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

She looked desperately fragile. “I don’t think so, Dave,” she said. “I need some time.”

A long silence fell between us. “Please,” I said. “It’s important.”

More snow was coming. I watched it through the windshield, thick gray clouds drifting toward us. Approaching cars had their headlights on.

Helen followed me in her small blue Ford. I watched her in the mirror while I considered all possible scenarios on how to handle this. Tell her first, I finally decided. Leave out the time travel stuff. Use the story I’d told Jerry as an example of how misunderstandings can occur. He’s not dead, Helen. She won’t believe it, of course. But that’s when I get him and bring him into the room. Best not to warn him . God knows how he would react. But get them together, present Shel with a fait accompli , and you will have done your self-sacrificial duty, Dave. You dumb bastard.

I pulled through blowing snow into my driveway, opened the garage, and went in. Helen rolled in beside me, and the doors closed. “Glad to be out of that,” she said, with a brave smile that implied she had decided we needed something new to talk about.

The garage opened directly into the kitchen. I stopped before going through the door and listened. There were no sounds on the other side. “Helen,” I said, “I’ve got something to tell you.”

She pulled her coat around her. Her breath formed a mist. “We aren’t going to go into it out here, I hope, are we?”

“No,” I said, as if the notion were absurd, and opened the door. The kitchen was empty. I heard no sounds anywhere in the house.

“It’s about Shel,” I said.

She stepped past me and switched on the kitchen lights. “I know,” she said. “What else could it be?”

A white envelope lay on the table, with my name on it, printed in his precise hand. I snatched it up, and she looked at me curiously. “What is it?” she asked.

“Just a list of things to do.” I pushed it into my pocket. “How about some coffee?”

“Sure. Sounds good.”

“It’ll have to be instant,” I said, putting a pot of water on the stove.

“Do you always do that?” she asked.

“Do what?”

“Write yourself notes?”

“It’s my to-do list. It’s the first thing I do every morning.”

She got two cups down and I excused myself, slipped out, and opened the envelope.

Dear Dave,

I don’t know how to write this. But I have to think about what’s happened, and figure out what I need to do. I don’t want to jump the gun if it’s not necessary. You understand.

I know this hasn’t been easy for you. But I’m glad you were there. Thanks.

Shel

P.S. I’ve left most of my estate to the Leukemia Foundation. That will generate a half-dozen lawsuits from my relatives. But if any of those vultures show signs of winning, I’ll come back personally and deal with them.

I read it a half-dozen times. Then I crumpled it, tossed it, and went back to the kitchen.

She was looking out the window at the falling snow. Usually, my grounds were alive with bluejays and squirrels. But the critters were all tucked away now. “It’s lovely,” she said unexpectedly. And then: “So what’s the surprise?”

Startled, I tried laughing to gain time. “Son of a gun,” I said. “I went out to get it and came back without it.” We strolled into the living room, where she sat down on the sofa. I hurried upstairs in search of an idea.

I’ve mentioned that the wardrobe was also a small museum. There were items of inestimable value, but only if you knew their origin. We had scrolls from the library at Alexandria, a sextant designed and built by Leonardo, a silver bracelet that had once belonged to Calpurnia, a signed folio of Hamlet , a pocket watch that Leo Tolstoy had carried while writing War and Peace . There were photos of Martin Luther and Albert Schweitzer and Attila the Hun and Charles XII of Sweden. All more or less worthless.

I couldn’t bear to give away Calpurnia’s bracelet to someone who would not understand its true value. I settled instead for a gold medallion I’d bought from a merchant in Thebes during the fifth century, B.C. It carried a handsomely-wrought likeness of a serpent. The Apollonian priest who joined me later insisted I had acquired a steal. At one time, he said, it had belonged to Aesculapius, the divine doctor, who had been so good he cured the dead. He backed up his view by trying to buy it from me, offering six times what I’d paid for it.

I carried it downstairs and gave it to Helen, telling her that Shel had wanted me to be sure she got it in the event anything happened to him. She glowed, and turned it over and over, unable to get enough of it. “It’s exquisite,” she said. And the tears came again.

If that thing had possessed any curative powers, I could have used them at that moment.

Snow filled the world. The stand of oaks bordering the approach to the house faded out. As did the stone wall along Carmichael Drive, and the hedges on the west side of the property. Gradually a heavy white curtain was drawn across the middle of the lawn. “I think we’re going to get a foot before this is over,” I told Helen.

She stood by the curtains, enjoying a glass of chablis. I’d started the fire, and it cracked and pocked comfortably. We added Mozart, and I hoped the storm would continue.

“I think so too,” she said. A pair of headlights crept past, out beyond the stone wall. “I feel sorry for anybody out in this.”

I stood beside her, and we talked inconsequentials. She had recovered herself, and I began to realize that it was her proximity to me, with all the baggage I brought to any meeting, that had triggered the emotional display earlier. I was not happy that Shel was still in the field. But during that afternoon, I came to understood that even if Shel were safely in his grave, I might still be the embodiment of too many memories. The decent thing to do would be to fade out of her life, just as Carmichael Drive and the outer grounds were fading now. But I knew I could not bring myself to do that.

She talked about looking for a break in the weather so she could go home. But luck held and the break did not come. The snow piled up, and we stayed near the fire. I was alone at last with Helen Suchenko, and it was perhaps the most painful few hours of my life. Yet I would not have missed them, and I have replayed them countless times since, savoring every movement. Every word. I feel sorry for anybody out in this. I was out in it, and I believed I would never find shelter.

We watched the reports on the Weather Channel. It was a heavy system, moving down from Canada, low pressure and high pressure fronts colliding, eight inches predicted, which, on top of yesterday’s storm, was expected to shut down the entire east coast from Boston to Baltimore.

She talked a lot about Shel that day. Periodically, she’d shake her head as if she’d remembered something, and then dismiss it. And she’d veer off onto some other subject, a movie she’d seen, the latest political scandal, a medical advance that held hope for a breakthrough in this or that. There were a couple of patients she was worried about, and a few hypochondriacs whose lives were centered on their imagined illnesses. I told her how much I missed teaching, which wasn’t entirely true, but it’s the sort of thing people expect you to say. What I really missed was a sense of purpose, a reason to exist. I had that upstairs, in notes detailing conversations with Rachmaninoff and Robert E. Lee and Oliver Cromwell and Aristotle and H. G. Wells. Those conversations would make the damnedest book the world had ever seen, reports by the principal actors on their ingenuity, their dreams, their follies. But it would never get written.