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

“Which means what?”

“They’d lose the lab.”

I was still watching the thing, fascinated. It seemed to be rotating slowly, although the lights moved independently at different speeds, and some even rotated against the direction of turn. The effect was soothing.

“In fact,” she continued, “they were afraid of losing the Dakotas.”

“You mean that it might destroy the Dakotas?”

“Yes.”

“Ridiculous.”

“I would have thought so too. But apparently not. Not if the records are correct.”

I couldn’t figure it out. “Why would they make something like that?” I asked.

“They didn’t set out to make it. They thought it was possible . A by-product. But the chances seemed remote, and I guess the research was important, so they went ahead.”

I still couldn’t see the problem. After all, it was obvious that nothing untoward had occurred.

“They took steps to protect themselves in case there was an incident. They developed a defense. Something to contain it.”

“How?”

“You’re looking at it. It’s a magnetic field that plays off the new element. They called it Heisium.”

“After its discoverer?”

“Yes.”

“So it’s contained. What’s the problem?”

She stood with her back to it, looking away. “What do you suppose would happen if the power failed here?”

“The lights would go out.” And I understood. The lights would go out. “Isn’t there a backup?”

“It’s on the backup. Has been for almost two hundred years. The Crash took out their electrical source, and it’s been running on the Tower’s solar array ever since.”

“Why do you come down here every day?”

“Check the gauges. Look around. Make sure everything’s okay.”

That shook me. “What do you do if it isn’t?”

“Flip a circuit breaker. Tighten a connection. Rewire whatever.” She inhaled. “Somebody has to do this.”

“Jesus.”

“They kept this place manned for forty years. Then, after the Crash, the son of one of the people responsible for the original decision, Avery Bolton, the guy the Tower’s named for, stayed on. And kept the place going. When he died, his daughter succeeded him. And brought her family. In one way or another, that family has been here ever since. Until Corey. And his brothers. His brothers weren’t worth much, and now I’m all that’s left.” She shook her head. “Seen enough?”

“Ellie, do you really believe all this?”

“I believe there’s a good chance the threat is real.” We were sitting in the lobby. “Why else would I be here?”

“Things get twisted over a long time. Maybe they were wrong.” Outside, the day was bright and cold. “I just can’t believe it.”

“That’s good,” she said. “You should continue to think that. But I’m going to have to continue to assume that Corey knew what he was talking about.”

“My God, Ellie, it’s a trap .”

She looked at me, and her eyes were wet. “Don’t you think I know that?”

I looked up at an oil of a Sioux warrior on horseback, about to plunge a lance into a bison. “There’s a way to settle it,” I said.

She shook her head. “No.”

“Ellie. We can shut it down. Nothing will happen.”

“No. I won’t consider it. And I want you to promise you won’t do anything like that.”

I hesitated.

“I want your word, Jeff. Please. ”

“Okay,” I said.

“Not ever. No matter what.”

“Not ever.” She looked fragile. Frightened. “No matter what.”

She looked out across the snowfields. “It must be time to go.”

“I won’t leave you,” I said.

That evening was a night to kill for. The consummation of love, denied over a lifetime, may be as close as you can come to the point of existence. I took her, and took her again, and went limp in her arms, and woke to more passion. Eventually the curtains got gray, and I made promises that she said she didn’t want to hear, but I made them anyway. We had a magnificent breakfast, and made love again in the room with the fireplaces. Eventually, sometime around lunch, we went down and looked again at Bolton’s devil. She took along a checklist, and explained the gauges and circuit breakers and pointed out where the critical wiring was, and where things might go wrong. Where they’d gone wrong in the past. “Just in case,” she said. “Not that I expect you to get involved in this, but it’s best if someone else knows. Edward hated to do this. He rarely came here.”

She showed me where the alarms were throughout our living quarters, and how, if the power supply got low, the system automatically shunted everything into the storage batteries in the lab. “It’s happened a couple of times when we’ve had consecutive weeks without sunlight.”

“It must get cold,” I said. The temperatures here dropped sometimes to forty below for a month at a time.

“We’ve got fireplaces,” she said. “And we’ll have each other.”

It was all I needed to hear.

I stayed on, of course. And I did it with no regrets. I too came to feel the power of the thing in the lab. I accepted the burden voluntarily. And not without a sense of purpose, which, I knew, would ultimately bind us together more firmly than any mere vow could have.

We worried because the systems that maintained the magnetic bottle were ageing. Eventually, we knew, it would fail. But not, we hoped, in our lifetimes.

We took turns riding the buckboard over to Sandywater for supplies. Our rule was that someone was always available at the Tower. In case.

And one day, about three months after my arrival, she did not come back. When a second day had passed without word, I went after her. I tracked her as far as the town, where I found the buckboard. There was no sign of her. Jess Harper, who works for Overland, thought he’d seen her get into a buckboard with a tall bearded man. “They rode west,” he said. “I thought it was odd.”

That was almost a year ago. I still make the rounds in the Tower, and I still believe she’ll come back. In the meantime, I check the gauges and occasionally throw a circuit breaker. The power in the living quarters shut down once, but I got through it okay. We got through it okay.

What I can’t understand is how I could have been so wrong. I know who the bearded man was, and I try to tell myself that they must have been very desperate to get away. And I try to forgive them. Forgive her .

But it’s not easy. Some nights when the moon is up, and the wind howls around the Tower, I wonder what they are doing and whether she ever thinks about me. And occasionally, I am tempted to break my promise, and turn things off. Find out once and for all.

It can’t be done.” I stared at him and at the gridwork torus that dominated the lab. “Time travel is prohibited.”

He pushed a stack of printouts off the coffee table to make room for his Coors. “Gillie,” he said, “you’ve got all those old Civil War flags and that drum from—ah—?”

“Fredericksburg.”

“Yeah. Fredericksburg. And how many times have you been to the battlefields? Listen, we can go see the real thing. Sumter. Bull Run. The Wilderness. You name it.” He grinned as if it were a piece of cake. “The arrow of time runs both ways. We can reverse it in the macroworld, too, Gillie. Tonight, I’ll prove it to you.”

“How?”

“What would you say to dinner and a show in Lincoln’s D.C.?”

“Come on, Mac. Think about it. If it’s possible, someone will eventually do it. If not you, someone else. If that ever happens, history will be littered with tourists. They’d be everywhere . They’d be on the Santa Maria , they’d be at Appomattox with Polaroids, they’d be waiting outside the tomb, for God’s sake, on Easter morning. So if you’re right, where is everybody?”