Джек Макдевитт - Cryptic - The Best Short Fiction of Jack McDevitt

Seattle, Tuesday, January 28, 1986

We’ve lost a shuttle. And a crew.

Grim day. I’d been looking forward to this trip for a long time. Rob picked me up at the airport, and we stopped for lunch on the way out to his place. The waitress told us about Challenger .

Rob looked at me very strangely, and I knew what he was thinking. We’d been able to get together four times over the course of a quarter-century. And three of those occasions had been marred by a major American disaster. There had been far greater catastrophes in the world duringthe period, in terms of body count. But we seemed to be tuned to a local wave length.

Neither of us said much. Until we heard the details, we hoped that the crew might have been able to survive, although it was difficult to visualize any kind of shuttle explosion that one could walk away from.

Philadelphia, Wednesday, March 4, 1987

…(Madeline and I) were talking about the various ways in which miniscule events produce results out of all proportion. Like the short cut through a park that generates an accidental meeting that ends in a marriage. One of the Kennedy assassination theories holds that Lee Oswald shot down the President because Marina Oswald indicated a sexual preference for him over her inadequate husband.

Madeline said she’d heard once that a butterfly, moving its wings in Africa under the right conditions, could produce a hurricane in the Caribbean. Interesting conceit.

Philadelphia, Sunday, December 18, 1988

Rob called today. He’ll be in the area Wednesday. Did I think we could manage dinner without provoking an international crisis?

I explained that I won’t be able to pick him up at the airport because I’m booked at the office. He will take a cab.

Philadelphia, Wednesday, December 21, 1988

It’s happened again! A London to New York flight with more than two hundred people disintegrated over Scotland while Rob and I sat in a restaurant out on the Main Line.

I’m spooked.

So is he.

Philadelphia, Thursday, December 22, 1988

People died on the ground as well. The photographs from Lockerbie, the crash site, are just too much. I stayed away from the TV most of the night. I’ve got Dickens beside me, but I can’t keep my mind on it. They are saying now that it looks as if there was a bomb on board. How can people be so evil?

And we were together again.

Kennedy.

Teheran.

Challenger.

Flight 103.

Here’s to us.

Rob left on an afternoon flight. We tried to calculate odds, but neither of us is mathematician enough to be able even to frame the problem. Rob, who is ordinarily a world-class skeptic, wondered whether it was possible that we might sense oncoming disaster? And instinctively huddle against the storm? I told him about Madeline’s butterfly.

Has it happened every time?

We both thought so. But I went back through this diary tonight. On August 7, 1964, we got safely through a meal.

One exception to the pattern.

The bond between my father and Orin Robinson grew closer, possibly as a result of the curious intersections between their quiet reunions and the series of historic disasters. They came to refer to this trend as the Tradition . Their phone conversations became more frequent. They discounted their alarm on the night of the Lockerbie flight. Absurd, they said, to think they could be connected. And anyway there was, after all, the exception to the general pattern. Thank God for 1964. That phrase became their watchword.

It was during this period that my father engaged in his brief flirtation with Catholicism. Rob was horrified but took the position that it was my responsibility to stand by my father during this aberration.

There were still occasional echoes of the Tradition in the diary….

Washington, D.C., Tuesday, February 4, 1992

…Visited the Eternal Flame today. It is a lovely and sober spot. How does it happen that the shots fired in Dallas so long ago still hurt?

If Rob and I had not run into each other in Minneapolis that day, is it at all possible it might not have happened? Does that make any kind of sense at all?

Portland, Oregon, Saturday, December 12, 1992

The (dental) convention’s a bit dry. But I got together with some of the guys from Chicago, and we went over to Margo’s. It’s a topless place, and I guess it’s a sign you’re getting old when you wish they’d move so you could see the basketball game.

I would have enjoyed getting together with Rob. But we let it go this time, more or less by mutual consent.

Philadelphia, Tuesday, June 14, 1994

…Rob confessed tonight that he has been east any number of times over the last few years, but has not mentioned it to me. But it’s dumb to behave as if we have been doing something dangerous.

He’s right, of course.

I’ll be in New York this weekend. I could get down for dinner.

I keep thinking about the butterfly.

“Listen, how about a change of venue?”

Okay. What did you have in mind?

“I don’t know. Something more exotic than Philly.”

Why don’t we meet in Atlantic City?”

“Yeah. Sounds good.”

Dinner by the sea.

Be nice to see him again. And the world looks quiet. Here’s to us.

Philadelphia, Wednesday, June 15, 1994

I’ll be glad when it’s over—

Philadelphia, Friday, June 17, 1994

Rob tomorrow. I cannot imagine what life would have been like without him. Yet I’ve seen so little of him.

As the world knows, the meteor fell at 7:22 p.m. on the 18th of June. Possibly just as they were sitting down to dinner.

I’ve read through these passages until I have them by heart, and I can offer no explanation. The correlation between meetings and catastrophe is necessarily coincidental because it can’t be anything else.

But there’s one more point: I’ve gone back and looked closely at August 7, 1964. The exception to the Tradition.

Robinson and my father were wrong: there was a disaster on that day. But its nature was less immediately cataclysmic than the other events, so it’s easy to see why it might have passed unnoticed.

In the late afternoon of that date, the Congress, with only two negative votes, approved the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution.

We didn’t know it at the time, but the United States had formally entered the Vietnam War.

The banging sounded like distant thunder.

Cardwell was slow to move, had in fact been sitting in the dying firelight, allowing the storm to carry away his gloomy mood. Rick padded barefoot from the kitchen through the hallway and opened the front door. The wind blew louder.

There were whispers in the hall, and an authoritarian voice that he did not recognize. Rick appeared. “Dad,” he said. “You have a visitor.”

A tall, severe figure followed the boy into the room. Cardwell saw at once that he was a clergyman, one of those advanced types that affect plaid jackets. His hair was full and black, and his eyes blazed with dark intensity. He shook rain off his hat and coat, and held them out for Rick. “Dr. Cardwell?” he asked, coming forward.

Cardwell eased himself out of his chair. “You have the advantage of me, sir.”

“I’m Pastor Gant.” His glance swept the room, and registered diffident approval. “From the Good Shepherd Church over in Bridgeton.” He said it as if it explained his visit.