by Mike Ashley
Several boats, including a tiny blue-hulled sailboat, were tied up at the pier. Indistinct human figures waiting there gradually resolved themselves into a small party of Navy men in tropical khakis and two civilians who stood apart both from them and from each other. Both civilians wore white suits, but one man was short, stout, and sunburnt, and the other was tall as well as thickset, tanned rather than burnt, and had a Panama hat with a purple hat band set at a rakish angle atop his squarish head. It was clear from his bearing that he considered himself to be a vision. Leveritt laughed when she saw him, waved, and called out, “Rob! Rob Brinkman!”
Brinkman waved back, and when the boat had been tied up he reached down and offered Leveritt his enormous brown hand. She was a medium-sized woman, heavier in the hips than she cared to be, but he seemed to lift her right out of the boat and on to the pier with only minimal assistance from her. His grin and voice were as big as the rest of him. “Welcome to the Silurian!”
Leveritt hugged him. She could not quite encircle his torso with her arms. “It’s about time someone here said that to me. What a suit! What a hat! Is this what you wear on collecting trips now?”
“Only if pretty grad students are going along.”
Behind her, somebody peevishly said, “I’m supposed to meet Ed Morris. I’m Michael Diehl, from the San Diego Natural History Museum.”
As Brinkman stepped around Leveritt to ask a bluejacket to hand up her gear, she saw the other civilian peering anxiously into the boat, as though he expected to spot Ed Morris trying to hide from him among the cargo. The party of Navy men had got immediately to work unloading the boat, and their interest in Diehl did not extend beyond his keeping out of their way. Hales, however, introduced himself and said, “I regret that Mister Morris is unable to come ashore at this time.”
“Eh? Why not?”
“Side-effects of the jump.”
“Oh. Well, you could’ve radioed that piece of information and saved me an hour’s wait for nothing. Could’ve saved yourself a boat ride, too.”
Hales noticed Leveritt watching him. He favored Diehl with a mild version of his frown-above, smile-below expression. “Boat rides’re what the Navy’s all about.”
Brinkman turned with Leveritt’s seabag on his shoulder and said, “Okay,” and the two of them walked away. The pier came straight off the camp’s main thoroughfare, which was paved with metal matting and lined with huts. Tents had been erected along intersecting streets. There was a good deal of pedestrian traffic, both civilian and Navy. Brinkman led Leveritt past supply, generator, and administration buildings, the dispensary, the exchange, the mess – “The Navy part of camp,” he told her, adding, “but we get to use the facilities, of course.” Civilian personnel lived in and worked out of a group of tents he called the suburbs. “Our people’re already upriver, so, tonight, you’ll be the guest of a bunch of centipede enthusiasts.”
“How charming.”
“It’d probably be a good idea to shake out your shoes in the morning. Want some dinner?”
“I think all I want tonight,” she said, “is to walk a little way past the last row of tents, where I can see pure and unadulterated Paleozoic.”
“Care for a guide?”
She gave him a sidelong mock-wary lock. “Not if it’s some notorious lady-killer in an ice-cream suit.”
Brinkman laughed. “Just make sure you keep the camp on your left when you go out, or you’ll wind up in the marsh. And don’t go out too far, either. And don’t stay up too late.”
“Yes, Mother.”
“We leave right after breakfast, and around here breakfast is at sunrise.”
He showed her where she was to spend the night. None of his centipede enthusiasts was about, so Leveritt put her seabag just inside the door, bade him good night, and with no further ado set out on her walk. Not far beyond the last row of tents, the ground rose sharply; the going was not especially rough, but she did not push her luck – the sun was going down fast, and she did not fancy making her way across unfamiliar ground in the dark. Just as she reached a ledge from which she could look down into the camp, a thin bugle call announced the commencement of the evening colors ceremony. Electric lights illuminated the camp, and she had no trouble spotting the flagpole. There came a second bugle call, followed by the national anthem. The flag sank slowly out of sight behind a Quonset hut. Out on the water, the shadow of the Earth itself swallowed up the ship. Leveritt sat down on warm smooth rock, lay back to look up at the purpling, then blackening, sky, and finally felt herself part of Silurian reality, in Paleozoic time and space. Contentment filled her.
How long she remained thus, she did not know. The moon rose, the unrecognizable stars slightly shifted their positions. Eventually, she became aware that the rock had cooled without getting any softer. She got up and walked slowly toward camp.
As she came among the tents, she heard voices and music from some of them and noticed that traffic had thinned. No insects orbited the lights, unexpectedly reminding her that no birds had wheeled and screeched over the bay. She knew, of course, that the Silurian was too early for birds and insects – flying insects, at least – but until this moment she had not appreciated their absence.
Just before she reached her tent, she saw Michael Diehl approaching. His face held a sickly cast, and he appeared to have his entire attention focused on the ground before him. When she started to go inside, however, he called out, “Excuse me, these tents’re reserved for the San Diego Natural History Museum.”
“Rob Brinkman said there’s an extra cot. He’s the—”
“Brinkman. Texas A and M.” Diehl was near enough now for her to catch a whiff of what he breathed out. His red complexion, she decided, was not wholly the result of too much sun.
“We’re on our way upriver in the morning,” she said, “so it’ll only be—”
“You’re the woman who came in on the boat with Lieutenant Hales. Leveritt, isn’t it?”
“Yes. And your name’s Diehl. Look, if there’s a problem, I’m sure Doctor Brinkman can—”
“You made the jump this morning. With Ed Morris.”
“Yes.” She said it quickly and said no more, not wanting to be cut off again.
Diehl glanced to left and right. “I think you better come with me. I know where we can have a drink and talk in private.”
“Um, thank you for the offer, but I’m very tired, and I need to—”
“You’re the only one I can talk to about what’s happened to Ed Morris!” There was a note of pleading in the whiskey-scented voice. “And I’m the only one you can talk to.”
“What? What’s happened to Ed Morris?”
Diehl looked closely at her. “You don’t know? No, I can see you don’t. You didn’t really see it happen. I guess nobody really saw it. And Hales didn’t tell you, did he? No, of course he didn’t. He laid that Navy security stuff on me, too. Tried to hand me some crap, and when I raised holy hell and threatened to go straight to his commanding officer—”
“What about Ed Morris?”
“There was an accident! Come on, let’s go where we can talk. We’re too close to the Navy here.”
She hesitated as he walked past, got as far into a protest as “I don’t think I’m supposed,” then followed him back the way she had just come, up the slope behind the camp, to the ledge. Diehl wiped the mouth of a small flask on his coat sleeve and offered it to her. She declined to accept. He took a drink, gasped, and replaced the screw top.
“Ed Morris,” he said, “didn’t come through the hole today like he was supposed to.”
“What do you mean?”
“Just what I said. Hales told me – after I made him tell me – Morris made the jump one minute after you, but he never arrived here. He’s gone. Lost.”
“Gone, lost – where?”
Diehl shook his head. “They don’t know.”
“But—”
“They don’t know! They honestly don’t. Maybe it was some g
litch in the machinery that did it, or sunspots. Maybe some quirk of the hole itself, something they don’t know about. I frankly don’t think they know much more about the hole now than they did in the beginning.”
“But how do you lose somebody?”
“You gotta remember what a strange thing the hole is. When they first stumbled across it, all they knew was, here’s this strange thing. This anomaly. They sent in robot probes to get specimens, photograph everything in sight. By and by, they figured out what they had was this doorway into the past. But it didn’t just open up on a place on a day. It wasn’t that stable. There was a sort of flutter, and it caused what they call spatial drift and temporal spread. So, two probes might go through together on our side, the twenty-first-century side, but come out miles and years apart on the Silurian side. That’s why they built the jump stations. They built one of them aboard that ship and pushed the ship through the hole so they could keep things synchronized on both sides of the hole. It all worked perfectly, until today. Today, Ed Morris may’ve been plunked down anywhere. Far inland or far out to sea. He may’ve arrived a hundred years ago or a hundred years from now.”
“Alive?” She was barely able to ask it.
“Not for long. Not unless he’s a helluva lot smarter and luckier’n Robinson Crusoe. And if he was hurt—”
“How awful. That poor man.”
“If he was really lucky, he never knew what happened. Never felt a thing. Hales says he may just’ve been scattered across four hundred million years.”
Leveritt felt a chill of horror, though she could not have said what being scattered across four hundred million years might entail.
“He says everything’s working again,” Diehl went on, “they’re sending and receiving again, but until they figure out what went wrong . . .” He abandoned the sentence to take another drink. “Everything we use here, food, supplies, it’s all gotta come through the hole. And the hole—”
Leveritt knew what he was about to say and said it for him. “The hole’s the only way home.”
“You got that right! The only way!”
She looked upward. The moon was slightly higher in the sky than when she had seen it – how long before? Half an hour? Then, she had experienced happiness greater than any other she could remember. Now, she felt oppressed, weighed down.
They were silent for almost a minute. Then, as Diehl tilted his head back to drink, Leveritt said, “Well, what can we do about it?”
Diehl smacked his lips. “Indeed, what? Doesn’t seem right. It isn’t right. A man dies, vanishes – whatever’s applicable in this case. He’s got no family or friends far’s I can find out, and there’s nothing to bury. And nobody’s supposed to talk about him, so he won’t even get a memorial service. Not even if he did have family and friends.”
“M-mister Diehl, I don’t think we should—”
“It isn’t right! Know what really sets us apart from the animals? Never mind what religion says about souls. Souls’re just puffs of air. The only thing makes a man’s death meaningful is remembrance. Without remembrance, he’s just a wind that blew over the world and never left a trace.”
“Mister Diehl! I don’t think we should talk about him any more. I don’t think we should meet again, either.”
“Huh? Why not?”
“If Lieutenant Hales finds out we’ve had this conversation and that I know about Ed Morris—”
“To hell with Hales! Don’t be scared of him; stand up to him like I did!”
“He may not be able to make trouble for you,” Leveritt said impatiently, “but I think he can make a lot for me. It’s already occurred to him to either send me back home or lock me up. Will you give me your word you won’t let him find out?”
“Bastard’s not gonna hear a thing from me. And if you’re upriver, he can’t bother you any.”
“I wish I could be sure of that. I’m – listen, from the moment I learned about the hole, I wanted to join this expedition. I worked hard to get here. Now that I am here . . .”
Her voice trailed off in a sob; her throat constricted as she sensed impending, insupportable loss, and tears gathered on her eyelashes. She clenched her jaw and fists and held on, somehow, to her composure. Beside her, Diehl coughed and said in his thickened voice, “Still some left, how ’bout it?” and when she had blinked away the tears, she saw him holding the flask out to her again.
“No,” she said, “thank you.”
“You ever drink?”
“Hardly ever.”
“Same here,” and he raised the flask to his lips.
“Well,” she said, and went carefully down the slope and directly to her tent. The camp had grown quiet, and most of the electric lights had been extinguished. A middle-aged woman answered her knock and let her get barely one sentence into an explanation before inviting her inside and introducing herself as Carol Hays.
“Rob Brinkman met me in the mess tent,” Hays said, “and told me to expect you. Sorry nobody was here earlier, but we were probably still sluicing the mud off ourselves. We’ve been slogging around in the marsh all day.”
Leveritt let Hays introduce her to a sleepy-looking young woman. She instantly forgot the woman’s name but managed to smile and say, “Doctor Brinkman told me you’re centipede enthusiasts.”
Hays made a mock-horrified face and then laughed, and the young woman, affecting a tolerably good Dixie-belle drawl, said, “We have found that gentlemen do not look at us quite so askance if we refer to ourselves as entomologists.”
Did either of you know Ed Morris? Leveritt wanted to ask. She was grateful that they were very tired and not such good hosts that they would stay awake on her account.
Soon, on her cot, in the dark, she lay listening to their soft, regular breathing and trying to resist falling immediately asleep. She had realized as soon as she lay her head down that she was exhausted, but she felt herself under obligation, at the end of a day she regarded as the most momentous of her life, to spend some time sifting through its events, analyzing and categorizing, summing up. She could not, however, keep everything straight on the ledger page before her mind’s eye; Ed Morris kept shoving everything else aside. Then, when she thought pointedly about what must have happened to him, her imagination was drawn not to visions of accidents resulting in death, but to one of a human figure stretched like a rubber band from the top of the geologic column toward an indefinite point at the mid-Paleozoic level. The figure was alive. It writhed across almost half a billion years.
She recoiled from that image, and another promptly presented itself: Ed Morris as a straight line continually approaching a curve but never meeting it within finite distance.
But perhaps, she told herself, he met a real death instead of some exotic asymptotic fate. Perhaps he’s at the bottom of the bay . . .
If I’d let him make the jump before me, it would’ve been me who . . .
And Morris might’ve been sitting out there with Diehl tonight, trying to think of something to say about a person he’d barely known for five minutes.
Or maybe not. Diehl wouldn’t even have known who Morris was talking about . . .
She awoke remembering no dreams. The sky had only begun to lighten; she showered and dressed and was packed and waiting to go when Brinkman came for her. He wore old khaki now, and a hat that needed blocking. After a quick breakfast, they went directly to the pier. There was fog enough so that, viewed from the pier’s end, the camp seemed obscured by curtains of gauze. Nothing could be seen of the vessels in the bay.
Leveritt and Brinkman stepped aboard the boat that was to carry them upriver. There was no ceremony, no one to see them on their way, and they were the only passengers. They sat under a white canopy and drank coffee from a thermos bottle as the lines were cast off and the boat nosed into the current. Pier and camp receded and were soon lost from sight; by the time the fog lifted, they lay behind a bend in the river. The view from the boat was of barren heights and marshy borders. Dense Lilliput
ian forests of primitive plants covered the low, muddy islets. At length, Brinkman put his face close to Leveritt’s and said, “Hello.”
She started, drew back, looked at him in astonishment.
“I said hello, Bonnie. Before that, I said I think it’s going to be a beautiful day.” He aimed a finger vaguely skyward. “You know, dazzling blue sky, fleecy white clouds.”
“Sorry. I must’ve – I was in a trance.”
“I’ll say.”
She nodded toward the marsh. “I guess I’ve probably seen nearly every documentary ever made about the Silurian. But I never imagined how quiet it is here. Life on Earth hasn’t found its voice yet. Hasn’t hit its stride.” She broke into a grin. “I think I’m quoting from one of those old documentaries.”
“I doubt it,” said Brinkman. “I bet everybody here is secretly, mentally narrating a documentary every second of the day.”
The boat bisected the silent world. Brinkman pulled his hat down over his eyes, folded his arms, and slept. After a time, Leveritt realized, and was by fast turns surprised and appalled to realize, that the vista bored her.
It can’t be! she thought in panic.
It isn’t, she thought a moment later. It’s something else. I’m distracted.
By Ed Morris.
Leveritt sprawled on her cot, arms and legs dangling over the edge because she could not bear her own blistering touch. It was a hot evening and humid, so sticky that her face stung and her T-shirt and boxer shorts adhered to her skin, pasted to it with perspiration. Her tentmate, Gilzow, lay on the other cot, a wet handkerchief over her face. The flaps were drawn at both ends of the tent; from time to time, the air between the two women stirred discreetly, trying, it seemed to Leveritt, to attract as little attention as possible when it did so.