Baylee had spent his last four days at Bantwell going through material left by the historian Marco Collins. “He’s the one we want to talk to,” I said.
Alex nodded. “That would be ideal. Unfortunately, he died about twenty years ago.”
We looked through the Collins inventory. He had wide-ranging interests, but he seemed to have specialized on the New Dawn, the recovery from the Dark Age. “What we need to do,” said Alex, “is try to narrow down any of his work that touched on the artifacts.” He gave me a series of search terms, Apollo artifacts, Cutler, Grand Forks, Zorbas. “Dmitri Zorbas is probably the most critical one. He’s the person associated with the last days of the Prairie House. He was the crusader, the guy who tried to salvage artifacts when things turned ugly in Grand Forks.”
“I’ve heard the name before,” I said.
“He’s pretty well-known for his efforts to recover books that had gotten lost.” We sat down at a table, in front of a pair of displays. Alex brought up a list of the Collins material. It included a diary covering twenty-seven years, final versions and early drafts of seven histories, several hundred essays, and more than twenty thousand pieces of correspondence.
“Collins is easily our most likely candidate. So we should be careful going through this.”
To make things more daunting, the books were all doorstops. I looked at the titles: The Grand Collapse: The Last Days of the Golden Age; Beaumont (Margot Beaumont, of course, was the British president who played a key role in initiating the New Dawn); Incoming Tides: How Climate Change Brought Everything Down; A Brief History of Civilization; Looking Back at the Future (a title suggesting Collins was not an optimist about our own chances); Beyond the Moon: The Great Expansion; and, finally, How to Create a Dark Age.
“Where do you want me to start?” I said.
“Go with that one.” He indicated The Grand Collapse. “That’s the one Baylee was spending most of his time with near the end. That and the correspondence. I’ll check that.”
While there were only seven books, there were twenty-two drafts. “If you write a book,” said Alex, “I doubt you can do it in a single draft. The writers I’ve known won’t even let anyone see their first draft. We probably don’t have anything earlier than a third draft.”
“This one’s marked first draft.”
“Don’t believe it.”
“Whatever,” I said. “Fortunately, since the books are probably all available, we shouldn’t have to go through the drafts at all.”
“That sounds reasonable. But we’re trying to find something that’s been overlooked. There’s a good chance that would have happened because it didn’t make the final cut.” His expression suggested he sympathized. “You obviously don’t know much about how writers work.”
That hit home.
“What?” he said. “Did I say something wrong?”
“Alex, I have a confession to make.”
Those intense eyes locked on me. “About what?”
“I’ve been recording some of the stuff we’ve been doing. Writing memoirs.”
“Oh. I thought for a minute you were going to say you believed this is a fool’s errand. No, that’s okay. If you want to do that, it’s not a problem. Maybe eventually you’ll be able to contribute them to somebody’s archives.”
“Well, actually it’s probably past that point.”
He swung his chair around to face me. “What do you mean?”
“The first one will be released in the spring.”
“The first one? You mean you sold one of the memoirs?”
“Actually I sold the first three.”
His jaw dropped. “The first three?”
“The Polaris incident. And two others.”
“Chase, you can’t be serious.”
“You’re a big name, Alex. The publishers think they’ll sell pretty well.”
“Shouldn’t you have cleared it with me first?”
“I wasn’t sure you’d approve.”
“I’m not sure I do.”
“Rainbow Enterprises will get a lot of publicity out of it.”
“I understand that, but—”
“What?”
“We have to be concerned about the privacy of our clients. Did you stop to consider that?”
“Sure. I’ve changed all the names.”
“Chase, I’m not so sure that’s a good idea.”
“Maybe we should get back to The Grand Collapse. Or did we just have one?”
There was a distinct growl. But he said, “No, we’re fine.”
“Good. I’m working on the Sunset Tuttle one now.”
“All right. Let’s try to concentrate on Garnett Baylee, okay? And do me a favor?”
“Sure.”
“If anyone asks, I never knew about any of this.”
I started paging through draft one of The Grand Collapse. And glanced down at the bottom of the screen, where the word count was over three hundred thousand. “This is impossible, Alex,” I said. “We’ll be here for a year trying to go through all this.”
“You don’t have to read everything, Chase. Just scan—”
Unfortunately, Marco Collins was impossible to scan. I had never read him before, but the book just sucked me in. I couldn’t believe I was looking at an early draft. (There were two, plus the book itself, to go through.)
I’ve read the standard histories that most people have, but I’d never seen anything like this one, which was a tour through the general collapse. I was present when the global economy, almost without warning, crashed on Thursday, March 8, 3021. Collins explained how it had happened, and even though I’ve never had any interest in economics, I couldn’t break away from it. I was in the North American Stock Exchange when the sale orders began to arrive. A few days later, I watched angry mobs in Chicago rampage through the downtown area in defiance of a government too weak to respond.
We didn’t get out for lunch. Alex picked up some cookies somewhere, and we got by on those.
I was seated in a living room with a small family in Casper, Wyoming, when the internet went down. Within hours, personal-communication devices began to fail. Suddenly, a group of people who had been connected all their lives to the rest of the world found themselves completely cut off. Angry voices filled the streets. No one had any idea what had caused the problem.
It didn’t go away. A few hours later, the lights went out. The power system failed, and the only way people could talk with each other was to go outside and knock on doors. It was chilling, a life I couldn’t imagine.
Fortunately, the weather was mild. A militia unit showed up to provide security. But within a few days, food deliveries began to fail, and the militia seemed unable to do much to ease the problem. Gradually, they faded from the scene. And the first raiders appeared. For a time, the raiders traveled in trucks and cars, but with the electricity down, they had no way to recharge. Eventually, they switched to horses. They ignored money, which was becoming irrelevant. They stole supplies and killed at will. The town organized its own defense force, but it was running out of food. Another blow came when the water system shut down.
They had to learn the farming and hunting skills earlier generations took for granted. And how to make bullets and shoes. Many of them died in the process. People wandered into Casper on occasion with news of civil war, plague, utter chaos.
It never ended. New generations appeared, adapted, and hung on as best they could.