by Jack Dann
PENNSYLVANIAN
270-310 MILLION YEARS
On both sides of the canyon, the rock layers lay stacked like sections from a giant meat slicer. In the pickup cab, the passengers had been listening to the news on KTWO, As the canyon deepened, the reception faded until only a trickle of static came from the speaker. Carroll clicked the radio off.
"They're screwed," said Ginger.
"Not necessarily." Carroll, riding shotgun, stared out the window at the slopes of flowers the same color as the bluffs. "The BIA's still got hearings. There'll be another tribal vote."
Ginger said again, "They're screwed. Money doesn't just talk—it makes obscene phone calls, you know? Paul's got this one bagged. You know Paul—I know him just about as well. Son of a bitch."
"Sorry there's no music," said Steve. "Tape player busted a while back and I've never fixed it."
They ignored him. "Damn it," said Ginger. "It took almost fifteen years, but I've learned to love this country."
"I know that," said Carroll.
No one said anything for a while. Steve glanced to his right and saw tears running down Ginger's cheeks. She glared back at him defiantly. "There's Kleenexes in the glove box," he said.
MADISON FORMATION
MISSISSIPPIAN
310-350 MILLION YEARS
The slopes of the canyon became more heavily forested. The walls were all shades of green, deeper green where the runoff had found channels. Steve felt time collect in the great gash in the earth, press inward.
"I don't feel so hot," said Ginger.
"Want to stop for a minute?"
She nodded and put her hand over her mouth.
Steve pulled the pickup over across both lanes. The Chevy skidded slightly as it stopped on the graveled turnout. Steve turned off the key and in the sudden silence they heard only the light wind and the tickings as the Chevy's engine cooled.
"Excuse me," said Ginger. They all got out of the cab. Ginger quickly moved through the Canadian thistle and the currant bushes and into the trees beyond. Steve and Carroll heard her throwing up.
"She had an affair with Paul," Carroll said casually. "Not too long ago. He's an extremely attractive man." Steve said nothing. "Ginger ended it. She still feels the tension." Carroll strolled over to the side of the thistle patch and hunkered down. "Look at this."
Steve realized how complex the ground cover was. Like the rock cliffs, it was layered. At first he saw among the sunflowers and dead dandelions only the wild sweet peas with their blue blossoms like spades with the edges curled inward.
"Look closer," said Carroll.
Steve saw the hundreds of tiny purple moths swooping and swarming only inches from the earth. The creatures were the same color as the low purple blooms he couldn't identify. Intermixed were white, bell-shaped blossoms with leaves that looked like primeval ferns.
"It's like going back in time," said Carroll. "It's a whole nearly invisible world we never see."
The shadow crossed them with an almost subliminal flash, but they both looked up. Between them and the sun had been the wings of a large bird. It circled in a tight orbit, banking steeply when it approached the canyon wall. The creature's belly was dirty white, muting to an almost-black on its back. It seemed to Steve that the bird's eye was fixed on them. The eye was a dull black, like unpolished obsidian.
"That's one I've never seen," said Carroll. "What is it?"
"I don't know. The wingspread's got to be close to ten feet. The markings are strange. Maybe it's a hawk? An eagle?"
The bird's peak was heavy and blunt, curved slightly. As it circled, wings barely flexing to ride the thermals, the bird was eerily silent, pelagic, fishlike.
"What's it doing?" said Carroll.
"Watching us?" said Steve. He jumped as a hand touched his shoulder.
Sorry," said Ginger. "I feel better now." She tilted her head back at the great circling bird. "I have a feeling our friend wants us to leave."
They left. The highway wound around a massive curtain of stone in which red splashed down through the strata like dinosaur blood. Around the curve, Steve swerved to miss a deer dead on the pavement—half a deer, rather. The animal's body had been truncated cleanly just in front of its haunches.
"Jesus," said Ginger. "What did that?"
"Must have been a truck," said Steve. "An eighteen-wheeler can really tear things up when it's barreling."
Carroll looked back toward the carcass and the sky beyond. "Maybe that's what our friend was protecting."
GROS VENTRE FORMATION
CAMBRIAN
500-600 MILLION YEARS
"You know, this was all under water once," said Steve. He was answered only with silence. "Just about all of Wyoming was covered with an ancient sea. That accounts for a lot of the coal." No one said anything. "I think it was called the Sundance Sea. You know, like in the Sundance Kid. Some Exxon geologist told me that in a bar."
He turned and looked at the two women. And stared. And turned back to the road blindly. And then stared at them again. It seemed to Steve that he was looking at a double exposure, or a triple exposure, or—he couldn't count all the overlays. He started to say something, but could not. He existed in a silence that was also stasis, the death of all motion. He could only see.
Carroll and Ginger faced straight ahead. They looked as they had earlier in the afternoon. They also looked as they had fifteen years before. Steve saw them in process, lines blurred. And Steve saw skin merge with feathers, and then scales. He saw gill openings appear, vanish, reappear on textured necks.
And then both of them turned to look at him. Their heads swiveled slowly, smoothly. Four reptilian eyes watched him, unblinking and incurious.
Steve wanted to look away.
The Chevy's tires whined on the level blacktop. The sign read:
SPEED ZONE AHEAD
35 MPH
"Are you awake?" said Ginger.
Steve shook his head to clear it. "Sure," he said. "You know that reverie you sometimes get into when you're driving? When you can drive miles without consciously thinking about it, and then suddenly you realize what's happened?"
Ginger nodded.
"That's what happened."
The highway passed between modest frame houses, gas stations, motels. They entered Shoshoni.
There was a brand-new welcome to shoshoni sign, as yet without bullet holes. The population figure had again been revised upward. "Want to bet on when they break another thousand?" said Carroll.
Ginger shook her head silently.
Steve pulled up to the stop sign. "Which way?"
Carroll said, "Go left."
"I think I've got it." Steve saw the half-ton truck with the Enerco decal and native American resources division labeled below that on the door. It was parked in front of the Yellowstone Drugstore. "Home of the world's greatest shakes and malts," said Steve. "Let's go."
The interior of the Yellowstone had always reminded him of nothing so much as an old-fashioned pharmacy blended with the interior of the cafe in Bad Day at Black Rock. They found Paul at a table near the fountain counter in the back. He was nursing a chocolate malted.
He looked up, smiled, said, "I've gained four pounds this afternoon. If you'd been any later, I'd probably have become diabetic."
Paul looked far older than Steve had expected. Ginger and Carroll both appeared older than they had been a decade and a half before, but Paul seemed to have aged thirty years in fifteen. The star quarterback's physique had gone a bit to pot.
His face was creased with lines emphasized by the leathery curing of skin that has been exposed years to wind and hot sun. Paul's hair, black as coal, was streaked with firn lines of glacial white. His eyes, Steve thought, looked tremendously old.
He greeted Steve with a warm handclasp. Carroll received a gentle hug and a kiss on the cheek. Ginger got a warm smile and a hello. The four of them sat down and the fountain man came over. "Chocolate all around?" Paul said.
"Vanilla shake," said Ginger.
Steve sensed a tension at the table that seemed to go beyond dissolved marriages and terminated affairs. He wasn't sure what to say after all the years, but Paul saved him the trouble. Smiling and soft-spoken, Paul gently interrogated him.
So what have you been doing with yourself?
Really?
How did that work out?
That's too bad; then what?
What about afterward?
And you came back?
How about since?
What do you do now?
Paul sat back in the scrolled-wire ice-cream parlor chair, still smiling, playing with the plastic straw. He tied knots in the straw and then untied them.
"Do you know," said Paul, "that this whole complicated reunion of the four of us is not a matter of chance?"
Steve studied the other man. Paul's smile faded to impassivity. "I'm not that paranoid," Steve said. "It didn't occur to me."
"It's a setup."
Steve considered that silently.
"It didn't take place until after I had tossed the yarrow stalks a considerable number of times," said Paul. His voice was wry. "I don't know what the official company policy on such irrational behavior is, but it all seemed right under extraordinary circumstances. I told Carroll where she could likely find you and left the means of contact up to her."
The two women waited and watched silently. Carroll's expression was, Steve thought, one of concern. Ginger looked apprehensive. "So what is it?" he said. "What kind of game am I in?"
"It's no game," said Carroll quickly. "We need you."
"You know what I thought ever since I met you in Miss Gorman's class?" said Paul. "You're not a loser. You've just needed some—direction."
Steve said impatiently, "Come on."
"It's true." Paul set down the straw. "Why we need you is because you seem to see things most others can't see."
Time's predator hunts.
Years scatter before her like a school of minnows surprised. The rush of her passage causes eons to eddy. Wind sweeps down the canyon with the roar of combers breaking on the sand. The moon, full and newly risen, exerts its tidal force.
Moonlight flashes on the slash of teeth.
She drives for the surface not out of rational decision. All blunt power embodied in smooth motion, she simply is what she is.
Steve sat without speaking. Finally he said vaguely, "Things."
"That's right. You see things. It's an ability."
"I don't know . . ."
"We think we do. We all remember that night after prom. And there were other times, back in school. None of us has seen you since we all played scatter-geese, but I've had the resources, through the corporation, to do some checking. The issue didn't come up until recently. In the last month, I've read your school records, Steve. I've read your psychiatric history."
"That must have taken some trouble," said Steve. "Should I feel flattered?"
"Tell him," said Ginger. "Tell him what this is all about."
"Yeah," said Steve. "Tell me."
For the first time in the conversation, Paul hesitated. "Okay," he finally said. "We're hunting a ghost in the Wind River Canyon."
"Say again?"
"That's perhaps poor terminology." Paul looked uncomfortable. "But what we're looking for is a presence, some sort of extranatural phenomenon."
" 'Ghost' is a perfectly good word," said Carroll.
"Better start from the beginning," said Steve.
When Paul didn't answer immediately, Carroll said, "I know you don't read the papers. Ever listen to the radio?"
Steve shook his head. "Not much."
"About a month ago, an Enerco mineral survey party on the Wind River got the living daylights scared out of them."
"Leave out what they saw," said Paul. "I'd like to include a control factor."
"It wasn't just the Enerco people. Others have seen it, both Indians and Anglos. The consistency of the witnesses has been remarkable. If you haven't heard about this at the bars, Steve, you must have been asleep."
"I haven't been all that social for a while," said Steve. "I did hear that someone's trying to scare the oil and coal people off the reservation."
"Not someone," said Paul. "Some thing. I'm convinced of that now."
"A ghost," said Steve.
"A presence."
"There're rumors," said Carroll, "that the tribes have revived the Ghost Dance—"
"Just a few extremists," said Paul.
"—to conjure back an avenger from the past who will drive every white out of the county."
Steve knew of the Ghost Dance, had read of the Paiute mystic Wovoka who, in 1888, had claimed that in a vision the spirits had promised the return of the buffalo and the restoration to the Indians of their ancestral lands. The Plains tribes had danced the Ghost Dance assiduously to insure this. Then in 1890 the U.S. government suppressed the final Sioux uprising and, except for a few scattered incidents, that was that. Discredited, Wovoka survived to die in the midst of the Great Depression.
"I have it on good authority," said Paul, "that the Ghost Dance was revived after the presence terrified the survey crew."
"That really doesn't matter," Carroll said. "Remember prom night? I've checked the newspaper morgues in Fremont and Lander and Riverton. There've been strange sightings for more than a century."
"That was then," said Paul. "The problem now is that the tribes are infinitely more restive, and my people are actually getting frightened to go out into the field." His voice took on a bemused tone. "Arab terrorists couldn't do it, civil wars didn't bother them, but a damned ghost is scaring the wits out of them—literally."
"Too bad," said Ginger. She did not sound regretful.
Steve looked at the three gathered around the table. He knew he did not understand all the details and nuances of the love and hate and trust and broken affections. "I can understand Paul's concern," he said. "But why the rest of you?"
The women exchanged glances. "One way or another," said Carroll, "we're all tied together. I think it includes you, Steve."
"Maybe," said Ginger soberly. "Maybe not. She's an artist. I'm a journalist. We've all got our reasons for wanting to know more about what's up there."
"In the past few years," said Carroll, "I've caught a tremendous amount of Wyoming in my paintings. Now I want to capture this too."
Conversation languished. The soda-fountain man looked as though he were unsure whether to solicit a new round of malteds.
"What now?" Steve said.
"If you'll agree," said Paul, "we're going to go back up into the Wind River Canyon to search."
"So what am I? Some sort of damned occult Geiger counter?"
Ginger said, "It's a nicer phrase than calling yourself bait."
"Jesus," Steve said. "That doesn't reassure me much." He looked from one to the next. "Control factor or not, give me some clue to what we're going to look for."
Everyone looked at Paul. Eventually he shrugged and said. "You know the Highway Department signs in the canyon? The geological time chart you travel when you're driving U.S. 20?"
Steve nodded.
"We're looking for a relic of the ancient, inland sea."
After the sun sank in blood in the west, they drove north and watched dusk unfold into the splendor of the night sky.
"I'll always marvel at that," said Paul. "Do you know, you can see three times as many stars in the sky here as you can from any city?"
"It scares the tourists sometimes," said Carroll.
Ginger said, "It won't after a few more of those coal-fired generating plants are built."
Paul chuckled humorlessly. "I thought they were preferable to your nemesis, the nukes."
Ginger was sitting with Steve in the back seat of the Enerco truck. Her words were controlled and even. "There are alternatives to both those."
"Try supplying power to the rest of the country with them before the next century," Paul said. He braked
suddenly as a jackrabbit darted into the bright cones of light. The rabbit made it across the road.
"Nobody actually needs air conditioners," said Ginger.
"I won't argue that point," Paul said. "You'll just have to argue with the reality of all the people who think they do."
Ginger lapsed into silence. Carroll said, "I suppose you should be congratulated for the tribal council vote today. We heard about it on the news."
"It's not binding," said Paul. "When it finally goes through, we hope it will whittle the fifty percent jobless rate on the reservation."
"It sure as hell won't!" Ginger burst out. "Higher mineral royalties mean more incentive not to have a career."
Paul laughed. "Are you blaming me for being the chicken, or the egg?"
No one answered him.
"I'm not a monster," he said.
"I don't think you are," said Steve.
"I know it puts me in a logical trap, but I think I'm doing the right thing."
"All right," said Ginger. "I won't take any easy shots. At least, I'll try."
From the back seat, Steve looked around his uneasy allies and hoped to hell that someone had brought aspirin. Carroll had aspirin in her handbag and Steve washed it down with beer from Paul's cooler.
GRANITE
PRECAMBRIAN
600 + MILLION YEARS
The moon had risen by now, a full, icy disc. The highway curved around a formation that looked like a vast, layered birthday cake. Cedar provided spectral candles.
"I've never believed in ghosts," said Steve. He caught the flicker of Paul's eyes in the rearview mirror and knew the geologist was looking at him.
"There are ghosts," said Paul, "and there are ghosts. In spectroscopy, ghosts are false readings. In television, ghost images—"
"What about the kind that haunt houses?"
"In television," Paul continued, "a ghost is a reflected electronic image arriving at the antenna some interval after the desired wave."
"And are they into groans and chains?"
