wonders, but it had to be done. I headed up the path, where a thin film of ice was already forming on the puddles. I intended to tell Paddy Enderton that I could not cross the lake again until the spring.
    But although he was in his room, he was already asleep when I sneaked upstairs. Through the locked door I could hear him snoring and wheezing, with a rattle in his chest that was sounding worse and worse as the weather grew colder.
    No matter, I thought. I would tell him first thing in the morning.
    But next morning, before Paddy Enderton and Mother were up and about, Doctor Eileen paid a visit.
    * * *
    The day dawned late, under heavy grey skies. With it came the first real snow of winter, drifting down in big, soft flakes. It made perfect snowballs. I went outside, throwing the icy spheres at trees and birds and bushes, and laughing at our tame miniver, Chum. He was a bit witless, and he didn't understand the game. He tried to catch everything in his mouth, and he was scooting around looking a bit like an oversized snowball himself when Doctor Eileen's car came floating in along the northern path.
    I pretended that I was going to chuck one at her when she turned off the engine and got out of the little runabout. She stood her ground and faced me down, grinning out from the fur hood that muffled her so only eyes to mouth were visible.
    "I don't know about you," she said, "but I've been up all night. I decided to cadge something hot from Molly on my way home. Your mother up yet?"
    It was her first visit for a few months. Doctor Eileen's patients were scattered over a big area west of Lake Sheelin, the "poor side," as she called it, and when she had been working to the north of us she had the habit of dropping in unannounced. The official reason was to perform a routine check on my health and Mother's, but I thought that was a waste of time, because it seemed to me that both of us were healthy as ticks. The real reason, I decided, was that Mother and Doctor Eileen got on well, and liked to sit and talk. And talk and talk.
    But now I have to take a break, and point out that when I sat down to describe the quest for the Godspeed Drive, it was Doctor Eileen herself who told me that I must not take anything for granted. I had to describe everything, she said, people and places and things, even ones so familiar to me that I had never really looked at them before. In fact, especially ones that I had never really looked at before.
    So she can hardly object when I apply that rule to her.
    I don't remember a time when I did not know Doctor Eileen Xavier. She had been prodding and poking and making me say "Ah" since I was an infant, and probably before that. I thought of her as big, but she wasn't. By the time I was twelve, we were eye to eye. She was little and old, with a brown, wrinkled face that somehow stayed tanned summer and winter, and she was sort of roly-poly, a little bent forward and kind of thick through the middle. She was not strong, not in the way that people usually mean, like lifting things, but I had never seen her tired, even when she rolled up at our house after a day and a half on the road.
    What she was, she was there, at all hours and in all weathers, whenever people needed a doctor. Mother said there wasn't a man or woman within thirty miles of Toltoona who wouldn't give Doctor Eileen anything they owned if she asked for it.
    So there was never a question, on that brisk, snowy morning, that I would take Doctor Eileen into the kitchen without consulting anyone, set her cold outer clothes to warm and dry, and give her hot cakes and a mug of sugary tea, the way she liked it. And only after that did I start upstairs to tell Mother that she was here.
    "What is that? " said Doctor Eileen, before I could set my foot on the first