Ancient Shores

by Jack McDevitt

  The TV crews returned in force the next day. They interviewed everybody and showed particular interest in the stag’s head. Max stayed late on the summit that evening, working. There was still some light on the escarpment when Tom Brokaw led into the final feature of the evening news broadcast, which was traditionally chosen to leave a positive impact. “In North Dakota, a team of researchers has begun digging again at the site of a very mysterious object,” he said. Aerial and ground pictures of the excavation site and the roundhouse appeared. “The object you are looking at was discovered several months ago a few miles from the Canadian border. The people who are directing the excavation aren’t talking much, but persons close to the effort think it may have been left by extraterrestrial visitors. Was it?” Brokaw smiled. “Carole Jensen, of our affiliate KLMR-TV in Grand Forks, has the story.”

  Closeup. Jensen stood in front of the curving wall, wrapped in a stylish overcoat. She was wearing no hat, and the wind played havoc with her hair. She looked cold. (It was hard to believe that elsewhere in the country pitchers and catchers were reporting to spring training.) “Tom, we’ve heard a lot of speculation about this site since we first found out about it last November. Experts across the country are saying that the test samples that were taken from the object they call the roundhouse should not be possible. They are also saying that they have no idea how such an element could be manufactured. But it’s here. And a small group of amateur archeologists has begun digging again. Before it’s over, we may have the first convincing evidence of a visit by extraterrestrials.”

  Yeah, thought Max. That’s good. As long as we’re not the ones saying it.

  The other networks took the same approach. They were all cautious. But it was a great story, and the media, once they were reasonably assured that nothing was amiss, would be trumpeting it.

  Max pulled on his coat and went outside. Moonlight fell on the excavation, illuminating the roundhouse, throwing shadows across the circular cut in which it stood. Peggy Moore’s theory that the cut was artificial, that someone had sliced a piece out of the rock to accommodate the structure, now seemed beyond question. The rocky shore had been too high above water level, Max thought, visualizing the ancient lake. So they’d removed a piece, installed their boathouse, and cut a channel through the last few feet.

  Eventually the inland sea had gone away, leaving the thing high and dry. And over ten thousand years the wind had filled everything back in.

  Might it be possible to find the piece they had taken out? He walked close to the edge and peered down.

  Harry Ernest was Fort Moxie’s lone delinquency problem. He’d acquired a passion for spray-can art in Chicago and had come to North Dakota to live with relatives when his mother died. (Harry never knew his father.)

  Harry’s major problem was that in a place like Fort Moxie, no free spirit can hide. He was the only known vandal north of Grand Forks; and consequently when an obscene exhortation showed up on the water tower or on one of the churches or at the Elks hall, the deputy knew exactly where to go to lay hands on the culprit.

  To his credit, and to his family’s dismay, Harry was dedicated to his art. But since he knew he would inevitably have to pay the price, he learned to choose his targets for maximum impact. When the roundhouse showed up on TV, Harry experienced a siren call.

  Tom Brokaw had hardly signed off before Harry was collecting the spray paint he’d hidden in the attic. Gold and white, he thought, would contrast nicely with the object’s basic color.

  He gave a great deal of consideration to the appropriate message and finally decided that simple was best. He would express the same sentiments he’d left on countless brick walls in and around Chicago. Harry’s response to the world.

  At around eleven o’clock, when the house had settled down, he took the car keys from the top of his uncle’s bureau, climbed out his bedroom window, and eased the family Ford out of the garage. A half-hour later he discovered that a police presence had been established at the access road. He therefore drove past and parked a half-mile beyond. From there he cut through the woods, intercepted the access road, and walked up.

  The roundhouse was a dark cylindrical shadow cast against subdued starlight. It overlooked the valley, and whatever he wrote would be spectacularly visible from Route 32 when the sun hit it.

  Several temporary buildings had been erected around the thing. He noted lights in one and somebody moving inside. Otherwise the area was deserted.

  He strolled across the summit, whistling softly, enjoying himself. In the shadow of the roundhouse he paused to check his spray cans. It was getting cold again, but they worked okay. Satisfied, he stood for a minute letting the wind blow on him. Yeah. This was what life was about. Wind in your hair. Snow coming. And sticking it to the world.

  He smiled and walked out onto the narrow strip of rock across the front of the roundhouse. The void beside him did not touch his sensibilities. He reached the center, turned to survey his canvas, and backed up until his heels ran out of shelf. Fortunately, the wind was coming from the west, so the structure protected him. That was important if you were trying to work with a spray can.

  He was relieved to note that the wall was made of beveled glass. There had been some disagreement on the TV about that. But people had been talking about glass, so he’d brought enamel.

  He pointed his flashlight at the wall, and the beam seemed to penetrate. He moved in close, tried to see inside. It occurred to him that there might be no inside, that the object might be solid.

  He shrugged and took out his spray can.

  He would do the first word in gold. He looked up and measured his target with his eye. The angle wasn’t so good because he was too close. But there was no help for that.

  The only sounds were the wind and a far-off plane.

  He aimed and pressed the nozzle. Paint sprayed out of the can in a fine mist, and the satisfying sense of changing pressures flowed down his arm.

  But unlike water towers and churches, the roundhouse tended to resist interaction with the world. The mist did not cling. Some of it liquefied and dribbled down the face of the wall. Some very little of it lodged in chinks and seams. But the bulk of it skimmed off into the air and formed a golden cloud.

  The cloud held its shape only briefly and then began to dissolve and descend.

  Harry could not have understood what was happening. He knew only that his face was suddenly wet. And his eyes stung.

  He dropped the can, cried out, and fell to his knees. His fists were in his eyes, and he scraped his arm against something in the dark, and he knew where he was, could not forget where he was. Then the ground was gone and he was falling. In his office a hundred yards away, Max heard the scream, poked his head out the door, and assigned it to an animal.

  13

  In all that vast midnight sea,

  The light only drew us on….

  —Walter Asquith, Ancient Shores

  Searchers found Harry by noon. His family reported him missing at eight o’clock, his car was discovered at nine-thirty, and workmen found an enamel spray can and a flashlight on the shelf in front of the roundhouse at a little after ten. The rest was easy.

  Max was outraged to think that anyone would want to damage the artifact. He found it hard to sympathize until he stood at the brink in the middle of the afternoon and looked down.

  Arky Redfern appeared near the end of the day. He examined the shelf with Max and shook his head. “Hard to believe,” he said.

  Max agreed.

  “There is the possibility of a lawsuit,” he added.

  The remark startled Max. “He came up here to vandalize the place,” he said.

  “Doesn’t matter. He was a child, and this is a dangerous area. A good lawyer would argue that we failed to provide security. And he would be right.”

  Max’s breath hung in the sunlight. It was a cold, crisp day, the temperature in the teens. “When do we reach a point where people become responsible for their own actio
ns?”

  Redfern shrugged. He was wearing a heavy wool jacket with the hood pulled up over his head. “There’s not much we can do now for this kid, but we’ll act to ensure there’s no repetition. That way, at least, we can show good faith if we have to.” He directed Max’s attention toward the parking area. A green van was just emerging from the trees at the access road. “I want you to meet someone,” he said.

  The van parked and the driver’s door opened. A Native American wearing a blue down jacket got out, looked toward them, and waved. He was maybe thirty years old, average height, dark eyes, black hair. Something about the way he looked warned Max to be polite. “This is my brother-in-law,” said Redfern. “Max, meet Adam Kicks-a-Hole-in-the-Sky.”

  The brother-in-law put out his hand. “Just Sky is good,” he said.

  “Adam will direct the security force,” Redfern continued.

  “What security force?” asked Max.

  “It came into existence this morning,” said the lawyer.

  Sky nodded. “My people will be here within the hour.” He surveyed the escarpment. “We’re going to need a command post.”

  “How about one of the huts?” suggested Redfern.

  “Yes,” he said. “That would do.”

  Max started to protest that they didn’t have space to give away, but the lawyer cut him off. “If you want to continue operations here, Max, you’ll have to provide security. I recommend Adam.”

  Sky shifted his weight. He looked at Max without expression. “Yeah,” Max said. “Sure. It’s no problem.”

  “Good.” Sky took a business card from his wallet and gave it to Max. “My personal number,” he said. “We’ll be set up here and in business by the end of the day.”

  Max was beginning to feel surrounded by con artists. What were Sky’s qualifications? The last thing they needed was a bunch of gun-toting locals. Redfern must have read his thoughts. “Adam is a security consultant,” he said. “For airlines, railroads, and trucking firms, primarily.”

  Sky looked at Max and then turned to gaze at the roundhouse. “This is a unique assignment,” he said. “But I think I can assure you there’ll be no more incidents.”

  Within an hour a pair of trucks and a work crew had arrived to begin putting up a chain-link fence. The fence would be erected about thirty feet outside the cut and would extend completely around the structure. Anyone who wanted to fall off the shelf now would have to climb eight feet to do it. “There’ll be no private vehicles inside the fence,” Sky explained.

  That was okay by Max. He was still wondering how the young vandal had managed to spray paint in his own eyes. He was aware that a rumor was circulating that the kid had used his flashlight to look through the wall. And had seen something.

  The fence went up in twenty-four hours. Sky’s next act was to set up a string of security lights around the perimeter of the cut. He mounted cameras at five locations.

  Uniformed Sioux guards appeared. The first that Max met fit quite closely his notion of how a Native American should look. He was big, dark-eyed, and taciturn. His name was John Little Ghost, and he was all business. Max’s views of Native Americans were proscribed by the Hollywood vision of a people sometimes noble, sometimes violent, and almost always inarticulate. He had been startled by his discovery of a Native-American lawyer and a security consultant. The fact that he was more at ease with John Little Ghost than with either Sky or Redfern left him paradoxically uneasy.

  The police investigation of Harry Ernest’s death came and went. Forms got filled out, and Max answered a few questions. (He had been on the escarpment until midnight, he said, and he didn’t think there had been anyone else here when he left. He had completely forgotten the “animal” cry he’d heard.) It was an obvious case of accidental death resulting from intended mischief, the police said. No evidence of negligence. That’s what they would report, and that would be the finding.

  Max went to the funeral. There were few attendees, and those seemed to be friends of the boy’s guardians. No young people were present. The guardians themselves were, Max thought, remarkably composed.

  The next day Redfern informed him that no legal action appeared likely.

  Tourists continued to arrive in substantial numbers. They were allowed onto the escarpment, but they were required to remain outside the fence. Police opened a second access road on the west side of the escarpment and established one-way traffic.

  No one had yet found a door.

  The security fence ran unbroken across the front of the roundhouse. Now that the area had been rendered safe, workers began to excavate the channel.

  With TV cameras present, they brought in a girl in a wheelchair from one of the local high schools to remove the first spadeful of dirt. She was a superlative science student, and she posed for the cameras, smiling prettily, and did her duty. Then the work teams got started.

  They knew it would be a drawn-out process because of the confined space. Only two people could dig at a time. Meanwhile, the sky turned gray and the temperature rose, a sign of snow. Around the circumference of the building, an army of people wielding brooms was clearing off the walls and the half-dozen braces that anchored the structure to its rocky base. April and Max watched through a security camera in the control module.

  This was to be the last week for all except a few designated workers. The rest would be paid and thanked and released. Charlie Lindquist was planning an appreciation dinner at the Fort Moxie city hall, and he’d arranged certificates for the workers which read I Helped Excavate the Roundhouse. (At about this time, the structure acquired a capital R.) Media coverage was picking up, as was the number of visitors. Cars filled Route 32 in both directions for miles.

  Periodically April went out, climbed down into the excavation, and strolled along the wall. She liked being near it, liked its feel against her palms, liked knowing that something perhaps quite different from her had stood where she now stood and had looked out across the blue waters of the long-vanished glacial lake.

  But today there was a change in the wall. She stood at the rear, near the stag’s head, looking past the long, slow curve at the wooded slope that mounted to the northern ridge, trying to pin down what her instincts were telling her. Everything appeared the same.

  She touched the beveled surface. Pressed her fingers to it.

  It was warm.

  Well, not warm, exactly. But it wasn’t as cold as it should have been. She let her palm linger against it.

  The west grew dark, and the wind picked up. Max watched the storm teams assemble and begin distributing tarpaulins. The digging stopped, and workers rigged the tarps around the excavation to prevent it from being filled with snow. When that was completed, they sent everyone home.

  No one wanted to be caught on the road when the storm hit. Including Max. “You ready?” he asked April.

  “Yes,” she said. “Go ahead. I’m right behind you.”

  Max put on his coat. The wind was beginning to fill with snow. Visibility would soon go to near zero.

  “Hey,” he said, “how about if I stop and get a pizza?”

  “Sure. I’ll see you back at the motel.”

  Max nodded and hurried out the door. The wind almost took it out of his hands.

  He walked to the gate and was greeted by Andrea Hawk, one of the security guards. She was also a radio entertainer of some sort in Devil’s Lake, Max recalled, and she was extremely attractive. “Good night, Mr. Collingwood,” Andrea said. “Be careful. The road is treacherous.”

  “How about you?” he asked. “When are you leaving?”

  “We’ll stay here tonight, or until our relief comes. Whichever.”

  Max frowned. “You sure?”

  “Sure,” she said. “We’re safer than you.”

  Whiteouts are windstorms, gales roaring across the plains at fifty miles an hour, loaded with dry snow. The snow may accompany the storm, or it might just be lying around on the ground. It doesn’t much matter. Anyone trying
to drive will see little more than windshield wipers.

  April resented the delay caused by the storm. She seldom thought about anything now other than the Roundhouse. She was desperate to know what was inside and who the builders were, and she spent much of her time watching the laborious effort to clear the channel.

  The day she’d seen Tom Lasker’s boat, she had begun a journal. Chiding herself for an attack of arrogance, she had nevertheless concluded that she was embarked on events of historic significance and that a detailed record would be of interest. During the first few days she’d satisfied herself with accounts of procedures and results. After Max had found Johnson’s Ridge, she’d begun to speculate. And after she had closed the operation down for the winter, she had realized that she would eventually write a memoir. Consequently, she’d begun describing her emotional reactions.

  The stag’s head intrigued her. It seemed so much a human creation that it caused her to doubt her results. Somehow, everything she had come to believe seemed mad in the face of that single, simple design. She had spent much of the afternoon trying to formulate precisely how she felt and then trying to get the journal entry right. Important not to sound like a nut.

  She put it in a desk drawer and listened to the wind. Time to go. She signed off the computer, and headed out into the storm. She was about ten minutes behind Max.

  At the entrance, John Little Ghost forced the gate open against the wind and suggested that maybe she should stay the night. “Going to be dangerous on the road!” he said, throwing each word toward her to get over the storm.

  “I’ll be careful,” April said.

  She was grateful to get to her car, where she caught her breath and turned the ignition. The engine started. There was an accumulation of snow on the rear window. She got her brush out of the trunk and cleared that off, and then waited until she had enough heat to keep the snow off the glass. Then she inched out of the lot and turned toward the opening in the trees that concealed the access road. She drove through a landscape in motion. The storm roared around her.