Jack McDevitt - Coming Home

“Okay. Misunderstanding somewhere, I guess. Did you by any chance know him, Shirley?”

“I met him. He spent some time here, but that was years ago. But he wasn’t in the classroom. As best I can recall, he was doing research.”

“Do you have any idea what he was looking for? I’m doing some research on him . Trying to fill in some blank spaces.”

“No, Alex. I wish I could help. You might check with the library. That was where he spent most of his time.”

Winnipeg was all green landscapes, broad parks, beautiful homes. Thick forest on the north and west shielded the city from the cold winds of long winters. The Miranda Cone, named for the woman who had brought the North American Federation back during the Time of Troubles, rose 187 meters over Grantland Park on the southern side. Monuments, some dating back thousands of years, dominated fountains, parks, and government buildings across the city. The university sprawled over a wide area on the west side. Its architecture had been created in the mode of the last century, using cylinders, cubes, triangular pyramids, and polygons.

The campus was crowded with students when we arrived. Two mag streetcars were disgorging passengers as we pulled into the parking lot at Union Hall, which housed the library. Something, presumably a subway, rumbled past underfoot. We got out of the car, went inside, and made for the central desk. A librarian, studying a display, looked up as we approached. “Can I help you?”

“Hello,” Alex said. “My name’s Benedict. We’re working on a book about Garnett Baylee. Do you know who he is?”

She was middle-aged, thin, and well pressed. Her hair, tied in a knot, was beginning to gray. “Yes, I’ve heard his name,” she said. “What precisely do you need?”

“He came here regularly at one time. About eighteen or nineteen years ago. Do you by any chance remember his being here?”

She smiled. “Not really. That’s a long time ago.”

“Of course,” said Alex. “Is there a way to find out what he was working on here?”

“Wait a minute.” She seemed to be having a conversation with herself. “Sure. I’m not sure I can tell you anything, but I can show you the library record. It would have what he was looking at.”

“Beautiful,” Alex said. “Would we be able to get access to the same material?”

“Just a moment.” She got up and disappeared through a doorway.

The record consisted of a list of titles of histories, essays, and papers, authors’ names, and dates. The dates would have been those on which Baylee examined the document. There were also two collections of poetry. Alex looked pleased as we walked away from the desk. “Marco Collins,” he said. “No surprise there, I guess. Shawn Silvana. Frederick Quintavic.” There were maybe fifty more authors.

“You know all these people?” I asked.

“I know their reputations. Some of them. I’d guess they’re all historians or archeologists. Some of them have been dead for centuries. Let’s get started and see if any lights go on. This shouldn’t take long.”

I laughed. “Alex, you may not have noticed, but that’s a lot of material.”

“With luck, we’ll be finished in time for lunch. We’ll start at the end of the list. If he found anything here, that’s most likely where it’ll be, just before he cleared out.”

“You’re making an assumption.”

“Well, it’s hard to imagine it happened any other way.”

“Okay,” I said. “I hate to be the dummy, but what precisely are we looking for?”

“Anything that touches on moving the artifacts, either from the Huntsville Space Museum, or from Centralia. Preferably the latter.”

Baylee had spent his last four days at Bantwell going through material left by the historian Marco Collins. “He’s the one we want to talk to,” I said.

Alex nodded. “That would be ideal. Unfortunately, he died about twenty years ago.”

We looked through the Collins inventory. He had wide-ranging interests, but he seemed to have specialized on the New Dawn, the recovery from the Dark Age. “What we need to do,” said Alex, “is try to narrow down any of his work that touched on the artifacts.” He gave me a series of search terms, Apollo artifacts, Cutler, Grand Forks, Zorbas. “Dmitri Zorbas is probably the most critical one. He’s the person associated with the last days of the Prairie House. He was the crusader, the guy who tried to salvage artifacts when things turned ugly in Grand Forks.”

“I’ve heard the name before,” I said.

“He’s pretty well-known for his efforts to recover books that had gotten lost.” We sat down at a table, in front of a pair of displays. Alex brought up a list of the Collins material. It included a diary covering twenty-seven years, final versions and early drafts of seven histories, several hundred essays, and more than twenty thousand pieces of correspondence.

“Collins is easily our most likely candidate. So we should be careful going through this.”

To make things more daunting, the books were all doorstops. I looked at the titles: The Grand Collapse: The Last Days of the Golden Age ; Beaumont (Margot Beaumont, of course, was the British president who played a key role in initiating the New Dawn); Incoming Tides: How Climate Change Brought Everything Down ; A Brief History of Civilization ; Looking Back at the Future (a title suggesting Collins was not an optimist about our own chances); Beyond the Moon: The Great Expansion ; and, finally, How to Create a Dark Age .

“Where do you want me to start?” I said.

“Go with that one.” He indicated The Grand Collapse . “That’s the one Baylee was spending most of his time with near the end. That and the correspondence. I’ll check that.”

While there were only seven books, there were twenty-two drafts. “If you write a book,” said Alex, “I doubt you can do it in a single draft. The writers I’ve known won’t even let anyone see their first draft. We probably don’t have anything earlier than a third draft.”

“This one’s marked first draft.”

“Don’t believe it.”

“Whatever,” I said. “Fortunately, since the books are probably all available, we shouldn’t have to go through the drafts at all.”

“That sounds reasonable. But we’re trying to find something that’s been overlooked. There’s a good chance that would have happened because it didn’t make the final cut.” His expression suggested he sympathized. “You obviously don’t know much about how writers work.”

That hit home.

“What?” he said. “Did I say something wrong?”

“Alex, I have a confession to make.”

Those intense eyes locked on me. “About what?”

“I’ve been recording some of the stuff we’ve been doing. Writing memoirs.”

“Oh. I thought for a minute you were going to say you believed this is a fool’s errand. No, that’s okay. If you want to do that, it’s not a problem. Maybe eventually you’ll be able to contribute them to somebody’s archives.”

“Well, actually it’s probably past that point.”

He swung his chair around to face me. “What do you mean?”

“The first one will be released in the spring.”

“The first one? You mean you sold one of the memoirs?”

“Actually I sold the first three.”

His jaw dropped. “The first three ?”

“The Polaris incident. And two others.”

“Chase, you can’t be serious.”

“You’re a big name, Alex. The publishers think they’ll sell pretty well.”