Cryptic - The Best Short Fiction of Jack McDevitt

by Jack McDevitt

  “It’s been a lot of years,” he said. “Technology’s better than it used to be.”

  “Where are we?” demanded Helen, barely able to make herself heard.

  Shel was hanging onto a ladder. His clothes were drenched. “A. D. 79,” he said. “Just west of Pompeii.”

  His eyes were afire. His silver hair was already streaked with black ash, and I began to suspect he had lost whatever anchor he might have had to reality. Time had become at last perhaps too slippery for him.

  The ship rolled to starboard, and would have dumped Helen into the sea had the old man not grabbed her, and hung on, pushing me aside. “Isn’t this glorious?” he asked.

  “Why are we here?” Helen demanded, wiping her eyes.

  The sea and the wind roared, and the dust was blinding.

  “I will pick the time of my death,” he cried. “And its manner.”

  I was having a hard time hanging on.

  “I am uniquely qualified—.”

  We went down into a trough, and I thought the sea was going to bury us.

  “—To make that choice,” he continued, ignoring the ocean. “My death will be an appropriate finale to the symphony of my life.”

  A fireball roared overhead, and plowed into the water.

  “Don’t do it,” I cried.

  “Have no fear, David. I’m not ready yet. But when I am, this will be the way of it.” He smiled at me and touched the Watch. “What better end for a time traveler than sailing with Pliny the Elder?” And he was gone.

  “What was that all about?” called Helen. We dipped again and salt water poured across the deck. “Maybe we ought to get out of here too.”

  I agreed, and wrapped one arm around a stanchion, something to hold onto while I set the Watch.

  “Wait,” she said. “Do you know who Pliny the Elder is?”

  “A Roman philosopher.”

  “I did a paper on him once. He was an essayist and moralist. Fought a lot for the old values.”

  “Helen, can we talk about it later?”

  “He was also a naval officer. He’s trying to rescue survivors. Dave, if Shel meant what he said, he’ll be back.”

  “I understand that.”

  “He’ll be older. But he’ll be back.”

  “We can’t do anything about that. I don’t think we want to wait around here.”

  We were on the starboard side, near the beam. The sails were down, and a few shadowy figures were moving through the volcanic haze. (I would have expected to hear the roar of the volcano, of Vesuvius, but the only noise came from the sea and the warm dry wind that blew across the deck.) “Let’s try the other side,” I said.

  He was there, on the port quarter, clinging to a line, while the wind howled. Even more ancient this time, frail, weary, frightened. Dressed differently than he had been, in slacks and a green pullover that might have come out of the 1930’s.

  Cinders stung my eyes.

  He saw us and waved. “I’ve been looking for you.” His gaze lingered on Helen, and then drifted toward the sea. His eyes seemed utterly devoid of reasoning. I wondered whether any part of the old Shelborne remained.

  “Don’t,” I cried.

  She let go her handhold and tried to scramble across the pitching deck.

  He was hanging onto a hawser, balanced near the rail.

  The ship pitched, went up the front of a wave and down the back. He raised his hand in a farewell gesture, and the sea broke across the deck. I was thrown hard against a gunwale. The night was filled with water.

  When it blew off, Shel was gone. The rail was clear, and the line to which he’d clung whipped back and forth.

  Helen shouted and pointed. I saw him briefly, rising over a swell, clutching a board and struggling to stay afloat, his white hair trailing in the water. But another wave broke over him and moments later the board popped to the surface, and drifted into the haze.

  Something in the ship gave way with a loud crack, and the crewmen cried out. I pulled Helen close.

  “Dead again,” she said.

  Maybe this time for good. I pressed the stem.

  6.

  Saturday, November 26. Mid-afternoon.

  We returned to the wardrobe in separate, but equally desperate, moods.

  Helen could not connect the wild man on the galley with Shel, or even the moody septuagenarian on the dock at the Piraeus, Furthermore, she had not yet accepted either the reality or the implications of time travel. Yet, on a primal level, she had seen him. And for the second time, she mourned him.

  And I? I’d lost all feeling. How could I reconcile two graves? I collapsed into a chair and stared helplessly at the costumes, hanging neatly, marked off by period. Damn them. I remembered the planning and research that had gone into their creation. We had felt so well organized in those days. Prepared for anything.

  I let it go.

  And then I noticed that I was seeing the costumes. There was light in the room. It was gray, not bright, but it meant that the black mist was gone. I threw the curtains back, and looked out at a rain-swept landscape.

  The trees, the grounds, the walkway, the garage, were visible, huddled together in the storm. The wall still circled the property. And beyond the wall, I could see most of Carmichael Drive. Most of it. But Ray White’s house was missing. As was the world behind it. Carmichael Drive now skirted the edge of a precipice, its far side gone, broken off into a void. Beyond, I could see only gray sky.

  Terrified, we went from room to room. Everywhere, in all directions, the picture was the same. On the east, where my property was most extensive, even the wall was gone. A seldom-used patio had been cut in half, and the stand of elms that used to provide shade for it now lined the limits of the world.

  We opened a bottle of brandy and drew all the blinds in the house.

  “Can’t we replay that last scene?” she asked. “Go back and rescue him? I mean, that’s the whole point of a time machine, isn’t it? Nothing’s ever irrevocable. You make a mistake, you go back and fix it.”

  I was tired and my head hurt and at that moment I hated Adrian Shelborne with every fiber of my being. “No,” I said. “It would just make everything worse. We know what happened. We can’t change that.”

  “Dave,” she said, “how could we possibly make things worse?”

  That was a pretty good question.

  She eased onto a sofa and closed her eyes. “Time travel,” she said, “isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, is it?”

  Rain rattled against the windows. “We need to find a way to eliminate the paradox.”

  “Okay,” she said. “What exactly is the paradox?”

  I thought it over. “Adrian Shelborne has two graves. One out on Monument Hill. And the other in the Tyrrhenian Sea. We have to arrange things so that there is only one.”

  “Can we go back and stop the Friday night fire?”

  “Same problem as trying a rescue on the galley. The Friday night fire has already happened, and if you prevent it, then what was the funeral all about?”

  “It’s like a big knot,” she said. “No matter where you try to pull, everything just gets tighter.”

  We were still wearing our Hellenic robes, which were torn and soiled. And we both needed a shower, but there was no water. On the other hand, we did have rain. And as much privacy as we could ever want.

  I got soap, towels, and wash cloths. She took the back yard, which was more sheltered (as if that mattered), and I stood out front. It was late November, but the weather had turned unseasonably warm nevertheless. Hot water would have been nice, but I felt pretty good anyway after I’d dried off and changed into clean clothes.

  Then we sat, each in a kind of private cocoon, thinking about options. Or things lost. The rain continued through the afternoon. I watched rivulets form and wondered how much soil was being washed over the edge. Where? Where would it be going? When the weather cleared, I promised myself that I would walk out and look down.

  “Who’s bu
ried in the grave on Monument Hill?” she asked.

  “Shel.”

  “How do we know? The body was burned beyond recognition.”

  “They checked his dental records. We can’t change that.”

  She was sitting on the sofa with her legs drawn up under her. “We also can’t recover the body from the Tyrrhenian Sea. We have to work on Monument Hill. What can we do about the dental records?”

  I looked at her. “I don’t think I understand,”

  “We have a time machine. Use your imagination.”

  Chain-reaction collisions have become an increasingly dangerous occurrence on limited-access highways around the world. Hundreds die every year, several thousand are injured, and property damage usually runs well into the millions. On the day that we buried Shel, there had been a pileup in California. It had happened a little after eight o’clock in the morning under conditions of perfect visibility when a pickup rear-ended a station wagon full of kids headed for breakfast and Universal Studios.

  We materialized by the side of the road moments after the chain reaction had ended. The highway and the shoulder were littered with wrecked vehicles. Some people were out of their cars trying to help; others were wandering dazed through the carnage. The morning air was filled with screams and the smell of burning oil.

  “I’m not sure I can do this,” Helen said, spotting a woman bleeding in an overturned Buick. She went over, got the door open, and motioned me to assist. The woman was unconscious, and her right arm was bent in an awkward manner.

  “Helen,” I said. “We have a bigger rescue to make.”

  She shook her head. No. This first.

  She stopped the bleeding and I got someone to stay with the victim. We helped a few other people, pulled an elderly couple out of a burning van, got one man with two shattered legs off the road. (I was horrified. Shel and I had always maintained a strict hands-off policy.) “We don’t have time for this,” I pleaded.

  “I don’t have time for anything else,” she said.

  Sirens were approaching. I let her go, concentrating on finding what we’d come for.

  He was alone in a blue Toyota that had rolled over onto its roof. The front of the car was crumpled, a door was off, and the driver showed no sign of life. He was bleeding heavily from a head wound. One tire was spinning slowly. I could find no pulse.

  He was about the right size, tangled in a seat belt. When Helen got there, she confirmed that he was dead. I used a jack knife to cut him free. EMT’s had arrived and were spreading out among the wrecked cars. Stretchers were appearing.

  Helen could not keep her mind on what we were doing. “Your oath doesn’t count,” I said. “Not here. Let it go.”

  She looked at me out of empty eyes.

  “Help me get him out,” I said.

  We wrapped him in plastic and laid him in the road.

  “He does look a little like Shel,” she said in a small voice.

  “Enough to get by.”

  Footsteps were approaching. Someone demanded to know what we were doing.

  “It’s okay,” I said, “we’re doctors.” I pushed the stem and we were out of there.

  His name was Victor Randall. His wallet carried pictures of an attractive woman with cropped brown hair seated with him in a front porch swing. And two kids. The kids were smiling up at the camera, one boy one girl, both around seven or eight. “Maybe,” Helen said, “when this is over, we can send them a note to explain things.”

  “We can’t do that,” I said.

  “They’ll never know what happened to him.”

  “That’s right. And there’s no way around it.”

  There was also about two hundred cash. Later, I would mail that back to the family.

  We carried him down to the garage and put him in the Porsche. I adjusted the temporal sweep to maximum, so that when we went the car would go with us.

  7.

  Thursday, November 10. Near midnight.

  Mark S. Hightower had been Shel’s dentist for seven years. He operated out of a medical building across the street from Friendship Hospital, where Helen had interned, and where she still served as a consultant.

  I’d met Hightower once. He was short, barrel-chested, flat-skulled, a man who looked more like a professional wrestler than a dentist. But he was soft-spoken and, according to Shel, particularly good with kids.

  We materialized on a lot down on Penrod Avenue, which was in the commercial district. The area was always deserted at night. Ten minutes later, we approached the hospital and pulled into the parking lot at the Forest Elm Medical Center. Hightower was located in back, well away from the street.

  Victor was in the front seat, supported from behind by Helen. He was wrapped in plastic. He’d stopped bleeding, and we had cleaned him up as much as we could. “Are you sure you know how to do this?” I asked.

  “Of course not, Dave,” she said. “I’m not a dentist. But the equipment shouldn’t be hard to figure out. How do we get inside?”

  I showed her a tire iron. “We’ll have to break in.”

  She looked dismayed. “I thought you could manage something a little more sophisticated than that. Why can’t you just use that thing on your wrist and put us right inside the building?”

  “Because it’s not very precise. We could be here all night.” I was thinking of Shel’s trick in moving us from the Piraeus to the quarterdeck on Pliny’s galley. If I’d tried that, we’d have gone into the ocean.

  We put on gloves, and walked around the building, looking for an open window. There was none, but we found a rear exit that did not seem very sturdy. I wedged the tire iron between the door and the jamb, worked it back and forth, and felt the lock give. The door all but came off the hinges. I held my breath, waiting for the screech of a burglar alarm. It didn’t come, and we were past the first hurdle.

  We went back to the Porsche, got Victor out of the back seat and half-carried, half-dragged him around to the open door. Once inside, we set him in a chair. Then we turned on penlights and looked around. A half-dozen rooms were designated for patients, opening off a corridor that looped around to the reception area. I wandered from office to office, not really knowing what I was looking for. But Helen did one quick turn through the passageway and pointed at a machine tucked away in a corner. “This is it,” she said.

  The manufacturer’s label said it was an orthopantomograph. “It does panoramic X-rays,” Helen said.

  “Panoramic? What’s that?”

  “Full mouth. It should be all we’ll need.”

  The idea was that the person being X-rayed placed his forehead against a plastic rest, and his chin in a cup-shaped support. The camera was located inside a cone which was mounted on a rotating arm. The arm and cone would traverse the head, and produce a single panoramic image of the teeth. The only problem was that the patient normally stood during the procedure.

  “It’ll take six to eight minutes,” said Helen. “During that time we have to keep him absolutely still. Think you can do it?”

  “I can do it,” I said.

  “Okay.” She checked to make sure there was a film cassette in the machine. “Let’s get him.”

  We carried Victor to the orthopantomograph. At Helen’s suggestion, we’d brought along some cloth strips which we now used to secure him to the device. It was an uncomfortable and clumsy business, and he kept sliding away from us. Working in the dark complicated the procedure, but after about twenty minutes we had him in place.

  “Okay,” she said. “He should be all right now. Don’t touch him. Right?”

  I backed away.

  “Something just occurred to me,” I said. “Victor Randall already has the head wound.”

  Her eyes closed momentarily. “You’re suggesting the arsonist didn’t hit Shel in the head after all?”

  “That’s what I think.”

  She considered that piece of data. “This keeps getting weirder,” she said.

  A mirror was mounted on the ma
chine directly in front of the patient’s face. Helen pressed a button and a light went on in the center of the mirror. “They would tell the patient to watch the light,” she said. “That’s how they’re sure they’ve got it lined up.”

  “How are we sure?”

  “What’s the term? ‘Dead reckoning’?” She punched another button. A motor started, and the cone began to move.

  Ten minutes later we took the cassette in back, carefully leaving Victor in place until we were sure we had good pictures. The developer was located in a windowless storage room. Helen removed the film from the cassette and ran it through the machine. When the finished picture came out, she handed it to me without looking at it. “What do you think?”

  The entire mouth, uppers and lowers, was clear. “Looks good,” I said.

  She held it against the light. “Plenty of fillings on both sides. Let’s see how it compares.”

  The records were maintained in manila folders behind the reception desk. Helen found Shel’s, and sat down with it at the desk, where the counter hid her from anyone passing outside.

  The folder was filled with records of Shel’s visits. “He goes every three months,” she said. “That’s not bad.” (She also tended to talk about him in the present tense.) The results of his most recent checkup were clipped on the right side. In the middle of the sheet was a panoramic picture, like the one we had just taken, and several smaller photos of individual sections. “I think they call these ‘wings’” she said. “But when they bring a dentist in to identify a body they do it with these.” She held up the panoramic and compared the two. “They don’t look much alike in detail. And if they ever get around to comparing it with the wings, they’ll notice something’s wrong. But we should have enough to get by.”

  She removed Shel’s panoramic, and substituted the one we had just taken. Then she replaced the folder. We wiped off the headrest and checked the floor to be sure we’d spilled no blood. “One more thing,” said Helen. She inserted a fresh cassette into the orthopantomograph. “Okay. We’ve done what we came to do. Let’s clear out.”