Jack McDevitt - Ancient Shores

He shrugged and took out his spray can.

He would do the first word in gold. He looked up and measured his target with his eye. The angle wasn’t so good because he was too close. But there was no help for that.

The only sounds were the wind and a far-off plane.

He aimed and pressed the nozzle. Paint sprayed out of the can in a fine mist, and the satisfying sense of changing pressures flowed down his arm.

But unlike water towers and churches, the roundhouse tended to resist interaction with the world. The mist did not cling. Some of it liquefied and dribbled down the face of the wall. Some very little of it lodged in chinks and seams. But the bulk of it skimmed off into the air and formed a golden cloud.

The cloud held its shape only briefly and then began to dissolve and descend.

Harry could not have understood what was happening. He knew only that his face was suddenly wet. And his eyes stung.

He dropped the can, cried out, and fell to his knees. His fists were in his eyes, and he scraped his arm against something in the dark, and he knew where he was, could not forget where he was. Then the ground was gone and he was falling. In his office a hundred yards away, Max heard the scream, poked his head out the door, and assigned it to an animal.

Searchers found Harry by noon. His family reported him missing at eight o’clock, his car was discovered at nine-thirty, and workmen found an enamel spray can and a flashlight on the shelf in front of the roundhouse at a little after ten. The rest was easy.

Max was outraged to think that anyone would want to damage the artifact. He found it hard to sympathize until he stood at the brink in the middle of the afternoon and looked down.

Arky Redfern appeared near the end of the day. He examined the shelf with Max and shook his head. “Hard to believe,” he said.

Max agreed.

“There is the possibility of a lawsuit,” he added.

The remark startled Max. “He came up here to vandalize the place,” he said.

“Doesn’t matter. He was a child, and this is a dangerous area. A good lawyer would argue that we failed to provide security. And he would be right.”

Max’s breath hung in the sunlight. It was a cold, crisp day, the temperature in the teens. “When do we reach a point where people become responsible for their own actions?”

Redfern shrugged. He was wearing a heavy wool jacket with the hood pulled up over his head. “There’s not much we can do now for this kid, but we’ll act to ensure there’s no repetition. That way, at least, we can show good faith if we have to.” He directed Max’s attention toward the parking area. A green van was just emerging from the trees at the access road. “I want you to meet someone,” he said.

The van parked and the driver’s door opened. A Native American wearing a blue down jacket got out, looked toward them, and waved. He was maybe thirty years old, average height, dark eyes, black hair. Something about the way he looked warned Max to be polite. “This is my brother-in-law,” said Redfern. “Max, meet Adam Kicks-a-Hole-in-the-Sky.”

The brother-in-law put out his hand. “Just Sky is good,” he said.

“Adam will direct the security force,” Redfern continued.

“What security force?” asked Max.

“It came into existence this morning,” said the lawyer.

Sky nodded. “My people will be here within the hour.” He surveyed the escarpment. “We’re going to need a command post.”

“How about one of the huts?” suggested Redfern.

“Yes,” he said. “That would do.”

Max started to protest that they didn’t have space to give away, but the lawyer cut him off. “If you want to continue operations here, Max, you’ll have to provide security. I recommend Adam.”

Sky shifted his weight. He looked at Max without expression. “Yeah,” Max said. “Sure. It’s no problem.”

“Good.” Sky took a business card from his wallet and gave it to Max. “My personal number,” he said. “We’ll be set up here and in business by the end of the day.”

Max was beginning to feel surrounded by con artists. What were Sky’s qualifications? The last thing they needed was a bunch of gun-toting locals. Redfern must have read his thoughts. “Adam is a security consultant,” he said. “For airlines, railroads, and trucking firms, primarily.”

Sky looked at Max and then turned to gaze at the roundhouse. “This is a unique assignment,” he said. “But I think I can assure you there’ll be no more incidents.”

Within an hour a pair of trucks and a work crew had arrived to begin putting up a chain-link fence. The fence would be erected about thirty feet outside the cut and would extend completely around the structure. Anyone who wanted to fall off the shelf now would have to climb eight feet to do it. “There’ll be no private vehicles inside the fence,” Sky explained.

That was okay by Max. He was still wondering how the young vandal had managed to spray paint in his own eyes. He was aware that a rumor was circulating that the kid had used his flashlight to look through the wall. And had seen something.

The fence went up in twenty-four hours. Sky’s next act was to set up a string of security lights around the perimeter of the cut. He mounted cameras at five locations.

Uniformed Sioux guards appeared. The first that Max met fit quite closely his notion of how a Native American should look. He was big, dark-eyed, and taciturn. His name was John Little Ghost, and he was all business. Max’s views of Native Americans were proscribed by the Hollywood vision of a people sometimes noble, sometimes violent, and almost always inarticulate. He had been startled by his discovery of a Native-American lawyer and a security consultant. The fact that he was more at ease with John Little Ghost than with either Sky or Redfern left him paradoxically uneasy.

The police investigation of Harry Ernest’s death came and went. Forms got filled out, and Max answered a few questions. (He had been on the escarpment until midnight, he said, and he didn’t think there had been anyone else here when he left. He had completely forgotten the “animal” cry he’d heard.) It was an obvious case of accidental death resulting from intended mischief, the police said. No evidence of negligence. That’s what they would report, and that would be the finding.

Max went to the funeral. There were few attendees, and those seemed to be friends of the boy’s guardians. No young people were present. The guardians themselves were, Max thought, remarkably composed.

The next day Redfern informed him that no legal action appeared likely.

Tourists continued to arrive in substantial numbers. They were allowed onto the escarpment, but they were required to remain outside the fence. Police opened a second access road on the west side of the escarpment and established one-way traffic.

No one had yet found a door.

The security fence ran unbroken across the front of the roundhouse. Now that the area had been rendered safe, workers began to excavate the channel.

With TV cameras present, they brought in a girl in a wheelchair from one of the local high schools to remove the first spadeful of dirt. She was a superlative science student, and she posed for the cameras, smiling prettily, and did her duty. Then the work teams got started.

They knew it would be a drawn-out process because of the confined space. Only two people could dig at a time. Meanwhile, the sky turned gray and the temperature rose, a sign of snow. Around the circumference of the building, an army of people wielding brooms was clearing off the walls and the half-dozen braces that anchored the structure to its rocky base. April and Max watched through a security camera in the control module.