Free Godspeed by Charles Sheffield

sight of him lying dead on the floor had sent them into a rage.
    "They could hardly believe it," she said. "The biggest one went across and kicked the body and swore at it, as though Enderton had died just to annoy him. Damned Black Paddy, he called him. He searched Enderton's clothing, then he set the other three to ransacking the house while he questioned me. I did my best to act innocent. Said Enderton was just a lodger who had the upstairs room, and hardly ever came down. I was vague about everything, and I acted dumb as I knew how."
    "I'll bet you did," Doctor Eileen said. She had already been out all morning on a call, and was getting ready to go out again. "We'll need a full description."
    "I'll give you one, but it won't help unless I see them again. I'm sure they were spacers, every one, but there was nothing out of the ordinary about any of them."
    "Nobody with no arms, or no legs," I said, and felt myself blush when Duncan West stared at me as though I had lost my mind.
    "I tried to get them to say what they were after," went on mother. "But that didn't work."
    I started to open my mouth again, ready to mention the telecon still sitting high on the water tower, but Mother quickly disposed of that possibility.
    "Whatever it was they were after," she said, "it must have been no bigger than your hand, because of the places that they were looking. And when they couldn't find anything they got more and more annoyed. They started to smash things at random. That's when they knocked me about a bit, too, just to take it out on somebody. Then they moved upstairs and tied me down. I think they were getting interested in other options for me when the big one said forget it, the boss was waiting and he'd told them go easy on the redhead woman."
    "Lucky for you," said Uncle Duncan.
    "Oh, I don't know." Mother smiled at him, but she had her eye on Doctor Eileen. "I think in another five minutes I could have had a couple of them at each other's throats."
    "Or slitting yours," Doctor Eileen said. "Molly, you're plain incorrigible. Come on. I'll give you and Jay a ride back to the house. We'll pick up a few strong men in Toltoona, to stay with you and make sure there's no more trouble."
    I glanced out of the window. There was a clear blue sky, and outside the snow was melting fast. "I've got to take the sailboat back home," I said. "I might as well do it now, and get it over with."
    "All right," Mother said mildly. "But no heading off across the lake again. 'Clean your room,' has a whole new meaning today. I wouldn't like to think you were trying to skip housework."
    As the other three left the kitchen I realized that she was right. I was avoiding going home. But it was nothing to do with housework. It was the thought of Chum, casually slaughtered and skewered to the front porch. No matter what Paddy Enderton had done, and no matter what the others wanted from him, they didn't have to do that.
    I had lost my appetite. I washed the dishes, put on my coat, and headed for the place where I had tied up the boat. My whole water journey and final arrival last night seemed like an awful dream. It was surprising to find everything just as I had left it, the sail still not properly furled, the seats and the bottom of the boat covered in snow.
    Before I could sail home, the boat had to be cleared. I took a square of wood and began to use it as a makeshift shovel, scraping snow into heaps and dumping it overboard into the black lake water.
    I had been at work no more than two minutes when I came across the rectangular wafer of black plastic. It was sitting in the bottom of the boat, just where it had dropped from Paddy Enderton's hands.
    * * *
    Mother's orders had been explicit: Go home, and at once. But no command in the universe could have stopped me from sitting down in the bow of the boat and staring at Enderton's little sealed device.
    It was thin, hardly more than a plastic card, and at first sight the front was plain. Upon a closer look