Jack McDevitt - Coming Home

“Your voice means a lot in this struggle. A statement from you will not necessarily carry the day, but it would have considerable weight. If you can help, the sooner you are heard, the better.

“However you decide, I appreciate that you’ve at least listened. A reply to this message has already been paid for. Again, thank you for your time.”

We were seated in back while the car navigated through heavy traffic. Alex was staring straight ahead. The roadway was sealed off from pedestrians or animals, raised three or four meters off ground level.

I’d never have described Alex as being indecisive. But at that moment, he looked like a man in pain.

“Maybe we could try contacting John,” I said. “It’s possible they’ve had a breakthrough, and they could guarantee everybody’s safety.”

“No.” He was scowling, as if some dark creature fluttered outside the windshield. “If they’d managed something like that, he’d have let us know.”

The car got us to Union City shortly after sunset. The visitors’ center was closed, but we’d done the research. The Prairie House had been located on what was now the northeastern edge of town, a few blocks from the Red River.

We checked in at a hotel and drove to the site, which was occupied by an abandoned church. It was away from streetlights and flanked by a vacant lot on one side and a grocery store on the other. The front doors were at the top of a half dozen steps. A sign off to one side identified the grounds as the Good Shepherd Baptist Church. Another sign stated that it was closed. A stone angel, with folded wings, waited on one side of a walkway, and a large cross rose from the steeple. The grounds were freshly cut, and there were a few headstones in back. Lights were just coming on in the houses, and people were sitting out on porches while kids chased one another along otherwise-quiet streets.

We got out of the car. The church had been there a long time, almost a century. The data for the site went back almost a thousand years. The location had usually been occupied by a church. But there had been private homes, a couple of retail shops, and even, at one point, a hardware store.

Prior to that, the record was unclear. It wasn’t even certain this had been the location of the storied Prairie House, which, in its time, had served as a community center, a warehouse, and a militia outpost. It had been burned down once, or maybe twice, during the Dark Age. No picture of it existed.

The Baptist church had closed down twenty years earlier, when the city took over the property and tried, with no success, to cash in on the Apollo artifacts legend by establishing an Apollo gift shop. The former gift shop still stood, pale and desolate, beside the church, where it now functioned as a grocery store.

The rock walls of the church were dark and gray. “I don’t think we’re going to learn much here,” I said.

“You never know, Chase.” He took a deep breath. I could see frustration in his eyes.

“What?” I said.

“The scanner would have come in handy. I’d like to see what the lower levels look like.”

“You don’t think there could still be something here, do you?”

“Anything’s possible. But no, it’s not very likely. Still, I’d like to take a look. Maybe we could at least find some evidence that the artifacts had actually been brought here.”

Some of the kids who’d been playing stopped to watch us. As did a few of the adults on their porches. One man stood up, came down the steps onto a sidewalk, and started across the street in our direction. He was small, with a ridge of gray hair around his skull. His ears stuck out, and he probably needed a better diet. He took a long look at our car as he passed it. “Hello,” he said. “What’s going on?”

“We’re tourists,” said Alex. “I see we’re too late to get a look at the church. Do you know if there’s any way we can get inside?”

“Well, you’re right. It is a little bit late. Why would you want to go in there ?”

“We’re interested in the Prairie House.”

He laughed. “That’s been gone awhile, Mister.”

“I know. But it was a famous place. I’d love to be able to tell my family I was inside the building that’s on the grounds now.”

“Why don’t you come back in the morning?”

“We could do that if it would work. We just want to look around a bit. We wouldn’t damage anything.”

“I doubt you could damage anything.” He looked at the church and then at me and then back at Alex. “Who are you, Mister?”

“My name’s Alex Benedict. This is Chase Kolpath. Is there anyone here—?”

“I’m the curator. My name’s Edmunds.”

“Oh. Good. We’re doing research work. If you could provide access to the building, I’d be happy to pay you whatever it might entail.”

“Give me a few minutes,” he said. “I’ll be back.”

He returned with a lamp. “There’s not really much to see, Mr. Benedict.” He unlocked the gate, and we walked up to the church door, which he also opened. He held the lamp inside. We were looking at gray stone walls and a pulpit. The pews had been removed. “Careful where you walk,” he said. “The floor’s uneven.”

An electronic wall plate began to glow. And a voice spoke: “Welcome to the Golden Age Sanctuary, where the artifacts from the scientific era were protected during the dark times. These priceless treasures are believed to—”

Edmunds waved a hand, and it stopped. “We’d planned for a while to turn this into a kind of museum. But the board of commissioners decided it would just be a waste of money. That ”—he pointed at the plate—“is as far as we got.”

“Mr. Edmunds,” said Alex, “what do you think actually happened to the artifacts? Were they really here at all?”

“Oh, I don’t think there’s any doubt about that. But it’s thousands of years ago, Mr. Benedict.” He raised both hands. “Who knows?”

“Are there any legends about what happened to them? Any theories?”

“Sure. They took them to Winnipeg. There’s another notion that they got taken to the Moon.” I knew Alex didn’t expect Edmunds to be able to give us anything helpful. But at a moment like this, his natural inclination was to keep people talking. You just never knew what you might pick up. “I’ve heard every kind of crazy story you could imagine,” the curator continued. “They’re lost, and nobody has any idea what happened to them.”

“Somebody thought they might have been taken to the Moon?”

“Yeah. That’s been a pretty popular notion here. That the government’s got them hidden up there.”

“Why would the government hide the artifacts?” I asked.

Edmunds shrugged. “Who knows? Some people will tell you that’s just the way governments are.”

“What do you think?”

“About what?”

“About whether they were actually able to get the artifacts safely away.”

He laughed. “I doubt it.”

“Why’s that?”

“It would have been a hellish situation. Those people would have been too busy saving their lives to worry about a lot of museum pieces. It’s a nice legend. But I can’t imagine that it really happened. And I’m sorry. I know that’s not what you want to hear. I think the truth is that people at that time were going crazy everywhere. They didn’t have anything, and they probably stole everything they could carry off and burned the rest. Now, do you still want to look around?”

We followed him up the center aisle, turned left past the pulpit, and exited through a side door into a passageway. “The storage area, what’s left of it, is below.”