Jack McDevitt - POLARIS

“Yeah, they did a lot of good,” said Benny. “I’ll give you that. But it’s not the whole story. They can be fanatics if you get on their wrong side. If they decide you’re dangerous, somebody’s going to pollute the streams, or you’re fooling with something that could blow up, they could get pretty ugly.”

The coffee was good. The flavor was a little off what I was used to, a little minty, maybe. But it was better than the stuff I got at home. Benny shook his head at the sheer perfidy of the Lamplighters and how people like us could not know them for what they really were.

He had to be exaggerating. I thought of the Lamplighters as people who were forever arriving on disaster scenes to pass out hot beverages and provide blankets.

“They sent representatives to the lab to ask Dunninger what they were going to do to prevent the human race from stagnating when people stopped dying.”

“How do you know, Benny?”

“Because they always made sure everything they did got plenty of publicity. And the other side got put in the worst possible light. They thought death was a good idea.

Gets rid of the deadwood. So to speak. They actually said that. And when they didn’t get anywhere with the lab they got on the media. For a while we had demonstrators out there.”

“At Epstein.”

“Yes.” He rubbed the back of his head. “And then there were the Greenies.”

People who worried about the effect of population on the environment.

“Other people said they’d have to do away with the minimum subsistence payouts, because the government wouldn’t be able to afford to pay all the people who’d become eligible.

“It got so bad they had to hire security guards. At the lab.”

“Did you know any of them, Benny? The guards?”

He broke into a wide, leathery grin. “Damn, Alex,” he said, “I was one.”

“Really?”

“Oh, yes. I worked up there about six months.”

“So you knew Tom Dunninger.”

“I knew Mendoza, too. He was here a couple of times.”

“Did they get along?”

“Don’t know.” His face scrunched up while he considered the question. “My job was mostly outside.”

“How did Dunninger react to the opposition?”

“Well, he didn’t like it much. He made some efforts to reassure everyone. Gave interviews. Even attended a town meeting once. But it seemed as if it didn’t matter what he did, what he said, things just got worse.”

“How about Mendoza?”

“I don’t know that he ever got involved with the demonstrators. No reason for him to. I mean, he was just in and out a couple of times.”

“Were there any incidents while you were there? Anybody try to break into the lab?”

He swung his chair around, pulled a hassock forward, and put up his feet. “I don’t think anybody ever actually got into the lab who shouldn’t have been there. Not while I was there, anyhow.” He thought about it. “They got close. Right up to the doors a couple of times. People sticking signs under my nose. Making threats.”

“What kind of threats?”

“Oh, they were saying they’d close the place down. It got so that Dunninger wouldn’t go into town. We did his shopping for him. But conditions never really got completely out of hand. The idiots came and went. Sometimes for whole weeks we wouldn’t see anybody. And then they’d start showing up every day.”

“The police must have been involved.”

“Yes. They made some arrests. For trespassing. Or making threats. I really don’t remember the details.” He squinted. “People can really be sons of bitches when they want to.”

“What’d you think about it?”

“I thought the protestors were damned fools.”

“Why?”

“Because anybody who knew anything understood he wasn’t going to succeed.

We weren’t intended to live forever.” He thought about it. “On the other hand, if somebody actually figured out how to do it, I sure wouldn’t want to see anybody stop him.”

Twenty minutes later Alex and I were drifting over the Big River searching for the Epstein ruins that the marker said were down there. It turned out there weren’t any.

Benny had warned us there’d be nothing left, but we thought he was exaggerating, that there’d be something, a scorched wall, a few posts, a collapsed roof.

The trees came out to the river’s edge. They were relatively new growth, the older trees having been destroyed in the fire. There were still signs of destruction, fallen trunks, blackened stumps, but whether they were from the 1365 fire, or another one, there was really no way to know. Nor, I suppose, did it matter.

“Look for a bend in the river,” Benny had told us. “You can see a small island out there with a lot of rocks piled on it. The lab’s located just west of the bend, on the south bank.”

We found a few pipes sticking out of the ground, some buried paving, and the remnants of a power collector submerged in heavy brush. That was all.

The river was wide at that point. The island with the rocks would have taken a few minutes to swim to. I stood on the bank and wondered how the past sixty years might have been different had the fire of 1365 not happened.

“I think,” Alex said, “it’s time we paid a visit to Morton College.” We were in our hotel suite at West Chibong.

“Everson’s place?”

“Where else?”

“But if you’re right about Everson-”

“-I am-”

“-Wouldn’t that be taking a horrendous chance?”

“Staring back at the Gorgon,” he said. “Chase, we’d be safer there than we are here.”

That hardly put me at ease. “What makes you say so?”

“Everson knows we wouldn’t go out there without informing someone. He wouldn’t want us to turn up dead or missing when we were known to be visiting the college.”

“Okay. That makes sense.”

“When can we be ready?”

“This afternoon,” I said reluctantly. “I have some work to do.”

“Let the work go. See if you can arrange transportation as early as possible. It’s a long run, and I’d like to get there today.”

“If you want.”

“All right.” I waited for him to say something more. But he turned on his heel and started for the door.

“Alex,” I said, “are we actually going to inform someone?”

“Jacob will. If we don’t come back.”

“And what will we be looking for?”

“I want to confirm an idea.”

Morton College is located in the Kalo Valley in the far northwest, almost on the ocean. It’s a cold, bitter climate, forty below on a pleasant day, with winds ranging to seventy kilometers per hour. There aren’t many mountains, but the land is broken up by ridges, gullies, rills, and chasms. There’s a huge waterfall in the area that, were it in a more hospitable place, would have been a major tourist draw.

The nearest town is Tranquil, a village with a population at that time of six hundred. Census figures revealed that people had been leaving Tranquil at a steady rate for about thirty years. The town was originally a social experiment, an attempt at an Emersonian lifestyle. It worked for about three generations. Then people apparently started getting fed up. I asked Alex if he knew why, and he shrugged.

“One generation’s ideals don’t necessarily fit the kids,” he said.

The college was six kilometers northeast of Tranquil. It occupied a substantial tract of land, maybe twelve acres, most of it wilderness. There was a complex of four buildings, all in the ponderous, heavy style of Licentian architecture. Lots of columns, heavy walls, curved rooftops, and a sense that the buildings would last forever. The grounds were buried by unbroken snow, so we knew the facility was tied together by passageways.