The Year's Top Hard Science Fiction Stories 3

by Allan Kaster

  The first few clippings were all accounts of the silent city, taken from periodicals like the New York Tribune and the Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society. There were pages torn from books by Miner Bruce and Alexander Badlam, and a thick volume by a writer named Charles Fort. Then came several scientific papers, one by Oliver Heaviside, another by J.J. Thomson, and a third with the translated title “Simplified Deduction of the Field and the Forces of an Electron Moving in Any Given Way.” Lawson tried to read it and quickly gave up.

  But the other articles were easier to understand. So was the final item that he found, buried under the rest of the material. It was Russell’s wallet. Lawson had already invaded the man’s privacy in other ways, so it seemed like only a small step from there to looking inside. Taking out all the bills, he rifled through the stack. There were at least three hundred dollars.

  Lawson was tempted. He didn’t think that he could take all of it, but peeling off a few twenties didn’t seem unreasonable, if only as compensation for the plane. In the end, it was the memory of Russell’s strangely old eyes that decided him. Russell was the kind of man, he reflected, who would keep track of what he carried. And perhaps there would be better ways to get at the money.

  He stuffed the bills into the wallet again. Taking out the broken tip of the propeller, he traced it carefully on the page, then put the pencil back where it had been lying on the table. His best hope was to cut down the other tip so that it matched. There was no balancing machine between here and Juneau, so he had to eyeball it as close as he could and hope that it would get him off the ground.

  It was growing dark by the time Cora returned. Lawson had put a pot of rice on the fire, and he was smoothing down the rough edges of the broken tip as he waited for it to finish cooking. Earlier, he had gone outside and looked toward the mountain range to the northwest, but he had seen nothing unusual in the sky.

  Lawson glanced up as the door opened. Cora seemed exhausted, her hair loose around her face, and he was suddenly reminded of his dream from the night before. “No luck, I take it?”

  She shook her head. Collapsing into a chair, she accepted a cup of broth, and when the rice was ready, she ate a bowl of it without speaking. Lawson saw that she was holding herself together, but he still chose his next words with care. “If he doesn’t get back tonight, I can come with you tomorrow, as soon as I get the propeller back on the plane. He’s probably just lost in the woods.”

  “Sam’s not lost,” Cora said tonelessly. “All he had to do to find his way back was follow the shoreline north. If he didn’t come back here, it’s because something happened to him.”

  “We aren’t going to find him in the dark. If he doesn’t turn up, we can take the plane to Juneau and come back with a real search party. If I can get us off the water, we’ll make it to town. And if not—”

  Lawson stopped. Looking into her face, he saw real fear there. Even if Russell came back, she might not want anything to do with Alaska again, and this was the best chance he would ever have to convince her otherwise.

  He broke what was left of the fudge bar in two and offered her the larger piece. After a beat, she took it. Lawson chewed on his own half for a minute before speaking again. “I wanted to ask you something.”

  Cora glanced at him warily. They were seated close to the barrel stove. “What?”

  “I want to know what you’re really doing here. Your husband gave me his version, but I don’t think that he came all this way to prove that some old sourdough saw a mirage.” Lawson fed a chunk of wood into the fire. “I’ve seen strange things over the ice. All pilots have. There’s nothing unusual in that.”

  Cora seemed to weigh her words. “This isn’t an ordinary mirage. It’s what they call a Fata Morgana. I’ll show you.”

  She took a piece of paper and the pencil stub from the table. For a second, she seemed to study the pencil in her hand, and then she turned to him again. “You’re sure you’re interested?”

  Lawson gave a slight shrug. “It passes the time. And I like hearing you talk.”

  He saw her blush. Cora lowered her head and drew a diagram on the page. “It’s called a superior mirage, which means that it appears higher in the sky than the original object. You tend to see them in cold climates, over something like an ice sheet. It causes a layer of cold air to form under a warmer area, which is the opposite of the usual arrangement. A thermal inversion.”

  As she spoke, the weariness seemed to leave her voice. “Light from the object is refracted when it hits the inversion, which bends it along the curve of the Earth. If you’re in the atmospheric duct, you can see it from hundreds of miles away.” She put the pencil down. “That’s what Willoughby saw.”

  Lawson pretended to study the drawing. “And what was the object behind it?”

  “Maybe nothing. A Fata Morgana can be caused by as little as a stretch of coastline or a land formation. The spires that people see are produced by turbulence in the air. Nothing more to it than that.”

  He decided to play his last card. “That’s a pretty good story. Now tell me the truth.”

  Cora looked up sharply. Something was stirring behind her green eyes. “Excuse me?”

  “The truth,” Lawson repeated. “You didn’t come here for a mirage. When I asked for the money for the charter, your husband didn’t blink. He thinks there’s something real here. I’m not saying I believe it. But if you’re serious, you need someone like me to help you.”

  Cora continued to look at him. Finally, she seemed to decide. “Have you heard of a man called Charles Fort?”

  Lawson remembered the name from the book on the table, but he decided not to mention it. “I don’t think so.”

  Cora turned toward the fire. “He was a writer, too. Like Sam, but more so. He spent his life in museums and libraries, looking for accounts of unexplained events. There was a club that got together at his apartment to talk about the unknown. Fort didn’t welcome the attention. He didn’t like being held up as an authority. But Sam cared about him a lot. And so did I.”

  In the firelight, her face was difficult to read. “Fort died seven years ago. He just collapsed. Leukemia. I went to see him in the hospital before he went. It’s where I met Sam. All I knew was that he wanted to take up where Fort had left off. Fort never traveled or did any investigations on his own, and he tried to cover too much at once. Sam thought that you should focus on one problem at a time. The silent city seemed like a good place to start. Fort even gave him his blessing.”

  “If he’s spent years looking into it, why is he coming up to Alaska only now?”

  “You shouldn’t underestimate him. Sam wanted to put together all the pieces before he came. And he realized from the beginning that there was more to the story than even Willoughby knew.”

  Cora went to the table and pulled out the picture of the silent city. “Look at the photo. It’s an obvious hoax. An ordinary picture of Bristol. But before Willoughby started selling it to the tourists as the real thing, other witnesses had already claimed that the city was Bristol, too. Bristol is more than four thousand miles away. There’s no way that a mirage could come even a tenth of that distance. So what was it about the city in the sky that reminded them of it?”

  Lawson looked at the picture again. He saw no more there than before. “You tell me.”

  “Bristol is a city of spires. Some eyewitnesses even claimed to recognize a church called St. Mary Redcliffe. It’s got a row of pinnacles and a spire with a cross. Like this.” Cora sketched a vertical column with four smaller lines projecting from the top. “The accounts differ. But they all mention the spires.”

  “You said that the spires were probably just caused by turbulence in the air.”

  “That’s true of some Fata Morgana images, but it doesn’t make sense here. A cold mass of air over ice would be relatively still. All of the accounts say that the city was stationary. It would hang there in the sky for more than twenty minutes. And it appears in late June and the
middle of July, near the summer solstice, when sunset lasts the longest, which would draw out the phenomenon. The men who witnessed it weren’t fools. Whatever they saw was real.”

  Lawson began to see that she was just as cracked as her husband. “So what was it?”

  “There are plenty of descriptions, but they don’t agree. Some witnesses say that the city looked like Bristol, but there are others who compare it to Montreal, Toronto, or even Peking. Others say that whatever it was, it wasn’t European. You know what that says to me?”

  Lawson had a hunch, but he was more fascinated by the light in her eyes. “What?”

  “It reminds me of a famous detective story. Maybe you’ve read it. A voice is overheard arguing in a room. One witness thinks it was talking in German, another in English, another in Russian. None of them can speak the language themselves, but they think they can recognize it by the sound. The speaker turns out to be an orangutan.” Cora smiled. “And if people say that a city looks like Bristol, Montreal, or Peking, they’re really all saying the same thing without knowing it. It’s something strange. Alien. Or from another time. You think I’m crazy, don’t you?”

  This last question took him by surprise. He wanted to warn her not to throw away her life on this, but he only shrugged. “I wouldn’t know.”

  “I don’t mind.” Cora regarded him with evident amusement. “I’ve been doing all the talking. Tell me. What made you come out to Alaska?”

  He had rarely been asked this before. “There wasn’t much for me on the outside.”

  “That’s what I thought. It draws people who have been pushed to the margins. They have nowhere else to go. The same is true of ideas. Some of us end up on the fringes. It can become a sickness. You know why prospectors go mad? It’s because you have to be nuts to go looking for gold in the first place. You could say the same thing about writers. Sam and I both know this. But I love him, and I don’t want to lose him. Anyway, you knew all this before I even said a word.”

  Cora held up the pencil. “You went through my papers. Did you take the money?”

  Lawson felt his face grow warm. “You can count it. If I looked at your notes, it was because I wanted to know what the hell I was doing here. I stand to lose a lot on this trip, and I had to know why.”

  He came forward until they were close enough to touch. “If it matters, I believe you. Or at least that you’re telling the truth. Hell, for all I know, maybe Willoughby really did see a city from the past—”

  Behind him, the door of the cabin opened. When he turned, he saw the shape of a man outlined against the darkness.

  “You’re wrong,” Russell said. “It wasn’t a city of the past. It’s a city of the future.”

  III.

  In the New York Times, October 31, 1889, is an account, by Mr. L.B. French, of Chicago, of the spectral representation, as he saw it, near Mount Fairweather. “We could see plainly houses . . . and trees. Here and there rose tall spires over huge buildings, which appeared to be ancient mosques or cathedrals. . . . It did not look like a modern city—more like an ancient European city.”

  —Charles Fort, New Lands

  Russell lowered himself into the nearest chair and began to unlace his boots. Lawson saw that he was carrying his right leg stiffly, and that something had been bound around his knee so that it strained against the fabric. Russell noticed him looking and grinned. “Give me a hand with this, will you?”

  As Cora stood watching from the corner, Lawson helped the older man roll up his trouser cuff, which was stained with fresh mud. When the knee was revealed, he saw that Russell had wrapped it in a brace of some heavy material in which he had punched holes, lacing it together with the drawstring from his knapsack. Then he realized that it was the leather cover of a book, its title stamped on the spine. It was The Book of the Damned by Charles Fort.

  Russell’s grin widened. “Fort would have appreciated it. Every writer likes to think that his work will be useful.”

  He undid the lacing. Underneath, his kneecap was discolored by an ugly bruise, with red welts, like teeth marks, running to either side. Lawson took the flask from his pocket and offered the other man a drink, which he accepted. Then they sat in silence as Russell ate a bar of mintcake.

  When he was done, Russell looked at his wife for the first time. “I’m sorry, Cora.”

  Cora remained standing. She seemed visibly relieved, but also determined to tamp it down. “What happened?”

  Russell laughed. “The next time I act like I know what I’m doing, just whisper the name of this island in my ear.” He looked ruefully at his sprained knee. “I didn’t see the storm coming. By the time it hit, all I could do was hunker down in the woods. I spent the night there. It wasn’t too bad. When I set out in the morning, I slipped on a patch of mud, and my knee came down on a foothold trap that someone had thoughtfully placed at that very spot.”

  Lawson nodded. “The trap houses get most of the foxes. For the rest, you use snares. And for the really stubborn ones—”

  “—you set out steel traps,” Russell finished. “I guess that makes me a stubborn fox.”

  He tested his leg and winced. “When I went down, I was probably two hundred paces from shore. It took me half the morning to cobble a brace together. I still can’t put any weight on it. Even with the tripod as a crutch, I didn’t get to the beach until it was almost dark. You were looking for me?”

  “I spent all day calling for you,” Cora said quietly. “Shouting into the wind.”

  “We must have just missed each other. I didn’t mean to worry you. Maybe it serves me right. But I got what I needed.”

  Russell unbuttoned his shirt and withdrew a folded map, which he had been careful to keep dry. Cora was avoiding her husband’s eyes. Lawson wondered if she would say anything about what had passed between them, but he also saw that it didn’t matter. As Russell opened the map, he had the look of a man who was ready to stake everything he had on it, like a prospector about to pour his life into a doubtful claim, even if countless others had failed there before.

  Taking a pencil and a ruler from his bag, Russell drew a line from the southern tip of Willoughby Island toward the western slope of Mount Fairweather, extending it deep into the interior. Then he drew a second line from the island to the eastern edge of the mountain, covering the same distance. He connected the far ends of the lines to make a triangle. The result enclosed a narrow wedge of territory, roughly four hundred miles long and a hundred miles across, with its vertex on the island itself. Russell tapped it with his pencil. “This is where we need to look.”

  Lawson took it in. “So that’s why you came here. To narrow the search area—”

  Russell set the pencil down. “Among other things. You can do a lot with an atlas and an armchair, but there’s no substitute for going into the field. If the image of a city appears here every year, there must be something real behind it. And it has to be somewhere in this triangle.”

  He glanced at Lawson. “You understand, don’t you? The city is seen above the Fairweather range by observers in Glacier Bay, which means that it lies to the northwest. But it also has to be relatively far. I took the sightings yesterday. The top of the range is three degrees above the horizon from the southern end of the island. You can add another degree or so to suspend the city in the air. Each additional degree of elevation indicates seventy miles of horizontal distance, so—”

  He indicated the map again. “The original of the image, whatever it is, is a minimum of two hundred miles away and a maximum of four hundred, which is the upper range for Fata Morgana mirages. And for it to appear where it does, it has to be somewhere in this direction.”

  Lawson studied the area in question. “There isn’t much there. Valdez is the only real town, and there are a couple of villages to the north. I can fly you out there, if you like. The plane got pretty banged up. Once I pay for the repairs, I’d be glad to take you wherever you want—”

  If Russell got the hint, he didn�
��t follow up on it. “There’s nothing to see. But there might be something there one day. And it will probably appear where a settlement is now. A foothold for what will come in the future. But I don’t think any of us will live long enough to visit it.”

  Lawson wondered if Russell and Cora both somehow suffered from the same delusion. “You lost me.”

  “I thought Cora explained it to you. You certainly seemed deep in conversation when I got back.” Russell fixed his wife with an unreadable look. “Do you want to tell him, or should I?”

  Cora took a breath. “It isn’t so hard to understand. A mirage bends light rays in space. Under the right conditions, the image can travel down an atmospheric duct for hundreds of miles. And the same thing could happen in time. It would have to be rare. You might only see it in one place, a few times a year, at sunset. But if you’re standing in the kind of duct that transmits images across time, you would see a temporal mirage of what will be there. Not now. But someday.”

  Lawson wanted to laugh. There was no reason for any sane man to settle there, much less build a city of spires. They were chasing a castle in the air. He had been doing it for years.

  A second later, he realized something else. “You said that you only see it at sunset.”

  “That’s what the witnesses say,” Russell said. “In late June and July. That’s why—”

  “—you were in such a rush to come out,” Lawson finished. “If you waited any longer, you might miss your window. That’s what you told me. But you also said that you’d have me back by dinner. You were lying. No one would come all the way out here just to take some measurements. You wanted to see the city for yourself. Which means that you always meant to stay overnight.”

  Russell looked back at Lawson. “Yes. I wasn’t sure that you’d agree to take me if it meant staying for the night. Once we were on the island, I planned to make myself scarce until dark, and then offer to pay you for the overtime. I wasn’t counting on the storm. The clouds were too heavy. I didn’t see anything at all. It didn’t appear tonight, either. But I don’t need to see it to know that it exists.”