Jack McDevitt - Ancient Shores

When he was in a cockpit, Max felt disconnected from his own life. It was as if all the mundane events of daily existence were directed toward the single purpose of getting him off the ground. The steady roar of the twin engines filled the night, and he thought how it must have been, flying alongside the B—17’s over Germany. He imagined himself strafing an ammunition train, watching it erupt into a ball of flame as he pulled up to engage two ME—109’s.

He was grinning when he touched down at Fort Moxie International Airport. Will Lasker was waiting with a black Ford station wagon. The kid wore a jacket with a football letter, and he looked embarrassed. “I’m sorry you had to come all this way, Max,” he said. “I mean, we aren’t really scared of a light , but you know how women are.”

Max nodded and threw his bag in the trunk.

Will was full of information, describing how they had found the boat, what it looked like, how visitors were still showing up every day. “A lot of them think we put it in the hole.”

“I can see,” said Max, “why they might think that.”

Will hunched over the wheel, and the car left the lights of Fort Moxie behind and rolled out onto the dark prairie. “You’d have to be crazy to think that,” he said, as if Max hadn’t spoken. “If we had a boat like that, we’d have put it in the lake, not in the ground.”

Max wasn’t sure what he expected to find at the farm. He’d conjured up a vague notion of a rotted-out hulk with lanterns hung on its gunwales. He was therefore not at all prepared for what he saw when Ginny led him into the barn.

“My God,” he said. “You’re kidding me.” The yacht was bright and sleek even under strings of bare light-bulbs. Will was right: It belonged on Lake Winnipeg, not stored in an old farm building outside Fort Moxie.

Ginny read his eyes. “We have no idea where it came from,” she said. “None.”

It was mounted on a trailer. The mainmast, which was hinged, had been folded over. Several piles of white canvas were shelved along the wall. “Those are the sails,” Ginny said, following the direction of his gaze.

A moist, animal smell alerted him to the presence of horses in stalls at the rear. He saw a lamp forward on the hull, long and teardrop-shaped, but it was not lit. Nor was any other part of the vessel lit. The keel was broad and deep and ran the length of the hull. A wheel was installed in the stern, and there was probably another in the pilothouse just forward of the cockpit. Black spidery characters unlike anything he had seen before were stenciled across the bow, below the lamp.

“Did you turn them off?” he asked. “The lights?”

“Not exactly,” said Ginny. She flipped a wall switch.

The barn went dark. It was a tangible dark, absolute, universal. The horses sounded uneasy.

“Ginny?” he asked.

“Wait.”

Something began to glow. It reminded him of phosphorous, ambient and silver and amorphous, not unlike moonlight through thin clouds. As he watched, the effect brightened. It was green, the color of a lawn after a spring rain, of ocean water just below the surface when sunlight filters down. It penetrated the stalls, illuminated pitchforks and hoes, and threw shadows from the tractor and the feeding troughs across a side wall. He gaped at the light, suddenly aware why she had been spooked.

“There’s one on the other side,” said Ginny. “A white light.”

“Running lights,” he said. “But that’s not right, is it? This is the port side. The light should be red.”

“I don’t know.”

“Sure. Red to port, green to starboard.” He walked around and looked at other light. “White’s not even in the ballpark,” he said. He touched the hull. It felt good, the way carved mahogany feels good, or a leather chair. He turned back to her. “How old is this supposed to be?”

She threw up her hands in exasperation. “I don’t know.”

Max folded his arms and circled the boat. First things first: Why would anyone want to bury something like this? “No one’s called to claim it?”

“No.”

“This thing’s in showroom shape.” He stared at its gleaming bow, its polished masts, its color. He walked over to the shelves where the sails had been folded. They did not feel like canvas.

“We washed it,” Ginny said.

“It can’t have been in the ground long.”

“I can’t believe anybody buried it while I was living here.”

He looked at her. That went back a few years. “What’s inside it? You find any bodies in there?”

“We thought the same thing. No, no bodies. And no drugs.”

“How about an identification number? There ought to be something that would allow you to trace the previous owner.”

“If there’s anything like that, we haven’t been able to find it.” She stayed close to him. “Max,” she said, “it also doesn’t have an engine.”

“That can’t be. It has a propeller.” He noticed that the shaft was broken off. “Or at least it had one.”

“I know. The propeller tied into a little green box. We can’t open the green box, but it doesn’t look much like an engine.”

She turned the lights back on. Max cupped his hand over the running light and watched it fade.

“Scares me silly,” said Ginny. She folded her arms over her breast. “Max, what is this thing?”

It didn’t look like any boat that Max had seen before. “Let’s go back to the house,” he said.

He was happy to be away from the boat. Ginny insisted her two sons bring their bedding down to the living room. Jerry was delighted by the opportunity to camp downstairs, and anyhow he was jittery, too. Will didn’t really mind, although he pretended to be annoyed. “Humor your mother,” Max told him, adopting the just-us-guys mode from the airport.

The kids complied, and they all bunked together. Ginny left lights on all over the house.

Max did not sleep well. He had put on a show of good-natured amusement at Ginny’s fears and her insistence they stay together, as if some demonic spirit had come in off the plains and invaded the barn. But it was he who suggested they leave a few lights on outside. Best that the glow leaking in through the windows be coming from GE sixty-watt bulbs rather than from the whatsis. But he felt a degree of pride that she had turned to him for support.

It was not the presence in the barn, however, that caused his restlessness. It was rather the sense of home , of a family drawing together. He had known this kind of atmosphere as a child but never as an adult. Lasker occasionally joked about the assorted pleasures of Max’s social adventures. Never the same woman twice. And Max played along, because it was expected. But he would have traded it all to get a Ginny in his life.

In the morning they located Tom. The previous evening’s alarms now seemed overblown, and if Ginny had a difficult time explaining why she had summoned help, Max felt uncomfortable at his presence in the rambling farmhouse. “I wouldn’t want you to think I was nervous,” she told her husband over the phone. “But it was really spooky here. I’m in favor of getting rid of the damned thing.”

Lasker was on the speaker. He couldn’t believe that the lights had come on, and he kept asking whether she was sure. Finally he seemed satisfied, although Max knew he would not believe it until he’d seen it for himself. As for getting rid of it: “I don’t think we want to make any quick decisions,” he said. “Let’s find out what we’ve got first. We could throw some canvas over it, if you want. That way you wouldn’t be able to see the damn thing.”