“I know what you’re thinking,” she said, mischievously.
“What am I thinking?”
“He won’t care,” she said. “Ed doesn’t care about me.”
That made no sense. He doesn’t own the property. If he had no feelings for her, why on earth would he stay in this godforsaken place? I replayed the evening. The way Marsh had introduced her. The way he’d responded when he had discovered we’d known each other. The way he talked to her. “I don’t believe it,” I said.
“Nevertheless it’s true. He feels trapped here, and he blames me.” She pushed up out of her chair. “He stays out of a sense of duty.”
Her grip tightened on my hand, and a tear ran down her cheek. It was a moment I’d contemplated many times when I was younger. Ellie perhaps realizing at last what she had lost. Asking me to forgive. In my imagination, the moment had always seemed delicious. But when it came, I took no pleasure in it.
“You never married,” she said.
“I never stayed in one place long enough. Anyway no one ever seemed much interested.”
“Well, we both know that’s not true,” she said. She stared at me for a long moment, and, without another word, got out of her chair, pressed her lips against my cheek, and left the room.
I went to bed. I didn’t sleep well, though, and I was tempted to clear out during the night. But that might have raised questions and embarrassed Ellie. So I determined to get through breakfast and leave as quickly as I reasonably could.
Bacon and coffee were already on when I started down. I poked my head into the dining room first, saw no one, and made for the kitchen. Ellie was there, manning an electric stove. But I saw immediately that something was wrong. She looked tired, and the joie-de-vivre of the previous day had been replaced with knife-edged intensity. “Good morning, Jeff,” she said. Her tone was cordial, but not warm.
She wore a white jumper open at the throat, and a knee-length knit skirt. Her hair was brushed back, revealing pale, drawn features. “You okay?” I asked.
“I’m fine.” She delivered a dispirited smile. “How do you like your eggs?”
“Medium well.” I looked at her. “What’s wrong?”
She poked at the bacon. “He’s gone, Jeff.”
“Gone? Ed?”
“Yes.”
“Where?”
“Out. Skedaddled. Left for parts unknown.”
“My God. What happened?”
She turned her attention to the eggs, scooping at them and wiping her eyes with the backs of her hands. I pulled the pan from the burner and set it down where things wouldn’t burn, and then I caught her up: “Talk to me,” I said.
“He left before dawn.”
“Did he think something happened between us?”
“No,” she said. “No. Nothing like that.”
“What makes you think he’s not coming back?”
“I know he’s not coming back.” She shook her head. “Listen, I’ll be okay. Best thing is for you to eat and head out.”
“Tell me why,” I said.
“I’ve already told you. He felt trapped here. I warned him what it would be like, but he wouldn’t listen, or didn’t really understand. When you came, last night, when he saw that we had been friends, maybe more than friends, he saw his chance.”
“To bolt?”
She nodded.
“Knowing that I wouldn’t leave you here alone?”
“I’m sure that’s what he thought.”
“A creep with a conscience.” I sank into a chair.
“That’s not true,” she said. “He waited. He stayed for years. Most men would have just walked out. Jeff, he never committed to this.”
“Sure he did,” I said. “When he moved in, he made a commitment.” But I could see it hurt her. She wanted to think well of the son of a bitch, so I let it go.
We abandoned the kitchen, left breakfast in ruins, and wandered into the room with the fireplaces.
“Okay,” I said. “What happens now?”
She shrugged. “I’ll manage.”
“You can’t stay here alone.”
“Why not?”
“Alone? Rattling around in this place?”
“It’s my home.”
“It will be a prison. Close it up and come back with me. To the Forks. It’ll be safe for a while. Give yourself a chance to get away from it.”
“No.” Her voice caught. “I can’t leave here.”
“Sure you can. Just make up your mind and do it.”
She nodded and took a long breath. “Maybe you’re right,” she said. “Maybe it is time to let go.”
“Good.” I saw possibilities for myself. “Listen, we’ll—”
“—Take my chances—.” She was beginning to look wild. “There’s no reason I should have to be buried here—”
“None at all,” I said.
“If it gets loose, it gets loose. I mean, nobody else cares, do they?”
“Right,” I said. “If what gets loose?”
She looked at me a long time. “Maybe you should know what’s in the basement.”
I didn’t like the sound of that.
I tried to get her to explain, but she only shook her head. “I’ll show it to you,” she said.
So I followed her down to the lobby. Outside, the snow cover ran unbroken to the horizon. I looked at the Native American display. “Corey’s idea,” she said. “He thought it provided a counterpoint to the technology.”
We went downstairs, down four more levels in fact, into the bowels of the building. At each floor I paused and looked along the corridors, which were dark, illuminated only by the lights in the stairway area. The passageways might have gone on forever. “How big is this place?” I asked.
“Big,” she said. “Most of it’s underground. Not counting the tunnel.” As we got lower, I watched her spirits revive. “I think you’re right, Jeff. It is time to get out. The hell with it.”
“I agree.” I put an arm around her and squeezed, and her body was loose and pliable, the way a woman is when she’s ready.
“Jeff,” she said, “I meant what I said last night.”
During the time we had known one another, I had never told her how I felt. Now, deep below the Tower, I embraced her, and held her face in my hands, and kissed her. Tears rolled again, and when we separated, my cheeks were wet. “Ellie,” I said, “for better or worse, I love you. Always have. There has never been a moment when I would not have traded everything I had for you.”
She shook her head. No. “You’d better see what you’re getting into first before you say any more.”
We turned on lights and proceeded down a long corridor, past more closed rooms. “These were laboratories,” she said, “and storage rooms, and libraries.” The floor was dusty. Walls were bare and dirty The doors were marked with the letter designator ‘D’, and numbered in sequence, odd on the left, even on the right. There had been carpeting, I believe, at one time. But there was only rotted wood underfoot now.
“Doesn’t look as if you come down here very much,” I said.
She pointed at the floor, and I saw footprints in the dust. “Every day.”
She threw open a door and stepped back. I walked past her into the dark.
I could not immediately make out the dimensions of the room, or its general configuration. But ahead, a blue glow flickered and wavered and crackled. Lights came on. The room was quite large, maybe a hundred feet long. Tables and chairs were scattered everywhere, and the kind of antique equipment that turns up sometimes in ruins was piled high against both side walls.
The blue glow was on the other side of a thick smoked window. The window was at eye level, about thirty feet long, and a foot high. She watched me. I crossed to the glass and looked in.
A luminous, glowing cylinder floated in the air. It was a foot off the floor, and it extended almost to the ceiling. Thousands of tiny lights danced and swirled within its folds. It reminded me of a Christmas tree the
Sioux had raised outside Sunset City a couple of years ago. “What is it?” I asked.
“The devil,” she said softly.
A chill worked its way up my back. “What do you mean?”
“It’s a result of the research they did here. A by-product. Something that wasn’t supposed to happen. Jeff, they knew there was a possibility things might go wrong. But the bastards went ahead anyway—.”
“Wait,” I said. “Slow down. Went ahead with what?”
“With what we were talking about last night. Smashing atoms. Jeff, this was state-of-the-art stuff,” She moved close to me, and I touched her hair. “Do you know what protons are?”
“Yeah. Sort of. They’re made of atoms.”
“Other way around,” she said. “The thing about protons is that they are extremely stable. Protons are the basic building blocks of matter. There is nothing more stable than a proton. Or at least, there used to be nothing—.”
“I’m not following this.”
“The people who worked here knew there was a possibility they might produce an element that would be more stable.” Her voice was rising, becoming breathless. “And they also knew that if it actually happened, if they actually produced such an element, it would destabilize any proton it came into contact with.”
“Which means what?”
“They’d lose the lab.”
I was still watching the thing, fascinated. It seemed to be rotating slowly, although the lights moved independently at different speeds, and some even rotated against the direction of turn. The effect was soothing.
“In fact,” she continued, “they were afraid of losing the Dakotas.”
“You mean that it might destroy the Dakotas?”
“Yes.”
“Ridiculous.”
“I would have thought so too. But apparently not. Not if the records are correct.”
I couldn’t figure it out. “Why would they make something like that?” I asked.
“They didn’t set out to make it. They thought it was possible. A by-product. But the chances seemed remote, and I guess the research was important, so they went ahead.”
I still couldn’t see the problem. After all, it was obvious that nothing untoward had occurred.
“They took steps to protect themselves in case there was an incident. They developed a defense. Something to contain it.”
“How?”
“You’re looking at it. It’s a magnetic field that plays off the new element. They called it Heisium.”
“After its discoverer?”
“Yes.”
“So it’s contained. What’s the problem?”
She stood with her back to it, looking away. “What do you suppose would happen if the power failed here?”
“The lights would go out.” And I understood. The lights would go out. “Isn’t there a backup?”
“It’s on the backup. Has been for almost two hundred years. The Crash took out their electrical source, and it’s been running on the Tower’s solar array ever since.”
“Why do you come down here every day?”
“Check the gauges. Look around. Make sure everything’s okay.”
That shook me. “What do you do if it isn’t?”
“Flip a circuit breaker. Tighten a connection. Rewire whatever.” She inhaled. “Somebody has to do this.”
“Jesus.”
“They kept this place manned for forty years. Then, after the Crash, the son of one of the people responsible for the original decision, Avery Bolton, the guy the Tower’s named for, stayed on. And kept the place going. When he died, his daughter succeeded him. And brought her family. In one way or another, that family has been here ever since. Until Corey. And his brothers. His brothers weren’t worth much, and now I’m all that’s left.” She shook her head. “Seen enough?”
“Ellie, do you really believe all this?”
“I believe there’s a good chance the threat is real.” We were sitting in the lobby. “Why else would I be here?”
“Things get twisted over a longtime. Maybe they were wrong.” Outside, the day was bright and cold. “I just can’t believe it.”
“That’s good,” she said. “You should continue to think that. But I’m going to have to continue to assume that Corey knew what he was talking about.”
“My God, Ellie, it’s a trap.”
She looked at me, and her eyes were wet. “Don’t you think I know that?”
I looked up at an oil of a Sioux warrior on horseback, about to plunge a lance into a bison. “There’s a way to settle it,” I said.
She shook her head. “No.”
“Ellie. We can shut it down. Nothing will happen.”
“No. I won’t consider it. And I want you to promise you won’t do anything like that.”
I hesitated.
“I want your word, Jeff. Please.”
“Okay,” I said.
“Not ever. No matter what.”
“Not ever.” She looked fragile. Frightened. “No matter what.”
She looked out across the snowfields. “It must be time to go.”
“I won’t leave you,” I said.
That evening was a night to kill for. The consummation of love, denied over a lifetime, may be as close as you can come to the point of existence. I took her, and took her again, and went limp in her arms, and woke to more passion. Eventually the curtains got gray, and I made promises that she said she didn’t want to hear, but I made them anyway. We had a magnificent breakfast, and made love again in the room with the fireplaces. Eventually, sometime around lunch, we went down and looked again at Bolton’s devil. She took along a checklist, and explained the gauges and circuit breakers and pointed out where the critical wiring was, and where things might go wrong. Where they’d gone wrong in the past. “Just in case,” she said. “Not that I expect you to get involved in this, but it’s best if someone else knows. Edward hated to do this. He rarely came here.”
She showed me where the alarms were throughout our living quarters, and how, if the power supply got low, the system automatically shunted everything into the storage batteries in the lab. “It’s happened a couple of times when we’ve had consecutive weeks without sunlight.”
“It must get cold,” I said. The temperatures here dropped sometimes to forty below for a month at a time.
“We’ve got fireplaces,” she said. “And we’ll have each other.”
It was all I needed to hear.
I stayed on, of course. And I did it with no regrets. I too came to feel the power of the thing in the lab. I accepted the burden voluntarily. And not without a sense of purpose, which, I knew, would ultimately bind us together more firmly than any mere vow could have.
We worried because the systems that maintained the magnetic bottle were ageing. Eventually, we knew, it would fail. But not, we hoped, in our lifetimes.
We took turns riding the buckboard over to Sandywater for supplies. Our rule was that someone was always available at the Tower. In case.
And one day, about three months after my arrival, she did not come back. When a second day had passed without word, I went after her. I tracked her as far as the town, where I found the buckboard. There was no sign of her. Jess Harper, who works for Overland, thought he’d seen her get into a buckboard with a tall bearded man. “They rode west,” he said. “I thought it was odd.”
That was almost a year ago. I still make the rounds in the Tower, and I still believe she’ll come back. In the meantime, I check the gauges and occasionally throw a circuit breaker. The power in the living quarters shut down once, but I got through it okay. We got through it okay.
What I can’t understand is how I could have been so wrong. I know who the bearded man was, and I try to tell myself that they must have been very desperate to get away. And I try to forgive them. Forgive her.
But it’s not easy. Some nights when the moon is up, and the wind howls around the Tower, I wonder what they are doing and whether she ever thinks
about me. And occasionally, I am tempted to break my promise, and turn things off. Find out once and for all.
TIME’S ARROW
It can’t be done.” I stared at him and at the gridwork torus that dominated the lab. “Time travel is prohibited.”
He pushed a stack of printouts off the coffee table to make room for his Coors. “Gillie,” he said, “you’ve got all those old Civil War flags and that drum from—ah—?”
“Fredericksburg.”
“Yeah. Fredericksburg. And how many times have you been to the battlefields? Listen, we can go see the real thing. Sumter. Bull Run. The Wilderness. You name it.” He grinned as if it were a piece of cake. “The arrow of time runs both ways. We can reverse it in the macroworld, too, Gillie. Tonight, I’ll prove it to you.”
“How?”
“What would you say to dinner and a show in Lincoln’s D.C.?”
“Come on, Mac. Think about it. If it’s possible, someone will eventually do it. If not you, someone else. If that ever happens, history will be littered with tourists. They’d be everywhere. They’d be on the Santa Maria, they’d be at Appomattox with Polaroids, they’d be waiting outside the tomb, for God’s sake, on Easter morning. So if you’re right, where is everybody?”
He nodded. “I know. It is odd. I don’t understand why there’s no evidence.”
I drew back the thick curtains that blocked off the hard sunlight. Across the empty street, I could see Harvey Keating trying to get his lawn-mower started. “In fact, if you were the father of time travel, they’d be out there now. Taking pictures of the house. Banging on the door.”
He nodded. “I hear what you’re saying.” A pickup rumbled past. Keating’s lawnmower kicked into life. “Still,” he said quietly, “it works.” He jabbed an index finger toward the torus and expanded his arms in a grand gesture that took in the entire lab, with its computer banks, gauges, power cord tangles, roll-top desk. Everything. “It works,” he said again. His gaze lost focus. “I’ve been somewhere. I’m not sure where.” He lowered himself onto a mustard-colored divan. “I finally realized the problem was in the stasis coils—”
Cryptic - The Best Short Fiction of Jack McDevitt Page 55