Analog SFF, May 2007

by Dell Magazine Authors

  At length Chad vaguely noted he was skiing by mining scars: open adits like black unblinking eyes, old trails snow-highlighted on the surrounding slopes; spoils dumps, heaped with snow, dark rock sticking out in patches; even a few tumbledown buildings, now nearly shapeless masses of ragged stone adorned with a few sticks of gray timber. He found that he was following a trail, mostly choked with stones, and that he was moving his skis reflexively to dodge those stones. (His heels were unlatched again so he could stride as the trail flattened out. He didn't remember doing that.)

  Chad skied up in front of a low tumbledown adit that opened directly onto the trail. A crumbled pile of gleaming rocks lay next to the trail. The metallic yellow glint of the stones caught his eye ... he picked one up absently, barely even noticing he did so, and put it in his parka pocket. Then he skied on. A distant part of his mind wondered at the haze that surrounded his actions.

  * * * *

  Chad Gutierrez found himself walking along a canyon, skis slung over one shoulder, his ski boots unlatched to make strides easier, ski poles clutched together in his other hand as a makeshift walking stick. Snow had dwindled to discontinuous patches, lurking only in shaded areas. Up ahead the canyon opened out of the range front.

  At first he didn't wonder why he was walking. He just was.

  And then Chad realized he couldn't remember how he got here. He was on a ski trip—he had been skiing. The memory of the helicopter came back; then memories of fleeing the avalanche, and his hard fall. Then ... nothing. Nothing. But here he was....

  Chad kept walking and finally emerged from the mountain front, his mind whirling. The drainage he'd been following, freed of the confines of the canyon, spread out abruptly into the broad desert valley below the Mule Deer Mountains. The sudden openness starkly contrasted with the narrow canyon he'd just left. Other mountains, low and blued by distance, stood silhouetted against the sky far across the valley.

  This was not where he was supposed to rendezvous with the chopper, either. He paused for a second, then realized that the locator beacon would tell Charlie where he was in any case. That was the point, after all—sometimes in backcountry skiing you didn't come out where you'd meant to.

  Speaking of which ... he heard a familiar buzz crescendoing in the sky. Charlie flew directly over him, waggling the craft in acknowledgment, and slowed down abruptly to a near hover. It was a relief to see the chopper setting down on the flats a couple of hundred meters ahead. Chad slogged that way as fast as he could manage. Ski boots weren't meant for hiking.

  The chopper squatted on the ground like an overgrown grasshopper, its big viewing bubble bulging low out front as if to bite the ground below. Chad dodged exaggeratedly under the lazily swishing blades and latched his gear into the rack below the cabin. Then he clambered up through the passenger's door and buckled himself into the seat.

  “How'd ya get way over here?” Charlie asked.

  “Dodged an avalanche and ended up in the next canyon over after a cornice collapsed under me. So I had to come out here.” Even though I can't remember doing so,Chad thought to himself.

  “You're entitled to another trip.”

  Chad shook his head. “That last time kind of freaked me out. Dodging an avalanche is bad enough. Then I took a bad fall, too. Kind of shook me up. I'm pretty tired too ... no point in tempting fate.” And I still have that weird hazy feeling ... do I have a concussion?

  “No problem,” Charlie said. “Come back tomorrow.” He shifted something on the controls, and the low thrum of the engine rose to a shrill whine, while the blades sped up from a lazy swish-swish-swish to a deafening thwack-thwack-thwack. The ground dropped away below them as though they were riding an express elevator. Chad, looking out through the bubble, felt an irritating twinge of vertigo. The occasional jolt from atmospheric turbulence didn't help, either. He found himself gripping the arms of the seat.

  “You heard about Gold City? The lost mining camp?” Charlie asked as he tilted the craft toward Tonopah.

  Chad shook his head.

  “S'posed to be someplace in the Mule Deers. There's stories about people coming out of the mountains with jewelry rock in their pockets, but they couldn't tell where they'd gotten it, didn't even remember getting it.”

  “Jewelry rock?” Chad asked.

  “Rock that's mostly gold. The highest of high-grade ore. You don't find it laying around anymore!”

  “I'd guess not. Pretty picked over, now, huh?”

  It was hard to hear over the racket, and Chad had only half his mind on the conversation. But he was trying to be polite.

  “Yeah,” Charlie answered. “Only place you find it now is underground, in a mine. Even as late as a hunderd years ago, during the Depression, there'd be tales. They said over in Tonopah that people would occasionally show up with these chunks of gold rocks, with no memory where they'd come from.”

  “Didn't people go out to look?" Chad asked.

  “Course they did. That's what's funny, ‘cause no one ever found the source. And what was even funnier is that they said the people who'd actually come out with the jewelry rock would never go back to look. It's like it just didn't cross their minds. Since then the whole area's been isolated in the Bombing and Gunnery Range. No one's been wandering around here for nigh on a century. We didn't even get the skiing concession till last summer.”

  “Yeah,” Chad said. “I saw your ad on-line, and I couldn't resist. Right in my backyard!”

  “Glad you did. Not too many jobs for chopper pilots these days, with the Air Force downsizing,” Charlie said.

  “Well, at least you'll get your chance to go prospecting.”

  “That's for sure. And I'm going to be out in the Mule Deers every chance I get!”

  Chad pointed at the desert floor, checkerboarded with polygons of various colors. “That's my gold. I work for SolarFuels. The company that grows gengineered algae for fuel.”

  “So that's how you can afford this trip, huh?”

  Chad grinned ruefully. “Don't remind me! I should be working. But you can only spend so many hours at work. And besides. To get the chance to ski, where no one had everskied before ... that's worth something. It's like you said about jewelry rock. You just don't find it anymore.”

  Charlie laughed briefly.

  Chad noticed something heavy in his parka pocket. “What's this?” he wondered aloud. Absently, he pulled out the piece of jewelry rock.

  “Where did you get that?"Charlie demanded.

  Chad, astonished, looked at the gleaming rock in his hand. “I ... I don't remember!”

  The rest of the trip was very quiet, even with the roar of the rotors.

  Chad had hardly left when Charlie called the fuel truck over.

  “Heading out again, Charlie?” the fuel operator asked. “I thought you were done for the day.” He topped off the tank and set the nozzle back into its cradle on the truck.

  Charlie was electronically filing a hasty flight plan.

  “Thar's gold in them thar hills!” he replied cheerfully, if a bit thoughtlessly.

  As soon as the truck was clear Charlie took off and made a beeline. He remembered exactly where he'd picked up Chad, and figured that the gold outcrop had to be somewhere in that canyon. On skis, Chad couldn't have done anything but follow the drainage downhill. So he might even be able to find it this afternoon.

  Charlie pushed his craft for all it was worth, much faster than he would have traveled with a client, and heedless of fuel consumption. It was almost like combat flying, right on the edge, with that sense of urgency driving you to fly to the limits of your ability. Except that no one was actually attacking him.

  He buzzed the pickup point to get his bearings, and then headed up the canyon where Chad had to have walked out, flying as low as he dared. Charlie had to gain altitude where the canyon narrowed, but then dropped down again as it widened out. A ghost town lay there, its gray weather-beaten buildings casting the exaggerated shadows of late afternoon. Snow
still lingered in the shady parts and on the north sides of buildings, but much of the area was open and dry. Gold City!Charlie thought. He vaguely wondered how such a well-preserved town could have gone unnoticed for so long, but it didn't seem important. More important was that he could find no place nearly big enough to set down the chopper. He'd have to set down outside the range front and hike in.

  Worse, he could see lots of old dumps and adits on the hills around—which one held the jewelry rock? Well, clearly Chad would have been low down, on his skis. So he should concentrate along the bottom of the drainage. Maybe he could see bootprints or ski tracks in some of the residual patches. Trying to see better, Charlie dropped the chopper down just above the old town, moving forward slowly with intermittent hovers as he strove to locate Chad's trail. The rotors raised dust off the dry parts, finely pulverized rock puffing up here and there from previously sunlit spots. He smelled the pungent aromas of dust and sagebrush as rotor wash reflected off the ground below and blew back into the cabin....

  Suddenly Charlie noticed he was flying the helicopter. In the mountains. Lowin the mountains. He throttled up abruptly, twisting away from the canyon side that loomed before him. The chopper, shuddering, slewed sideways on the verge of a stall. Why was he here? He was at a loss. Then a snatch of old song bubbled up:

  In a cavern, in a canyon

  Excavatin’ fer a mine...

  Charlie was singing tunelessly, aimlessly, while the chopper teetered on the edge of control. To get the gold. Yes, the gold! That was it!

  Gold! Gold! Gold! Gold!

  Bright and yellow, hard and cold!

  Got to go back and get the gold. The chopper wheeled around, back toward the range front, barely under control. He had to get down and get the gold.

  Charlie never noticed he was flying the chopper straight into the ground.

  * * * *

  Chad turned the key in the door (How quaint! he thought, a real metal key!) and stepped into the room. He was staying at the old Silver Queen in downtown Tonopah, which for well over a century had been the highest building between Reno and Las Vegas. Ornate fire escapes still decorated the windows. In fact, the whole hotel, dating from before the First World War, affected a self-conscious Edwardian splendor.

  Chad sat on the overstuffed bed, hardly noticing his surroundings. He clicked on the TV absently, out of reflex. The blank in his memory was like an aching tooth: he kept probing at it, trying to see if it had changed. And of course it hadn't. He pulled the gaudy stone out of his pocket for the umpteenth time, glaring at it as if it were a prisoner under interrogation.

  The TV abruptly intruded into his reverie. An announcer was declaiming, “No further word on the helicopter crash in the Mule Deer Mountains. The pilot's name is being withheld pending notification of next of kin. We have unconfirmed reports that the Air Force is investigating the crash, but so far they have refused comment. We will post updates online as new information becomes available.”

  On watching the TV, Chad had a sudden thought. He remembered he'd been carrying those automatic video recorders, partly for safety and partly for a memento. Why didn't I think of that sooner? It was jarring ... maybe even now there was a haze over his mind.

  It was a minute's work to plug the helmet cam into the TV. He paged forward, watched his brush with death in the avalanche and then his hard fall as he headed into the other canyon. Then, what...? He watched as he descended farther into the canyon, and then, thunderstruck, saw himself pick up the piece of jewelry rock out of a pile broken off an obvious gold-bearing vein. Chad then watched himself skiing down through a ghost town that looked like an archeological time-warp, with artifacts like museum exhibits. An old ore car still sat on a set of rusty tracks coming out of an adit, like a Disney prop. A store front had windows intact, dusty goods still dimly visible through the glass. A hammer rested on an anvil in what was obviously a smithy, as though the blacksmith had just stepped away for a minute. A partly mended horseshoe even lay on the anvil.

  The movie was even more disturbing because it triggered no memories at all.

  Chad had another thought. He'd printed out a set of detailed topographic maps of the Mule Deers where he'd figured he might be skiing. He dug them out and looked at them, retracing his route ... it wasn't hard to identify the canyon he must have come out of. Of course ... topo maps had been made from aerial photographs for over a century, and evidently mechanical means recorded faithfully. It was only human memory that was fallible.

  A knock on the door interrupted his investigations. Chad looked up, puzzled. He wasn't expecting anybody. He clicked the remote on the TV to the securitycam over the door; at least the hotel didn't still have Edwardian surveillance technology. An unkempt man, maybe in his mid twenties, stood at his door, tattoos appearing abundantly around and through his torn and dirty shirt. The way he held himself, arms crossed, glaring at the door ... “tough young punk” was the characterization that occurred, unbidden, to Chad. He clicked to another view and saw two or three other guys loitering in the hall, looking much like the first. Evidently they were trying to stay out of the line of sight from his door. Presumably they weren't aware that there was more than one securitycam.

  He called the front desk, but there was no answer. He was about to call the police when he heard scratching noises at the doorknob. They were trying to pick that old mechanical lock.

  Chad set the phone down. I've got to do somethingnow,he thought. Tackling a bunch of toughs in his hotel room seemed like a really bad idea. He strode over to the window and looked out. Sure enough, that ornate fire escape came right to his window. A steel mesh catwalk with a thin railing went from window to window. It linked to the catwalk on the next floor down by a metal stair so steep it might as well be a ladder.

  Deciding quickly, he stuck the video card in a pocket and made sure he had his car keys. And his cell phone. The window was stiff, probably not having been opened since the previous summer. To Chad, acutely aware of that scratching at the doorway, raising it seemed to take forever as he struggled with the recalcitrant frame. At least the intruders seemed to be having trouble with the lock—mechanical lock picking was probably another quaint skill these days, Chad realized. He snorted. Criminal skills must be as prone to obsolescence as any other line of work. Finally stepping out of the window onto the catwalk, Chad got reminded of the piece of jewelry rock as it swung heavily in his coat. He thought wryly that it would have easily paid for his heli-skiing trip. Still, he could do without the hassle it seemed to have brought him. All he could figure was that somehow those thugs outside had learned about his gold discovery.

  He climbed down the ladder to the floor below, trying to be as quiet as possible. It was hard because the metal creaked and popped as it flexed with his weight. Then, on the second floor, the last ladder, which went to the parking lot in back of the hotel, was raised up. Of course—it wouldn't do to have the fire exit routinely accessible from the ground level. It would just give burglars and other nefarious types easy access to the hotel rooms. Like the ones in there now, for example.

  The latch that released the ladder was obvious, but when Chad tried to lower it gently, it got away from him and dropped with a tremendous crash. As he scrambled down it, he saw someone looking down at him from the window of his room. At that point Chad jumped down the rest of the way. Should he now go back into the hotel's main entrance? But there'd been no one at the front desk. As he dithered momentarily, the decision was made for him. A man appeared on each side of the building, coming toward him. They appeared to have been among those waiting in the hall.

  “Hey, wait up!” one said, breaking into a run. Chad didn't acknowledge the hail but dove for his car. Many people, he remembered, had gotten mugged through being polite. Social graces could get you in trouble.

  Chad had made the right decision. One of the men pulled out a big wrench from underneath his tattered denim coat as Chad landed in the front seat and slammed the front door. The engine started
immediately. He engaged the gears and popped the clutch to back up, forcing the fellow running up with the wrench to jump out of the way. Chad then cut the wheel sharply coming out of the parking space. He headed for the exit, gunning the motor as he passed the other assailant. That punk also had something out in his hand, and as he jumped out of the way, Chad heard a thunk on the roof. At least it wasn't my head,he thought.

  Chad paused at the driveway entrance, where Highway 95 passed through town. Now where? Then he saw a car coming up rapidly behind him out of the parking lot and once again had to react rather than decide. That car was an ancient Detroit model, probably rear-wheel drive, and probably weighing a ton more than Chad's 4x4. It didn't appear to plan on stopping. Chad lurched out of the driveway into the street, squealing into a right turn. He cut off an oncoming car, which shifted to the left lane quickly, its horn blaring. The old Detroit car followed Chad's, its tires also squealing.

  Chad accelerated suddenly and pulled into the left lane, ahead of the car he'd forced over. He kept accelerating, hoping if he drove crazily enough, he'd get pulled over by a cop. Or the punks chasing him would.

  No such luck. He was swiftly approaching the edge of town—even with SolarFuels’ new contribution to the local economy, Tonopah was not very big.

  Chad considered where to go. On the highway, his 4x4 would be no match for the muscle car behind him. Even if a cop was on his way right now, there was no guarantee he'd arrive in time.

  Deciding quickly, Chad twisted the 4WD knob on the dash to engage the front wheels, and then turned sharply left onto the new graded road toward Alkali Lake. They'd been installing some new solar ponds that way, and it would probably be easier to lose his pursuers on the dirt. He had a better vehicle for that sort of road than they did. As he straightened out, he saw a plume of dust rise up behind the car. Part of his mind marveled at how snow could cap the high mountains while the valleys remain so dry.