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

It was hard to breathe. Her lungs hurt, and tears froze on her cheeks.

She pushed her hands into her sweater pockets and started out again. Hell with it. Didn’t need the light anyway.

Still no sign of anything. Not of a cabin. Not of the marker.

The terrifying truth was she could walk right past the marker and never see it.

She was counting her steps now. Roughly thirteen hundred to a kilometer. Right? She’d already come about five hundred. Or maybe one hundred. Somewhere, below her, she heard the sound of a plane.

She tried to pick up her pace. Keep moving. Keep watching. And think about something else. Think about Daddy’s rising falsetto. If she was lucky the marker and the cabin would be right next to each other. Why, Daddy, they’d be touching!

After a while, she became convinced she must have missed it. She debated starting back toward the Jeep, and looked helplessly in both directions. Couldn’t have been this far. She’d only passed it about three minutes before she’d stopped and gone into the ditch. She’d been traveling about fifteen, twenty at most. How far was that?

She couldn’t figure it out. She’d begun to feel as if she’d withdrawn into a cave, was looking out through her eyes from a safe place somewhere back of her nose.

That was funny, Lang. Laugh.

Ha.

Still trudging forward, she flipped open the cell phone. Time to confess. Tell Kwame she was in trouble.

Off to her left, a soft orange glow appeared in the blowing snow.

Nothing about this class of brown dwarfs made sense. Their composition was just under fifty percent deuterium. Fifty thousand times what it should be. Crazy enough. The remaining half was mostly hydrogen, the ordinary one-nucleon variety. No problem with that, except that it left little room for helium, which, in most of the chimeras, totaled less than one percent. It was their larger than normal size that tightly constrained the helium abundance. Even Tim, the brightest young theorist she knew, had to concede the point. Every other cosmic object is born with the allotment imprinted by the Big Bang: a full twenty-seven percent. So where was the rest of the helium?

There was no way to hide helium in a still-warm brown dwarf, and all of the chimeras were warm Galactic infants. Kristi’s deuterium reservoirs mocked her, because they simply could not exist.

The orange glow hung momentarily in the darkness. Then it went off.

Somewhere, far away, she heard a snarl. Leopards don’t climb this high, do they?

She started walking toward the spot where she’d seen the light. It came on again. And went off.

It had to be the cabin.

She moved closer. Saw the 5000-meter marker to her right. A metal sign, white with black numbers.

The light blinked on again. More distinct this time. It was a police car beacon. Set on a rooftop.

Thank God.

Wooden steps led up onto a porch. She saw three dark windows and a door. There were wicker chairs on the porch, and a table. She climbed the steps, felt the wind cut off as she came into the shelter of the cabin, and tried the doorknob.

It was locked.

A number pad was bolted to the frame. The combination. What was the combination?

Kwame had said, Remember ‘e’ . Twenty-seven eighteen.

The beacon kept flashing. Every few seconds. It reflected off the snow cover, giving her just enough light to work with.

She got it wrong the first time, and for a heart-stopping moment she feared the lock was frozen. Or she’d been mistaken. But the second try was golden and the door clicked. She pulled it open, kicked the snow out of the way, and half-fell through onto a stone floor.

The interior was frigid.

She shut the door and looked around. There were more wicker chairs and another table. A long row of solar batteries powered the beacon. A cot was set against one wall. And a pot-bellied stove stood in the middle of the room. She looked around for a thermostat. Saw nothing.

Someone had left a box of matches, and a yellowed copy of USA Today .

Kristi stared at the stove. My kingdom for a few logs. She could go outside and root through the storm. Maybe get lucky. But the furniture was more convenient. She picked up one of the chairs and brought it down hard against the floor.

It held together.

She tried again.

It was remarkably resilient. She stumbled around the cabin, looking for an axe, gave up, and went back to beating the chair. Desperation lent strength and, finally, it came apart. Enough, at least, that she could jam it into the stove.

Ten minutes later she sat in front of a fire that, if it was not quite blazing, nevertheless served to take the freeze off the room. She called Kwame. “I’m in.”

“ Good, ” he said. “ I was getting worried. Don’t leave the cabin until the storm stops. ”

“Have no fear. One problem—.”

“ Yes? ”

“I left my transportation in a ditch.”

“ You were not hurt, I hope? ”

“No, I’m fine.”

“ Okay. I’ll send a truck down as soon as the road’s clear. ”

“Kwame?”

“ Yes? ”

“Send sandwiches, too.”

Her toes began to recover some feeling. She found a blanket in a closet. It smelled of cigarettes but she didn’t care. She warmed it on the stove, wrapped herself in it and closed her eyes.

She was wide awake. She’d have liked to read. But even if the light had been adequate, she’d left her briefcase in the car. In it were copies of Physics Today and People , which she’d brought for the skyride. And a marked-up version of her dissertation. Once at Clarke, there’d be no leisure. She expected to spend six days doing nothing but observing, reducing data, and sleeping.

The wind shook the cabin. And suddenly her eyes felt heavy. Her head drifted back, and the sounds of the fire, the sense of the storm outside, faded.

She woke a couple of times, and jammed more furniture into the stove. And once, toward the end, she saw gray light in the windows.

The nuclei were piled high in her office. Thousands of deuterons. In the drawers. On the keyboard. Scattered across her desk. Each deuteron’s green neutron and blue proton were morphing back and forth, into each other, a colorful display of the strong nuclear force in action.

Get the vacuum cleaner. Where was the vacuum cleaner?

She was still looking when a hand touched her shoulder. “Hey, Kristi. How you doing?”

Kwame.

The fire had gone out but the stove still held some heat. “I’m okay,” she said.

“Good. The road’s clear. If you’re ready we can head out.”

Kwame was a middle-aged African, not quite as tall as she. His hair had gone white, and his features suggested he’d known some difficult times. He was wrapped in a heavy parka with the hood down. His dark eyes were shining, and he spoke with a British accent.

She pulled the blanket more tightly around her while she pushed her feet back into her shoes. “I’m ready,” she said.

“You don’t want to take a shower first?” He nodded toward the washroom, but kept a straight face.

A snow plow waited outside. The sun was behind some white clouds. It was relatively warm, and the cabin roof was lined with melting icicles.

She climbed into the passenger’s seat and looked back at the police light. “If it hadn’t been for the blinker,” she said, “I’d never have found the place.”

He nodded. “That’s why it’s there, Kristi.”

She thought about suggesting he add an ax to the amenities. And maybe some canned goods. But, on second thought, maybe another time.