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

“It was a night like this,” Uncle Harold said. “Chilled. Rain just beginning to fall.”

He imagined it coming in, full of light, the three astronauts inside, feeling for the ground like they weren’t sure it was there.

“Why’d they come here to land, Uncle Harold?” Tommy had heard bits and pieces of the story before, how it had come to Warner-Robbins, and how people had ridden out from the town and the astronauts had gotten out and just walked away and nobody ever saw them again. But it had never meant much to him until he actually came to live in Warner-Robbins a few days before. After his mother died. And came out here to see the place where the lander came down.

“Nobody really knows, Tommy,” said Uncle Harold. “I mean, they just rolled to a stop. Well, they didn’t exactly roll . They sort of bounced up and down a lot and busted a wing and they finally swung around and tipped over.”

“Did it catch fire?”

“No. It just laid out there in the dark like a big dead bird.”

“And the astronauts—?”

“Well, like I said, they got out, the three of them—.”

“What happened to the fourth? Mrs. Taylor said there were four on the mission.”

“That’s what the books say, but only three got out. And they walked off west. Toward Macon.”

“Macon’s a long way. Why’d you let them do it?”

“ I didn’t let them do it, Tommy. They pretty much done it on their own. Horace Kittern and Mack Willoughby, they rode after them. Asked whether they was hurt. Whether they could do anything. But the astronauts, they never slowed down, just waved and said everything was fine. Said they’d be back later for the lander. I thought at the time maybe they were afraid of us. Afraid we were infected.”

“And they really never came back?”

“Nope. Never seen ’em again.”

“How about over in Macon?”

“Wasn’t nobody in Macon by then. Macon went early.”

“The whole town?”

“Far as we know.”

Tommy imagined them walking into the night. Into the rain.

Uncle Harold was riding Montie. The horse was cold. It breathed out a cloud of frost and he patted the animal’s flank. “Tommy, I wasn’t as old as you at the time. Wasn’t nothin’ I could do. Or anybody else.”

Tommy shifted his weight. Poke stirred under him, and a cold wind blew down out of the trees. It began to rain. “What happened to the lander?” he asked.

Harold turned Montie around. Started for home. “What happened to the lander?” he said, as if the question puzzled him. “Let’s go back to the house and I’ll show you.”

He was glad to get into the barn and out of the wind. They unsaddled the horses, gave them water, and closed them up in their stalls. Then Uncle Harold picked up the lantern and led him to the back door where they kept the equipment. “There.” He pointed to a plow.

“And there. ” A spade.

“And here.” A yoke for the team.

“And over here.” Braces for the wagon. “We used some of the Teflon to wire the main house. For insulation.”

Tommy didn’t understand at first. And Uncle Harold kept right on going. “You can still see the tiles. They’re from the outside of the lander. We used them to line the smelter down at Jimmy’s. And the town freezer that used to be over at Casey’s place but that we moved to Hazlett’s after Casey died. They were put on the outside of refrigerators from one end of town to the other. Saved energy at a time when we hardly had any.

“They salvaged the computers and kept them going for a while, as long as somebody thought they’d be useful. Turned out they didn’t really need computers anymore.

“ We took the radios. The kids. I got one, but it wasn’t no use because there wasn’t anything on it except an Atlanta station where they just kept playing the same music and asking whether there was anybody out there until we got into January and I guess it got too cold. They stopped broadcasting and we never heard from them again.

“One of the fuel pumps runs the water system at your Uncle Tim’s. They took something off the wings that helped keep the town generators going for a while. And the chairs. They’re scattered around. Pete Baydecker’s got one. It’s the most comfortable chair I’ve ever sat in—.” He seemed to run down, like a clock that needed to be wound.

“You just took it apart ?” Tommy asked. “And used it to make stuff?” He remembered the legend, recalled vividly in that moment Mrs. Taylor’s description of what it must have been like as the astronauts, three Americans and a Russian, had neared Mars, and they heard the news, that a virus had broken loose at home, was killing everyone.

“And eventually their radios must have gone quiet.” She had said the words and Tommy had imagined himself with them out in the cold dark night between the worlds, a million miles from the ground.

“You have to understand what it was like then,” Uncle Harold was saying. He opened the door that would take them across to the house. “We were caught with no power, except what we could produce ourselves. One night the lights and the TV’s just went out. They came back on long enough for us to go to bed. But it got cold during the night and we all had to go down and sleep by the fire.

“What ran the lights also ran the tractors and the milking machines and the combines. And suddenly none of it was there anymore. They had all that equipment but they didn’t have gas to make it run.”

“You could have gotten other people to help you.”

Uncle Harold shook his head. “The plague was everywhere. There was nowhere to go. Nobody to help. People were scared to leave town. You never seen anything like the way people behaved when a stranger came up the road. They were bad times. We were lucky to survive.”

He turned the lantern out, signaling that it was time to go into the house. Candles burned brightly in the windows. But Tommy didn’t move. “You took everything ? And melted it down?”

“ I didn’t. The town did. Everything we had went, Tommy. The pickups and the cars that nobody had any use for anymore, and the tractors, and the lander. We needed raw materials to keep alive. I can tell you, Tommy, it was a near thing. We had our hands full just getting through the winter. People died. Half the town died. Not from the plague. Thank God it never came here. But people died from exposure and sheer exhaustion. We’d forgotten how to live without supermarkets and electricity. But we survived.

“For six years we even managed to light the town. I have to tell you, the people here saw the lander as a God-given miracle.”

Tommy felt his heart beat. He looked down at his footprints in the snow, watched the flakes filling them in almost as quickly as he made them. “Frank doesn’t know that,” he said. His voice had a catch in it. “It wasn’t right.”

“It’s what we had to do.”

“And Alice doesn’t know it either.”

Frank and Alice had befriended him after he arrived last week. After Mom died, Tommy had locked onto the lander as if it were part of the world he’d left behind. As if it were connected with his mother and the life over in Milledgeville, which hadn’t been as lucky as Warner-Robbins. And Uncle Harold had seen an opportunity to distract him, had talked to him about the Mars mission, had shown him pictures of the Columbia , photographs of it under construction and later docked to the space station, artists’ drawings of it in Martian skies. He’d asked whether the astronauts had landed on Mars.

Nobody knew.

He was aware of that, of course, but he asked the question anyway. It was required, somehow. Part of the ceremony. “Did they ever get to the ground?” It seemed not right that they had gone all the way out there and not gotten to the surface. So he and Alice and Frank had invented their game, had taken the Columbia to Mars, listened to the terrible news, orbited the planet, and landed .