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

The cell phone chimed. Kwame. “ How you doing, Kristi? ”

“I’m doing just dandy.”

“ You find the cabin yet? ”

“Negative. Doesn’t matter. I want to get up there before my ride leaves.”

“ Kristi, they’ve canceled it. I told you that. ”

“No, you didn’t.”

“ Why did you think I wanted you to find the cabin? They’re going to try again in the late morning. ”

“Okay.”

“ Go to the cabin. ”

“I’m past it.”

He sighed. “ Can you get back to it? ”

She looked behind her, down the road. It was dark and cold and she could barely see the edge of the highway. “I guess.”

“ Do that, then. Don’t try to come up tonight. It’s too icy. Already had one truck go off the road. Driver was damn near killed. ”

“Okay.”

“ You sure you can find the cabin? ”

“Sure. Relax. Everything’s fine, Kwame.”

It was about a kilometer back, maybe two. She put the phone down on the seat and peered out onto the highway. Nothing coming in either direction.

She cut the wheel and started to turn. She couldn’t judge how wide the road was, so she was careful not to go too far forward. She reversed and started back. Felt the rear wheels lose traction. Tried to go forward again. But the Jeep continued sliding back. And down .

My God, she was going into a ditch.

She fought the wheel, damning the Jeep and the highway and the storm. But it did no good and the vehicle slid sideways off the shoulder and crunched over a large rock into a snowbank. She shifted gears and gunned the engine. The wheels spun, the Jeep struggled forward a few centimeters, dug a deeper hole, and slid back in.

Damn.

She called Kwame.

“ You want me to come get you? ”

She looked down at the tee-shirt and shorts. The heater was on full blast. “No,” she said. “Don’t do that. I’ll make for the cabin.”

“ Okay. Be careful. ”

“I will.”

“ Call me if you have a problem. ”

It was frigid out there. Better was to sit tight and wait for somebody to come along.

There are twenty-one billion brown dwarfs in the Milky Way, give or take. Kristi had found and mapped almost every one of them. “The light output of brown dwarfs alternates wildly between adjacent wavelengths, Dad,” she’d once explained to him. “My infrared survey filters are tuned to just the right wavelengths, so all other stars appear dimmer. The hard part is keeping track of them all, and repeating the survey a year later to measure their motions. Then we have to sift out all the weird quasars that sneak through the filtering. That’s why we have MEGASPEC. It catches them all.”

Brown dwarfs were not massive enough to ignite thermonuclear fires in their cores. They would always be failed stars, their dim glow generated by cooling and contracting. “Ninety-nine point six nines” was the delicious phrase she used in colloquia to describe her survey’s thoroughness. No one had ever done that for brown dwarfs. Hell, nobody had ever done that for anything in astronomy. She had nailed the definitive sample for all time. Sure, there’d be a few hundred hiding behind luminous primaries, or lurking directly in front of distant quasars, but she’d gotten the rest. There was no arguing with twenty-one billion spectra and parallaxes and radial velocities and proper motions. She could tell you what the temperature of each one had been a million years ago. And where each one would be ten million years from now. Her census was the last word on how the Galaxy’s failed stars had arranged themselves during the past thirteen billion years. She could chart the few ancient, metal-free brown dwarfs along their orbits looping far out into the Milky Way’s halo. The larger population of metal-rich youngsters, the astronomical infants, clung to the plane of the Milky Way.

The chimeras (she settled for the term “anomalous objects” in her seminars) had been culled from her complete sample of twenty-one billion by statistical sifting and weighing. Every one of them had a spectrum that called attention to itself, that defied everything she thought she knew about this type of object. The surface abundance of deuterium was impossibly high. It was a heavy isotope of hydrogen, with one proton and one neutron, and the Big Bang had made only a pinch of it, before stingily shutting off production just three minutes after creation. There was no known way that any planet or star or galaxy or anything else was going to concentrate the primordial trace of deuterium to more than a pinch. The textbooks maintained that anything over 0.001% was impossible. Yet Kristi had found two thousand brown dwarfs whose composition was nearly fifty percent deuterium.

It was frigid out there. The engine, which had been keeping her reasonably warm, coughed and died.

She tried to restart it.

Tried again.

When she opened the door, she smelled gasoline and stuck her head outside. There was a stain on the snow. She must have punctured the tank. Or the gas line.

The mountain highway remained silent.

Shut the door against the cold.

Okay. Crunch time. Can’t stay here. The temperature in the Jeep was already dropping.

She checked to be sure she had her pen flashlight. Staple for astronomers. She turned it on and pointed it out the window, where the beam got lost in the snow. There was a travel bag in back with light clothing, and she could try putting everything on, but she was still going to get pretty cold out there.

It was only a kilometer back, two at most. She could manage that. She pulled her bag from the back seat and began sifting through her clothes.

She put on two extra blouses. They weren’t going to help very much, but she’d take what she could get. And there was a sweater. She pulled it around her shoulders. Felt like an idiot.

She thought about Tim. He was the romance that had never happened. Partly her own fault. Always too busy. And her father, safe and warm in their North Jersey home.

Love you, Daddy.

The wind tried to take the door out of her hand. She hung on, dragged her bag out of the back seat, and chunked the door shut. The snow was driving at her, and it seemed to be coming from all directions.

The ditch was shallower than it had seemed, but the sides were ice, and she had to climb out on hands and knees. When she finally stood on the road, she fished out her penlight and turned it on. The world around her looked desolate.

The wind cut through her garments and chilled her to the bone. It literally took her breath away. She was wearing canvas shoes and her feet got cold before she’d gone a dozen steps.

The penlight beam outlined ditches and a snow cover fading into the night.

She pressed her arms against her chest and tried to push the cold out of her mind. Move out, Scout, she told herself. There’s shelter back there somewhere.

Her toes went numb. A blast of wind knocked her down. When she got up, she no longer had the penlight. Didn’t know where it had gone. She’d been carrying it in her right hand, but the hand had no feeling.

For the first time in her life, she felt real fear.

This was the darkest place she’d ever seen. There was no glimmer of light anywhere . The edge of the road was no longer visible. The world had vanished, had become a place utterly without borders, without any distinguishing features, other than the snowflakes that continued to rush at her.

She thought about calling Kwame. But she couldn’t do that. What would he think? Poor woman can’t get from the Jeep to the cabin without getting in trouble.