Jack McDevitt - The Devil's Eye

When we'd finished at the cemetery, the tour bus took us out to look at the android laboratory. It was a cluster of small buildings with specimen tables and tubs and exotic-looking equipment. It was, the driver explained, not the real lab, which had gone away centuries ago. But it was an "accurate replica." "Furthermore," he said, "this is the ground on which it stood." He continued as if everything were still standing. Here and over there were the quarters of the scientists, directly to your right the dining room. The main laboratory itself was the one-story white building on your right. He stopped in front of it. "Some of the damage was done by the government when it came to recover whatever might connect it with the monster. We think it was the creature itself, though, that really leveled the place." "They must think we're all idiots," I told Alex. "No, no. It's all showbiz. They know no one buys it, but what they want is a momentary suspension of disbelief. Like in a sim. Kick back and enjoy yourself, Chase." "Okay." "Of course, who really knows?" "About things like this? Would you please stop? You've been reading Greene's books again, haven't you?" He smiled, and we both had a good laugh. "Seriously, though, I wonder whether the story has any basis in fact? Whether they might have tried to build androids out here?" He shrugged. "Sure. They might have tried to put together a better cop. In a dictatorship, you'd pretty much expect it. It's what makes technology so scary, Chase. Sometimes, the wrong people get to make use of it." "You think Vicki took this tour?" "You think there's any chance in the world she came all the way out here and didn't take the tour?" For a long minute I kept my peace. Then: "How about we come back out tonight?" "Where? Here? " "Yes. Here. " "Why?" "Because that's what Vicki would have done. She would have wanted to feel the emotional impact of the android story. And the grave at night was part of that impact. I doubt she could have resisted it." "You're probably right, Chase. But I don't see any point in pushing this any further. What we need to do is find out where she went from here." "That seems like cheating. I think we should repeat the experience." "You really want to do this, don't you?" "Yes," I said. "I'd like to be here when the star gets overhead. That's the way she'd have done it." "Chase-" "We came to repeat the experience. To do what she did. It seems to me, this might be at the center of things." "Okay." His voice was resigned. "If you insist." I shook my head. "No." "No what?" "I'll go alone." "Why?" "Because she did." "Chase, you're not fooling anybody." "What do you mean, Alex?" "You're still a little kid."

He didn't like the idea. It's dangerous, he said. No place for a woman. Who knows who's hanging around out there at that time of night? There might even be predators in the area. I told him not to worry, that I'd call him if anything out of the ordinary happened. Anyhow, I was armed. I'd bought a 21k scrambler, which I would have with me. "But," I told him, "you might want to keep a plasma gun handy

in case there really is a monster running loose." He said something along the lines of how I needed to work on my sense of humor. When Callistra had risen prominently into the center of the sky, I fought my way through another series of cautionary admonitions from Alex, went up to the roof, and took the skimmer back to the cemetery. It's an even drearier place at night. There was no light, save the soft blue evanescence cast over the headstones and monuments by the lone star. I landed in the parking area, about thirty meters from the grave site. A strong wind was blowing out of the west and carrying a lot of dust with it. I climbed out, turned on my lamp, and walked over to the grave. Something moved off to my right, on the edge of vision. A couple of teens, trying to walk and make out at the same time. They disappeared behind a mausoleum. I shut off the lamp and stood in the silence, broken only by the drone of insects. The block gleamed in the starlight. I'd expected to be able to see the town lights, but there was only a soft glow in the trees to the south. A warm breeze kicked up. I pictured Vicki standing at that identical spot, listening to the darkness. And she had to be thinking how she might re-create that place, how she could use it. In her Point Man interview, she'd mentioned The Devil's Eye as a working title. I looked up at the blue star. It was the wrong color. But that night, in the presence of the oversized marker, color didn't matter. I wondered whether she'd been at all nervous. Or whether she delighted in an experience like that. Was that maybe why she'd come? Maybe it had nothing to do with planning a novel. Maybe she just liked the inner creep, the chill, that came with standing near a grave that people insisted was unquiet. A set of lights appeared in the northwest, passed overhead, and descended toward the glow that marked the town. I turned my lamp back on and looked at the symbols on the marker. Forrest Barryman. Gone to Glory.

The rock and the Arrakesh characters had to be pure showbiz. Who knew what they really said? Whether they said anything at all? The whole town was an enterprise based on a fantasy. Like West Kobal on-where was it?-Black Adrian, where a sea monster with enormous tentacles was periodically reported. Or Bizmuth in the Spinners, where visitors from another galaxy were supposed to have crashed. (They and the wreckage had been spirited off by the government, which denied everything.) There's even a place that claims to have a doorway into another dimension. They'll show you the doorway, it's in the side of a mountain, cut into solid rock, but conditions have to be exactly right to get through it, which, of course, they never are. Just as well: The locals claim no one has ever come back. But townspeople swear you can get a magnificent view of this other-dimensional place. It was easy to imagine Vicki Greene standing there, thinking the same thoughts, wondering the same things. Possibly concluding that the answers didn't matter. That it was the uncertainty that counted. I began, that night, to feel close to her. Until then, she'd struck me as a kind of opportunist, making money by writing about things that could never be. That I personally didn't care about. But it struck me that the vampires and Forrest Barryman and all the rest of it weren't imaginative creatures dreamed up to separate idiots from their money. That they reflected light into the darkest corners of what makes us human. There was, after all, a time when we did not comprehend the natural world, did not see the order. There was only a vast darkness, a world for which no one really knew the rules. Filled with phantoms snatching unwary travelers, perhaps. With angels moving stars, and gods riding the sun across the sky. The ground moved. It wasn't a tremor, exactly. More like a flutter, a barely noticeable palpitation. My imagination, probably. It came again. I could see nothing, but I eased the scrambler out of my pocket and took a long look around. I was alone. The teenagers seemed to have gone. The block moved. Began to rise. I shook my head. Stared as one end, the forward end, the end closer to me, lifted.

I'd like to say I stood my ground. I understood immediately it was an elaborate illusion for tourists brave enough to go out there at night. To feed the legend. But it didn't matter. My hair rose, and my heart started to pound. The bottom of the rock cleared the ground, and I could see something holding it, lifting it from beneath. An oversized blue-tinted hand appeared, pushing down on the ground while the slab kept going up. I turned and ran. All the way back to the skimmer. I ordered the AI to open the hatch while I was still running. "Start the engine," I told it. My heart was coming out of my chest. The skimmer was already off the ground when I jumped on board.