I don’t think I’ve ever properly appreciated Rob. The world’s a more comic place when he’s around. Its absurdities are a bit more clearly defined. We share a sense of the ridiculous that seems to transcend language: a word, sometimes a glance, is enough to suggest some new buffoonery on the march. He ignites insight, in the way a good woman intensifies the emotional climate. We spent the evening raking over the Johnson administration, the Bible-thumpers who are citing chapter and verse against the Freedom Riders, and the latest academic notion that everyone’s opinion is equally valid. (Rob’s not exactly big on the Freedom Riders either. They’re another example of what happens when people start taking their rights seriously.) He thinks ballots should be weighted. Particularly his. Probably mine. A bonus for common sense. It’s in short supply these days.
We ate a late lunch at Bookbinder’s, and retired for the evening to the Officers’ Club at the Naval Base. We stayed until midnight. It strikes me that the art of conversation has almost disappeared from the world. Rob, in that sense, is something of an anachronism: a visitor from the nineteenth century, from an age in which there were more important things to do than to sit around and be entertained.
He’ll be leaving in the morning, ten o’clock flight.
Pity.
Philadelphia, Wednesday, January 9, 1974
School districts are burning Mark Twain. In California, two police officers have been sued for using unnecessary force to subdue a man who was in the act of stabbing a woman. And there’s a report that a group of volunteers trying to stop their TV habit went through withdrawal. Anyone who worries that the U.S. is headed for collapse can relax. It is raining on the rubble.
Terri Hauser has begun suggesting that Sammy needs a mother. Truth is, he probably does, but that seems to me to be a weak foundation for a marriage. I know she would move in if I suggested it. But where would that end?
Post Office returned Rob’s Christmas card today, stamped MOVED—FORWARDING PERIOD EXPIRED.
Philadelphia, Friday, November 2, 1979
Rob is back.
There’ve been a few changes in his life. He’s living in Seattle now. And he’s gotten married. They’ll be here on one of these Amtrak plans where you get to ride all over the country. Her name is Anne, and she is from Vermont. The plan is that she will go up to visit her folks for a few days, and Rob will stop off here. I wonder if he will be able to figure out a use for this home computer. I thought I might be able to get it to do my taxes, but they keep changing the laws every year.
Philadelphia, Sunday, November 4, 1979
The train was late getting in. I had to hang around 30th Street Station two hours. But it was good to see him again. Been a lot of years. We came back here, got settled, and then went to the Berlinhaus up on the Boulevard for sauerbraten. Lots of talk about a sex poll that was released yesterday, indicating that women are as adulterous as men. We tried to imagine how it might be possible to poll people about their sexual habits and come up with anything close to valid results. The Ayatollah also took his lumps. What do you suppose it would be like to sit down with him for coffee?
Later in the evening, we stopped by Janet’s place. She’d asked to meet Rob, and that went pretty well too. We probably drank a little too much. But I don’t think I’ve ever seen Janet enjoy herself so much.
Rob has gone completely gray since the last time I saw him. Otherwise, he doesn’t seem to have lost much ground.
Incidentally, toward the end of the evening at the Berlinhaus, someone at the next table overheard us talking about Khomeini and asked whether we’d heard that the Iranians had seized the embassy in Teheran?
It was true, of course. They’ve taken fifty or sixty hostages. State Department isn’t sure yet how many. It must be a first of some kind: nobody ever seized diplomatic people. Even Hitler didn’t do that. It’s what happens when you put an amateur in charge of a government.
Well, they’ll release everybody tomorrow. And apologize. If we behave according to past practice, we’ll lodge a stiff protest and go back to business as usual.
Philadelphia, Monday, November 5, 1979
Another delay with the train this morning, but Rob finally got away. This time, we’ve agreed to get together again soon.
The Iranian government claims it has no control over the students who’ve taken the embassy. Rob thinks we should give the Ayatollah a list of targets and start destroying them one by one until the government discovers it can do something to release our people. I’m not sure that isn’t the best way to handle it.
Question: what should our primary objective be? To get the hostages released? Or to act in such a way that future hostage-takers will think it over before trying the same thing?
Philadelphia, Tuesday, September 7, 1982
Rob’s marriage has collapsed. I had no idea it was in trouble. He doesn’t talk much about his personal life, and of course over a telephone you don’t really get to see anything. He’s obviously shaken. I get the impression he didn’t see it coming either. I suggested he might take some time and come here, but he says he’ll be fine. I’m sure he will.
I never got to meet her.
Seattle, Tuesday, January 28, 1986
We’ve lost a shuttle. And a crew.
Grim day. I’d been looking forward to this trip for a long time. Rob picked me up at the airport, and we stopped for lunch on the way out to his place. The waitress told us about Challenger.
Rob looked at me very strangely, and I knew what he was thinking. We’d been able to get together four times over the course of a quarter-century. And three of those occasions had been marred by a major American disaster. There had been far greater catastrophes in the world during the period, in terms of body count. But we seemed to be tuned to a local wave length.
Neither of us said much. Until we heard the details, we hoped that the crew might have been able to survive, although it was difficult to visualize any kind of shuttle explosion that one could walk away from.
Philadelphia, Wednesday, March 4, 1987
…(Madeline and I) were talking about the various ways in which miniscule events produce results out of all proportion. Like the short cut through a park that generates an accidental meeting that ends in a marriage. One of the Kennedy assassination theories holds that Lee Oswald shot down the President because Marina Oswald indicated a sexual preference for him over her inadequate husband.
Madeline said she’d heard once that a butterfly, moving its wings in Africa under the right conditions, could produce a hurricane in the Caribbean. Interesting conceit.
Philadelphia, Sunday, December 18, 1988
Rob called today. He’ll be in the area Wednesday. Did I think we could manage dinner without provoking an international crisis?
I explained that I won’t be able to pick him up at the airport because I’m booked at the office. He will take a cab.
Philadelphia, Wednesday, December 21, 1988
It’s happened again! A London to New York flight with more than two hundred people disintegrated over Scotland while Rob and I sat in a restaurant out on the Main Line.
I’m spooked.
So is he.
Philadelphia, Thursday, December 22, 1988
People died on the ground as well. The photographs from Lockerbie, the crash site, are just too much. I stayed away from the TV most of the night. I’ve got Dickens beside me, but I can’t keep my mind on it. They are saying now that it looks as if there was a bomb on board. How can people be so evil?
And we were together again.
Kennedy.
Teheran.
Challenger.
Flight 103.
Here’s to us.
Rob left on an afternoon flight. We tried to calculate odds, but neither of us is mathematician enough to be able even to frame the problem. Rob, who is ordinarily a world-class skeptic, wondered whether it was possible that we might sense oncoming disaster? And instinctively huddle against the storm? I told him about Madeline�
�s butterfly.
Has it happened every time?
We both thought so. But I went back through this diary tonight. On August 7, 1964, we got safely through a meal.
One exception to the pattern.
The bond between my father and Orin Robinson grew closer, possibly as a result of the curious intersections between their quiet reunions and the series of historic disasters. They came to refer to this trend as the Tradition. Their phone conversations became more frequent. They discounted their alarm on the night of the Lockerbie flight. Absurd, they said, to think they could be connected. And anyway there was, after all, the exception to the general pattern. Thank God for 1964. That phrase became their watchword.
It was during this period that my father engaged in his brief flirtation with Catholicism. Rob was horrified but took the position that it was my responsibility to stand by my father during this aberration.
There were still occasional echoes of the Tradition in the diary…
Washington, D.C., Tuesday, February 4, 1992
…Visited the Eternal Flame today. It is a lovely and sober spot. How does it happen that the shots fired in Dallas so long ago still hurt?
If Rob and I had not run into each other in Minneapolis that day, is it at all possible it might not have happened? Does that make any kind of sense at all?
Portland, Oregon, Saturday, December 12, 1992
The (dental) convention’s a bit dry But I got together with some of the guys from Chicago, and we went over to Margo’s. It’s a topless place, and I guess its a sign you’re getting old when you wish they’d move so you could see the basketball game.
I would have enjoyed getting together with Rob. But we let it go this time, more or less by mutual consent.
Philadelphia, Tuesday, June 14, 1994
…Rob confessed tonight that he has been east any number of times over the last few years, but has not mentioned it to me. But it’s dumb to behave as if we have been doing something dangerous.
He’s right, of course.
I’ll be in New York this weekend. I could get down for dinner.
I keep thinking about the butterfly.
“Listen, how about a change of venue?”
Okay. What did you have in mind?
“I don’t know. Something more exotic than Philly.”
Why don’t we meet in Atlantic City?
“Yeah. Sounds good.”
Dinner by the sea.
Be nice to see him again. And the world looks quiet. Here’s to us.
Philadelphia, Wednesday, June 15, 1994
I’ll be glad when it’s over—
Philadelphia, Friday, June 17, 1994
Rob tomorrow. I cannot imagine what life would have been like without him. Yet I’ve seen so little of him.
As the world knows, the meteor fell at 7:22 p.m. on the 18th of June. Possibly just as they were sitting down to dinner.
I’ve read through these passages until I have them by heart, and I can offer no explanation. The correlation between meetings and catastrophe is necessarily coincidental because it can’t be anything else.
But there’s one more point: I’ve gone back and looked closely at August 7, 1964. The exception to the Tradition.
Robinson and my father were wrong: there was a disaster on that day. But its nature was less immediately cataclysmic than the other events, so it’s easy to see why it might have passed unnoticed.
In the late afternoon of that date, the Congress, with only two negative votes, approved the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution.
We didn’t know it at the time, but the United States had formally entered the Vietnam War.
PART V
INVENTIONS AND FALLOUT
CRUISING THROUGH DEUTERONOMY
The banging sounded like distant thunder.
Cardwell was slow to move, had in fact been sitting in the dying firelight, allowing the storm to carry away his gloomy mood. Rick padded barefoot from the kitchen through the hallway and opened the front door. The wind blew louder.
There were whispers in the hall, and an authoritarian voice that he did not recognize. Rick appeared. “Dad,” he said. “You have a visitor.”
A tall, severe figure followed the boy into the room. Cardwell saw at once that he was a clergyman, one of those advanced types that affect plaid jackets. His hair was full and black, and his eyes blazed with dark intensity. He shook rain off his hat and coat, and held them out for Rick. “Dr. Cardwell?” he asked, coming forward.
Cardwell eased himself out of his chair. “You have the advantage of me, sir.”
“I’m Pastor Gant.” His glance swept the room, and registered diffident approval. “From the Good Shepherd Church over in Bridgeton.” He said it as if it explained his visit.
Cardwell debated whether he could leave him standing. But his breeding got the better of him, and he indicated a chair. “What can I do for you, Pastor?”
“I’ll come right to the point if you don’t mind.” He sat down and held his hands out to the fire.
“Yes. Good. Can I offer you a brandy?”
He waved the idea away with a choreographed gesture. His fingers were long and graceful. “No, thank you. I’m not opposed to drink on principle, you understand. But I prefer to abstain.”
Rick, whose boredom with Cardwell’s inner circle was usually painfully obvious, took a chair where he could watch.
Pastor Gant reached into his pocket, and took out precisely what Cardwell had expected: the clipping from last Tuesday’s News. He held it toward the firelight, and looked at it as though it were vaguely loathsome. “Is there actually anything to this?” he asked.
“The Displacer?”
“The time machine.”
“The story is correct in its essentials.”
“I see.” The long fingers toyed with the paper. He turned toward the boy. “Son,” he said, “perhaps it would be best if you left the room.”
Rick didn’t stir, but Gant did not seem to notice.
“Pastor,” said Cardwell, “I don’t want to be abrupt, but I’m really quite preoccupied at the moment.”
“Yes, I’m sure you are.” He crossed his legs, and let his head drift back. “Doctor, you must understand that the people of my church are good people.”
“I’m sure they are.”
“But life can be very harsh. Several, at this moment, are bearing up under terminal illnesses. Another has recently lost a child. Just about your son’s age, I might add. Still another—.”
“Might I press you to come to the point?”
“Of course.” He looked not quite substantial in the flickering light. “The only thing that keeps us going, when life becomes—,” he searched for a word, “—difficult, the only thing that sustains us, is our sure and certain knowledge of a divine protector.”
Cardwell’s stomach began to hurt. “Reverend,” he said, “I’d be pleased to discuss all this with you at a future date.”
Gant stared into the fire, as if his host had not spoken. “You will take all this from them, Doctor.”
Cardwell frowned. There’d been some minor fuss over that article. Fortunately, the limited circulation of the News, and the general tendency of people in the area to mind their business had however protected him. “I hardly see how that can be,” he said.
“You know what will happen if you complete the device?” He rose from his chair and towered over Cardwell. His eyes grew very large and very black. “You will cruise through Deuteronomy. Glide across Numbers. Descend into Exodus. There were no trumpets at Jericho, you will say. No angel at Sodom. No division of the Red Sea. No haircut for Samson.” His smile lengthened at that, but there was no warmth in the gesture. “You will say there was no Fall, and hence no need for a Redeemer. You will travel into the sacred country and every time you will return with a cargo of despair. I simply cannot allow that to happen.” He drew a small revolver from his pocket and pointed it at a spot between Cardwell’s eyes.
Rick gasped a
nd started forward. But his father, with a quick jerky wave, stopped him. “I’m sorry,” said the pastor. It was hard to see his expression in the play of light and shadow. “I truly am.” He studied the weapon. “It is often difficult to know the right thing to do.”
Cardwell could not take his eyes from the gun. It amazed him that a stranger would come into his home and threaten to use one on him. The entire world centered in the round black muzzle. “You’re too late,” he said.
Gant’s gaze shifted. Bored into him. “What do you mean?”
“I’ve already done it. I’ve made the flight. Several, in fact.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Did you really think I’d let the newspapers have the story if I weren’t sure? And there’s only one way to be sure,” He lowered himself back into his chair. Anything to get out from in front of that muzzle. And he was relieved to see that when it followed him, it locked onto his right knee. “There is a prototype, George. Your name is George, isn’t it?”
That surprised him. “How did you know?”
“I pass your church every day on my way to the campus. Your name is prominently displayed.”
“I wish that you might have seen fit to come by and say hello.”
Cardwell nodded. “Possibly I’ve been remiss.”
“I’m surprised you would see that.” Gant’s brow furrowed.
“How could I not? Pastor, I’ve been on the ark.”
The rain hissed against the windows. “That’s ridiculous.”
“Is it? Then why are you here? Either you believe it’s possible, or you don’t. If you don’t, I’d like to know why you’re threatening my life.”
Gant stared at him. He seemed to be having trouble breathing. “Is it really true?”
“Yes, it’s true. I’ve walked her decks. Felt her roll in the swell of the storm. Seen the tigers in their bays.”
The gun came up. Swung a few degrees. Cardwell realized it was pointed at Rick. “Stay back,” said Gant. “I don’t want to shoot you.” He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Indeed, I wish there were a way to do this without shooting anyone.”
Cryptic - The Best Short Fiction of Jack McDevitt Page 51
