Eternity Road

by Jack McDevitt

  “Wait,” cautioned Claver.

  But Quait’s blood was up. He ignored the warning and threw his weight behind the effort. Hinges popped and metal creaked. He got his fingers into the opening and pulled. The door came.

  They tied a lamp to a line and dragged it across the threshold from a respectful distance. When nothing untoward occurred, they entered the room.

  It was identical to the others, two stories high, circled by a gallery. But it was dry. The furniture, the cabinets and chairs and tables were all standing. And bound volumes gleamed inside the cabinets.

  Chaka shrieked with joy. Her cry echoed through the chamber.

  “I don’t understand it,” said Claver. “What happened here?”

  “Who cares?” Quait strode into the room, went to the nearest cabinet, and opened the top drawer. “Look at this,” he said.

  Black leather. Gold script. The Annals. By Tacitus.

  The cover was held shut by snaps. He wiped off a tabletop and lifted the book out. The others gathered behind him while he set it down and opened it.

  They turned the pages, past the titles into the text:

  He was given sway over the more important provinces, not because he was exceptionally talented, but because he was a good businessman, and neither his ambitions nor his talent reached any higher….

  The cabinets were arranged methodically, usually in groups of four, backed against each other, with angled reading boards and writing tables nearby. Chairs were arranged in convenient locations. A long elliptical counter dominated the center of the chamber.

  Flojian selected a cabinet, deliberately averted his eyes from the identifying plate and, while the others watched, opened the top drawer and removed the book. Its title was written across the cover in silver script:

  Paideia

  by

  Werner Jaeger

  Volume I

  He opened the cover gently, almost tenderly. Title and author appeared again. And a date: 1939.

  Turn a page. Lines of script in shining black ink filled the vast whiteness of the paper. Education is the process by which a community preserves and transmits its physical and intellectual character. For the individual passes a way, but the type remains.

  “Voices from another world,” Chaka whispered.

  They embraced in the flickering light. For a few moments the shadows drew back. All the tension and frustration of the preceding months drained away. Claver, pumping Quait’s hand, gave way to tears. “I’m glad I came,” he said again and again. “I’m glad I came.”

  These were substantial volumes, not books as another age might have understood the term. They were written by hand, thousands of lines of carefully produced script on large sheets of paper, the whole bound into gilt-edged leather covers. They were of the same family as Connecticut Yankee.

  It must have been the history section. They found works they’d heard of, like Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (in numerous volumes), and books they hadn’t, like The Anabasis. They paged through McMurtrie’s The American Presidency in Crisis and Ingel Kyatawa’s Japan in the Modern Age and Thomas More’s The History of King Richard III. There was Voltaire’s The Age of King Louis XIV and The Anglo--Saxon Chronicle and Josephus’s The Jewish War. There were copies of The American Century, Kissinger’s Diplomacy, and America and the Pacific, 1914-2011.

  “These are relatively recent transcriptions,” said Quait. “Look at the condition of the paper. They can’t be more than a couple of centuries old.”

  The gallery was also filled with volumes. Chaka went up the staircase and plunged into the upper level treasures.

  They almost forgot where they were. Like children, they gamboled among the ancient texts, calling one another over to look at this or that, carrying their lamps from place to place, opening everything.

  Chaka was paging through a copy of Manchester’s The Last Lion. Suddenly her eyes brightened and she shook Quait. “I think we’ve found Winston,” she laughed.

  Coming on the day after her wedding, discovery of the golden chamber seemed almost a culmination to that sacred event. She was standing in the uncertain light, looking lovingly at Quait and at The Last Lion, when the illusion exploded. Flojian, down on the lower floor, announced there was water in the corridor. Rising fast.

  30

  They tried to close the door, but water poured through the bent frame. One of the lamps crashed to the floor and went out. “Not going to work,” said Chaka. She looked around wildly, “How high will it go?”

  “It’s going to fill up,” said Claver.

  “You sure?”

  “What do you think happens every day in the other rooms?”

  They were snarling at each other now, the joy of a few moments before turned to rage and frustration. They opened the door and, two inside and two outside, tried to lift it higher in its frame and shut it again. The water kept coming in.

  Books and cabinets looked polished in the dim light.

  Chaka was close to panic.

  “It’s the lake,” said Flojian. “It’s open to the sea, and the tide’s rising.”

  “No way to stop it?” asked Quait.

  Claver laughed. “Are you serious?”

  Quait tore off his jacket and tried to jam it between the door and the frame. “Damn!” he said. “One of us should have thought—”

  Chaka watched the water spreading across the floor. “What do we do? There must be something—”

  “We can save a few.” Flojian splashed over to the nearest cabinet, opened it, and removed the top book. It was The Letters of Abelard and Heloise.

  Quait looked around wildly. “We’ll save, what, twenty or thirty, and lose everything else?”

  “Wait.” Claver was holding his lamp high, looking at a shadowy ceiling. “There might be something we can do, at that.”

  “What?” said Quait.

  “Give me a minute.” He hurried up the stairway into the gallery. They watched his lamp move swiftly along the upper level, watched it hesitate, watched it eventually circle the room. His face was pale in its spectral glow.

  “We’re wasting time,” said Flojian. He lifted out a second book. It was Chronicles of the Crusades, Being Contemporary Narratives of Richard of Devizes and Geoffrey de Vinsauf. Quait helped him load both volumes into his arms. Then Flojian turned and stumbled toward the door. “Open up, Chaka,” he said.

  She couldn’t help laughing at him. “How are you going to climb up to the landing with that load?” The water was running over the tops of her shoes. “It’s coming in fast,” she said. “If we’re going to do something, we better get to it.”

  “What’s to do?” asked Flojian. “Except to get out whatever we can.”

  Claver’s light was still floating along the upper rail. He seemed to be holding a conversation with himself. “Yes,” he was saying, “no reason why not.” And, “I believe we can do it.” Abruptly, he hurried to the top of the stairs, grasped the handrail, and leaned out. “Start bringing the books up here,” he said. “And hurry.” Incredibly, he had taken off his shirt and was beginning on his trousers.

  “Why?” demanded Quait. “The room’s going to fill up.”

  “I don’t have time to explain things,” said Claver. “Just do it. Trust me.”

  “We need to get out of here while we can,” said Flojian. “Or we’ll get caught.”

  “There’s still time,” said Claver. His voice had risen, and it echoed through the room. “If you want to give it up, just say so and we’ll do it. But we might be able to save most of this stuff if you’re willing to try.”

  They started by clearing bottom drawers, getting the books most immediately threatened by the rising water and piling them on top of cabinets, tables, benches, whatever offered itself.

  The volumes were, of course, all hand-printed. They were heavy and awkward, some of them so large that Chaka would ordinarily have had to struggle to lift one. But her adrenalin was flowing and she performed f
eats in that hour that no one who knew her would have believed.

  Claver hurried back downstairs. In the uncertain light, Chaka thought her eyes were playing tricks. He was naked. “Take off your clothes,” he said. “I need everybody’s clothes.” He retrieved Quait’s jacket from the door and dashed back among them. “Quick,” he said.

  “I think it’s over,” said Quait, whose expression left no doubt he believed Claver had come apart.

  “Just do as I say. And hurry.”

  Chaka was already out of her jacket. “It’s going to get cold in here,” she said.

  “What’s he doing?” asked Flojian.

  “I’m blocking ducts, damn it.”

  “I don’t get it,” said Quait. Nevertheless, he began to strip off his shirt.

  “Oh,” said Flojian. “If we can make the room airtight, when the tide rises past the top of the door the air’ll begin to compress.”

  “Very good,” said Claver, gesturing for Chaka’s blouse.

  “So what?” demanded Quait.

  “If we can form an air bubble, it’ll keep the water out of the upper part of the room.”

  “What happens if it doesn’t work?” asked Chaka.

  Quait slipped out of his clothes. He piled shirt, trousers, socks, shorts, everything, on top of Emil Ludwig’s Napoleon.

  Flojian got out of his clothing quickly. He handed them over to Claver, glanced with considerable discomfort at Chaka, who was now equally naked, and turned away. Chaka would have liked to duck down in the water, but that kind of response felt somehow childish.

  Claver ascended back to the gallery with his arms full of garments. Meantime, it occurred to both Chaka and Quait that Chaka’s hauling books upstairs wouldn’t be the most efficient use of her time. They’d gained slightly on the rising water, so they rearranged the tasking: She continued removing the lower volumes while Quait and Flojian carried them to the upper level. She rescued The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius and Belzoni’s Narrative of Operations and Recent Researches in Egypt and Nubia and Samuel Eliot Morison’s The Two-Ocean War. She saved Caesar’s Commentaries and Babcock’s Waiting at the Station and Mulgrave’s Dusk at Mecca. She dropped Herodotus into the water.

  “I think this’ll work,” Claver called down.

  She saved Polybius and Thucydides and Voltaire and T. E. Lawrence and Fuller and Woollcott and Churchill. (Was it the same Churchill?) She slipped and went down hard with Livy in her hands. She stacked Xenophon on top of Prescott and Commager on Henry Adams. “Okay.” Claver’s voice seemed to come from nowhere. “We should be in business now.”

  “Good,” said Quait. “We can use you down here.”

  By then, Quait was the only one hauling books to the upper level. Working alone, Chaka had been losing ground and Flojian had diverted to help her get the remaining volumes out of the cabinets. That part of the job was almost done, but the water was rising too fast. It caught up to them and drowned a few volumes. Then it overflowed the tops of the tables on which the books were stacked and rose around the edges of The Chronicle of Novgorod and The Dawn of History and China: the Dragon Wakes and Roger Bacon’s Commentaries and a host of others.

  They saved what they could, piling the books on the upper stairs and going back for more. The water reached Chaka’s shoulders. But she stayed with it, lifting volumes made even heavier by having been submerged, lifting them over her head and passing them up to Quait. Then she was swimming. But it all got too heavy finally and she had to drag herself out of the water.

  “Time to go anyway,” said Quait. The water level had reached the top of the door. There would be less than a few feet of air left in the outside passageway.

  Flojian handed up Plutarch’s Alcibiades and Coriolanus. It was too late for the rest. “I’m with you,” he said. “Let’s clear out.”

  But Claver hesitated. “What’s wrong?” asked Chaka. “We’ve done what we can.”

  “No,” said Claver. “I’m sorry.” He took a deep breath. “Listen, how badly do you want to save this stuff?”

  They were all cold and they looked toward the doorway. The surface of the water sparkled in the lamplight. “What are you trying to say?” asked Quait.

  “There’s no way to know how high the water will go. My guess is that it’ll rise to a point about halfway between the top of the door and the ceiling. If that happens, we’ll still lose most of this stuff.” Many of the volumes that had come up from the lower level had been piled on the gallery floor. “We have to get everything up higher. We have to clear the cabinets up here and put everything as high as we can get it.”

  “Orin,” said Quait, “there’s no time to do that. If we don’t leave now, we’re not going to leave at all.”

  “I know,” he said. He turned and looked at them and they could see that he was fearful. “Tell me what you want to do.”

  Most of the staircase was now submerged. Only the top three steps were still clear of the water. “I don’t want to drown in here,” said Flojian. “Nothing’s worth that.”

  “We won’t drown,” said Chaka, “if Orin’s right. Are you right, Orin?”

  “Probably,” he said. “But I can’t guarantee it.”

  For a long moment, they could hear only the gurgle of the tide. Quait looked at Flojian. “How about if you and I stay?” he said. “Two in, two out.”

  “Forget it,” said Chaka. “I’m not going home alone.”

  Claver nodded. “No point in my trying to leave, either. I couldn’t launch the balloon myself.”

  There were roughly thirty cabinets in the gallery, which housed another hundred or so volumes. The gallery also had an ample supply of small tables. They pushed the cabinets into pairs and mounted the tables atop the cabinets. Then they began the arduous work of moving roughly three hundred heavy volumes onto the tables. They watched the water cover the doorway, submerge the last few stairs, and spill across the gallery floor.

  By the time they’d got everything out of the cabinets, and off the cabinets, and piled up on the tables, they were hip-deep. But they had done everything they could.

  “It doesn’t seem to be slowing down any,” said Chaka.

  Claver folded his arms and tried to keep warm. “It has to,” he said. “Be patient.”

  “How long’ll we be in here?” asked Quait.

  “Turn of the tide. Six hours or so, I guess,” said Flojian.

  They killed all but one lamp. This was Claver’s suggestion. He explained that he didn’t know how much air a room this size would hold, but that the lamps burned oxygen. On the other hand, no one was quite willing to sit in the clammy dark while the water kept coming up. So the single light was a compromise.

  They clung together, trying to take advantage of body heat to ward off the numbing cold.

  They talked a lot. Most of the conversation had to do with titles they’d seen and how they were going to get everything out of this room as quickly as they could when the water went down. Claver thought their best plan would be to leave everything where it was and return to Brockett. “This time,” he said, “I think there’ll be no trouble about getting a boat.”

  “Going to be a long few hours,” said Chaka.

  With nothing to do but wait, Quait tried to distract himself by perusing titles. One caught his eye: Notes on the Last Days, by Abraham Polk. He pointed it out to the others. “At least,” he said, “we’ll finally get the truth.”

  The conversation wandered. Claver sat silent for almost twenty minutes. Then he said, “I think I know what happened to the first expedition.”

  “I think we’ve found out,” said Quait. “They got caught by the tide and drowned.”

  “In a manner of speaking,” said Claver. “The tides themselves are too slow. And we know they didn’t try to do what we’re doing.” Claver looked at the lamp and shivered. He cradled himself in his arms and Chaka sympathetically drew him closer to her. Quait thought he saw a smile glimmer on Claver’s lips, but it might have been a trick of th
e light. “No,” he said. “I think they found all these rooms in the same condition we found this one. They saw no danger, as we saw none. The corridor was probably dry, so they’re less to be blamed for their stupidity than we are for ours. They broke into the library rooms, one by one. Fortunately, they didn’t quite get all of them. And they began removing the contents.

  “There was one situation that was different from the rest, though. When they first came down the stairway into the central chamber, one of the four passageways was blocked by a door.”

  “That’s not right,” said Flojian. “All the passageways were open.”

  “When we got there, all the passageways were open. That’s because Karik’s people took the door down. And what did they find?”

  “The lake,” said Quait.

  “Eventually. But first they found another door.” Claver let them digest this, and then he continued. “According to legend, the Quebec came back to this place and tied up. If that’s true, there was a submarine chamber. I think the lake is that chamber.

  “Something went wrong. Whatever system they had to keep the water level low inside the chamber failed. Maybe an outer lock got stuck so that it remained open to the sea. Anyhow, eventually the internal ventilation system got old and gave way. Once that happened, once the air could get out, tides began to rise and fall inside the chamber. Now, think about the corridor with the two heavy doors.”

  Chaka thought about it and saw no light. Nor did the others. “I suspect it was designed so that one door had to be closed before the other could be opened.”

  “Why?” asked Chaka.

  “Because if both doors are opened, we get the effect we just talked about. The water tries to match the water level outside. It rises or falls. Whatever.”

  Quait still didn’t see that it changed anything. “So you’re saying they got caught in the rising tide? But you said earlier the tide’s too slow.”

  “I don’t think they got caught in the tide. Not that way. If I understand Knobby’s story, the disaster happened more or less during high tide. But if the submarine chamber had broken down, the water would rise and fall each day with the tide.” He looked at Chaka. “If that were so, what would the condition have been inside the chamber when they broke through the second door?”