Jack McDevitt - Ancient Shores

Randy Key was rendered even more desperate by the conviction that he was probably the only person on the planet who understood the truth about the ominous structure on Johnson’s Ridge. He had tried to warn his brother. Had tried to talk to his ex so she could at least hide their son. Had even tried to explain it to Father Kaczmarek. No one believed him. He knew it was a wild story, and he could think of no way to convince his family and friends of their danger. To convince anyone. So he had no choice but to take the situation into his own hands.

The thing they called the Roundhouse was in fact a signaling device left to sound the alarm that the human race was ready for harvest. Randy suspected it had been atop the ridge far longer, many times longer, than the ten thousand years the TV stations were talking about. He could not be sure, of course, but it didn’t matter anyhow. The only thing that did matter was that he understood the danger. And knew how to deal with it.

Randy worked for Monogram Construction. He was currently assigned to a road crew that was out restoring Route 23, in the Ogilvie area, north of Minneapolis. It pained him to think what it would all look like, these pleasant little white-fenced homes, and the lighted malls, and the vast road network, after the enemy had come.

It was, of course, too late now to stop the signal from being sent. It was on its way. All that remained to do, all that could be done, was to punctuate that signal in such a way that the creatures at the other end would understand there would be no free lunch on Earth. He would show them we knew about them and that they should be prepared for a long, hard fight if they came.

He would ride to the top of the ridge and gun the engine and crash into the son of a bitch. There were five hundred pounds of C4 in back of his Isuzu Rodeo, connected to a remote-control device that he’d purchased with a model car outfit. If everything went well, he would get out of the Isuzu quickly, warn any bystanders to take cover, and turn the Roundhouse into rubble. He hoped nobody inside would be killed, but he couldn’t help that. In the end, people would understand. It might take a while, but once they realized what he had done, he would be on television. And his ex would be sorry she hadn’t listened to him. But it would be too late then for her because he’d be damned if he was going to take the bitch back. Not even to get his boy.

He cruised along the expressway, staring placidly out at the barren, snow-covered fields. A sense of repose had been creeping over him since he’d left Minnesota. He’d be at Fort Moxie by midafternoon. He had read there was no space in the Walhalla motels, but Fort Moxie was close enough. He hadn’t figured out how he would return to his motel after he’d destroyed his means of transportation. But that was okay. Once they saw the inner workings of the Roundhouse, they would be grateful, and someone would understand and give him a ride.

He’d used the workings of the model car to make the switch that would blow his bomb. He’d armed it but had put a wooden wedge between the electrical contacts to make sure they could not accidentally close.

Randy ran into two pieces of bad luck that afternoon. The first occurred as he passed Drayton on I—29. A red station wagon with Manitoba plates cut in front of him; Randy slammed on his brakes, slid sidewise, and bounced out onto the median. A tractor-trailer roared past, almost taking his front end off. But it missed him, and Randy, who ended up facing south, felt very fortunate. He shouldn’t have. His wedge had shifted, and it shifted again when he had to gun his engine to climb the narrow snow-covered embankment below which the pickup had come to rest. By the time he got back onto the freeway, it no longer served its purpose, and the contacts, although not actually touching, were close enough to permit a spark to cross. The bomb was, in effect, armed.

At the northernmost exit, just before entering Canada, he turned east onto Route 11 and followed it into Fort Moxie. Randy’s second piece of bad luck came when he approached the intersection at 20th Street. He was on the edge of town, and there wasn’t much out there, other than a lumberyard and the forlorn white building that housed the Tastee-Freez and Wesley Fue’s house. It happened that Wesley, who’d been fighting a cold for six weeks, had come home from his job at the bank, planning to make himself a good stiff drink and go to bed. It also happened that Wesley’s garage door opener was tuned to precisely the same frequency as the radio-controlled toy that Randy had converted into a firing switch.

The garage stood with its back to 20th Street. Wesley pulled into his driveway as Randy approached from the west. The driveway was partially blocked by his daughter’s sled. Wesley angled carefully around it, promising himself to speak with her when she got home from school, and reached up to activate his door opener, which was clamped to the top of the dash. He squeezed the remote just as its directional angle swept across Bannister Street. The radio beam caught Randy entering the intersection and closed the circuit on his bomb.

The intersection erupted in a sheet of flame. The explosion blew out the western end of the lumberyard, leveled the Tastee-Freez, knocked out all of Wesley’s windows, and demolished his garage. Wesley suffered two broken arms and a mass of cuts and burns, but he survived.

One of the few pieces of Randy’s vehicle that came through more or less intact was a vanity plate that read UFO .

Traffic was so heavy that Max decided to do something about it. In the morning he contacted Bill Davis at Blue Jay Air Transport outside Grand Forks and scheduled a helicopter pickup service. They established an operating schedule among Fort Moxie, Cavalier, Devil’s Lake, and Johnson’s Ridge.

Matthew R. Taylor had come to the White House by a circuitous route. His father had run a candy store in Baltimore, which had provided a meager existence for Matt and his six siblings. But the old man had provided his kids with one priceless gift: He’d encouraged them to read, and he didn’t bother too much about the content, subscribing to the theory that good books ultimately speak for themselves.

By the time he was nineteen, Taylor had devoured the Greek and Roman classics, Shakespeare, Dickens, Mark Twain, and a wide array of modern historians. He was also a decent outfielder in high school and at Western Maryland University. In 1965 he went to Vietnam. During his second patrol he took a bullet in the hip. Doctors told him he would not walk again, but he had stayed with a six-year-long program of therapy and now needed only a cane to get around the White House. Eventually, of course, the cane would become a symbol of the man and his courage.

He married his nurse and invested his money in a car wash, which failed, and in a fast-food outlet, which also failed.

Taylor was never very good at business, but he was scrupulously honest, and he was always willing to help people in the community who got in trouble. During the mid-seventies, when he was working as a clothing clerk at Sears Roebuck, he allowed himself to be persuaded to run for the county highway commission by people who thought they could control him.

He proved to be a surprisingly shrewd steward of the public money. Before he was done, several county officials and a couple of contractors were in jail, costs were down, and the road system had improved dramatically.

Taylor was elected to the House in 1986 and to the Senate eight years later. He chaired the ethics committee and introduced a series of reforms that brought him national prominence and the vice presidency. But within sixty days after his accession to office, a stroke incapacitated the chief executive, and Taylor became acting president under the Twenty-fifth Amendment. He was subsequently elected in his own right.