Cryptic - The Best Short Fiction of Jack McDevitt

by Jack McDevitt

  It was a blip, a rhythmic murmur gone so quickly that he wasn’t sure it had been there at all. He reversed the scanner, and was listening to a jumble of signals, nothing he could make out, but different in quality from the stellar transmissions he’d heard previously. He used the filters to isolate the strongest signal, and then boosted it. It became a piano, and a voice:

  “…A lipstick’s traces,

  “An airline ticket to romantic places,

  “And still my heart has wings;

  “These foolish things remind me of you…”

  Martin frowned, smiled, shook his head.

  Rescue ship nearby? That brought a momentary surge of elation, but he knew it could not be. He got up anyhow and went outside to see if anything was moving against the stars. The piano sounded very far away.

  “…A telephone that rings, but who’s to answer?

  “Oh, how the ghost of you clings!…”

  The singer finished to a burst of applause, and the melody shifted smoothly.

  “Thanks, folks, and goodnight from all of us here at the Music Hall until next Sunday, when we’ll be coming your way again with more of America’s favorite tunes.”

  More applause, music up in volume, and then a fadeaway to another voice:

  “This is CBS, the Columbia Broadcasting System. News is next, with Waldo Anderson.”

  Old Earth: he was picking up carrier waves that had left Earth more than two centuries ago!

  Anderson arrived in a clatter of electronic gimmickry, introduced his lead story, which concerned an armed robbery, and gave way immediately to a woman with a passion for antacid tablets. Then Anderson returned, speaking in a rich, cultured voice:

  “The Willie Starr case went to the jury today. Starr is one of two men accused in a triple slaying last March at a Brooklyn liquor store. His alleged partner, Joey Horton, has already…”

  Martin sighed, and turned it off. He had found his alien civilization.

  The sun broke through and the day warmed. Languidly, Martin stripped and gave himself to the sea. The water had turned cold. He swam out beyond the breakers with sure, swift strokes, turned and surveyed his world, rising and falling with the waves.

  It was like one of those early summers off St. Simons, minus the white frame houses and the beachfront restaurants. And the women.

  Anyone.

  He sat on the beach, wrapped in a robe, with his reader propped against his knees, lost in a planetary, a novel set during the early days of extraterrestrial settlement. The author, Reginald Packard, had grown wealthy cranking out these historical romances. Martin did not normally read such things. But he had become engrossed in the book over breakfast. Now, however, as the sun began its long slide toward the mountains, he found that his eyes kept wandering from the rows of neat print to the shadowy places among the trees.

  Something was there.

  He pulled the robe tight around him. A long wave unrolled and ran up the beach. He could not get his eyes off the edge of the forest.

  Nothing moved.

  The Dome was three hundred yards away. A long run in the sand. How easily he could be cut off!

  His heart pounded.

  The wind blew and the trees writhed.

  Greenway. He understood the woman, hysterical in her capsule beyond Centaurus, while a space-born thing with sharp teeth and feral eyes prowled the outside, slavering at her through the viewscreen, gnawing at the airlock.

  His heartbeat picked up. And suddenly, without thinking about it, he was on his feet, churning through the loose sand. He did not look back, but kept his eyes fixed on the Dome. He fell and, in slow motion, rolled over and came back to his feet in a single fluid move.

  When he got back inside, he bolted the door, set the shields in place, drew the blinds, and collapsed. His cheek was bleeding.

  That night he tried to distract himself by working out a search pattern for the datapak. If, by a remote chance, he found what they’d all been looking for, they’d have to come get him… Martin’s eyes narrowed at the thought that had surfaced, that he’d refused to consider. That someone might decide a rescue was too expensive. They knew, or would know, he was the only survivor. One person laid against the cost of a multi-year mission. But the Service had a tradition to maintain. He had nothing to fear.

  At dawn, he started the search. While the display blipped and beeped, he sat by the window, peering through the drawn shades.

  Deciding that chatter would at least be company, he switched back to the terrestrial radio station and listened to two domestic serials, “Our Gal Sunday” and “Life Can Be Beautiful.” His tension lessened. The shows had a small-town charm, and the characters seemed generally virtuous and vulnerable, if not bright. Sunday’s voice had a peculiar vitality, a quality of moonlight and laughter. He tried to picture the actress, and decided he would have liked to know her.

  And there was more news:

  “…Governor Dewey at a press conference this morning stated that police are closing in on Buchalter, and that his arrest is imminent. Known in gangland as Lepke the Leopard, Buchalter jumped bail two years ago. Onetime boss of New York’s protection racket, he is believed—.”

  He experimented with other terrestrial frequencies. Most were in foreign languages. But there were others. He listened to “Ma Perkins” and a quiz show. And he discovered “Terry and the Pirates” and “Jack Armstrong.”

  There were supplies to be got in from the capsule, a job he’d been putting off. And he’d dropped his reader when he ran from the beach. He looked out the windows and saw nothing. He turned up the radio, unlocked the door, and forced himself to walk. He went first to recover the reader. Then he hurried to the capsule. He loaded his arms with packets of dehydrated foods, sealed the vehicle, and started home. Nothing watched him from the hills. Nothing charged out of the trees. When he’d gotten back to the Momsen, he was proud of himself. He bolted the door, though—no point being foolish—and put everything away. Then he sat down and turned the radio back on.

  Immediately, he heard a familiar name:

  “Berlin announced today that Polish authorities were continuing to expel German citizens. The official Nazi newspaper Volkischer Beobachter reported two men killed near Stettin this afternoon. Both were German citizens, and were said to have been fleeing a Polish mob when they ran out onto a highway, where they were struck by a bus.

  “Chancellor Hitler, speaking at a party meeting in Munich, labeled the incident quote yet another provocation by anti-German leftists in the Polish government unquote. He called on President Moscicki to intervene, and warned that German patience is not without its limits.

  “Closer to home…”

  Martin, of course, knew Hitler, the twentieth-century warlord and nutcase.

  The newscast went on to describe a quarrel in Congress over the Neutrality Act, a bungled attempt at an armored car holdup, and an argument at a schoolboard meeting. Tomorrow would be sunny and hot. The current heat wave was going into its sixth day. And there were some baseball scores.

  Martin hadn’t realized that baseball was so old. Some of the teams were the same, but it must be a strange version of the game in which you only scored three or four runs.

  He slept that night with the shields up, though he knew, really knew, they were unnecessary.

  He tried to pick up “Our Gal Sunday” again next day, but failed to take into account the two-hour-plus time differential resulting from the longer day. But there were other shows. “Stella Dallas” and “Just Plain Bill.” He listened with interest: the problems faced by the characters were of a personal nature, rather than social struggles. These were people for whom there might have been no outside world, but merely the melodramatic mix of love and lust.

  He passed a sizable part of his afternoon with Xavier Cugat and the Boys in “the Green Room of the beautiful Grant Park Hotel in downtown New York.” Between songs, behind the announcer’s voice, Martin heard the low murmur of conversation, the clink of ch
ina: fragile place of glass and laughter.

  Berlin announced that two unarmed German passenger planes had been fired on by Polish fighters near Danzig. One had crashed in a field, killing all on board. The other had carried a cargo of dead and wounded back into German territory. Hitler was said to be furious.

  There were also reports of an attack on a German border station.

  The Poles denied it all.

  Martin understood that these events were not real, that the people in the Green Room, sipping their martinis and drifting into the coming carnage, were long since gone to dust. He might as well have been listening to an account of the Third Crusade. Yet…

  Warfare had been a common enough occurrence over the centuries, but to Martin it was part of a barbaric past, relegated to dusty tomes in libraries. Unthinkable.

  Next day he returned to the beach. He even walked briefly into the forest that afternoon. There was nothing here to fear. No predators.

  When the Wehrmacht rolled into Poland, Martin was lying on the sand, naked, tanned, reading Byron. He listened to appeals from Britain and France, from the White House and the Vatican. After sundown, when the first battle reports came in (both sides were claiming victories), he looked out at the dark, quiet hills, trying to imagine ponderous tanks clanking toward him, Heinkels crossing his western mountains to drop explosives on his head.

  The Germans bombed Cracow. Martin listened to an eyewitness description, heavy accent, heavy static, muted blasts, children fleeing the stuttering stukas, Nazi tanks sighted west of the city, everything on fire…

  Emory Michael, of the Blue Network, got through from a small town whose name he couldn’t get straight. The townspeople, mostly women and children, had gathered in a pasture on the west side of the city, watching the Nazi planes circling. Watching the bombs drop.

  Michael found a woman who spoke English, and asked where her husband was. “With the cavalry,” she said, with a heavy accent. “They will cut the Boche to pieces!”

  Horses, thought Martin. After a long while, he strode off, walking at the edge of the incoming tide, listening to the unhurried roar of the sea. From here, the war seemed so distant. (He smiled at that.)

  Rain clouds were building in the west.

  What was remarkable: These people bombed and strafed—how many would die during the conflagration?—and it would all pass, leaving only a few ripples on the tide, the wreckage washed out to sea. His generation barely knew of World War II. It was something in the history books.

  A fine drizzle began to fall.

  He turned into the forest. The ground was thick with leaves. He ducked under a floater that had tethered itself to a low branch. Something small, with fur, stopped to watch.

  He came to Patricia’s grave and said hello, aloud. There was no marker, other than three rough stones. Eventually, soon, he would correct that.

  He sat down. It was a beautiful, leafy glade, a place for children, or lovers. He cradled his chin against his knees, and mourned all those, down the long years, whose lives had been cut short, caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, victims of greed, folly, or plain bad luck: Patricia, the children of Cracow, the woman whose husband was in the cavalry, the Roman farmers in the path of the Vandals. Here’s to everybody. There’s room here, on Amity, and welcome.

  The rain was falling harder, becoming a downpour. Above him, on a branch, something stirred.

  There was some good news: A woman named Myers was reunited with her mother after 43 years; Lepke turned himself over to a newsman named Winchell; and Martin discovered Fibber McGee. McGee was unlike anything he had encountered before, an engaging mixture of pomposity, naive dishonesty, and scrambling insecurity. McGee’s world of goodhearted bumblers seemed untouched by the savagery in the newscasts.

  Martin’s first experience with fictional psychotics and madmen came with “The Shadow.” It was a series which would not have been allowed in his own time. His society frowned on mindless mayhem. But week after week, the invisible, slightly schizophrenic hero tracked down and eliminated mass murderers and insane physicians in the most delicious manner. Martin loved it.

  Despite the global disaster, there was a warmth to the programming, good humor, a sense of purpose and community that extended beyond time and space to Martin’s beachfront property. He strolled the tree-lined streets of Philadelphia, dined in some of Chicago’s better restaurants. He became addicted to “Amos ’n’ Andy,” followed Captain Midnight into exotic jungle locales, explored the temple of vampires with Jack, Doc, and Reggie. He was a regular visitor in the Little Theater off Times Square.

  Meanwhile, Hitler’s armies swept all opposition aside. President Roosevelt appeared frequently in informal broadcasts, discussing the economy and the war, assuring his audience that America would stay out of the fighting.

  Although he could not recall the course of the struggle (he was not even certain yet which President Roosevelt he was listening to), Martin knew that, in the end, the Western Allies would win. Had won. But it was difficult, in the summer of 1940, to see how such an outcome might develop. Britain, bloody, desperate, stood alone. And Churchill’s regal voice rang defiance across the light years.

  Martin listened with sorrow to Edward R. Murrow in London, as the Nazis pounded the city. A year later, he was at a football game between the Redskins and the Eagles when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. He fought with the garrison on Luzon, watched the aerial battle over Midway, rode in the desert with Montgomery.

  In the late spring of 1944, the datapak picked up a subspace transmission: RESCUE UNIT ENROUTE. SHOULD ARRIVE WITHIN THIRTY DAYS AFTER YOU RECEIVE THIS. HANG ON, ROD.

  By then Martin had taken to getting away from home periodically on two- and three-day jaunts into the countryside. But he wanted to keep up with the war. He was on one of these trips, lying in the grass halfway up a mountain in the early afternoon when the response came, breaking into “Dawn Patrol.” He let it repeat several times, wondering why he wished they had been a little less prompt.

  Eisenhower’s army gathered in Britain. Everyone knew what was coming; most of the speculation centered on timing and landing points. Martin waited with the rest of the nation for word of the invasion. Tension inside the Dome grew thick.

  But the invasion did not happen. A few days later, while he was still caught up in speculation from Washington and London, the Eagle arrived. It was a sleek silver bullet-shaped cruiser, sailing majestically on its magnetics. (The Eagle was the same class vessel as Alexia, but his ship had never looked so good.) His datapak gave him a look at it, and an hour or so later its lander settled softly into the scrub. The hatch rotated, opened, and people spilled out. Martin hugged everybody.

  They stayed two weeks, splashing in the surf, drinking at night, walking in the woods. Martin talked constantly, to anyone who would listen. He paired off with a young technician and rediscovered a few lost emotions.

  Captain and crew gathered around his radio, and listened curiously to “Big Town” and Gabriel Heatter. But time was pressing. “You know how it is, Rod,” the captain said. “Got to be moving.”

  Martin noticed that, with the arrival of the Eagle, the broadcasts lost some of their sense of immediacy. He no longer felt he was living through the second war. When, on the fourth day of his rescue, Allied troops stormed ashore on Omaha Beach, he was in a glade with his technician. He heard about it later, but it seemed like an historical event. Something far removed from Amity.

  They dug up Patty’s body to be returned to New Hampshire. The medical officer and the captain each inquired after his health. One thought he seemed depressed; the other wondered if he was actually unhappy about being rescued. “Long time to be stuck in a place like this,” the captain said, looking around at the empty beaches and the silent woods.

  Martin’s eyes dimmed. “Not stuck here,” he said. “I’ve been traveling.”

  The medical officer frowned. “What do you mean, Rod?”

  “I’m not sure I ca
n explain it, Doc,” he said, “But I may be the world’s first time traveler.”

  SUNRISE

  Ilyanda had always seemed haunted.

  There is something that broods over its misty seas and broken archipelagos, that breathes within its forests. You can feel it in the curious ruins that may, or may not, have been left by men. Or in the pungent ozone of the thunderstorms that strike Point Edward each night with a clockwork regularity that no one has yet explained. It is no accident that so many modern writers of supernatural fiction have set their stories on Ilyanda, beneath its cluster of brilliant white rings and racing moons.

  To the planet’s twenty thousand inhabitants, most of whom live at Point Edward on the northern tip of the smallest of that world’s three continents, such notions are exaggerated. But to those of us who have arrived from more mundane locations, it is a place of fragile beauty, of voices not quite heard, of dark rivers draining the unknown.

  I was never more aware of its supernal qualities than during the weeks following Gage’s death. Against the advice of friends, I took the Meredith to sea, determined in the perverse way of people at such a time to touch once again a few of the things we’d shared in our first year, thereby sharpening the knife-edge of grief. And if, in some indefinable way, I expected to recapture a part of those lost days, it might have been from a sense that, in those phantom oceans, all things seemed possible.

  I sailed into the southern hemisphere and quickly lost myself among the Ten Thousand Islands.

  It didn’t help, of course. I curved round familiar coasts and anchored off rock formations that, silhouetted against other nights, had resembled freedivers and pensive women. But the images were gone now, driven to sea by relentless tides. I slept one evening on a sacrificial slab in a ruined temple that, on at least one occasion, had been put to far better use.

  In the end, I realized he was not out there.