Jack McDevitt - Ancient Shores

Taylor laughed. “Don’t know,” he said. “There’s plenty of precedent for giving away private property. But it really doesn’t matter. It would be wrong .”

“It would also be political suicide.”

“So you think all that’s happening here is that we’re being sent a message?”

“No. Of course not. Everybody’s scared. But there are still a lot of people who wouldn’t want to miss a chance to embarrass us.”

“They’re doing a hell of a good job of it.” The president refilled his sherry glass and offered the bottle.

Peters shook his head.

“Tony, who would have believed there’s oil in paradise?” Matt Taylor sighed. “We just don’t get a break.”

“It shouldn’t matter,” the aide said. “How much oil can you throw into the world market bringing it through that whatsis one barrel at a time?”

That was a point, and the President seemed happy for that small bit of good news. “But it will matter,” he said. “Eventually. If there’s a lot of the stuff out there, we’ll find a way to get it back. And everybody knows it. But that isn’t really the problem, is it?”

“No.”

Taylor understood there was more at stake here than economics and elections. Incredibly, a stairway into the sky had opened. He hardly dared consider the implications. He did not want to close it down. The man who did that would not look good a century or two from now. And Matt Taylor, like any president, was determined that history think well of him. He had believed attaining the White House would be enough. But once in the door, he began to envy Washington, Lincoln, the Roosevelts, and Truman. Theirs was a rank he had thought would be denied him because greatness is possible only in crisis. Every administration had its problems, but until the Roundhouse surfaced, his had been relatively mundane: no government to establish, no Union to save, no Hitler to oppose.

Now the crisis was here. In spades. And he had only to choose the right course.

What in hell was the right course?

“Tony,” he said, “I think we’ve had enough. The Sioux won’t cooperate, so we’re going to have to find another way to close the operation down. I don’t care what it takes, but I am not going to let this country come apart on my watch.”

Walhalla, ND, Mar. 27 (AP)—

A North Dakota man died this morning when he ran out of the woods off Route 32 south of here, directly into the path of a moving van. The victim was John L. McGuigan of Fort Moxie, who was apparently hunting out of season. His snowmobile was found abandoned about a mile away. It was reported to be in good working order. Police have not explained why he left the snowmobile or why he was running. An investigation is continuing.

McGuigan is survived by his wife, Jane, and two children.

“Dr. Deekin, are you absolutely certain about what you saw?”

Cass looked into the TV cameras. “Yes,” he said. “Absolutely.”

“Why haven’t the people at Johnson’s Ridge said anything about this? Is there a cover-up?”

Deekin thought it over. “I don’t think so,” he said. “I mean, this thing, whatever it was, was invisible . They may not know it exists.”

“So what you’re saying is that something that cannot be seen came through the port.”

“I believe so.”

“And is now loose in North Dakota.”

“Yes. I would think that is true.”

The interviewer turned toward the camera. “So we may have an invisible visitor. We’ll be back in a minute to try to determine whether there’s a connection between Dr. Deekin’s experience, the reports today of a disembodied voice at a remote railroad terminal, and the mysterious death of a hunter near Johnson’s Ridge.”

Excerpt from The Newshour with Jim Lehrer, March 28. Conversation with Doctor Edward Bannerman, of the Institute for Advanced Study, on the subject of the “Dakota port,” with Jim Lehrer. Dr. Bannerman is a two-time Nobel prize-winning physicist.

Bannerman:It might actually be what physicists call a bridge, which is to say a connection between separate universes. The Horsehead Nebula in the skies of Eden, for example, need not be our Horsehead at all. We don’t really know. And, to be quite honest, we may never know the truth of any of this. Incidentally, I should observe that were this to be the case, those people who are hoping to use this technology to travel from San Francisco to New York are going to be disappointed.

Lehrer:They will not arrive in New York?

Bannerman:Oh, I suspect they would. But it wouldn’t be our New York.

Jeri Tully was eight years old. Mentally, she was about three, and the experts cautioned her parents against hoping for much improvement. No one knew what had gone wrong with Jeri. There was no history of mental defects on either side of her family and no apparent cause. She had two younger brothers, both of whom were quite normal.

Her father was a border patrolman, her mother a former legal secretary who had given up all hope of a career when she followed her husband to Fort Moxie.

Jeri went to school in Walhalla, which had the only local special-education class. She enjoyed school, where she made numerous friends, and where everyone seemed to make a fuss over her. Mornings in the Tully household were underscored by Jeri’s enthusiasm to get moving.

Walhalla was thirty-five miles away. The family had an arrangement with the school district, which was spread out over too vast an area to operate buses for the special-ed kids: The Tullys provided their own transportation, and the district absorbed the expenses.

Jeri’s mother, June, had actually grown to enjoy the twice-daily round trip. The child loved to ride, and she was never happier than when in the car. The other half of the drive, when June was alone, served as quiet time, when she could just watch the long fields roll by or plug an audio book into the sound system.

Curt Hollis’s adventure had taken place on a Thursday. Jeri’s father worked the midnight shift the following night, and his wife was waiting for him with French toast, bacon, and coffee when he got home in the morning. While they were eating breakfast, an odd thing happened. For the only time in her life, Jeri wandered away from home. It seemed, later, that she had decided to go to school and, having no concept of distance, or of the day (it was Saturday), had decided to walk.

Unseen by anyone except her two-year-old brother, she put on her overshoes and her coat, let herself out through the porch door, walked up to Route 11, and turned right. Her house was on the extreme western edge of town, so she was past the demolished Tastee-Freez and across the interstate overpass within minutes. The temperature was still in the teens.

Three-quarters of a mile outside Fort Moxie, Route 11 curves sharply south and then almost immediately veers west again. Had the road been free of snow, Jeri would probably have stayed with it and been picked up within a few minutes. But a light snowfall had dusted the two-lane. Jeri wasn’t used to paying attention to details, and at the first bend she walked straight off the highway. When, a few minutes later, the snow got deeper, she angled right and got still farther from the road.

Jeri’s parents had by then discovered she was missing. A frightened search was just getting under way, but it was limited to within a block or so of her home.

Jim Stuyvesant, the editor and publisher of the Fort Moxie News , was on his way to the Roundhouse. The story that an apparition had come through from the other side was going to be denied that morning in a press conference, and Jim planned to be there. He was just west of town when he saw movement out on Josh McKenzie’s land to his right. A snow devil was gliding back and forth in a curiously regular fashion. The snow devil was a perfect whirlpool, narrow at the base, wide at the top. Usually these things were blurred around the edges; they possessed an indefiniteness, and they floated erratically across the plain. But this one looked almost solid, and it moved patiently back and forth along the same course.