Ancient Shores (17 page)

“By all means.”

“Chairman, it’s doubtful that there is anything of real value on that ridge. You know that. I know that. The government’s been there and they’ve already decided there’s no need for them to be concerned.” Redfern doubted that was true. “So it’s a shot in the dark. But on the off chance there might be something that could be turned to a profit, we are willing to pay for the chance to look. And pay quite well, I might add.”

He produced a blue folder and a leather-covered checkbook and took a gold pen from his pocket. “Why don’t we just settle it now? Say, five million?” He removed the cap from the pen. “You could do quite a bit with that kind of money. Truth is, Chairman, I’d like to come back in a few years to see how the reservation will have changed.”

Walker was able to conceal his surprise at the amount. He glanced at Redfern, who gave him no encouragement. Whatever they offer now, Arky thought, is too little. “A number of corporations,” the chairman said, “have already shown interest. They would like to build hotels up there. And restaurants.
Disney wants to build a theme park. I would not wish to sound greedy, Dr. Wells, but five million is small potatoes at this stage.”

Redfern was proud of the chairman.

Wells’s eyebrows went up. “I see,” he said. “And you have firm offers?”

“Oh, yes. They are very generous. And these people only want to
lease
property.
You
want to get at the heart of the property’s value. If we were to sell to you, we would have nothing save the cash in hand. Dr. Wells, under the circumstances, that would have to be a lot of cash in hand.”

Wells looked down at his checkbook. “You drive a hard bargain, sir. But I understand your point. And I am authorized to compete. May I ask what you would consider a serious offer?”

Walker closed his eyes briefly. “Why don’t you simply go to your final offer and save us both some time?”

Wells looked uncomfortable. Arky could see the wheels going around.

“Fifty million.” He spoke in a voice the lawyer could barely hear.

“That’s very good,” said Walker. “And the money would be payable…?”

Redfern caught his eye. Don’t do it.

“Ten percent on signing the contract. The balance on the actual deed transfer.” He offered his pen to the chairman. “Do we have an agreement?”

This time Walker was unsuccessful in masking his shock. “You must understand,” he said, “that I cannot make the decision. It will be up to the council.”

“Of course. But Mr. Redfern assures me you have considerable influence. I’m sure that if
you
are in favor of this action, the council will go along with it.”

Walker tried to look doubtful. But it wasn’t working. Wells smiled, confident the council could not resist so generous an offer. “Arky is inclined to overstate my influence, I think.” Walker glanced over at his lawyer.
“I wonder, Dr. Wells, if you would excuse us for a minute.”

“Of course.” Wells threw a quick grin at Redfern.
You son of a bitch
, it said,
you cost me, but let’s see you change his mind
. “I’ll be in the other room,” he said. He opened the blue folder, which contained a contract, pushed it toward Walker, and left the office.

The chairman smiled broadly. He could barely contain his pleasure.

“I advise against it,” said Redfern.

“Why not?” Walker beamed. “
Why
in God’s name should we not take this kind of money?”

“The value isn’t going to go away. Why would they offer so much?”

“It might be worth
nothing
. We could wind up selling T-shirts over there. Listen, Arky, we don’t
need
more than fifty million. Do you realize what that could do for us? He’s right, you know. That kind of money could put a lot of logs on front porches. I think we should not get greedy. And I will so advise the council.”

“This is not a man,” said Arky, “who is going to
give
us anything. He’s offering fifty million because he thinks it’s worth more. Considerably more. Advise the council to seek a second offer. You might be surprised at the result.”

Walker’s delight began to drain away. “You seriously expect me to go before them and recommend against this kind of money? When we could conceivably end up with nothing? Even if I did take a stand against the proposal, they’d sweep me aside.” He took a deep breath. “Give me a real reason. If you have one.”

Arky did not like the position he was in. If things went wrong, he knew who would be hanging out there. “If Wells and his people get hold of it, they’ll treat it exclusively as a source of wealth. Who knows what might get lost?”

“That’s not exactly a war cry,” said Walker.

“No, it isn’t. But we may be looking at another Manhattan island.”

“Maybe you weren’t listening, Arky. He isn’t talking twenty-six bucks.”

“Maybe not. But if you want a war cry, keep in mind that we now possess a discovery that may release whole new technologies. The road to the future, Chairman, might run directly across the top of Johnson’s Ridge. And you’re ready to give it away.”

“I’d see it the same way,” said Max. “Take the money and run.”

Arky looked disgusted. “That is precisely what they will do.” He was working his way through a plate of fish and chips. April, Arky, and Max were in a back booth at Mel’s Restaurant in Langdon. It was no longer possible to get near the Prairie Schooner, which was overwhelmed with customers. “The council will feel that it would be criminal to turn down an offer of that magnitude. And, to be honest, I’m not comfortable advising against accepting it.” He looked extremely unhappy. “Do you have any idea what would happen to me if they took my advice and the ridge turned out to be worthless?”

“You’d get scalped?” Max asked innocently.

Arky didn’t seem to have heard. “Not that it matters. They’ll take the money and run. Just as you say.”

“Damn,” said April. “If the project gets sold off, we’ll be out the following day.”

“I don’t think there’s much question about that,” said Max. He listened to the low murmur of conversation around him, to the clink of silverware and occasional bursts of laughter.

“Arky,” April said, “I can’t deal with the prospect of not being here when the discoveries get made.”

The lawyer looked sympathetic. “I know. But I think the matter is past my being able to control events.”

“How long do we have?” asked April.

“Wells’s people probably have teams ready to go as soon as the paper gets signed. There’ll be a special council meeting late tomorrow afternoon to consider the offer. If they approve it, which they will, Wells will make a phone call, and you’ll be history.”

When they got back to the Northstar, there was a package waiting for Max. “Filters,” he explained. “For the minicam. Maybe we can get a better look at what happens when the lights come on.”

They retreated gloomily to their rooms. But minutes later April appeared at Max’s door.

“Come in,” he said. “I was going to call you.”

She looked frantic. “What do we do?”

There was only one chair in the room. Max left it for her and sat down on the bed. “I don’t think there’s much we
can
do. Not with all that money out there.”

“Max,” she said, “fifty million’s peanuts. Listen, we may have found a link to
somewhere else
.” She forced it out, as she might an appeal to the supernatural. “The chair did not just get annihilated. It
went
somewhere.”

“You think.”

“I think.” She rubbed her forehead wearily. “Did
you know there’s a
seventh
icon?”

“No,” said Max, surprised. “Where?”

“Beside the ditch. Where they used to tie up the boat.”

Max pictured the area. “On one of the posts?”

“Yes. It’s got a design that looks like a kanji character. It doesn’t light up when you touch it. I even tried putting a chair in the ditch, and it still didn’t work. But Max, I think that’s the way they brought the boat in. Directly from
wherever
.”

Max shook his head. “I’m sorry. But I just can’t buy any of this. You’re talking
Star Trek
stuff. ‘Beam me up, Scotty.’”

They sat and listened to the wind blow.

“I think it’s really true, Max.”

“Well, good luck proving it. Whatever they are, the icons seem to work only once. What good is a long-range transport system that only works once?”

She pulled her legs up onto the chair and hugged her knees. “I think they work only once because the stuff we’ve been sending blocks the reception area. Somebody has to move it and clear the grid on the other end. If they don’t, the system shuts down.”

“That’s the wildest guesswork I’ve ever heard.”

“Max, we watched the chair fade out. It
faded
. It didn’t blow up. It didn’t disintegrate. It went somewhere. The question is, where?”

Max shook his head. “I think the whole idea is goofy.”

“Maybe.” April took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I think we better tell Arky what we know.”

“You mean, tell him we think we have a portal to another dimension? Or to Mars? He’ll think what I think: It’s goofy.”

Her eyes were pools of despair. “He wouldn’t think that if we did a demonstration for him.”

“What kind of demonstration? All we can do is make things disappear. That doesn’t prove anything.”

Neither of them wanted to state the obvious.

April squeezed her eyes shut. The eternal prairie winds shook
the windows. She was unnerved, but the conviction that she was right was going to help her get through it.

She heard a car pull up outside. The doors banged, and voices drifted in.

If there were time, she might have devised a test that would remove some of the risk. But there was no time. She sighed. Use it or lose it.

Through the wall, she could hear the mindless burble of Max’s TV.

What were the dangers?

She might be annihilated. But no piece of the chair had remained, and there was no indication of a violent event. It had simply lost its corporeality.
It had gone somewhere
.

She might find herself in a hostile environment. For example, in a methane atmosphere. But the visitors had presumably thrived in North Dakota. Surely whatever lay on the other side, through the port, was essentially terrestrial.

She might be stranded. But who ever heard of a port you could enter from only one side?

At midnight she filled her thermos and put two sandwiches and some fruit into a plastic bag. She loaded her camera and pulled on her Minneapolis Twins jacket, feeling pleased with herself. Forty minutes later she passed the police blockade at the access road and drove up the winding incline and out onto the ridge. The glow from the Roundhouse, out of sight in its excavation ditch, seemed brighter tonight. She wondered if it was still charging its batteries and made a mental note to start logging the luminosity.

It was cold, down in the teens. She parked just outside the security gate, opened her glove compartment, and took out a notebook. She sat thinking for several minutes before she knew what she wanted to say. When she’d finished, she laid the notebook open on the passenger seat, picked up a flashlight, and got out.

One of the guards, a middle-aged man whom she knew only as Henry, appeared in the door of the security station. “Good evening, Dr. Cannon,” he said. “Forget something?”

“No, Henry.” Her breath misted in the yellow light of the newly installed high-pressure sodium lamps. “I couldn’t sleep. Thought I’d come out and see if I could get some work done.”

He looked at his watch, not without a sense of disapproval. “Okay,” he said. “Nobody else here. From the staff.”

She nodded. “Thanks.”

He disappeared back inside. April walked through the gate and went directly into the Roundhouse, shutting the door against the cold.

At night the dome was a patchwork of light and dark, a scattering of illuminated alcoves. The lights shifted and moved as she did, following her, illuminating the ground in front, fading behind. As she
approached the grid, it also lit up, spotlighted for her as if the place
knew
what she intended.

She hesitated. It was just as well Max wasn’t here, because then it would be impossible to back away. And until now she had believed she
would
back away. But the fear had almost dissipated. Something was out there, waiting for her. The illuminated grid looked both safe and inviting. Time to move out.

She switched on the flashlight and approached the icons. The triggers.

Touch the icon and you get twenty-three seconds to walk over and take your place on the grid.

She looked at the arrow, the rings, and the G clef.

The arrow.

It gleamed in the half-light. She touched the wall, just her fingertips. And pressed.

The light came on.

She took a deep breath, crossed the floor, and stepped onto the grid. The trench that had once been a channel extended out into the shadows. Across the dome, the wall was lost in the dark and the lights faded out and the night went on forever. She hitched the camera strap higher on her shoulder, taking comfort from the mundaneness of the act. She zipped her jacket almost to her neck and fought down a sudden urge to jump off the grid.

It was still dark when the telephone brought Max out of a deep sleep. He rolled over, fumbled for the instrument, picked it up. “Hello?”

“Mr. Collingwood? This is Henry Short. Out at the security gate.”

He immediately came awake. “Yes, Henry? What is it?”

“We can’t find Dr. Cannon,” he said.

He relaxed. “She’s sleeping next door.”

“No, sir. She came out here at about twelve-thirty.
Went inside the Roundhouse. But she’s not in there now.”

Max looked at his watch. A quarter after three.

“We’ve checked the other buildings. She’s not anywhere. We can’t figure it out.”

“Is her car still there?”

“Yes, sir. She hasn’t come back through the gate.”

Max was genuinely puzzled. To him the conversation earlier that evening, with its implications and pointed omissions, had been purely hypothetical. “Henry, did you check the rear apartments in the Roundhouse?”

“We looked everywhere.”

“Okay. Call the police. I’m on my way.”

He hung up and rang her motel number. No one answered. He stared at the phone and finally recognized the possibility that she might have used the grid. Thoroughly alarmed, he dressed hastily, climbed into his car and started for Johnson’s Ridge. He should have told Henry to look in the channel. Maybe she’d fallen in there. It would have been easy enough for the security people to miss her.

He picked up his cellular phone, dialed the gate, and got a new voice. George Freewater. “How are we doing?” he asked.

“Still no news. The police are on their way.” Long pause. “Max, if she’s outside, she won’t last very long. It’s cold.”

“I know. Did you look in the channel?”

He heard a brief conversation on the other end, and then George came back. “Yes, we looked in the channel. Listen, Mr. Collingwood, we found something else. There’s a message addressed to you. It was on the front seat of her car.”

“Me?” Max’s stomach lurched. “What’s it say?”

“You want me to read it?”

“Yes, George. Please.”

“Okay. It says—Wait a minute; the light’s not so good here. It says, ‘Dear Max, I’m following the arrow.
Since you’re reading this, something may have gone wrong. Sorry. I enjoyed working with you.’” George grunted. “What’s she talking about?”

Max’s headlights lost themselves in the dark. “I’m not sure,” he said. But he knew.

When Max walked into the Roundhouse, he was angry with April Cannon. She had put him in a terrible position. He berated himself for not guessing what might happen and heading it off.

What the hell was he supposed to do now?

The dome was oppressive.

Henry Short was inside with two police officers. One was looking down into the pit. He was young, barely twenty-one. Sandy-haired, long, angular jaw, prominent nose.

The partner, who was bald and irritable, broke off his conversation with George Freewater as Max entered. “Sir, you’re Mr. Collingwood?”

“Yes,” said Max.

“I’m Deputy Remirov,” he said, producing a notebook that Max recognized as belonging to April. “What does this mean?”

I’m following the arrow
.

“What’s the arrow?” the younger one asked.

Max hesitated briefly. “I don’t know,” he said.

Remirov looked unhappy. “You have no idea what she was trying to tell you?”

“No,” said Max. “Not a clue.”

The policeman didn’t believe a word of it. “Why would she write you a note you can’t understand?” he asked angrily.

Max squirmed. He wasn’t good at lying. And he didn’t like being evasive with police officers. He’d had little contact with them during his life, and they made him nervous. “I just don’t know,” he said.

Exasperated, Remirov turned back to George. “You’re sure she didn’t go out through the gate without being seen?”

“We’ve got a camera on the gate,” George said.

“That doesn’t answer my question.”

“I guess it
is
possible. But we always have somebody on the monitors.”

“So you really don’t know,” said Remirov.

“Not without checking the tapes.”

“Why don’t we check the tapes?” he asked with exaggerated politeness.

Max wandered away to look at the grid. He saw no way to confirm whether she had actually used it. There were no footprints, no marks that told him anything.

Redfern, wearing a buckskin jacket and heavy boots, came into the dome. He spoke briefly with George and the two policemen before he saw Max. “They’re going to organize a search party,” he said.

“Good,” said Max.

A long, uncomfortable silence followed. “George told me she left a note for you. Max, where is she?”

“My guess is she’s dead,” said Max. Saying what he had been thinking ever since he’d heard about the note somehow made it less real.

Redfern’s jaw tightened. “How?” he asked.

Max thought about doing a demonstration, but since each of the icons seemed to work only once, he hesitated. Instead he simply pointed out the grid and the set of triggers, and explained what had happened. “This,” he said, directing the lawyer’s attention to the symbol at the top of the second column, “is the arrow.”

“You’re telling me there’s a device here that
anni-hilates
things, and you think she used it on herself?”

“That’s what I think,” said Max.

“Son of a bitch,” he said. “Don’t you people have any sense at all?”

“Hey, I didn’t know anything like this was going to happen.”

“Yeah. Well, maybe you should’ve been watching a little closer.”

Max started to protest, but Arky waved it aside. “We can figure out who to blame later. She thought she was going somewhere. How did she expect to get back?”

“I don’t know. She didn’t exactly talk this over with me. But I assume she hoped there’d be a similar device at the other end. If there
is
an other end.”

Arky turned to George, who had joined them. “How long ago, did you say?”

“She came through the gate at twelve-thirty.”

Arky looked at his watch. Ten after four. “I guess we can assume she isn’t coming back on her own.” He folded his arms. “So where,” he asked accusingly, “do we go from here?”

Max felt like an idiot.
Damn you, Cannon
.

Arky’s face was dark. The shadows of an internal
struggle played at the corners of his mouth and in his eyes. “Maybe it would be best,” he said, “if the tribe did sell. People die a little too easily here.” He got up and headed toward the door. “We’ll let the police go ahead with their search. There
is
a chance she wandered off and got lost on the mountain.” He hesitated. “Max—”

“Yes?”

“I would like your word that you will not try to follow her.”

The demand embarrassed him. Max Collingwood would
never
try that kind of stunt. It was flat-out stupid. But in some dark corner of his mind it pleased him that Arky believed he might be capable of it. “No,” he said, meaning it. “I won’t.”

Emotion flickered across the lawyer’s features. “Good,” he said. “Let’s let the search run its course. Meantime, you should find out about her next of kin.”

Next of kin? Max knew very little about April Cannon. He would have to check with Colson Laboratories.

Arky paused at the door. “Max, is there anything else about this place I should know?”

“No,” said Max. “At least, not anything that
I
know about.”

Max listened to the negative reports coming in from the search parties while the first vague streaks of dawn crept into the sky. The little girl with the brown curls was looking at him again from the cabin window. It was a memory he had thought he’d shut away. Buried.

He liked April Cannon, and he couldn’t bring himself to believe she was gone, vanished into a dark never-never land. The image of the fading chair, the vertical lines just visible through its legs and seat, was paused on each of the monitor bank’s four screens.

The lines might have been anything—a defect in the film, a momentary reflection. Or they might have
been a glimpse of another place. They looked vaguely like a column. He pictured the wooden chair set in the portico of a Greek temple.

If in fact it was a transportation system, it
had
to work in both directions. Why, then, had she not come back?

Because the system was old. After all, the smoke had not worked. Maybe she was simply stranded.

There was a test he could run.

Max installed a filter in his minicam, got a spade and collected a pile of snow, and went back to the Roundhouse. It was empty; the search was concentrated on the surrounding hillsides. His boots crunched on the dirt floor, and it occurred to him that it was the first time he’d been alone in here.

He made a little mound of snow in the center of the grid. Then he propped the camera on a chair, aimed it, and started it.

He pressed the wall over the arrow.

It lit up.

Max backed away, watching the pile of snow, counting down without meaning to.

Above the grid, the air ignited. It burned and expanded and threw off a golden cloud that shimmered and grew so bright he had to look away. Then it winked out.

The snow was gone. Not so much as a trickle of water remained.

Okay. He gathered up the camera, hurried back to the van, and loaded the videocassette into the VCR.