Alternities

by Michael P. Kube-Mcdowell

  “We’ll look worse if Andrews trucks that egg into D.C. and fries it on the Mall.”

  “Yeah.” The other man was silent for a long moment. “I’ll ask some questions.”

  “I think that’s a good idea.”

  Hagerstown, Indiana, Alternity Blue

  Rayne Wallace sat in the dark in the car and peered up from the street at the lighted windows of his mothers house. His mother’s house. Not his house, or his fathers house. His mothers house. A little Cape Cod on Lincoln Avenue near the northwest edge of town, just before Lincoln turned into County Road 21. He recognized the curtains hanging in the front windows, the wind chime on the little porch.

  He had found his father first, or as much of his father as remained—a rectangular stone in the ground near the Wallace monument in Mare’s Wood Cemetery. BELOVED SON HAROLD, f. JAN 8 1961, alongside BELOVED SON THOMAS, d. JAN 8 1927. He had not known that his father’s real name was Harold. Everyone had always called him Harry, even Grandmom. And how curious that his father had died on the same date as his stillborn older brother. Coincidence, surely, but somehow unsettling all the same.

  Sitting on his heels before the stone, he had cried quietly for his father, but also for himself. His life seemed suddenly tenuous, his visit home having cost him the illusion of his own inevitability. Chance had borne him. The many turnings which followed had been the product of incident and accident as much as choice.

  And the consequences of his choices had been hard enough to accept. The what—if game, Arens had called it. There was not much pleasure in the playing.

  He knew he would not leave his car. And if he tried he knew his legs would not carry him, would shield him from his own folly. He sat behind the wheel watching for a shadow against the curtains, a face at the door, any sign of the life within the house.

  Intent as he was, he did not notice the state police car when it coasted up behind the Magic. Not until the streetlamp-driven shadow of the trooper fell across the window, and the barrel of his flashlight tapped against the window glass.

  Not again—

  Quickly, Wallace rolled down the window. “Something wrong, officer?”

  “I’d like to see your license, please.”

  Wallace surrendered it readily.

  “Stay in your car, please.”

  Anxiously, Wallace waited out the long minutes as the officer returned to his cruiser. Presently he returned and handed the card back through the window. “What’s your business here, Mr. Wallach?”

  “I’ve been driving all afternoon, down from Fort Wayne, and stopped in town for dinner. You know how a big meal can make you sleepy as a baby,” Wallace said, flashing a friendly smile. “I just stopped here for a rest. I didn’t think I was doing anything wrong.”

  “We had a complaint about a stranger in the neighborhood. I guess that’d be you.”

  “Like I said, I was napping—”

  “Where are you bound, Mr. Wallach?”

  “Ohio. I’ve got business in Columbus.”

  “There’s a loitering law in this town, Mr. Wallach. If you’re too tired for the road, I’d suggest you stop at the Redwood Motel on State Road 1. Bonnie will be happy for the trade, and you won’t be worrying a quiet neighborhood.”

  “I’m feeling much better,” Wallace said. “If it’s all right with you, I’ll just get on my way.”

  The officer nodded. “Drive carefully, Mr. Wallach.”

  Relieved, grateful for a reason to leave, Wallace started the engine and headed south to find A-40. Strangers, he thought. The village never forgot who they were. You could live there for ten years and still be considered an outsider. “Oh, yes, you’re the people living in the Anderson house”—as if it was less yours for having gotten there second.

  Hagerstown remembered, because it looked upon outsiders with a jaundiced eye. Outsiders introduced alien ideas, flouted traditions, broke the unwritten rules. It was a boy from Muncie who had been caught circulating dirty books in a ninth-grade gym class, two transfers from Indianapolis who’d broken into the pharmacy, a girl from Richmond who got herself pregnant and refused to be ashamed.

  It wasn’t that no one from the town ever stepped over the line, ever trashed a classroom in the wee hours or went driving drunk and killed themselves and two classmates on a lonely moonlit road. But for those who belonged, allowances were made and forgiveness was possible. He goes to my church. He’s on my son’s Little League team. I went to school with his mom.

  Just as Wallace reached the automated, it began to snow, a dusting of tiny icy flakes that gleamed in the beams of the Magic’s headlights and swirled in clouds around the streetlamps marking the interchange.

  Wallace felt cold inside, cheated. It seemed there should have been something there worth taking away with him, something that was not a weight on his spirits. Some reason for it to be.

  Loneliness knotted his heart. The faces stayed in his mind. Weathered, stoic, restful, childish. Not one had opened to welcome him. Not one had seen that he belonged there.

  A stranger, like a thousand strangers before. Like all the strangers whose names he had forgotten, who came and a month, a year, two years later were gone again.

  And like one he had not forgotten. There was a what—if with a softer edge—

  Her name had been Shan, Shan Scott. A unique name, as unique as the spirit within her, a name borrowed like his from an older generation.

  She would be—what, twenty-six now. Almost twenty-seven. A what-if for sleepless wishing in dark rooms, for dreams that burned. There had been a year of wanting, a summer of talking, and a single kiss.

  Shan Scott. Daughter of the new high school principal from Chicago, a senior his junior year. Honey-caramel hair, thick and soft. Laughing, joyful, soulful eyes. She confounded by refusing to play the coquette, alienated by shunning basketball, amazed by talking of books no one else had read. City girl, they had said. Had sneered.

  Twenty-seven. Old enough to belong to the Common World. Old enough to be walking this world as well, somewhere.

  Feeling as he did, it was a small step from wondering if he could find her to searching for a phone. He found one at the next exit, standing alone at the edge of a diner’s parking lot. “Directory assistance for Deerfield.”

  “Go ahead.”

  A pilotless trailer roared by on the automated, kicking up a cloud of ice crystals in its wake. “Last name Scott, first name Shan, S-h-a-n.” An unusual name. Perhaps he would be lucky.

  “I have an S. Scott in Glencoe, an S. Scott in Glenview, and several S. Scotts for Chicago.”

  Married. Moved. One of the vanished. One in two hundred million, following her own path in her own world. What would she be? Artist? Teacher? She had had ambitions which did not fit neatly into any career.

  “What about a Franklin Scott?” he asked impulsively.

  “I have a Franklin Scott on Wilmot in Deerfield.”

  Wallace whooped. “That’s it.” He punched the redirect button, and the phone dialed the number as the operator recited it.

  “Scott’s,” a woman’s voice answered, a voice rich as a seasoned violin. Mary Scott, a gentle, generous woman, the anchor of the Scott family.

  “Mrs. Scott? I don’t know if you remember me. This is Michael.” An old Guard trick—everyone knew a Michael or two. It had been among the most popular male names for a quarter-century. “I’m an old schoolmate of your daughter Shan’s. I’m in town for a couple of days and I was hoping I could see her. But—”

  “Oh, this is such a shame,” the woman said. “I’m so sorry, Michael. I know she would have wanted to see you. But she doesn’t live in Chicago any more.”

  “No?”

  “She said it was just too hectic for her, Bloomington had spoiled her. She went to school there, you know.”

  “Bloomington? She’s in Bloomington, Indiana?”

  “She and some of her friends have a little store. And she’s still taking classes. Do you ever get to Bloomington?
Or maybe you’d like to write to her. I could give you her address.”

  “Please,” Wallace said.

  He scrawled the numbers and words on the back of a dollar bill. His heart was racing.

  Bloomington. An hour away from Indy. God—

  He thanked Mrs. Scott and politely extracted himself from further conversation. Burying his hands in his pockets, he walked slowly back to the Magic.

  What are you thinking, he scolded himself. This is another alternity. She’s not anything like what you remember. She doesn’t remember anything you remember. It’d be like starting over.

  But all the scolding notwithstanding, as the Magic edged forward into the snowy night, Wallace found that he could not stop smiling to himself.

  THE DEPARTMENT OF STATE

  Office of the Press Secretary

  * * *

  For Immediate Release: January 8, 1978

  REMARKS BY THE SECRETARY OF STATE

  TO THE UNITED NATIONS GENERAL ASSEMBLY

  ON THE MARJORIE INCIDENT

  Wien, Austria

  11:00 A.M.

  THE SECRETARY: Mr. Secretary, today, the town of Port Charlotte, Florida, will remember its dead. There can be no burial, for there are no bodies. But today Port Charlotte will honor and mourn as best it can five faithful, hardworking men, family men, fishermen. Let us give them names, that they not be ciphers in our deliberations:

  Daniel Keyes, married, father of two. Alfred Norse, thirty years a sailor. Edward Janacek, married, father of three. Leon James, married, father of a one-month-old daughter. Dick Weston, engaged to be married.

  Though any of us may mourn the passing of a fellow human being, I do not come here to call on you to mourn these five. We will deal with our grief in our own way.

  But I do call on you to condemn their murderers. The sinking of the Marjorie and the death of five of her crew is a tragedy. But it was no accident. These men died at the hands of the Soviet Navy.

  The facts are not at issue, for a fortunate sixth man, John Norse, the son of the captain, survived his twelve-hour ordeal to relate the shocking story. And Dick Weston’s camera survived, the few grainy frames he snapped offering horrifying corroboration.

  The facts are these: A week ago today, a Soviet submarine rammed and sank the American fishing boat Marjorie two miles off the Florida coast, in the Gulf of Mexico. The submarine then left the area, left the crew of the Marjorie to drown without so much as sending a distress call on their behalf.

  The facts are simple. But many lies have already been told to obscure them. The Soviet Navy first claimed that the collision was an accident and that the sub commander did not know of it until informed by Soviet naval authorities. We exposed this naked lie by releasing yesterday a transcript of the commander’s radioed report on the incident, as intercepted by our coastal defense stations.

  This morning Pravda released the “official report,” and it contains an even bolder lie—that the Marjorie was in fact an armed patrol boat and that the collision occurred when the submarine was submerging to escape an unprovoked attack. We are called “provocateurs” and “lawless pirates.” You are invited to blame the victims rather than the criminals.

  I offer for your consideration a photograph of the Marjorie and her captain Alfred Norse, and ask you to picture that “assault”.

  A forty-foot wooden-hulled fishing boat built before the Second World War and armed with a flare pistol and a shark gun, against a modern three-thousand ton, two-hundred-fifty-foot-long steel-hulled missile-firing submarine. It is ludicrous to contemplate.

  America is shocked and angry.

  We are shocked by the callousness of the Soviet Navy in first striking down and then abandoning these defenseless sailors. Though perhaps we should not be shocked, for callousness is a well-known Soviet trait.

  We are angry at the cowardly nature of the attack, angry at the needless loss of our friends and family members, angry at the arrogant violation of American sovereignty and international sea law.

  But we are a nation with a respect for law, a tradition of honor. We seek justice, but we will not seek revenge. We must and will respond, but we will not lower ourselves to the level of the sneak attack and the guerrilla war.

  Today I place on notice the naval forces of those powers hostile to democracy, the USSR foremost among them. We have not only the means but the will to defend our citizens and our waters.

  Beginning today, any military vessel, surface ship or submarine, which intrudes into American coastal waters without prior authorization will be presumed to have a hostile intent America’s coastal defense network is on the highest alert The commanders of our sub-killer destroyers and antiship missile batteries have full authority to attack and destroy intruders.

  I warn the navies of the Communist world and their masters to take heed. The line is drawn. Cross it at your peril.

  CHAPTER 13

  * * *

  Triumph of Honor, Failure of Courage

  Moscow, The Home Alternity

  The city was firmly in the grip of winter. The Moskva River wore a thick coat of ice, the hurrying pedestrians thick coats of wool and fur. Heads were lowered and faces muffled against the subfreezing wind. The freshest snow, three days old, had been hammered into a lumpy white crust which crunched and squeaked under foot and tire. Sokolniki Park was an arboreal graveyard of bare-limbed trees, the low-hanging sun casting a tangle of long, pale shadows.

  Inside a cavernous room, three unsmiling men faced the quiet fury of the General Secretary. “So what is happening?” Kondratyev asked. “Where is the truth? Geidar says yes, Nikolai says no. Pyotr avoids saying anything at all. The Americans call us liars and I am tempted to accept that judgment.”

  “I believe my captain,” Admiral of the Fleet Koldunov said stiffly.

  “Do you? Your submarine captain says he was provoked, his boat attacked at close range with automatic weapons, heavy machine guns. Yet the report from Dakar where the submarine is now moored says that these weapons failed to leave their mark anywhere on the hull. Is our armor that impervious, our steel that strong?”

  The Minister of Defense rallied to the defense of the Navy commander. “There was damage to the sail from the collision. Enough, perhaps, to conceal evidence to support Captain Avilov’s account.”

  “I trust that our shipwrights in Dakar are competent enough to detect bullet holes even in crushed metal,” Kondratyev said dismissively. “There is no evidence.”

  “True,” Voenushkin agreed. ”And yet, I, too, believe Captain Avilov has told the truth. And Avilov’s officers are unwavering in their support for him—”

  “A conspiracy of the guilty.”

  “I do not think so, Secretary.”

  “What explanation have you, then?” Kondratyev demanded “That those who wielded the weapons were incompetent?”

  “No. I believe that they were most competent.”

  “Explain.”

  The Intelligence director sat back in his chair and steepled his hands in his lap. “I have been contemplating the notion that this incident was staged, carefully scripted by the Americans. A fishing boat leaves port and does not return. Who is to say that it is the same boat which faced down the Nachodka? Six sailors go out, one comes back, and a town mourns its dead. But there are no bodies, only the tales of one man. Who is to say that they are truly dead?”

  “A deception, Geidar?”

  “Perhaps. I have examined the photographs released by the Americans. They show only the ocean and our submarine, and a few feet of gunwale that could belong to any boat. No hardworking fishermen. We should watch these ‘grieving’ families closely. Perhaps, ‘heartbroken’ or ‘destitute,’ they will one by one leave their hardworking little town in the next months. With new names in new cities, who will know that this father, that husband, is returned from the dead?”

  Kondratyev clapped his hands together and brought them to his lips. “And the crew of this Marjorie—”

  �
��Soldiers, CIA agents, guided toward our submarine by the American Navy. Their purpose from the start to draw an unwary Soviet officer into a foolish act. To create an incident which would fire the American blood fever and provide the context for Secretary Rollins’ impassioned performance in Vienna.”

  The Minister of Defense was nodding, his face wearing a look of wonder. “Yes. Yes,” said Medvedev. “No bullets struck because none were fired. Only blank cartridges, empty noise to panic Captain Avilov.”

  “Who did not panic,” Koldunov said quickly.

  Voenushkin nodded in agreement. “He submerged, as instructed, as he reported. There was a collision, yes. But Captain Avilov did not ram an American fishing boat. I greatly doubt whether a submarine of Nachodka’s class is nimble enough to accomplish the feat unless undetected until the moment of impact. I believe the Marjorie sailed deliberately into the submarine’s path.”

  “Brave men. Loyal men,” Kondratyev mused.

  “No doubt. Even if an air-sea rescue helicopter was waiting just over the horizon, they risked death. Some may have lost the risk.”

  “How confident are you of this analysis, Geidar?”

  “I am always confident of American duplicity.”

  Kondratyev turned toward the Admiral. “Nikolai,” he said “How real is the American threat to our submarines? And do not try to impress me with the skill of your crews and the superiority of your vessels. Impress me with the truth.”

  “American detection methods are much improved,” the Admiral conceded gruffly. “Their attack submarines are still largely blueprints. Their destroyers and corvettes are a minimal threat. Should they choose to employ their patrol aircraft and missile batteries, the threat would be greater.”

  “Do you have any reason to think that they will choose not to employ them?”

  “The Javelins are untested against live targets. Perhaps they will fear betraying a weak hand.”