“Okay.”
And pray.
Tod set up a clock. I saw thirty-six seconds begin to tick down.
“Looks too fast, Kellie. I don’t think it’s going to work.”
I didn’t say anything. Didn’t know what to say. He’s watching the ground rush up at him, what am I going to do, tell him everything’s going to be fine, have a nice day?
The last few seconds drained away. And without a sound Delta ripped into the ground. There was a brief flare in the darkness—not enough fuel left for a real explosion—, and he was gone.
They didn’t exactly blame it on me, although the muscles in Sylvia’s jaw did funny things when she saw me again, that night and during the investigation and later at the memorial service. We all said nice things about George, how he always found time for others, how he loved his work, how he was extraordinarily patient. None of it was true. Most of the time his work was fairly routine and he endured it. Now and then it turned up something that seriously engaged his interest, like the books at the Retreat. But that wasn’t the same thing at all.
He did succeed in saving most of them. So he became the hero of the hour, and we all drank to him. A few people looked down their noses at me, visibly grateful that someone had had the guts to stay with the payload.
In the end, though, it didn’t matter, at least as far as translations were concerned. The print—the ink—was smeared beyond recovery. Nobody’s sure yet whether it was that the force field that guarded the Retreat had stayed on for a longer time than anyone had expected, blocking out the preserving vacuum, or whether the occupants of the Retreat had needed a moist environment. Whichever it was, there’d been too much humidity over an extended period. The specialists had enough to conclude that they could detect only one language, that the language used upper and lower case, that it read from right to left, that it used punctuation, and that individual words were separated by spaces.
And that was it. Whatever scientific or philosophical ruminations might have existed therein, whatever timeless novels, whatever observations on the state of the universe, it was all lost.
So when I ventured to suggest to Sylvia that George’s sacrifice had consequently been pointless, she drew herself up in righteous indignation. We were standing in the main room, in front of the oculus, looking out at the spectacle of worlds and rings. The sofa and one of the armchairs had not yet been moved up to the Bromfield. They were huge pieces of furniture, the way everything looked when you were four years old. One of the side walls was in the process of being taken down and prepared for shipment back to Arlington. “Don’t even think it,” she said. “The books are invaluable artifacts, even if we can’t read them.”
Well, maybe there’s something to that. But it didn’t seem like much consolation for what we’d lost. And I couldn’t help recalling George’s comment just before it all started. “We already have the critical information about them. Even if we didn’t have the books, we have the window.”
What critical information?
I related the remark to Sylvia.
She frowned, considered it, and nodded. “Well,” she said, “I guess it’s a reference to the esthetic sense of their owners. And their creators. I suppose that’s significant. Considering what they looked like,”—she managed a smile,—“that comes as something of a surprise.” She turned away to caution one of the technicians to use more care in lifting a section of wall.
I thought there must have been more to it. But it didn’t occur to me until later that, if you stood in front of the oculus at the right angle, you could see your own reflection.
GOOD INTENTIONS
Written with Stanley Schmidt
“Do you believe in UFO’s?”
No, dammit. I don’t believe in anything that hasn’t been parked in my driveway so I could kick the tires and check the gearshift. So don’t ask again. Just because I’m a science fiction writer doesn’t mean I’m demented. I have no time for crop circles, telepathy, alien abductions, power centers, spontaneous combustion, or ancient astronauts. Loch Ness is empty, Atlantis is bunk, and I’ll sleep in any haunted house in the world for five hundred bucks plus expenses. Okay?
I mention this up front because I attended a seminar this past summer during which I may have touched the infinite. And I know how that sounds. But I want to avoid your saying well, after all, this is Jake Cobblemere, he writes all those stories about time travelers and rubber dimensions, so what do you expect? If you want to believe I’ve lost it, that’s okay; but don’t conclude all this just bubbled up out of my workday habits. Because that isn’t what happened.
Not at all.
Last spring I got a call from Sam Wynn inviting me to participate as an advisor at the Baranov Seminar, which is conducted annually at the Skyhawk Conference Center in upstate New York. You might have heard of it. The participants refer to themselves as Baranovians. They’re science fiction enthusiasts who meet for a few days every summer to renew old acquaintances and do the SF equivalent of a mystery weekend. They bring in a writer and maybe an outside expert to put together a simulation for them. The previous summer, for example, they converted Skyhawk into Moonbase and staged a murder. One of the guests was the New York City medical examiner. (The murderer, by the way, turned out to be the computer, à la Hal.)
The seminars have been running since 1971, when Abraham Baranov personally launched them, discovered how engaging they were, and stayed with them until his death. It was, I need not tell you, a signal honor to be asked to step briefly into the great man’s shoes.
“This year they want to do a Martian dig,” Sam told me. He explained that the group decides each summer what sort of program they’ll do the following year. “We’ve got Marsbase up and running. We’ve been there for a while, taking soil samples and whatnot, and we discover some artifacts.”
“Artifacts?” I said. “What sort of artifacts?”
“That’s up to you, Jake.”
“But Mars is dead. Has been for a couple of billion years, except maybe for microbes. How could there be artifacts?”
“Your problem, Jake. Come up with something. And listen, we’re giving you a professional archeologist to work with.”
“Okay,” I said, warming to the idea. “Does the archeologist write science fiction?”
“She doesn’t like science fiction. But she’s a friend of mine, she’s available, and she offered to come no charge.”
“What am I supposed to do with an archeologist? “
“They want to do an actual dig. She knows how.”
“I thought this would be a simulation.”
“Oh, no. There’ll be a real dig site. We’ve set aside some ground. You’re going to bury the artifacts, and the team will dig them up and try to solve the mystery.”
“What mystery?”
“Invent one.”
The archeologist was Maureen Coverdale. She worked out of Penn, and I lived in Indianapolis, so we did all the planning on-line. She surprised me. I guess I’d expected that she would treat the whole thing more or less as an excuse to get a free vacation, but she took it all very seriously. She kept after me, pointing out that Martian artifacts could not be produced at the last minute, and that we had a clear obligation to make sure the Baranovians got their money’s worth.
She turned out to be twenty years younger than I’d expected, dark-eyed, trim, a woman who looked as if she’d be more at home among soft blue lights than among ruins. But I dreamed up a story line and we agreed on what we needed to do. She took charge of manufacturing the stuff we needed. She showed up two days before the program was to start, supervised the Skyhawk earthmover, buried everything, and was waiting (with Sam Wynn) to shake my hand when I arrived late, having underestimated the driving time on a series of winding roads.