We both knew the other significance of that coming revelation. Once Seth knew how to do the tests, my vulnerability would increase enormously. As the endgame began, I was in danger of losing my queen. I knew — and he knew — that I needed a countermove.
He stared at me strangely when, with the car loaded and ready to go, I went back into the garden and collected Methuselah. “I won’t have a chance to come back and get him later,” I explained as I placed the box tortoise, appropriately, in with the other boxes in the rear compartment.
You won’t have much use for turtles where you’ll be going, his look said. But of course, he could not suggest that to me. We were still playing the game of mutual trust and goodwill, assisted on his part by a loaded gun.
He told me to drive. He would navigate. That was when I learned he had never before visited our destination.
So whose house was it? As we drove north I became increasingly apprehensive. I saw everything with heightened senses. Remember, this was my first opportunity to observe the effects of Supernova Alpha in a normal setting. My experience to date had been the emergence from the syncope facility, a bizarre river journey, and days of confinement within my own house and garden.
I drove slowly and carefully. The antique car would not go fast, and Seth did not need to remind me that police interest in our vehicle, for whatever reason, offered worse dangers for me than for him.
Our stately progress offered plenty of opportunity for observation. Seth’s occasional descriptions of the past two months had suggested to me a world shattered and shaken by the supernova. I had no reason to doubt what he said, and certainly what I saw on the highway offered much evidence to support his view. Hardly a car or truck was familiar, and the changes were not those that I might have reasonably expected after five years in judicial sleep. The vehicles had a jerry-built look to them, things of rags and patches.
On the other hand, they moved. And their drivers, except for an air of antiquity that matched the cars, seemed perfectly cheerful. Their manner said, we have faced the worse effects of the supernova; they’re over, and we’re going to beat this thing.
Some, of course, would not make that statement. I saw burned-out wreckage of old accidents, still uncleared. Someone had placed wreaths at three roadside points, where blackened earth showed the first sprouts of new green. As we progressed farther north, off to the left of the highway I saw the tail of a crashed aircraft, jutting into the red afternoon sky like a giant silver memorial to the dead.
As we left the finished roads and began to ascend a gravel track, the evidence of death became more immediate. Our car passed three crosses formed from cut saplings. The soil of the graves that they marked was ruddy and newly turned. They could be no more than a few days old.
I don’t think that Seth even noticed them. His attention was on his map.
“Turn left at the top,” he said. “And that’s it.”
That’s what? My apprehension mounted. I drove at a snail’s pace along the rough dirt road, until a small wooden house came into view, set back into the hillside.
“Stop a few yards short.” Seth was studying the house, but at the same time managed to keep one eye — and his gun — on me. “Then we’ll go take a look.”
“What about the telomere monitoring materials?”
“They can stay in the car. They’ll keep awhile, an’ I don’t see raccoons an’ deer takin’ too much interest in ’em.”
Which meant that Methuselah had to stay there, too. I made sure the doors and windows were closed before at Seth’s bidding I stepped out of the car and walked in front of him toward the house.
I mentioned that my sense of observation had been heightened from the moment we left my home. Now I saw Seth in the same super sensitive mood. In front of the house, he made me stop.
“No car tracks. Nobody has driven this way. But lots of boot marks. Recent. And both ways.” He motioned me forward again.
I noticed that one set of imprints was identical to those of the boots I had been wearing when I awoke at the syncope facility. That didn’t tell me much, and I did not mention it to Seth. In any case, I could see three different sizes and style of footprint. Not one of them looked like a woman’s shoe.
It was at this point that, as I remarked, chance seemed ready to undo my plans. I had been prepared for three people: Seth, and his two still-anonymous colleagues. My hope was to dispose of them, and to vanish. No one else would have any idea where to look for me.
Now I faced an uncertain number of adversaries. At a minimum there were three men and one woman, plus Seth. Disposing of all of them, however desirable, seemed impossibly difficult. That was even more the case since the woman had not been at the house, and she could be anywhere. She would be able to direct others here. My earlier hope, for their death and my disappearance, had been destroyed.
Chance favors the prepared mind. I looked even more closely at everything. We entered the house, me a step ahead of Seth.
“This gets a bit annoyin’,” he said, when we were both in the dim interior. He had a gift for understatement. “They’ve been here, sure as shootin’. Door not locked, footprints all over the place outside. But where the hell are they? It’ll be dark in another couple of hours.”
He did not expect an answer from me, so I was free to form my own impressions of the house. As Seth said, there were footprints outside, and not inside. But in places near the entrance, the wooden boards of the floor were slightly damp. Someone had recently been cleaning there. At the same time, the interior had the clammy, unused feel of a building unoccupied for weeks or months. A plate sat on the table, and the cup next to it contained a dried-out brown material. I bent over and sniffed. “Coffee,” I said to Seth. “But not made today — or yesterday, either.” When I straightened up I held hidden in my hand a little paring knife from the table. It was sharp enough but of no use as a weapon. The blade was barely an inch long.
“I don’t think so,” Seth said. “Put it back.”
Apparently he saw everything, even when he didn’t seem to be looking. I laid the little knife back on the table. Then I walked in front of him as we carried out an inspection of every part of the house.
“Not a thing,” Seth said at the end of it. “Not a sign, not a note, not even a callin’ card — not that I’d expect them to leave one, because for all they know, you might have arrived without me.”
Not a sign, he said, meaning not a sign of the owner, but I very much disagreed with that. I saw many signs. The house was sturdy and built of wood throughout. Although it was furnished with electric power, I also saw propane tanks, an oil stove, and kerosene heaters. The little bathroom had an old-fashioned hand razor and men’s aftershave lotion. The pantry was amply stocked with dried foods. The owner, whoever he might be, had apparently been rehearsing for Supernova Alpha long before the star exploded.