Ancient Shores

by Jack McDevitt

  “Johnson’s Ridge,” said Lasker.

  The canyon walls were rocky and almost sheer on the south and west. The northern slope rose more gradually toward the summit. It was heavily wooded, as was the valley floor. Two men were stopped just off the road, cutting firewood, stacking it in the back of a pickup.

  The canyon was two hundred yards wide at its mouth and maybe twice as deep. It narrowed by about a third toward the rear wall. An access road left the highway, plunged into the trees, and climbed the northern ridge in a series of hairpin turns.

  Lasker pulled over and stopped. The sun was sinking toward the top of the western promontory, which was lower by fifty to a hundred feet than the summits on either side. “Where was the water level?” he asked.

  “Depends on which period you’re talking about. It was never high enough that the southern side could have served conveniently as a harbor. But for a long time you could have taken a boat up there”—he indicated the rear wall—“tied up at your dock or whatever, and stepped out onto dry land.”

  Lasker squinted through the sunlight. A squadron of birds, too far away for him to see clearly, cruised over the summit. “Could be,” he said. “I think it belongs to the Indians,” he added.

  Arky Redfern’s law offices were located in a professional building on the outskirts of Cavalier, the county seat. He was flanked by an orthodontist and a financial advisor. The building was flat gray slate with maybe twenty parking places, about half of which were filled when Lasker pulled in and found an open slot next to the handicapped space.

  Inside, a brisk young woman looked up from a computer terminal. “Good afternoon, gentlemen,” she said. “Can I help you?”

  She took their names and picked up a phone. Fifteen minutes later they were ushered into an interior office dominated by a mahogany desk, leather furniture, and an array of glass-door bookcases. The walls to either side were crowded with plaques and certificates; the one behind the desk was conspicuously reserved for a hunting bow and a spread of five arrows.

  Arky Redfern was a lean young man in a gray tweed jacket. He was of about average height, with dark, distant eyes, copper skin, and thick brown hair. Just out of law school, Max thought. Redfern came through an inner door, greeted Lasker with easy familiarity, asking about his family, and shook Max’s hand.

  “Now,” he said as they settled down to business, “what exactly is it you gentlemen want to do on Johnson’s Ridge?”

  As they’d agreed, Lasker took the lead. “We’d like to have permission to conduct a ground-radar search. To look for artifacts.”

  The lawyer cocked his head as if he hadn’t heard correctly. “Really? Why? What would you expect to find?”

  Lasker said, “It’s a general survey. We want to see if there’s anything up there. And we’d agree not to remove anything.”

  Redfern took a pair of spectacles from his jacket pocket and fitted them carefully over his eyes. “Why don’t you tell me straight out what you’re looking for? Is there another yacht up there, Tom?”

  Lasker looked at Max. “We’re looking at places all over the area, Mr. Redfern,” Max said. “You can never tell where you might find something.”

  Lasker mouthed, “Trust him,” and Max sighed. Trust a lawyer? It flew in the face of his most cherished principles.

  Redfern was apparently not satisfied with Max’s answer. He seemed to be still waiting for a response.

  “We think,” said Max, “there might be some objects left over from the Paleolithic.”

  The lawyer’s eyes narrowed, and he turned toward Lasker. “This is connected with the boat, Tom? Right?”

  “Yes,” said Lasker. “There’s an outside possibility, and that’s all it is, that something might be buried on top of Johnson’s Ridge. It’s a long shot.”

  Redfern nodded. “Why don’t you tell me exactly what you know about the yacht?” he said.

  “It’s been in the newspapers,” said Max.

  “Nothing’s been in the newspapers. Old boat dug up on a farm. It’s in very good condition, suggesting that it hadn’t been in the ground more than a week. And it lights up at night.” He stared across at the two men. “You want access to Johnson’s Ridge? Tell me what’s going on.”

  “Can we get a guarantee of confidentiality?” asked Lasker.

  “I would like to be free to confer with the chairman if need be. But I can assure you that otherwise what you tell me will go no farther.”

  “Who’s the chairman?” asked Max.

  “The head of the local Sioux,” said Lasker. “Name’s James Walker.”

  “The head of the Sioux is a chairman?”

  “Movie Indians have chiefs,” said Redfern. “Now tell me about the boat.”

  Max nodded. “It might be a lot older than it looks.” A tractor-trailer went by and shook the building. Max described April’s findings, watching Redfern while he talked, expecting at every moment to be dismissed as a crank.

  Instead he was heard without comment or visible reaction. When he’d finished, Redfern sat silently for a few moments. “You’re suggesting,” he said, “someone sailed a yacht on Lake Agassiz?”

  When people put it like that, it always sounded dumb. “We’re not sure,” Max said. “It’s possible.”

  “Okay.” Redfern opened a drawer, and took out a piece of memo paper. “How much are you willing to pay for the privilege?”

  Lasker pushed back in his chair. “Since we won’t be doing any damage to the land, Arky, we’d hoped you’d just let us look around.”

  Redfern nodded. “Of course. And I hope you understand, Tom, that if it were up to me, I’d say yes without hesitation. But the tribal council has its rules, and I have no alternative except to abide by them.” He looked at his visitors.

  “I guess we’d be prepared to invest a hundred,” said Max.

  Redfern nodded yes, not yes to the offer, but yes to some hidden impression of his own. “How exactly do you intend to conduct the search?”

  “We’ll be using a ground-radar unit,” said Max.

  Redfern wrote on his sheet of paper. His brow wrinkled, he made additional notes. Then he looked up. “It’s hard for me to see how I can accept less than a thousand.”

  Max got to his feet. “That’s ridiculous,” he said.

  “It’s customary,” said Redfern. He let the statement hang, as if its validity were obvious. Max thought it over. There were other places to look, but Johnson’s Ridge was an ideal harbor. If the boat had been housed anywhere in the area, it would have been there.

  “We can’t manage a thousand,” he said. “But you might want to consider that if we do find something, everyone will benefit.”

  “I’m sure of that,” said Redfern. He sighed. “Okay. I tell you what I’ll do. Let me speak with the chairman. He might be willing to make an exception and come down for a worthy cause. What kind of figure can I offer him?” He smiled politely at Max.

  “How about five hundred?”

  Redfern’s eyes slid momentarily shut. “I suspect he’ll consider that a bit tightfisted. But I’ll try.” He wrote on the paper again. “I’ll draw up a contract.” He smiled. “Of course you understand that any Native-American artifacts you might find will remain the property of the tribe. Anything else of value, we will share according to usual conditions.”

  “What are those?” asked Max.

  Redfern produced another piece of paper. “In this case,” he said, “section four would seem to apply.” He handed the document to Lasker. “These are our standard guidelines for anyone applying to do archeological work on tribal land.”

  “I think,” said Max, “we need a lawyer.”

  Redfern looked amused. “I always recommend that anyone entering into a legal transaction seek counsel. I’ll draw up the agreement, and you can come by later this afternoon and sign, if you like.” He rose, business apparently concluded. “Now, is there anything else I can do for you?”

  Max had been admiring the bow. “H
ave you ever used it?”

  “It was my father’s,” he said, as if that answered the question.

  Peggy Moore had grown up in Plymouth, New Hampshire, in the shadow of the White Mountains. She’d gone to school in New York, left three marriages in her wake, and had little patience with people who got in her way. She handled a wide range of duties at GeoTech, and running a ground-search radar team was what she most preferred to do. Not because it was challenging, but because it could yield the most satisfying results. There was nothing quite like sitting in front of a monitor and spotting the rock formations that promise oil. Except maybe the Nebraska find that had been the highlight of her career: a mastodon’s bones.

  She had assumed that the hunt on Lasker’s farm had been for another boat. But now, without explanation, her team had been sent to the top of Johnson’s Ridge. What in hell were they looking for?

  It was a question that had begun to keep her awake nights. Moore suspected there was something illegal going on. Nothing else explained the compulsive secrecy. Yet Max (who reminded her of her first husband) seemed too tentative to be a criminal, and the Laskers were clearly up-front types. She was not sure about April Cannon, with whom she’d spent little time. Cannon possessed a streak of ruthlessness and was probably not above bending the law, given the right reason. But that still did not answer the basic question. What were they looking for? Hidden treasure? Buried drugs? A lost cache of nerve gas?

  She watched Sara track the input from Charlie’s radar. The weather had moderated somewhat, warmed up after the last few days, and Charlie was cutting his pattern across the top of the ridge. The scans were fed into the system and translated into images of rock and earth.

  They’d had a couple of days of unseasonable warmth, and the snow cover had melted. The ground was consequently wet and dangerous, so Moore had drawn the survey course carefully, keeping Charlie safely away from the edge of the precipice. She kept a close eye on his progress and occasionally warned him back in, sacrificing coverage to safety.

  The ground-search unit was giving them reasonable imagery to about a hundred feet. For archeological purposes—assuming that was the real reason they were here—that would be more than adequate.

  The western section of Johnson’s Ridge, the summit of the rear wall, was grassy and flat, a long plateau about two thousand yards north to south and a hundred fifty yards across the spine. On the south, a ravine split it off from the rising hills on its flank. The north side ended in a wall of trees.

  “Concentrate along the rim,” Max had said.

  “Slower,” she told Charlie, who was still uncomfortably close to the edge.

  “Roger,” said Charlie. He was wearing an outsized lumberjack coat and a woolen hat with its earflaps pulled down.

  Moore wanted to find something. Not only because she wanted to know what was going on, but because she was a professional and intended to deliver a product to the customer even when he made the project unnecessarily difficult. Still, it was irritating that Max and his associates wouldn’t trust her. Nobody was going to steal their beads and arrowheads, or whatever. And that was another aspect of this that pointed toward a geological motif: These did not seem like people who would be interested in digging up old cookpots. But she had explained that if they wanted to find, say, gold, they had to tell her about it if they expected to get results.

  She was seated with her feet on one of the work-benches, sipping coffee, when a very peculiar picture worked its way onto the bank of screens. “Son of a bitch,” she said, freezing the image on her personal display.

  9

  For the moonlit places where men once laughed

  Are now but bones in the earth…

  —Walter Asquith, Ancient Shores

  Max was in Tucson to bid on a Halifax bomber when the call came in.

  “I think we got it right out of the box.” April’s voice, hushed. “Something’s buried on the lip of the ridge.”

  “What? Another boat?” Max was standing near a window in the lone terminal of a small private airport. The Halifax was out on the runway, surrounded by the competition.

  “No. This is a lot bigger. About a hundred fifty feet across. And it’s right where you thought it might be. On the brink of the summit.”

  “Damn.”

  “Max,” she said, “it’s round.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me.”

  The word brought a long, pregnant silence at both ends.

  On the radar printouts, it looked like a roundhouse with a bubble dome. “I’m damned if I’ve ever seen anything like it,” Moore said. “It’s not a ranger station and it’s not a silo. And it sure isn’t a farmhouse.” She looked suspiciously at Max. “I assume you know what it is.”

  Max knew what he was hoping for. But the trace image didn’t look aerodynamic. He contented himself with shaking his head.

  “What else can you make out?” April asked.

  “Nothing. Nada. It’s just a big, round building. About five hundred feet in circumference.”

  “How high is it?”

  “Twenty feet at the perimeter. Thirty feet or so at the top of the bubble.” They were in the GeoTech van, which was parked uncomfortably close to the cliff edge, directly over the object. The wind pushed against the side of the vehicle. “Now here’s something else that’s strange,” Moore said. “The top of the summit is mostly rock, with a few feet of dirt thrown on top. Okay? But this thing is built inside a cut in the rock. Look, see these shadows? That’s all granite.”

  April asked her to enlarge the image.

  “The cut is also round,” Moore said. “Uh, I would have to say it was made specifically to accommodate the roundhouse.”

  Max and April exchanged glances.

  “Here’s something else,” said Moore. She pointed at dark shadings below and in front of the object. (If, that is, one could assume that the front was at the lip of the cliff.) “This is a channel cut through the rock.” It passed from a point directly under the structure out to the edge of the precipice.

  “What’s the roundhouse made of?” April asked.

  “Don’t know. I can tell you it isn’t rock, though.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “Quality of the return. It almost reads like glass.” Moore tapped her fingers against the top of her work table. “I just can’t imagine what anything like this is doing up here. If we were down on the plain, I’d say it was an abandoned storage facility. It’s big enough. But why would anyone put a storage building up here? It almost looks like a place where people came to sit on the front porch and look out over the valley. Right?” She looked hard at Max. “But this thing doesn’t have a front porch.” Max squirmed under her irritation and was tempted to blurt everything out. But what was he going to tell her? That he thought she’d just found a flying saucer?

  They climbed out of the van and stood looking down into the ground as if, by sheer will, they could see what lay beneath. It had snowed during the night, but the wind had been blowing hard all day and had swept the summit clear. It was just after sunset, and the temperature was dropping fast.

  The radar tractor crisscrossed the ground at a distance, looking for other objects. The periodic roars of its engine knifed through the still air. Far below, a pair of headlights moved south along Route 32, and a couple of farmhouses lit up the gathering gloom. The landscape was fading, becoming intangible.

  April surprised him. She put her arm through his and walked him along the brink, away from Moore. “The channel,” she said. “Are you thinking what I am?”

  He nodded. “It was for the boat.”

  She shivered with excitement. “I think we’ve hit the jackpot.”

  “I think so,” said Max.

  Neither spoke for a time. Max was savoring his feelings.

  “Do you think,” she said, “the Sioux will agree to our digging up the area?”

  “Sure. They stand to profit from this, too.”

  They
turned their backs to the wind and looked out over the void. “I don’t like the idea,” she said, “of putting this on a profit-and-loss footing. I wish we could just sneak in here and do this without saying anything to anybody. But we’re talking about a major project now.”

  Max agreed. “An excavation’s not going to be easy. This thing is a lot bigger than the boat.” The ground crackled beneath his feet. “I wonder whether we shouldn’t wait for spring.”

  “No.” April’s jaw tightened. “I am not going to sit on this for six months. We can get a small army of volunteers out here pretty quickly. When we show Lisa what we’ve got, I’m sure she’ll fund us. There’ll be no problem there.” She snuggled down into her coat. “We can post ads at UND and get some student workers. There are a lot of people in Fort Moxie, Cavalier, and Walhalla with not too much to do this time of year. I don’t think we’ll have any trouble assembling a workforce. First thing we need is to get some heavy equipment up here.” Her eyes were shining. “What do you think, Max? Have we got one?”

  She was warm and vulnerable. Like Max, she was reluctant to give too much credence to the find until they knew for sure. “I don’t know,” he said.

  Toward the east, the Red River Valley stretched away to the stars.

  Lisa Yarborough had spent a pleasant evening with a half-dozen friends watching Cats, after which they had retired to the Thai Lounge. At about 1:30 she pulled into her garage. She let herself into the house, bolted the door, and checked her calls.

  April’s voice said: “When you can, call me.”

  She debated waiting until morning, but there had been a note in the voice that excited her curiosity.

  April picked up on the second ring.

  “What’ve you got?” said Lisa.

  “Something’s buried on the ridge. We don’t know what it is yet, but it shouldn’t be there.”

  “Is it connected with the boat?”

  “We won’t know until we dig it up. I don’t want to make promises. Maybe somebody started to put a silo in up there. I just don’t know. But it’s big. And round. Lisa, I’m not objective about this anymore. But the present owners have had the property since the 1920s. They say there shouldn’t be anything there.”