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

“Who’s buried in the grave on Monument Hill?” she asked.

“Shel.”

“How do we know? The body was burned beyond recognition.”

“They checked his dental records. We can’t change that.”

She was sitting on the sofa with her legs drawn up under her. “We also can’t recover the body from the Tyrrhenian Sea. We have to work on Monument Hill. What can we do about the dental records?”

I looked at her. “I don’t think I understand.”

“We have a time machine. Use your imagination.”

Chain-reaction collisions have become an increasingly dangerous occurrence on limited-access highways around the world. Hundreds die every year, several thousand are injured, and property damage usually runs well into the millions. On the day that we buried Shel, there had been a pileup in California. It had happened a little after eight o’clock in the morning under conditions of perfect visibility when a pickup rear-ended a station wagon full of kids headed for breakfast and Universal Studios.

We materialized by the side of the road moments after the chain reaction had ended. The highway and the shoulder were littered with wrecked vehicles. Some people were out of their cars trying to help; others were wandering dazed through the carnage. The morning air was filled with screams and the smell of burning oil.

“I’m not sure I can do this,” Helen said, spotting a woman bleeding in an overturned Buick. She went over, got the door open, and motioned me to assist. The woman was unconscious, and her right arm was bent in an awkward manner.

“Helen,” I said. “We have a bigger rescue to make.”

She shook her head. No. This first.

She stopped the bleeding and I got someone to stay with the victim. We helped a few other people, pulled an elderly couple out of a burning van, got one man with two shattered legs off the road. (I was horrified. Shel and I had always maintained a strict hands-off policy.) “We don’t have time for this,” I pleaded.

“I don’t have time for anything else,” she said.

Sirens were approaching. I let her go, concentrating on finding what we’d come for.

He was alone in a blue Toyota that had rolled over onto its roof. The front of the car was crumpled, a door was off, and the driver showed no sign of life. He was bleeding heavily from a head wound. One tire was spinning slowly. I could find no pulse.

He was about the right size, tangled in a seat belt. When Helen got there, she confirmed that he was dead. I used a jack knife to cut him free. EMT’s had arrived and were spreading out among the wrecked cars. Stretchers were appearing.

Helen could not keep her mind on what we were doing. “Your oath doesn’t count,” I said. “Not here. Let it go.”

She looked at me out of empty eyes.

“Help me get him out,” I said.

We wrapped him in plastic and laid him in the road.

“He does look a little like Shel,” she said in a small voice.

“Enough to get by.”

Footsteps were approaching. Someone demanded to know what we were doing.

“It’s okay,” I said, “we’re doctors.” I pushed the stem and we were out of there.

His name was Victor Randall. His wallet carried pictures of an attractive woman with cropped brown hair seated with him in a front porch swing. And two kids. The kids were smiling up at the camera, one boy, one girl, both around seven or eight. “Maybe,” Helen said, “when this is over, we can send them a note to explain things.”

“We can’t do that,” I said.

“They’ll never know what happened to him.”

“That’s right. And there’s no way around it.”

There was also about two hundred cash. Later, I would mail that back to the family.

We carried him down to the garage and put him in the Porsche. I adjusted the temporal sweep to maximum, so that when we went the car would go with us.

Thursday, November 10. Near midnight.

Mark S. Hightower had been Shel’s dentist for seven years. He operated out of a medical building across the street from Friendship Hospital, where Helen had interned, and where she still served as a consultant.

I’d met Hightower once. He was short, barrel-chested, flat-skulled, a man who looked more like a professional wrestler than a dentist. But he was soft-spoken and, according to Shel, particularly good with kids.

We materialized on a lot down on Penrod Avenue, which was in the commercial district. The area was always deserted at night. Ten minutes later, we approached the hospital and pulled into the parking lot at the Forest Elm Medical Center. Hightower was located in back, well away from the street.

Victor was in the front seat, supported from behind by Helen. He was wrapped in plastic. He’d stopped bleeding, and we had cleaned him up as much as we could. “Are you sure you know how to do this?” I asked.

“Of course not, Dave,” she said. “I’m not a dentist. But the equipment shouldn’t be hard to figure out. How do we get inside?”

I showed her a tire iron. “We’ll have to break in.”

She looked dismayed. “I thought you could manage something a little more sophisticated than that. Why can’t you just use that thing on your wrist and put us right inside the building?”

“Because it’s not very precise. We could be here all night.” I was thinking of Shel’s trick in moving us from the Piraeus to the quarterdeck on Pliny’s galley. If I’d tried that, we’d have gone into the ocean.

We put on gloves, and walked around the building, looking for an open window. There was none, but we found a rear exit that did not seem very sturdy. I wedged the tire iron between the door and the jamb, worked it back and forth, and felt the lock give. The door all but came off the hinges. I held my breath, waiting for the screech of a burglar alarm. It didn’t come, and we were past the first hurdle.

We went back to the Porsche, got Victor out of the back seat and half-carried, half-dragged him around to the open door. Once inside, we set him in a chair. Then we turned on penlights and looked around. A half-dozen rooms were designated for patients, opening off a corridor that looped around to the reception area. I wandered from office to office, not really knowing what I was looking for. But Helen did one quick turn through the passageway and pointed at a machine tucked away in a corner. “This is it,” she said.

The manufacturer’s label said it was an orthopantomograph. “It does panoramic X-rays,” Helen said.

“Panoramic? What’s that?”

“Full mouth. It should be all we’ll need.”

The idea was that the person being X-rayed placed his forehead against a plastic rest, and his chin in a cup-shaped support. The camera was located inside a cone which was mounted on a rotating arm. The arm and cone would traverse the head, and produce a single panoramic image of the teeth. The only problem was that the patient normally stood during the procedure.

“It’ll take six to eight minutes,” said Helen. “During that time we have to keep him absolutely still. Think you can do it?”

“I can do it,” I said.

“Okay.” She checked to make sure there was a film cassette in the machine. “Let’s get him.”

We carried Victor to the orthopantomograph. At Helen’s suggestion, we’d brought along some cloth strips which we now used to secure him to the device. It was an uncomfortable and clumsy business, and he kept sliding away from us. Working in the dark complicated the procedure, but after about twenty minutes we had him in place.

“Okay,” she said. “He should be all right now. Don’t touch him. Right?”

I backed away.