Ancient Shores

by Jack McDevitt

  Max excused himself and went to pack. It was time to go back to Fargo. With Tom coming in and the crowd wandering the premises, he could see no reason why he was needed. From the living room, Max watched cars continue to arrive. Rain was beginning to fall. Beyond the driveway, the fields were gray and bleak and rolled on forever.

  Where had the yacht come from?

  No serial number. No plates of any kind.

  Sails that had to have been in the ground, Ginny insisted, for more than twenty years. Crazy. He knew that wasn’t true.

  He dropped his bag at the front door and went back out to the barn to look at them. They were neatly stacked in plastic sheaths. He opened one and removed the fabric. It was bright white. And soft. More like the texture of a shirt than a sail.

  When Ginny returned, he didn’t have to ask how it had gone. She looked ecstatic.

  “She’s in your business, Max,” she said. “Do you believe that? Except that she restores boats.” She held out a business card. Pequod, Inc., it read. Mrs. George McCarthy, director. Boating as It Used to Be.

  “I take it she made an offer?”

  Ginny’s eyes grew big and round. “Yes!” she said, and her voice escalated to a squeal. “Six hundred thousand!” She grabbed Max and hugged him so hard she knocked him off balance.

  A van pulled into the driveway and opened its doors. Its passengers, who appeared to be a group of retired people, hesitated about getting out into the rain.

  Max shook his head. “Don’t jump too quickly,” he said.

  “What? Why not?”

  “Because it’s probably worth a lot more. Look, Ginny, boats are not my specialty. But it’s never prudent to rush into a deal.” He screwed his face up into a frown. Damned if he could figure this out. “I don’t think you stand to lose much by waiting. And, depending on what it turns out to be, you might have a lot to gain.”

  Ginny put on her jacket and walked outside with Max, where they stood on the porch with five or six tourists. The rain wasn’t much more than a light drizzle, but it was cold. “Ginny,” he said, “do you have any pictures? Of the yacht?”

  “Sure.”

  “May I have a few? And one other thing: I’d like to make off with a piece of sail. Okay?”

  She looked at him uncertainly. “Okay,” she said. “Why?”

  “I’d like to find out what it’s made from.”

  “It feels like linen,” she said.

  “That’s what I thought.”

  She smiled. “Sure,” she said. “Let me know what you find out.” A curtain of hard rain was approaching from the west. “I better put it away.” She jumped down off the porch, climbed into the tractor, and started the engine. Most of the visitors, seeing the sky, decided to get out while they could and ran to their cars.

  She had to back the boat into the barn. It was about halfway in, and she was turned around in the operator’s seat, trying to ease between stalls, when she stopped and stared. “Max.” She waved him forward. “Look at this.”

  “It’s raining out there,” he protested.

  But she waited for him. He sighed, jammed his hands into his pockets, and walked across the squishy lawn. “What?” he said. The rain got heavier. It drove against him, drilled him, took his breath away.

  She was pointing at the prow, paying no attention to the downpour. “Look.”

  He looked. “I don’t see anything.”

  “I don’t think,” she whispered, “it’s getting very wet.”

  A haze had risen around the boat, much the way it will on a city street during a downpour. Max shrugged. “What’s your point?”

  “Look at the tractor.”

  No mist.

  Well, maybe a little. The tractor had been recently polished. It shimmered, and large waxy drops ran down its fenders.

  But the boat: The rain fountained off the hull and was shot through with rainbow colors. It was almost as if the water was being repelled.

  An hour later the P—38J rolled down the runway at Fort Moxie International Airport and lifted into a gray, wet sky. Max watched the airstrip fall away. The wind sock atop the lone hangar was around to the southeast at about twenty knots. North of the airport, frame houses and picket fences and unpaved streets mingled with stands of trees and broad lawns. The water tower, emblazoned with the town’s name and motto, A Good Place to Live, rose proudly above the rooftops. The Red River looked cold.

  He followed Route 11 west, into the rain, flying over wide fields of wilted sunflowers waiting to be plowed under. Only a farm truck, and a flock of late geese headed south, moved in all that vast landscape. He cruised over Tom’s place. The driveway was almost empty now, and the barn was shut against the elements. He turned south.

  The rain beat on his canopy; the sky was gray and soupy. He looked over at his starboard tail boom, prosaic and solid. The power plant consisted of two 1,425-horsepower liquid-cooled Allison engines. White Lightning had been manufactured sixty years ago by the Lockheed Aircraft Corporation of Seattle. It was magic, too, like the boat. But this was real; it was magic held aloft by physics. There was no room in the same world for a P—38J and a buried yacht with working lights.

  None at all.

  He climbed to seventeen thousand feet, his assigned altitude, and set course for Fargo.

  Max dropped the fragment of sail off at Colson Laboratories, asking that they determine the composition of the material and, if possible, where it might have been manufactured. They promised to get the results back to him within a week.

  Stell Weatherspoon was his executive assistant. She was an overweight, bright-eyed, matronly type with three kids in high school and an ex who was constantly delinquent with his payments. Her prime responsibility at Sundown was to handle the administrative details of the operation. She wrote contracts, scheduled maintenance, hired subcontractors. She was also a born conservative who understood the difference between risks and gambles, and who thereby exercised a restraining influence on Max’s occasional capricious tendencies. Had she been along, Kerr would have had his Lockheed Lightning, no questions asked. “Don’t get emotionally involved with the planes,” she warned him now and then. “These are business ventures, not women.”

  She greeted him on his arrival at the Sundown offices with a disapproving stare. “Hello, Max.”

  “He wasn’t the right guy for the P—38,” he said.

  Her eyes drifted shut. “Our business is to restore and sell airplanes. Not find homes for them.”

  “He was a jerk,” Max said. “No good comes from that kind of money.”

  “Yeah, right. Max, the world is full of jerks. If you’re not going to sell to them, we are going to eliminate most of the population.”

  “The male population,” said Max.

  “You said it; I didn’t.”

  Max picked up his mail. “I was up on the border last night.”

  “Really?” she said. “Doing what?”

  “I’m not sure. Tom Lasker dug up a yacht on his farm.”

  “I saw it on TV,” she said. “That’s Lasker’s place? I didn’t realize that.”

  “It is. I spent the night up there.” Max drew a chair over beside her and sat down. “I need your help, Stell.” He opened his briefcase. “Ginny gave me some pictures.” He handed over six nine-by-twelve glossies.

  “It’s in pretty good condition,” she said, “for something that was buried.”

  “You noticed that, huh? Okay, look, what I’d like you to do is find out who made the damned thing. There’s no ID on it of any kind. Fax these around. Try the manufacturers, boat dealers, importers. And the Coast Guard. Somebody’ll be able to tell us something.”

  “Why do we care?” she asked.

  “Because we’re snoops. Because your boss would like to know what the hell’s going on. Okay?”

  “Sure. When do you want it?”

  “Forthwith. Let me know what you find out.” He went into his office and tried to call Morley Clark at Moorhead State.r />
  “Professor Clark is in class,” said his recorded voice. “Please feel free to leave a message at the beep.”

  “This is Max Collingwood. Morley, I’m going to fax you some photos. They’re of a yacht, and there’s a piece of writing on the hull. If you can identify the language, or better yet get a translation, I’d be grateful.”

  Everett Crandall came out personally to usher Lasker into his office. “I saw your boat the other day, Tom. You’re a lucky man, looks like to me.” Ev was more or less permanently rumpled—both he and his clothes.

  “That’s why I’m here,” said Lasker.

  “What’s going on? Whose boat is it?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “Come on, Tom. You must have some idea.”

  Ev’s office was packed with old law books, framed certificates, and photos, most of which had been taken during his tenure as county prosecutor. Prominently displayed on his desk was a picture of Ev and Senator Byron Glass at last year’s Fourth of July celebration.

  Lasker sat down. “Ev,” he said, “I’ve got a prospective buyer.”

  “For the boat?”

  “Yes. Is it mine to sell?”

  Ev nodded, but his dark eyes said no. He took off his glasses, wiping them with a wrinkled handkerchief. “Hard to say,” he said.

  “It’s on my property. That should make it mine, right?”

  Ev’s hands were in his lap. He looked down at them. “Tom, if I left my RV over at your place, would it be yours?”

  “No. But this was buried.”

  “Yeah.” Ev considered that. “If I chose to hide my family silver by burying it out back of your house, would it be yours?”

  “I don’t know,” said Tom. “I don’t guess it would.”

  “Have you heard from anyone? I mean, has anybody put in a claim for the boat?”

  “No. Nobody.”

  “Have you exhausted reasonable means to establish ownership?”

  “Is that my responsibility?”

  “Who else’s? Listen, for all we know it could be stolen. The thieves hid it in your ground. For whatever reason. In that case, it would belong to the original owner.” Ev was a careful man, a model of caution. He took pride in not committing to a view until all the facts were in. Which meant, of course, that he was never quite on board. Or in opposition. “The question here, as I see it, is one of intent. Was the property abandoned? If so, then I think your claim to ownership would be valid. And I believe that claim would be substantiated in court, if need be. If someone challenged it.”

  “Who would challenge it?”

  “Oh, hard to say. A relative might claim the owner was not competent when he, or she, abandoned the boat. Burying it might constitute a sound argument in that direction.”

  “So how do I establish ownership?”

  “Let me research it, Tom. Meantime, it would help if we could find out how it came to be where it was.”

  5

  Antiquities are remnants of history which have casually escaped the shipwrecks of time.

  —Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, II

  Stell pursued her mission for three days. No one could identify a manufacturer. There were two more or less similar models of yachts, but nothing identical. Max asked her to keep at it.

  Morley Clark had no idea whatever about the symbols on the hull. In fact, Max found it impossible to convince him he was serious. “These characters,” Clark told Max, “are not part of any language of any industrialized society.” There were eleven of them, presumably the name of the craft. They were cursive, rendering it difficult to be sure of the exact shape of an individual character. Max recognized an O but nothing else.

  They were sitting in Clark’s office on the campus of Moorhead State. Outside, the sun was shining, and the temperature was a balmy forty degrees. “That can’t be right, Morley,” he said. “You must have missed something.”

  Clark smiled tolerantly. He was lanky, broad-shouldered, athletic. A softball nut. “I agree, Max. But I can’t see where. Maybe the data banks aren’t as complete as they’re supposed to be. But as a practical matter, I think we have damned near everything. Your stuff won’t make a match. Well, a couple of the symbols do. One’s Hindustani, another’s Cyrillic. Which means it’s pure coincidence. You put a few lines and loops together and you have to come up with something.” He looked down at the photo on his desk. “Max, it’s a joke.”

  Max thanked Clark and drove back to Chellis Field wondering who was the joker and who the jokee. He was by turns mystified and irritated. It had to be some kind of gang thing. Had to be.

  He was up on I—29 when Stell reached him on his cellular phone. “You got a call from Colson Laboratories. Can you take it?”

  Already? It was only two days. “Okay,” he said. “Put them through.”

  “Roger. And Max?”

  “Yes?”

  “They sound excited.”

  The phone clicked. “Mr. Collingwood?” A woman’s voice. And Stell was right: She sounded as if she’d just run up two flights of stairs.

  “Yes, this is Max Collingwood. Can I help you?”

  “My name’s Cannon. I’m calling for Colson Labs. About the samples you left the other day.”

  “Okay.”

  “I assume you’re not at your office now?”

  “I’ll be there in ten minutes,” said Max. “What have you got?”

  “Can I meet you there?” she asked.

  She was black, slender, in her mid-thirties. Her business card indicated she was a lab director for Colson. Good smile, high cheekbones, and an aura of barely-suppressed excitement. She wore a navy blue business suit and carried a leather briefcase. “Pleasure to meet you, Mr. Collingwood,” she said, extending her hand. “I’m April Cannon.”

  Max took her coat. “I didn’t expect results quite so soon.”

  Her smile implied there was a secret between them. She sat down, keeping the briefcase on her lap, and looked at him sharply. “I’ll admit we don’t usually do home delivery, Mr. Collingwood,” she said. “But you and I both know you’ve got something very unusual here.”

  Max nodded as if that was all very true.

  Her eyes cut into him. “Where did you get it?”

  Max wondered briefly whether he should keep the source quiet. But what the hell, it’d been on TV. “It was buried up on the border.”

  “The boat? The one they found on the farm?”

  Max nodded.

  “The boat. I’ll be damned.” Her eyes lost their focus. “May I see it?” she asked.

  “Sure,” he said. “Everybody else has been up there.” She seemed to be drifting away from him. “What exactly can you tell me?”

  “Let me ask you something,” she said, as if he had not spoken. “Did you drop any samples off anywhere else?”

  “No,” said Max.

  “Good.” She released the snaps on the briefcase, withdrew a folder, and handed it over. “How’s your chemistry?”

  “Shaky.”

  “That’s okay. Listen, Mr. Collingwood—”

  “I think this’ll go quicker if you call me Max.”

  “Okay, Max.” She smiled. Max had the feeling that she wasn’t really seeing him. “Colson’s a small operation. I did the lab work myself. Nobody else knows.”

  “Knows what?”

  She pointed at the folder.

  Max opened it and glanced over a one-page form.

  “I wonder if you’d translate it for me.”

  She looked around the office. “Can we be overheard?”

  That startled him. “No,” he said.

  “Okay. The material’s a fiber. It’s very fine, and it’s woven.” Her voice dropped almost to a whisper. “It has an atomic number of one-sixty-one. It’s a transuranic.”

  “What’s a transuranic?”

  “An artificially-created element.”

  “Is that a problem?”

  “Max, this is a transuranic in spades. We’ve
got one out there now so new it hasn’t even been named yet. It has an atomic number of one-twelve. That’s the top of the chart. Or it used to be. This stuff—” She shook her head. “It shouldn’t exist.”

  “So what are we saying here?”

  Her features were tense. “Nobody has the technology to manufacture this kind of stuff. Even if we did, the element should be inherently unstable. And hot.”

  “Hot? You mean radioactive?” Max began reviewing how much time he’d spent close to the sails.

  “Yes. That’s what it should be.” She produced what remained of the sample, and held it up to a lamp. “But it’s okay. Maybe at those levels, elements lose their radioactivity. I don’t know. Nobody does.”

  “Are you sure about this?” he asked.

  “Yes. Of course I’m sure.”

  Max got up and walked to the window. A Cessna was just touching down. “I don’t think I understand what you’re telling me.”

  She did not answer for a long time. “Somebody,” she said at last, “somewhere, has made a technological leap over the rest of us. A big one.”

  “Okay,” he said. “So is it important?”

  “Max, I’m not talking about a moderate advance. I’m talking light-years. This shouldn’t be possible.”

  Max shrugged. “Obviously it is.”

  She got that faraway look again. “Apparently,” she said.

  “So, what are the implications? Is there a commercial advantage to it?”

  “Oh, I would think so. The electrons are extremely stable. Extremely. I’ve already done some tests. It does not interact with other elements.”

  “I’m still not following.”

  “It’s virtually indestructible.”

  Max knew better. “That can’t be right,” he said. “The sample I sent you was cut with a pair of scissors.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t mean that kind of indestructibility. Obviously you can cut it. Or crunch it. But it won’t decay. It won’t fall apart on its own.” She was watching him closely, trying to decide, he thought, whether he knew more than he was saying. “Do you think if I drove up there, they’d let me see it tonight?”

  “Sure,” he said. “I’ll make a call for you, if you like.” Something that had been floating in the back of his mind suddenly took form. “You said it won’t decay. How old is the sample?”