Georgia On My Mind and Other Places

by Charles Sheffield

  “What do you think he can tell you?”

  “If I knew, I wouldn’t be going.” Tom took a blank envelope over to the typewriter next to the safe and typed his own name on it. Then he removed the golliwog stamp from the scanner, placed a thin layer of gum on the back of it, and carefully stuck it on the envelope. Finally he placed the letter from Colorado inside it. “I’ll call Ray now and tell him I’m interested in tracing works by an early American engraver. That’s quite true, and he’s bound to be interested. And during the meeting I want him to catch a look at this.” He held up the envelope. “And we’ll t-take it from there.”

  I had expected Eleanor Lockyer to quiz me about my proposed travel and give me a general hard time. Instead she was sweet and reasonable, and didn’t ask me one question about where I was going, or why.

  “Tell Thomas that the invitation is in the mail,” she said. “It will be just a small, intimate group, no more than a dozen.”

  “I’ll tell him.” (I didn’t.)

  He wanted to drive to Philadelphia in the Dodge death trap. I talked him out of it by suggesting that if we went by train we could fly straight to Denver after our meeting with Sines. Tom seemed surprised that I wanted to go with him, but he didn’t seem to mind.

  “Just don’t say too much about stamps or engraving,” he said.

  The least of my worries.

  Ray Sines was younger than I had expected, a thin, red-faced man of about thirty who suffered premature baldness. He was attempting the disastrous trick of training the remaining strands of hair to a pattern that covered his whole head, and every couple of minutes he ran his hand in a circular motion around his scalp. The top of his head looked like a rotary shoe-polisher. His office, above an industrial warehouse, reminded me of Tom’s store, dusty and shabby and somehow irrelevant to what went on there.

  He showed pleasure and no surprise at our visit, and he and Tom went off at once into their polite sarabande of talk about Gibbons and Scott and Minkus catalogs, the location of the printing equipment of the legendary Jacob Perkins of Massachusetts, and the newly discovered stamps of the 1842 City Despatch Post of New York City. I sat on the edge of my chair, drank four cups of coffee that I would later regret, and itched for Tom to get to the real business.

  After about an hour and a half I realized the dreadful truth: he wasn’t going to do it. The envelope and the golliwog stamp were there in Tom’s case, standing by his leg—and it was going to stay there. He had had no trouble devising a theoretical plan to startle information out of Ray Sines, but when it came to the act he couldn’t bring himself to begin.

  Finally I reached down, hoisted the case, and placed it on Tom’s lap. “The catalog. Don’t you have a catalog in here that you want to show Mr. Sines?”

  Tom glared at me, but he was stuck. He opened the case and peered inside. “I don’t know if I remembered to bring it,” he said. While Sines looked on he lifted out a layer of papers and placed them on the low table in front of us. On top was the envelope addressed to him, with its prominent golliwog stamp.

  Sines stared at it and his face lit up. “I didn’t know you were a member!” he said to Tom. Then he gave me a quick and nervous look.

  “Yes,” Tom started to say. “Both of us—”

  “Member of what?” I rapped at Sines. If this were a secret organization any self-respecting member would check a stranger’s credentials before admitting its existence.

  For answer, Sines reached behind him and produced a whole roll of golliwog stamps. “My design,” he said proudly. “I worked harder on this than on any commercial assignment. It’s all right, you can talk to me. I was one of the first people that Marcia allowed in. When did you join?”

  Tom looked at me beseechingly.

  “I came in about four months ago,” I said. “Tom’s a recent acquisition, he joined just a month back.”

  “Terrific!” Sines leaned back in his chair and beamed at both of us. “If you haven’t been out to the site already, there’s a real treat in store for you.”

  I reached into my purse and waved our airline tickets at him. “We’re on our way there now. Maybe you can tell us, what’s the best way once we arrive at the airport?”

  He frowned at me. “Isn’t someone meeting you?”

  We were moving onto tricky ground. I had an urge to get out quickly, but we needed information. “Everyone has their hands full,” I said. “There seem to be problems with one of the systems—Seven, is it?”

  “No, it’s Nine.” He relaxed again. “Yes, I hear it’s still doing funny things. We’ll get the right one eventually. Where are you flying to?”

  “Denver.”

  “Pity. You should have flown to Colorado Springs. Either way, though, you’ll have some pretty high driving ahead of you. Take Route 285 out of Denver until you meet Route 24 into Buena Vista. Go north from there and you should see the site on your left, up on the slopes of Mount Harvard.”

  “How far from Nathrop?” I asked.

  “A few miles. But if you get there, you’ve gone the wrong way out of Buena Vista. Pretty good steak restaurant, though, if you do make the wrong turn.” He frowned. “If you would like me to call ahead and try to arrange—”

  “No. Please don’t.” I took Tom’s arm and stood up. “We’d hate to make a nuisance of ourselves before we even arrive. And we’d better go now, our plane leaves in an hour and a half.”

  “You’ll need a cab.” He stood up, too. “I just wish I was going with you. Give me a call when you get back, tell me what you think of things out there. For me, it’s the most exciting thing that’s happened in my whole life.”

  He escorted us to the entrance of the building. “Ascend forever!” he said as we left, and raised his arm.

  “Ascend forever!” I replied, but Tom said nothing. As soon as Sines was out of sight and sound he exploded at me. “I hate that sort of thing!”

  “You think I enjoy it?” I had the caffeine shakes and I needed to go to the bathroom. “I know we lied to him, but what did you want me to do? Break down and explain to Sines that we went there to trick him?”

  He didn’t reply. But I suspected that it was not the lying that had him upset. It was me, pushing the attaché case at him, pushing him to do something alien to his temperament. He’d never believe me, but I was as upset about that as he was.

  Denver’s Stapleton Airport is at five thousand feet; our drive south and west took us steadily higher. Within the hour we were up over nine thousand, with snowcapped mountains filling the sky ahead. I had never been to Colorado before and the scenery bowled me over—magnificent country, like moving to a different planet after the rampant azaleas and dogwoods of May in Washington.

  Tom was less impressed. He had been here before—“skiing in Vail and Aspen, while I tried to persuade the family that they weren’t doing me any favors by sending me. I finally managed to break a leg, and that did it.”

  On the plane and again in the car we beat to death what we learned from Ray Sines, and what we knew or surmised about its relevance to Jason Lockyer’s disappearance.

  “Ascend Forever is in the middle of this,” said Tom. “Or perhaps it’s a subgroup of them. More likely that, because they’re going through a procedure to keep it a big secret, and that’s quite impossible with too many participants.”

  “A pretty childish procedure, don’t you think? I haven’t run across special stamps and secret symbols and hidden messages since I was in high school.”

  “You’d never make a Freemason. And I knew a bunch of people at Princeton who were still into private codes. Let’s go on. They have some project—”

  “—a group of projects. Remember Seven, Eight, and Nine. Which also means there’s probably a One through Six—”

  “—OK, at least nine projects, but they’re probably all doing similar things. There is some sort of development activity associated with them and it’s out in the Colorado mountains, west of Nathrop and Buena Vista. It’s pretty big, v
isible from a fair distance. And it’s in some sort of trouble—”

  “—or part of it is. Remember, Seven and Eight are doing fine. It’s Nine that’s off, enough to want Jason Lockyer to come out and take a look at what’s going on.”

  “And he’s a famous biologist. But the projects have something to do with strange attractors. Not to mention the old Mega-Mother.” Tom shrugged. “You’re the detective. Can you put it together?”

  “Not a clue. Unless Jason Lockyer has other talents, and the group is calling on those to help them.”

  Grasping at straws. We both knew it and after a while we dropped it in favor of general chat. We uncovered a total of three common acquaintances, not counting Jill Fahnestock, and we agreed that except for Jill we liked none of them. He found out, to his horror, that the purple mark on my left forearm was the scar of a bullet-wound, inflicted when a man I approached in a child custody case fired at me without warning. (“Cocaine,” I said. “He was carrying eight ounces of it, nothing to do with child custody. I was just unlucky—or lucky, depending on your point of view.”) I found out, with equal horror, that Tom carried no health insurance of any kind and did not propose to get any. (“Health insurance is for people who don’t have money. Obviously, it costs more on average to buy insurance than it does to be sick—otherwise, how could insurance companies stay in business. Health insurance is a bourgeois concept, Rachel.” That last sentence was to annoy me, but this time I handled it better.)

  He ate when he was happy. So did I. The fact that he was forty pounds overweight while I was too thin to please anyone but a clothes designer was lost on neither of us.

  Eventually we stopped talking and simply sat in companionable silence. Tom was one of the rare people whose presence you enjoy without speaking.

  Buena Vista came finally into view, a town that couldn’t be more than a couple of thousand people. For the past half hour we had scanned the mountains ahead of us for any anomalies, and seen nothing even though it was a glittering spring day and visibility was perfect.

  I had been driving, because we were renting a Toyota Celica and since I was considering buying one I wanted to see how it handled. When we reached Buena Vista I stopped the car at what looked like a general purpose store on the main through street.

  “You need to buy something?” said Tom.

  “Information. Want to come in with me?”

  The bored youth behind the counter knew instantly what I was talking about. “The Observatory, you mean,” he said. “You can see it from the road, but you have to look hard. Take the road north and look for a gravel cutoff to the left. That goes all the way on up, you can’t miss it.” He stared at us. “You’ll be working there?”

  “No. Just visiting.”

  “Ah. They say they’re making a spaceship up there, one that’s going off to the end of the universe.”

  “I don’t know about that. We’ll see.” I bought two cans of Coke and we left.

  “So much for the big secret,” Tom said when we were back in the car. “They’re practically running guided tours.”

  “If you want to hide something, disguise it as something else that local people don’t much care about—like an observatory.”

  Tom upended his can of Coke. He inhaled it more than drank it, in one long gulp. “What about the spaceship?”

  “Safe enough. No one in their right mind would believe it.”

  We had a major decision to make as we drove up the winding gravel-covered road. Would we barrel on up to the entrance, or would we leave the car and play Indian Scout?

  We discussed it for another minute, then compromised. A complex of buildings stood on the south-facing slope of the mountainside. We parked the car three-quarters of a mile away, where the top of the blue Toyota would barely be visible over the top of the final ridge. I led the way as we walked until we had a good view. The location was well above ten thousand feet, and three minutes walk up the slight incline left us gasping.

  There were five major structures ahead. Three of them were large, hemispherical, geodesic domes, made of glass or plastic. Two of those were transparent, and we could see shadows inside where trees or shrubs seemed to be growing marked off by triangular support ribbing of painted metal or yellow plastic. The third dome was apparently of tinted material, and its wall panels gleamed dull orange-red. The three domes stood in roughly an equilateral triangle, each one sixty feet across, and at the center of that triangle were two more conventional buildings. They were white and square-sided, with the look of prefabricated or temporary structures. I counted seven cars parked outside the larger one.

  A stiff breeze blew from the west, and even in the bright sunlight it was too cold to stand and watch for more than a few minutes. In that time no one appeared from any of the buildings or domes, nor was there evidence of activity within.

  We went back to the car and sat inside. I put my hand on my stomach. The Coke had been a mistake. I had the jitters and a pain that ran from my solar plexus around the lower right-hand side of my ribs.

  “What now?” said Tom. He looked like the detective, calm and confident. His question probably meant he had made up his own mind what we ought to do.

  I burped, in as ladylike a way as I could manage. “If Jason Lockyer is inside one of those buildings it won’t do us any good to sit here. And if Jason Lockyer’s not inside, and he’s a thousand or two thousand miles away, it still won’t do us any good to sit here.”

  “My thoughts exactly.” It was his turn to reach out and turn a car’s ignition key. “Let’s do it, Rachel. Let’s go up there and take the golliwog by the horns.”

  I eased up the slope at a sedate twenty miles an hour, all my attention on the road. Halfway there, Tom said, “Hold on a minute. Is something wrong with my eyes?”

  I stopped the car. It took a few moments, then I saw it, too. The orange-red dome had changed color to a darker, muddier tone, with rising streaks of deep purple within it. Tom and I looked at each other.

  “We’ll never find out from here,” I said. I let in the clutch—badly—and we jerked forward again. We crept all the way up to the larger building and parked in the line of cars. I did an automatic inventory. A new Buick, two old Mustangs, a Camaro that had been in an accident and needed bodywork, two VW Rabbits, and an ancient Plymouth that made even Tom’s car look fresh off the assembly line. The same sort of mix as I might expect to see in a Washington car park, but with a bit more Buy-American. The air was clear, the sunlight blinding, and there was not a sound to be heard. Living in the city you forget how quiet real quiet can be. We walked over to the building—aluminum-sided, I now saw—almost on tiptoe. My pulse rate was up in the hundreds, and I could feel it in my ears, the loudest sound in the world.

  “Inside?” whispered Tom.

  I nodded and he led the way. The front door was closed but not locked. It opened to a big lobby about twenty feet square, spotlessly clean and containing nothing but half a dozen metal-frame chairs. As we paused I heard a clatter of footsteps on the aluminum floor, and a man carrying a couple of thick notebooks came hurrying in. Tom and I froze.

  “Well, thank Heaven,” the new arrival said. “I didn’t know anyone was coming out. We’ve been so shorthanded this last week I’ve been on continuous double shifts.”

  New York accent, California tan. He was no more than twenty-two or twenty-three, and he was wearing an all-white uniform like a medical orderly. The first impression was of a clean-cut, clean-living lad who should have been carrying an apple for his teacher along with his notebooks. A closer look added something different. He had a spaced-out glassy stare in his eyes, a look that I had seen before only among the ranks of the Moonies and the Hare Krishnas.

  “First visit?” he said.

  Tom and I nodded. I hope I looked as casual and at ease as he did.

  “Great. You’ll love it here. I’m Scott.”

  “Rachel,” I said. As I took his outstretched hand the inside of my head made its own swirli
ng list of mysteries: vanished professor—golliwog stamp roll—observatory—spaceship—biology experiment—strange attractor—religion—sanctuary—lunatic asylum.

  What was I missing?

  “I’ll tell Marcia you’re here.” Scott had shaken hands with Tom and was heading off along a passageway. “But let’s settle you in first, and then find something for you to do.”

  We followed him to a long room with a dozen beds and a shower and toilet facility at the far end. “You’ll sleep in here,” Scott said. “Make yourselves comfortable. I’ll be back in five minutes.”

  I sat down shakily on one of the beds. Hard as a rock. “Prison? Military barracks? Hospital? Tom, we were crazy to come here.”

  “Don’t you want to find Lockyer?” Tom shook his head. “Not prison, not hospital. Boy Scouts, or the dorm in Vermont summer camp. Kids away from home for a big adventure, mummy and daddy miles away. But they’ve gone unisex.”

  “What is this place?”

  “I don’t know. Sounds like Marcia’s the kingpin, whoever she is. Or queenpin. Or camp counselor. Everyone defers to her, even Ray Sines.” He went across to the window and stood gazing out at it. “My imagination, or is it changing again?”

  I followed his pointing finger. The third dome was now a mottled and virulent green. A flowing column of darker color seemed to be rising steadily through the paint on the dome. Before we could discuss what we were seeing Scott came hurrying back in.

  “Right,” he said. “A quick look around, then introductions will have to wait until tonight. We’ll need uniforms.”

  He led us to an array of tall lockers at the end of the room. While he watched—no thoughts of privacy here—Tom and I took off our outer garments and replaced them with aseptic-looking white uniforms identical to the one that Scott was wearing. Tom had a little trouble finding one that fitted him; the members of Ascend Forever were presumably an undernourished group.

  When we were dressed to Scott’s satisfaction he took us to the entrance hall—and back outside the building. Tom gave me a quick glance. Why bother with sterile clothing if we were going to be outside? Answer: sterility was not the point; uniformity was.