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

Bacon and coffee were already on when I started down. I poked my head into the dining room first, saw no one, and made for the kitchen. Ellie was there, manning an electric stove. But I saw immediately that something was wrong. She looked tired, and the joie-de-vivre of the previous day had been replaced with knife-edged intensity. “Good morning, Jeff,” she said. Her tone was cordial, but not warm.

She wore a white jumper open at the throat, and a knee-length knit skirt. Her hair was brushed back, revealing pale, drawn features. “You okay?” I asked.

“I’m fine.” She delivered a dispirited smile. “How do you like your eggs?”

“Medium well.” I looked at her. “What’s wrong?”

She poked at the bacon. “He’s gone, Jeff.”

“Gone? Ed?”

“Yes.”

“Where?”

“Out. Skedaddled. Left for parts unknown.”

“My God. What happened?”

She turned her attention to the eggs, scooping at them and wiping her eyes with the backs of her hands. I pulled the pan from the burner and set it down where things wouldn’t burn, and then I caught her up: “Talk to me,” I said.

“He left before dawn.”

“Did he think something happened between us?”

“No,” she said. “No. Nothing like that.”

“What makes you think he’s not coming back?”

“I know he’s not coming back.” She shook her head. “Listen, I’ll be okay. Best thing is for you to eat and head out.”

“Tell me why,” I said.

“I’ve already told you. He felt trapped here. I warned him what it would be like, but he wouldn’t listen, or didn’t really understand. When you came, last night, when he saw that we had been friends, maybe more than friends, he saw his chance.”

“To bolt ?”

She nodded.

“Knowing that I wouldn’t leave you here alone?”

“I’m sure that’s what he thought.”

“A creep with a conscience.” I sank into a chair.

“That’s not true,” she said. “He waited. He stayed for years . Most men would have just walked out. Jeff, he never committed to this.”

“Sure he did,” I said. “When he moved in, he made a commitment.” But I could see it hurt her. She wanted to think well of the son of a bitch, so I let it go.

We abandoned the kitchen, left breakfast in ruins, and wandered into the room with the fireplaces.

“Okay,” I said. “What happens now?”

She shrugged. “I’ll manage.”

“You can’t stay here alone.”

“Why not?”

“ Alone? Rattling around in this place?”

“It’s my home.”

“It will be a prison. Close it up and come back with me. To the Forks. It’ll be safe for a while. Give yourself a chance to get away from it.”

“No.” Her voice caught. “I can’t leave here.”

“Sure you can. Just make up your mind and do it.”

She nodded and took a long breath. “Maybe you’re right,” she said. “Maybe it is time to let go.”

“Good.” I saw possibilities for myself. “Listen, we’ll—”

“—Take my chances—.” She was beginning to look wild. “There’s no reason I should have to be buried here—”

“None at all,” I said.

“If it gets loose, it gets loose. I mean, nobody else cares, do they?”

“Right,” I said. “If what gets loose?”

She looked at me a long time. “Maybe you should know what’s in the basement.”

I didn’t like the sound of that.

I tried to get her to explain, but she only shook her head. “I’ll show it to you,” she said.

So I followed her down to the lobby. Outside, the snow cover ran unbroken to the horizon. I looked at the Native American display. “Corey’s idea,” she said. “He thought it provided a counterpoint to the technology.”

We went downstairs, down four more levels in fact, into the bowels of the building. At each floor I paused and looked along the corridors, which were dark, illuminated only by the lights in the stairway area. The passageways might have gone on forever. “How big is this place?” I asked.

“ Big ,” she said. “Most of it’s underground. Not counting the tunnel.” As we got lower, I watched her spirits revive. “I think you’re right, Jeff. It is time to get out. The hell with it.”

“I agree.” I put an arm around her and squeezed, and her body was loose and pliable, the way a woman is when she’s ready.

“Jeff,” she said, “I meant what I said last night.”

During the time we had known one another, I had never told her how I felt. Now, deep below the Tower, I embraced her, and held her face in my hands, and kissed her. Tears rolled again, and when we separated, my cheeks were wet. “Ellie,” I said, “for better or worse, I love you. Always have. There has never been a moment when I would not have traded everything I had for you.”

She shook her head. No. “You’d better see what you’re getting into first before you say any more.”

We turned on lights and proceeded down a long corridor, past more closed rooms. “These were laboratories,” she said, “and storage rooms, and libraries.”

The floor was dusty. Walls were bare and dirty. The doors were marked with the letter designator ‘D’, and numbered in sequence, odd on the left, even on the right. There had been carpeting, I believe, at one time. But there was only rotted wood underfoot now.

“Doesn’t look as if you come down here very much,” I said.

She pointed at the floor, and I saw footprints in the dust. “Every day.”

She threw open a door and stepped back. I walked past her into the dark.

I could not immediately make out the dimensions of the room, or its general configuration. But ahead, a blue glow flickered and wavered and crackled. Lights came on. The room was quite large, maybe a hundred feet long. Tables and chairs were scattered everywhere, and the kind of antique equipment that turns up sometimes in ruins was piled high against both side walls.

The blue glow was on the other side of a thick smoked window. The window was at eye level, about thirty feet long, and a foot high. She watched me. I crossed to the glass and looked in.

A luminous, glowing cylinder floated in the air. It was a foot off the floor, and it extended almost to the ceiling. Thousands of tiny lights danced and swirled within its folds. It reminded me of a Christmas tree the Sioux had raised outside Sunset City a couple of years ago. “What is it?” I asked.

“The devil,” she said softly.

A chill worked its way up my back. “What do you mean?”

“It’s a result of the research they did here. A by-product. Something that wasn’t supposed to happen. Jeff, they knew there was a possibility things might go wrong. But the bastards went ahead anyway—.”

“Wait,” I said. “Slow down. Went ahead with what?”

“With what we were talking about last night. Smashing atoms. Jeff, this was state-of-the-art stuff.” She moved close to me, and I touched her hair. “Do you know what protons are?”

“Yeah. Sort of. They’re made of atoms.”

“Other way around,” she said. “The thing about protons is that they are extremely stable. Protons are the basic building blocks of matter. There is nothing more stable than a proton. Or at least, there used to be nothing—.”

“I’m not following this.”

“The people who worked here knew there was a possibility they might produce an element that would be more stable.” Her voice was rising, becoming breathless. “And they also knew that if it actually happened, if they actually produced such an element, it would de stabilize any proton it came into contact with.”