Jack McDevitt - Coming Home

Alex understood. He shared a similar sense of guilt over Gabe.

Lawrence Southwick III lived in Shelton, which is about forty miles southwest of Andiquar. Alex asked me to do background checks on everybody we were talking to, and Southwick was the only local who, as far as we could tell, had ever joined Baylee on one of his expeditions to the home world. He was a retired manufacturer, one of the major people behind the success of the Banner skimmers. He’d been friendly with Baylee since both were kids.

If anyone outside the family could help us, Southwick seemed like the guy. That meant Alex would prefer to meet him casually rather than call him. He tended to spend time at the Idelic Club, on the shoreline. I checked our records, and came up with two people who had connections with the Idelic Club. One was a journalist, and the other a client. Either, I thought, would be open to inviting Alex along to an event that might lead to a chance meeting. Naturally, Alex chose the client. But Southwick didn’t show up as expected. A second attempt also failed, so in the end we just played it straight and called him. I stayed back out of sight during the conversation.

Lawrence Southwick came from money. I knew that as soon as I saw the way he dressed and his furnishings. A Kopek painting hung on the wall behind him over a lush black sofa. He was tall, lanky, with sapphire eyes and thick brown hair, and the easy manner of a guy who had always been in control. His appearance suggested that he worked out regularly. “It’s been a long time,” he said, “since I’ve heard Garnett’s name. He was a good guy. He loved sports. Especially golf.”

“He was an archeologist, wasn’t he?” asked Alex.

“Yes. He did most of his work on Earth.”

“You went with him on one occasion, didn’t you? To the home world?”

“Actually on several occasions.” He stared at Alex. “May I ask what this is about? Has something happened?”

“We’re doing some research for Marissa Earl. She assured us you’d be happy to help.”

“Well, yes, of course I would. Garnett was among the major players.” His tone softened. “I accompanied him a few times. On terrestrial missions.”

“When was that?”

“Well, as I say, I did it several times. I went to Egypt with him once. To Asia, Europe. The Americas. All over the planet, really. Sometimes we just traveled around and visited historic sites. We saw the Parisian Tower. Or what’s left of it. And Kyoto. And Feraglia. Some of the places I’d really have liked to visit are, unfortunately, underwater. Like London. And I would especially have enjoyed going to Thermopolae.”

Alex asked some general questions about Baylee’s reactions to various sites, then inquired when they’d last been on the home world together.

“About nineteen or twenty years ago,” he said. “A long time.”

“I wonder if you could tell me what that was all about? That last visit?”

He had to think about it. “There was really nothing specific. He’d been there at that time for a couple of years, I guess. I just went to do some sightseeing. I only saw him once or twice. He was in Africa. Yeah, that’s right. North Africa. Mostly I just wandered around visiting museums and picking up stuff from gift shops. And from auctions. And visiting friends.” He glanced off to one side where a wall shelf came into view, adorned with a replica of a rocket. I couldn’t be sure, but I thought it was one of the Saturns. Lunar-era stuff. Hard to tell from a distance. Rockets all look pretty much alike.

“While you were with him on that last trip, did he come into possession of any major artifacts?”

“Well, sure. I mean, that’s what he did. There are whole sections of several museums dedicated to him. But—” His eyes took on an appearance of frustration. “Are we talking about the Corbett transmitter? Is that what this is about?”

“I’ll confess that’s what stirred my interest. Sure. It’s nine thousand years old. Do you have any idea where he might have gotten it?”

“None.” He laughed. “Garnie was full of surprises. But I certainly never expected he had anything like that. The truth is, he wasn’t inclined to tell you everything right away. He surprised me a few times. Like with Holcroft’s biography of Doc Manning. He had that for weeks before he showed it to me.”

“Did you keep in touch during the years he was on Earth?”

“Well, we both know that talking with someone that far away doesn’t work very well.”

“So you didn’t hear from him?”

“Occasionally. He’d come home once in a while and spend a few weeks with his family. And I’d get to see him. Then he’d be off again. Sometimes there’d be a message. It would usually be about a project he was working on. Or just a few general comments about how things were going.” He smiled. “We exchanged birthday greetings usually.”

“Mr. Southwick, you underwrote some of his expeditions.”

“Well, it’s probably more accurate to say I contributed to them. I still do what I can to support archeological research, Mr. Benedict.” He glanced at his link. Let us see he was checking the time. “Now, if you don’t mind, I have some business to attend to—”

“One other question, before we let you go. Do you know why he came home?”

“I think he decided to retire. He never really said that, but I think that’s what happened.”

“He was still in good health, though, wasn’t he?”

“As far as I know.”

“So why do you think he decided to retire?”

“Mr. Benedict, it was the Golden Age that intrigued him. He was especially interested in the early years of spaceflight. He was always looking for artifacts from that era. I think his most exciting experience was diving down to the Florida Space Museum. There’d been a lot of material there at one time. As I’m sure you know. But I think what happened was that he finally decided there was nothing more to be recovered. He’d pursued all the leads, had spent most of his life looking for the artifacts that had originally been on display in the Space Museum and in Huntsville, and I suspect he just gave up.”

Southwick had gotten me thinking about what it must have been like when the world was coming apart during the Dark Age. Population was exploding, disease and starvation were rampant, religious and political fanatics ran wild everywhere. Anyone who could get off the planet was doing so. It prompted the first serious interstellar-colonization period.

“When exactly did everything get lost?” I asked Alex.

“If you mean the contents of the Space Museum, most of them were moved to Huntsville as the seas rose. The stuff at Moonbase went to Huntsville, too. But that was probably eight hundred years later. At the beginning of the Dark Age. And eventually they had to abandon Huntsville. The story is that a guy running a storage facility in Centralia helped move the Huntsville artifacts. Supposedly everything went back to Centralia.” His head dropped onto the back of his chair.

“You okay?” I said.

“I’m fine.”

“What’s wrong?”

“I was thinking about Gabe. That artifact. The transmitter. He’d have loved to have found that. He spent a lot of time looking for something from that era. And he never got anything except bricks and assorted junk.” He took a deep breath. “Yeah. He’d have liked to see it. Just touch it.”

“I guess he was a lot like Baylee,” I said.

Alex had a reputation as a guy who did not get sentimental over artifacts. According to the common wisdom, the four-thousand-year-old Aguala Diamond, which Tora Canadra had conspicuously worn while being interviewed for The Gorpa Diaries , meant nothing more to him than profit. Ditto Henry Comer’s notebook, which Comer had famously thrown at Dr. Grace during the Arkhayne Award ceremony. It was a perspective I’d bought into for a long time. The truth, though, was simply that Alex tended to conceal his more emotional side. He shared Baylee’s passion for the Golden Age. And he was becoming tangled in the guy’s obsession with the lost artifacts. What had happened to the contents of the Huntsville museum? Did they still exist somewhere?