Jack McDevitt: Eternity Road

Coming on the day after her wedding, discovery of the golden chamber seemed almost a culmination to that sacred event. She was standing in the uncertain light, looking lovingly at Quait and at The Last Lion, when the illusion exploded. Flojian, down on the lower floor, announced there was water in the corridor. Rising fast.

They tried to dose the door, but water poured through the bent frame. One of the lamps crashed to the floor and went out. “Not going to work,” said Chaka. She looked around wildly. “How high will it go?”

“It’s going to fill up,” said Claver.

“You sure?”

“What do you think happens every day in the other rooms?”

They were snarling at each other now, the joy of a few moments before turned to rage and frustration. They opened the door and, two inside and two outside, tried to lift it higher in its frame and shut it again. The water kept coming in.

Books and cabinets looked polished in the dim light.

Chaka was dose to panic.

“It’s the lake,” said Flojian. “It’s open to the sea, and the tide’s rising.”

“No way to stop it?” asked Quait.

Claver laughed. “Are you serious?”

Quait tore off his jacket and tried to jam it between the door and the frame. “Damn!” he said. “One of us should have thought—”

Chaka watched the water spreading across the floor. “What do we do? There must be something—”

“We can save a few.” Flojian splashed over to the nearest cabinet, opened it, and removed the top book. It was The Letters of Abelard and Heloise .

Quait looked around wildly. “We’ll save, what, twenty or thirty, and lose everything else?”

“Wait.” Claver was holding his lamp high, looking at a

shadowy ceiling. “There might be something we can do, at that.”

“What?” said Quait.

“Give me a minute.” He hurried up the stairway into the gallery. They watched his lamp move swiftly along the upper level, watched it hesitate, watched it eventually circle the room. His face was pale in its spectral glow.

“We’re wasting time,” said Flojian. He lifted out a second book. It was Chronicles of the Crusades, Being Contemporary Narratives of Richard of Devizes and Geoffrey de Vinsauf . Quait helped him load both volumes into his arms. Then Flojian turned and stumbled toward the door. “Open up, Chaka,” he said.

She couldn’t help laughing at him. “How are you going to climb up to the landing with that load?” The water was running over the tops of her shoes. “It’s coming in fast,” she said. “If we’re going to do something, we better get to it.”

“What’s to do?” asked Flojian. “Except to get out whatever we can.”

Claver’s light was still floating along the upper rail. He seemed to be holding a conversation with himself. “Yes,” he was saying, “no reason why not.” And, “I believe we can do it.” Abruptly, he hurried to the top of the stairs, grasped the handrail, and leaned out. “Start bringing the books up here,” he said. “And hurry.” Incredibly, he had taken off his shirt and was beginning on his trousers.

“Why?” demanded Quait. “The room’s going to fill up.”

“I don’t have time to explain things,” said Claver. “Just do it. Trust me.”

“We need to get out of here while we can,” said Flojian. “Or we’ll get caught.”

“There’s still time,” said Claver. His voice had risen, and it echoed through the room. “If you want to give it up, just say so and we’ll do it. But we might be able to save most of this stuff if you’re willing to try.”

They started by clearing bottom drawers, getting the books most immediately threatened by the rising water and piling them on top of cabinets, tables, benches, whatever offered itself.

The volumes were, of course, all hand-printed. They were heavy and awkward, some of them so large that Chaka would ordinarily have had to struggle to lift one. But her adrenalin was flowing and she performed feats in that hour that no one who knew her would have believed.

Claver hurried back downstairs. In the uncertain light, Chaka thought her eyes were playing tricks. He was naked. ‘Take off your clothes,” he said. “I need everybody’s clothes.” He retrieved Quait’s jacket from the door and dashed back among them. “Quick,” he said.

“I think it’s over,” said Quait, whose expression left no doubt he believed Claver had come apart.

“Just do as I say. And hurry.”

Chaka was already out of her jacket. “It’s going to get cold in here,” she said.

“What’s he doing?” asked Flojian.

“I’m blocking ducts, damn it.”

“I don’t get it,” said Quait. Nevertheless, he began to strip off his shirt.

“Oh,” said Flojian. “If we can make the room airtight, when the tide rises past the top of the door the air’ll begin to compress.”

“Very good,” said Claver, gesturing for Chaka’s blouse.

“So what?” demanded Quait.

“If we can form an air bubble, it’ll keep the water out of the upper part of the room.”

“What happens if it doesn’t work?” asked Chaka.

Quait slipped out of his clothes. He piled shirt, trousers, socks, shorts, everything, on top of Emil Ludwig’s Napoleon.

Flojian got out of his clothing quickly. He handed them over to Claver, glanced with considerable discomfort at Chaka, who was now equally naked, and turned away. Chaka would have liked to duck down in the water, but that kind of response felt somehow childish.

Claver ascended back to the gallery with his arms full of garments. Meantime, it occurred to both Chaka and Quait that Chaka’s hauling books upstairs wouldn’t be the most efficient use of her time. They’d gained slightly on the rising water, so they rearranged the tasking: She continued removing the lower volumes while Quait and Flojian carried them to the upper level. She rescued The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius and Belzoni’s Narrative of Operations and Recent Researches in Egypt and Nubia and Samuel Eliot Morison’s The Two-Ocean War . She saved Caesar’s Commentaries and Babcock’s Waiting at the Station and Mulgrave’s Dusk at Mecca . She dropped Herodotus into the water.

“I think this’ll work,” Claver called down.

She saved Polybius and Thucydides and Voltaire and T. E. Lawrence and Fuller and Woollcott and Churchill. (Was it the same Churchill?) She slipped and went down hard with Livy in her hands. She stacked Xenophon on top of Prescott and Commager on Henry Adams. “Okay.” Claver’s voice seemed to come from nowhere. “We should be in business now.”

“Good,” said Quait. “We can use you down here.”

By then, Quait was the only one hauling books to the upper level. Working alone, Chaka had been losing ground and Flojian had diverted to help her get the remaining volumes out of the cabinets. That part of the job was almost done, but the water was rising too fast. It caught up to them and drowned a few volumes. Then it overflowed the tops of the tables on which the books were stacked and rose around the edges of The Chronicle of Novgorod and The Dawn of History and China: the Dragon Wakes and Roger Bacon’s Commentaries and a host of others.

They saved what they could, piling the books on the upper stairs and going back for more. The water reached Chaka’s shoulders. But she stayed with it, lifting volumes made even heavier by having been submerged, lifting them over her head and passing them up to Quait. Then she was swimming. But it all got too heavy finally and she had to drag herself out of the water.

“Time to go anyway,” said Quait. The water level had reached the top of the door. There would be less than a few feet of air left in the outside passageway.