Jack McDevitt - Coming Home

In the morning, we wandered down to the hotel restaurant and Alex asked me if I was ready to head out. I had mixed feelings, but a part of me was hoping we’d get an extra day in the area. “Why don’t we relax a bit?” I said. “Take some time for ourselves?”

“Oh.” He grinned. “It went that well, huh?”

“He’s a good guy. Saved our lives.”

“Okay. You can stay in the area if you want. I’m headed for Atlanta.”

“What’s in Atlanta?”

“The Albertson Data Museum.”

“Another museum?”

“They try to recover information that was lost when the first internet collapsed. That’s all. This has nothing to do with Baylee. I want to see if they have anything we can take back with us. For our clients.”

“Okay.” I hesitated. “I’ll go.”

“You don’t have to.”

“I know.”

“Good. I think it’s safer.”

An autotray rolled up to the table, and our breakfasts were placed in front of us. “Anything else you would like?” asked the bot.

Alex waited until I’d indicated I was fine. “No, thanks,” he said. “This is good.” We’d just started eating when Alex frowned and touched his link. He listened for a moment and formed the words Madeleine O’Rourke with his lips. I needed a moment to place the name. She was the reporter from The Plains Drifter . “Yes, Madeleine,” he said, “what can I do for you?” He increased the volume so I could hear.

“Alex, I just heard about the attack. You and Chase are okay, right?”

“Yes, we’re fine. Just got dumped in the water, that’s all.”

“I’m so glad. Who was it anyhow? Any idea?”

“None.”

“Wow. Alex, is this the first time it’s happened?”

“Yes, Madeleine, it is.”

“You know any reason why someone would be trying to kill you?”

“To be honest, I assumed someone was angry with Eisa Friendly Charters. I don’t think it was aimed at us. No reason it would be.”

“Be careful about assumptions.”

“I try to be.”

“Good.”

Pause. Then: “How’d you find us?”

“Oh, come on, Alex. You’re a big name. And now you’ve been involved in this incident. You think you’re not visible?”

I went back to my eggs while Alex touched his link. “Connect me with The Plains Drifter . It’s in Centralia.”

“Why are you calling her back?” I asked.

“Hang on a second, Chase.”

Then a man’s voice: “Good morning. Plains Drifter. This is Cam Everett.”

“Mr. Everett, I was trying to reach Madeleine O’Rourke.”

“Who?”

“Madeleine O’Rourke. She’s one of your reporters?”

“Umm, no. I never heard of her.”

“Oh. Sorry, Mr. Everett. Must have been a communication breakdown on my end. Thanks.” He disconnected and looked at me. “I think we might have just discovered who was in the skimmer.”

Alex thinks the worst disaster in the history of the human race occurred when the internet shut down, apparently without warning, early in the Fourth Millennium. “The breadth of the loss,” he said, as we went in through the museum’s front doors, “is best illustrated by the fact that we don’t even know what disappeared.”

The vast majority of books, histories, classic novels, philosophical texts, were simply gone. Most of the world’s poetry vanished. Glimpses of Shelley and Housman and Schneider survived only in ancient love letters or diaries. Their work doesn’t exist anymore. Just like almost every novel written before the thirty-eighth century. We hear references to the humor of James Thurber, but we have nothing to demonstrate it. Unfortunately, there was no equivalent this time of the monasteries that salvaged so much during the first dark age. Within a few generations of the electronic collapse, a few people knew Pericles had been important, but hardly anyone knew why. And Mark Twain was only a name.

There’d been internets on the colonial worlds, but unfortunately they were all in their early years and the titles they carried tended to be largely limited to local novels.

The Albertson Museum, apparently, had locked down its reputation when it recovered a copy of The Merry Wives of Windsor . That had given us a total of six Shakespearean plays. A bound copy of the six, titled The Complete Plays , was for sale in the gift shop. I couldn’t resist.

That got Alex’s approval. “It’s interesting,” he said, “we still use the term bookshelves , but we don’t put many books on them.”

Books aren’t generally available. You have to go to a specialty shop or a museum to find bound books. We’d kept the Churchill volume that we had come across several years ago on Salud Afar. It was Their Finest Hour , the second volume of his history of the Second World War. The rest, of course, is lost. At first, Alex had talked about selling it, but it wasn’t hard to persuade him to find a spot for it in my office, where it remains.

The museum had also posted a list of recently uncovered historical information. Most of it came from internets around the Confederacy. They aren’t connected, of course, so information thought lost in some places occasionally turns up in others. Anyhow, that was the day I discovered why the term waterloo meant bad news. And how it happened that rubicon had something to do with a point of no return. And I’d always known what people meant when they called someone a Benedict Arnold. That day I learned why.

We wandered through the displays, looking at household items dating back thousands of years, athletic equipment for games I’d never heard of, and kitchen gear from the days when people did their own cooking.

They had a theater where you could watch one of the movies from Hollywood’s early years. Hollywood was where they manufactured most of the films when the technology was just getting started. Only seven have survived from that era. All are shown in the theater, and are also available in the gift shop. In case anyone’s curious, they are High Noon , South Pacific , Beaches , Close Encounters of the Third Kind , Casablanca , Gentlemen Prefer Blondes , and Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein .

Alex spent several minutes gazing at the display. “You going to get any of them?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I’m not a fan of ancient movies. But Casablanca looks interesting.”

“Why don’t we get the entire package?”

I was surprised to discover that two songs I’d thought were more or less current, that I’d grown up with, had come from the films. “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Outta My Hair” was from South Pacific . And “Wind Beneath My Wings” came from Beaches . So we got the package.

They had some hardcover books for collectors. A few histories. Several copies of the Bible. Twenty or so novels I’d never heard of. Several commentaries on religion. A few histories, including a book titled It Never Happened , by Russell Brenkov. Brenkov was a Dark Age historian. His name had been mentioned during my college years, but I’d never read him.

There are also fictional characters who were once famous but who have been forgotten. Tarzan swung through jungles in a series of books that, in their time, are supposed to have outsold everything except the Bible. The search to identify him—it’s assumed he is a male—is still on.