The Year of the Quiet Sun

FIFTEEN

Chaney was apprehensive.

The red light blinked out. He reached up to unlock the hatch and throw it open. The green light went dark. Chaney grasped the two handrails and pulled up to a sitting position, with his head and shoulders protruding through the hatchway. He hoped he was alone in the room — the vehicle was in darkness. The air was sharply cold and smelled of ozone. He struggled out of the hatch and climbed over the side. Saltus had warned him the stool was gone so he slid cautiously to the floor, and clung to the polywater tank for a moment of orientation. The blackness around him was complete: he saw nothing, heard nothing but the hoarse sound of his own breathing.

Brian Chaney reached up to slam shut the hatch but then stopped himself — the TDV was his only lifeline to home base and it was wiser to keep that hatch open and waiting. He stretched out his hand to grope for the locker; he remembered its approximate location, and took a few hesitant steps in the darkness until he bumped into it. His suit hung in a dusty paper sheath, prepared by a dry cleaner now many years behind him, and his shoes were on the bottom beneath the suit. An automatic pistol — put there at the insistence of Arthur Saltus — now was an ungainly lump in the pocket of his jacket.

The weapon underscored his apprehension.

Chaney didn’t bother to check his watch: it lacked an illuminated dial and there was nothing to be seen on the wall. He quit the darkened room.

He moved slowly down the corridor in a black eerie silence to the shelter; dust stirred up by his feet made him want to sneeze. The shelter door was found by touch and pushed open but the overhead lights failed in their automatic response. Chaney felt for the manual switch beside the door, flicked it, but stayed in darkness: the electric power was out and the lecturing engineer was a liar. He listened intently to the unseen room. He had no matches or lighter — the penalty paid by a non-smoker when light or fire was needed — and stood there for a moment of indecision, trying to recall where the smaller items were stored. He thought they were in metal lockers along the far wall, near the racks of heavy clothing.

Chaney shuffled across the floor, wishing he had that cocksure engineer here with him.

His feet collided with an empty carton, startling him, and he kicked it out of the way. It struck another object before it came to rest: Saltus had complained of sloppy housekeeping, and Katrina had written a memo. After a period of cautious groping the ungainly bulge in his jacket pocket struck the leading edge of the bench, and he put forth both hands to explore the working surface. A radio — plugged in and wired to the antenna — a lantern, a few small empty boxes, a large one, a number of metal objects his fingers could not immediately identify, and a second lantern. Chaney barely hesitated over the objects and continued his probe. His roving fingers found a box of matches; the fuel tanks of both lanterns jostled with reassuring sounds. He lit the two lanterns and turned to look at the room. Chaney didn’t like to think of himself as a coward but his hand rested in the gun pocket as he turned and peered into the gloom.

The raider had returned to pilfer the stores.

From the looks of the place the man must have spent the last few winters here, or had invited his friends in with him.

A third lantern rested on the floor near the door and he would have knocked that one over if he had stepped sideways in the darkness. A box of matches lay ready beside it. An incredible number of empty food cartons were stacked along a wall together with a collection of water cans, and he wondered why the man hadn’t hauled the boxes outside and burned them to be rid of an untidy mess. Chaney counted the cans and boxes with growing wonder and tried to guess at the many years separating Arthur Saltus from his own recent arrival. That reminded him to look at his watch: five minutes before nine. He had the uneasy suspicion that the TDV had sent him askew once again. A plastic bag had been opened — as Saltus had reported — and a number of winter garments were missing from the racks. Several pairs of boots were gone from their shelves. The bundle of mittens was broken open and one had fallen to the floor, unnoticed in the darkness.

But there was no spilled food on the floor despite the litter of cartons and cans; every scrap had been taken up and used. Nor were there signs of mice or rats.

He whirled to the gun rack. Five rifles had been taken plus an undetermined number of the Army-issue automatics. He supposed — without count — that an appropriate amount of ammunition had gone with them. Major Moresby and Saltus would have accounted for two of the rifles.

The tiny metal objects on the workbench were the insignia Moresby had removed from his uniform, and Saltus had explained the reason for their removal in combat zones. The empty boxes had contained reels of tape, nylon film, and cartridges; the one remaining larger box was his bullet-proof vest. The map revealed the usual layer of dust. The radio was now useless — unless the supply of batteries had survived the intervening years.

Years: time.

Chaney picked up both lanterns and walked back to the room housing the TDV. He crossed to the far wall and bent down to read the calendar and clock. Each had stopped when the power line went out.

The clock read a few minutes of twelve noon, or twelve midnight. The calendar stopped measuring time on 4 Mar 09. Only the thermometer gave a meaningful reading: 52 degrees.

Eight and one half years after Arthur Saltus lived his disastrous fiftieth birthday, ten years after Major Moresby died in the skirmish at the fence, the nuclear power plant serving the laboratory failed or the lines were destroyed. They may have destroyed themselves for lack of replacement; the transformers may have blown out; the nuclear fuel may have been used up; any one or a hundred things could have happened to interrupt transmission. The power was gone.

Chaney had no idea how long ago it had failed: he knew only that he was somewhere beyond March 2009.

The outage may have happened last week, last month, last year, or at any time during the last hundred years. He hadn’t asked the engineers the precise date of his target but had assumed they would fling him into the future one year following Saltus, to reconnoiter the station. The assumption was wrong — or the vehicle had strayed once more. Chaney ruefully concluded that it didn’t matter, it really didn’t matter at all. The ill-starred survey was nearly finished; it would be finished as soon as he made a final tour of the station and went back with his report.

He carried the lanterns back to the shelter.

The radio took his attention. Chaney dug out a sealed carton of batteries and fitted the required number into the conversion unit. The band selector was swept over the military channels and back again, without result. He turned up the gain to peak and held the instrument to his ear but it refused to give him even the airy whisper of dead air; the lack of hiss or static told him that the batteries had not survived the passage of time. Chaney dismissed the radio as of no further value and prepared himself for the target.

He was disappointed there was no note from Katrina, as he’d found on the field trial.

The bullet-proof vest went on first. Arthur Saltus had warned him of that, had shown him the valued protection of that: Saltus lived only because he’d worn one.

Because he didn’t know the season of the year — only the temperature — Chaney donned a pair of boots and helped himself to a heavy coat and a pair of mittens. He picked out a rifle, loaded it as Moresby had taught him to do, and emptied a box of cartridges in his pocket. The map was of no interest: the probes into Joliet and Chicago had been hastily cancelled and now he was restricted to the station itself. Check it out quickly and jump for home base. Katrina had said the President and his Cabinet were awaiting a final report before concluding a course of remedial action. They called it “formulating a policy of positive polarization,” whatever that was.

A last tour of the station and the survey was ended; that much of the future would be known and mapped.

Chaney slung a canteen of water over his shoulder, then stuffed a knapsack with rations and matches and hung it from the other shoulder; he didn’t expect to be outside long enough to use either one. He was pleased the aged batteries didn’t work — that was excuse enough to leave radio and recorder behind — but he fitted film into the camera because Gilbert Seabrooke had asked for a record of the destruction of the station. The verbal description offered by Saltus had been a depressing one. One last searching examination of the room gave him no other article he thought he would need.

Chaney licked his lips, now dry with apprehension, and quit the shelter.

The corridor ended and a flight of stairs led up to the operations exit. The painted sign prohibiting the carrying of arms beyond the door had been defaced: a large slash of black paint was smeared from the first sentence to the last, half obliterating the words and voiding the warning. Chaney noted the time, and set the two lanterns down on the top step to await his return. He fitted the keys into the twin locks and stepped out hesitantly into the open air.

The day was bright with sunshine but sharply chill. The sky was new, blue, and clear of aircraft; it looked freshly scrubbed, a different sky than the hazy polluted one he had known almost all his life. Patches of light frost clung to the protected spots not yet touched by the sun.

His watch read 9:30, and he guessed the time was about right — the bright morning outside was still new.

A two-wheeled cart waited in the parking lot.

Chaney eyed the crude apparition, prepared for almost anything but that. The cart was not too skillfully made, having been put together with used lumber, an axle, and a pair of wheels taken from one of the small electric cars Saltus had described. Strands of machine wire had been employed to hold the four sides together where nails failed to do an adequate job, and to fasten the bed to the axle; the tires were long rotted away and the cart rode on metal rims. No skilled carpenter had fitted it together.

The second object to catch his eye was a heaped mound of clay in the adjoining area that had once been a flower garden. Unusually tall grass and weeds grew everywhere, partially obscuring a view of the station and almost blocking sight of the yellow mound; the grass grew high around the parking lot, and beyond it, and in the open spaces surrounding the buildings across the street. Weeds and grass filled the near distance as far as the eye could see, and he was reminded of the buffalo grass said to have grown here when Illinois was an Indian prairie. Time had done that — time and neglect. The station lawns had long gone unattended.

Moving warily, stopping often to scan the area around him, Chaney approached the mound.

When he was yet a distance away he discovered a faint trail running from the edge of the lot, through the garden and toward the mound itself. The next discovery was equally blunt. Alongside the path — almost invisible in the high grass — was a water channel, a crude aqueduct made from guttering ripped from some building and twisted into shape to serve this purpose. Chaney stopped short in surprise and stared at the guttering and the nearby mound, already guessing at what he would find. He continued the stealthy approach.

He came suddenly into a clearing in the rampant grass and found the artifact: a cistern with a crude wooden lid. A bucket and a length of rope rested beside it.

Chaney slowly circled the cistern and the clay that had come from the excavation, to stumble over yet another channel made of the same guttering; the second aqueduct ran through the weeds and grass toward the lab building — probably to catch the run-off from the roof. The clay mound was not fresh. Struck with an overwhelming curiosity, he knelt down and pried away the lid to find a cistern half filled with water. The walls of the pit were lined with old brick and rough stone slabs but the water was remarkably clean, and he looked to see why. Filters made of screenwire torn from a window were fitted over the ends of each gutter to protect the cistern from incoming debris and small animals. The gutters themselves were free of leaves and trash, and an effort had been made to seal the joints with a tarry substance.

Chaney put down the rifle and bent to study the cistern in wonder. It was already recognizable.

Like the cart, it had not been fashioned by skilled hands. The shape of the thing — the lines of it — were easily familiar: the sides not quite perpendicular, the mouth not evenly rounded, and the shaft appearing to be larger near the bottom than at the top. It was odd, amateurish, and sunk without a plumb line — but it was a reasonably faithful copy of a Nabataean cistern and it might be expected to hold water for a century or more. In this place it was startling. Chaney replaced the lid and climbed to his feet.

When he turned around he saw the grave.

It shocked him. The site had been concealed from him until now by the high growth of the garden, but again a faint path led to it from the clearing at the cistern. The mound above the grave was low, aged, and covered by a short weedy grass; the cross above it was nailed together and coated with fading white paint. Dim lettering was visible on the crossarm.

Chaney moved in and knelt again to read it.

A ditat Deus K

The gatehouse door had been loosed from its hinges and taken away — perhaps to build the cart.

Chaney peered warily through the opening, alert for danger but dreading the possibility of it, then stepped inside for a closer examination. The room was bare. No trace remained of the men who had died there: bone, weapon, scrap of cloth, nothing. Some of the window glass had been knocked out but other panes were intact; the screenwire had been taken from two of the windows. An empty place.

He backed out and turned to stare at the gate.

It was shut and padlocked, effectively blocking admittance to all but a determined climber, and an effort had been made to repair the damage done to it. Chaney noted all that in a single glance and went forward to study the additional stoppers — the added warnings. Three grisly talismans hung on the outside of the gate facing the road: three skulls, taken from the bodies of the men who’d died in the gatehouse so long ago. The warning to would-be trespassers was strikingly clear.

Chaney stared at the skulls, knowing the warnings to be as old as time; he knew of similar monitions which had guarded towns in Palestine before the Roman conquest, monitions which had been used as late as the eighteenth century in some of the more remote villages of the Negev.

He saw no one in the area: the entrance and its approaches were deserted, the warning well taken. Weeds and waist-high grass grew in the ditches and the fields on either side of the road leading to the distant highway but the grass had not been disturbed by the passage of men. The blacktopped road was empty, the white line down the center long since weathered away and the asphalt surface badly damaged by the years. An automobile using that road now would be forced to move at a snail’s pace.

Chaney photographed the scene and quit the area.

Walking north with an easy stride, he followed the familiar route to the barracks where he’d lived that short while with Saltus and Moresby. The site was almost passed over because it was covered by a tangle of weeds and grass; no buildings rose above the jungle.

Forcing his way through the tangle — and flushing from its nesting place a quick, furry thing he tardily recognized as a rabbit — Chaney stumbled upon the burnedout base of a building nearly lost in the undergrowth. He couldn’t recognize it as his own barracks, nor point to the location of his small room if it had been the barracks; only the long narrow rectangle of the foundation suggested the kind of dwelling it was. Chaney peered over the wall. A narrow band of frost lined the cement blocks at the groundline on the north side, pointing up the chill in the air. Patches of blue wildflowers grew in the sunlight and — much to his surprise — other patches of wild, red strawberries sprouted everywhere along the sunnier side of the foundation. He thought to glance at the sky, measuring the progress of the sun and the season, then stared again at the strawberries. It should be early summer.

Chaney photographed it and went back to the street. An abandoned place. He continued north.

E Street was easily identified without the need of the rusted sign standing on a pole at a corner. He stayed alert, walking cautiously and listening hard for any sound around him. The station was quiet under the sun.

The recreation area was harshly changed.

Chaney crept silently in the entrance and across the broken concrete patio to the rim of the swimming pool. He looked down. A few inches of dirty water covered the bottom — residue from the rains — together with a poor collection of rusted and broken weapons and an appreciable amount of debris blown in by the wind: the pool had become a dumping ground for trash and armament. The sodden corpse of some small animal floated in a corner. A lonely place. Chaney very carefully put away the memory of the pool as he’d known it and backed away from the edge. The area now seemed unkempt, ugly, and not a scene to be compared with more pleasant times.

He left quickly, bearing north and west. The far corner was a mile or more away as he remembered the map of the station, but he thought he could walk the distance in a reasonable time.

Chaney found the motor pool before he’d progressed a half dozen long blocks. Less than twenty cars littered the great blacktopped lot, but not one was operable: they had been wantonly stripped of parts and many of them were no more than burned-out shells. The hood of every vehicle was propped open, and the batteries taken; not one of the small motors was left intact to provide him with an idea of the plant. Chaney poked about the lot because he was curious, and because Arthur Saltus had told him about the little electric cars. He wished he could drive one. There were no trucks on the lot nor had he seen one anywhere on the station, although a number of them had been working the post during his training period. He supposed they had been transferred to Chicago to meet the emergency — or had been stolen when the ramjets overran the station.

Chaney emerged from the lot and stopped abruptly on the street. It may have been an illusion brought on by tension, but he thought he glimpsed movement in the high grass across the street. He slipped the safety on the rifle and walked to the curb. Nothing was visible in the heavy undergrowth.

There were no holes in the fence at the corner.

The burned and rusted shell of a truck occupied a place that had once been a hole, but now that truck was a part of the repaired fence. Barbed wire had been strung back and forth across the opening, pulled taut over, under, and through the wreck itself in such fashion that the truck became an integral part of the barrier; yet other strands of wire were laced vertically through the fencing, making it impossible for even a small boy to crawl through. He went along the fence to examine the second hole. It had been repaired and rebuilt in as thorough a manner as the first, and an old cavity in the ground had been filled in. The barricade was intact, impenetrable.

Everywhere the weeds and grass grew tall, actually concealing the lower third of the fence from a man standing only a few feet away. Chaney was not surprised to find the same gruesome talismans guarding the northwest corner; he had expected to find them. The skeletal owners of the skulls were missing, but nowhere on the station had he seen a human body — someone had buried them all, friend and foe alike. The three skulls hung at the top of the fencing, glaring down at the plain below and at the rusted railroad beyond.

Chaney turned away.

He prowled through the high grass, looking for anything. Arthur Saltus had found no trace of the Major but yet Chaney could not help himself; he searched for any trifle that would indicate the man’s presence on the scene. It was impossible to give up Major Moresby without some effort, some attempt to place him there.

From somewhere in the distance the shrill, playful shout of a child pierced the morning.

Chaney jumped with astonishment and nearly lost his footing on a chunk of metal buried in the grass. He turned quickly to scan the corner of the station he thought empty, then searched backward over the route he’d traveled from the motor pool. The child was heard again — and then a woman’s voice calling to it. Behind him. Down the slope. Chaney felt an eager, mounting excitement as he spun about and ran to the fence. They were out there beyond the fence.

He found them at once: a man, a woman, and a child of three or four years, trudging along the railway tracks in the middle distance. The man was carrying nothing but a stout stick or club, while the woman was toting a bag. The youngster ran along behind them, playing some game of his own devising.

Chaney was so glad to see them he forgot his own danger and yelled at the top of his voice. The rifle was a burden and he dropped it, to wave both hands.

Ignoring the barbed wire, he climbed part way up the fence to show himself and gain their attention. He shouted again, and beckoned them to come toward him.

The result left him utterly dumbfounded.

The adult members of the family looked around with some surprise, stared up and down the tracks, across fields, and discovered him at last clinging to the fence alongside the talismans. They stood motionless, frozen by fear, for only a tick in time. The woman cried out as though in pain and dropped the bag; she ran to protect the child. The man sprinted after her — passed her — and caught up the child in a quick scooping motion. The stick fell from his hands. He turned only once to stare at Chaney hanging on the fence and then raced away along the tracks. The woman stumbled — nearly fell — then ran desperately to keep pace with the man. The father shifted his small burden to one shoulder, then used his free hand to help the woman — urging her, hurrying her. They ran from him with all the speed and strength they possessed, the child now crying with consternation. Fear ran with them.

“Come back!”

He clung to the prickly fence and watched them out of sight. The billboard and high grasses hid them, shut them off, and the childish crying was hushed. Chaney hung there, his fingers curling through the holes of the fencing.

“Please come back!”

The northwest corner of the world stayed empty. He climbed down from the fence with bloodied hands.

Chaney picked up the rifle and turned away, plowing a path through the weeds and grass toward the distant road and the cluster of buildings at the heart of the station. He lacked the courage to look back. He had never known anyone to run from him — not even those beggar children who had squatted on the sands of the Negev and watched him pry into the sands of their forgotten history. They were timid and mistrustful, those Bedouin, but they hadn’t run from him. He walked back without pause, refusing to look again at the stripped automobiles, the recreation area with its pool-sized midden, the burned out barracks and the attending wildflowers — refusing to look at any of it, not wanting to see anything more of the world that had been or the new one discovered today. He walked with the taste of wormwood in his mouth.

Elwood Station was an enclosed world, a fenced and fright-inducing world standing like an island of dogged isolation amid the survivors of that violent civil war. There were survivors. They were out there on the outside and they had fled from him — on the inside. Their fears centered on the station: here was the devil they knew. He was the devil they’d glimpsed.

But the station had a resident — not a visitor, not a raider from beyond the fence who plundered the stores in the wintertime, but a permanent resident. A resident devil who had repaired the fence and hung out the talismans to keep the survivors away, a resident christian who had dug a grave and erected a cross above it.

Chaney stood in the middle of the parking lot.

Before him: the impenetrable walls of the laboratory stood out like a great gray temple in a field of weeds. Before him: a mound of yellow clay heaped beside the Nabataean cistern stood out like an anachronistic thumb, with a single grave hard by. Before him: a two-wheeled cart made of reclaimed lumber and borrowed wheels.

Somewhere behind him: a pair of eyes watching.

SIXTEEN

Brian Chaney took the keys from his pocket and unlocked the operations door. Two lanterns rested on the top step, but no bells rang below as the door swung. A rush of clammy air fell through the doorway to be lost in the crisp, cleaner air outside. The sun rode high — near the zenith — but the day stayed chilly with little promise of becoming warmer. Chaney was thankful for the heavy coat he wore.

Quiet sun, clean sky, unseasonably cold weather: he could report that to Gilbert Seabrooke.

He propped the heavy door open by shoving the cart against it, and then went below for the first armload of rations. The rifle was left beside the cart, all but forgotten. Carton after carton of foodstuffs was hauled up the stairs and piled in the cart, until his arms were weary of carrying and his legs of climbing; but medicines and matches were forgotten and he made another trip. A few tools for himself were included as a tardy afterthought. Chaney very nearly overestimated himself: the cart was so heavily loaded after the last trip that he had difficulty moving it from the doorway, and so a few of the heavier boxes had to be left behind.

He left the parking lot, pushing the cart.

It cost him more than three hours and most of his determination to reach the northwest corner of the fence the second time that day. The load moved fairly well as long as paved streets served him but when he left the end of the street and struck off through the high grass on his own back trail, progress was miserable. The cart was only slightly easier to pull than push. Chaney didn’t remember seeing a machete in the stores, but he wished for a dozen of them — and a dozen bearers to work in front of him hacking a trail through the weedy jungle. The load was back-breaking.

When at last he reached the fence he fell down and gasped for breath. The sun was long past noon.

The fence was assaulted with a crowbar. The task seemed easier where the fencing had been patched over the remains of the truck; it was not as stout there, not as resistant to the bar as the undamaged sections, and he concentrated on that place. He ripped away the barbed wire and pulled it free of the truck shell, then pried out the ends of the original fencing and rolled it back out of the way. When it was done his hands were bleeding again from many cuts and scratches, but he had forced an opening large enough to roll the cart through beside the truck. The wall was breached.

The heavy cart got away from him on the downward slope.

He ran with it, struggling to halt the plunge down the hillside and shouting at it with an exhausted temper but the cart ignored his imprecations and shot down through tall grass that was no barrier at all — now — until at last it reached the plain below and flipped end for end, spilling its load in the weeds. Chaney roared his anger: the Aramaic term so well liked by Arthur Saltus, and then another phrase reserved for asses and tax collectors. The cart — like the ass, but unlike the collector — did not respond.

Laboriously he righted the cart, gathered up the spill, and trudged across the field to the railroad.

The dropped walking stick was a marker.

His small treasure was left there for finding, laid out along the railroad right-of-way for the frightened family or any other traveler who might pass that way. He put the matches and the medicines atop the largest carton and then covered them with his overcoat to protect them from the weather. Chaney spent only a little while scanning the distances along the tracks for sight of a man — he was certain his shouting and his cursing would have frightened away anyone in the area. As before, he was alone in an empty world. From somewhere in the timber he heard a bird calling, and he would have to be content with that.

In the late afternoon hours when the thin heat of the sun was beginning to fade he pulled the empty cart up the hill and through the gaping hole in the fence for a last time, stopping only to retrieve the crowbar. Chaney didn’t dare look back. He was afraid of what he might find — or not find. To suddenly turn and look, to discover someone already at the boxes would be his undoing — he knew he would behave as before and again frighten the man away. But to turn and see the same untenanted world again would only deepen his depression. He would not look back.

Chaney followed his own trail through the verdant grass, seeking the beginning of the paved road. Some small animal darted away at his approach.

He stood at the edge of the parking lot, looking at the abandoned garden and thinking of Kathryn van Hise. But for her, he would be loafing on the beach and thinking of going back to work in the tank — but only thinking of it; perhaps in another week or so he’d get up off his duff and look up train schedules and connections to Indianapolis, if they still existed in an age of dying rails. The only weight on his mind would be the reviewers who read books too hastily and leaped to fantastic conclusions. But for her, he would have never heard of Seabrooke, Moresby, Saltus — unless their names happened to be on a document coming into the tank. He wouldn’t have jumped into Joliet two years ahead of his time and found a wall; he wouldn’t have jumped into this dismal future, whatever year this might be, and found a catastrophe. He would have plodded along in his own slow, myopic way until the hard future slammed into him — or he into it.

He thought he was done here: done with the aborted survey and done with the very quiet and nearly deserted world of 2000-something. He could do no more than tell Katrina, tell Seabrooke, and perhaps listen while they relayed the word to Washington. The next move would be up to the politicians and the bureaucrats — let them change the future if they could, if they possessed the power.

His role was completed. He could tape a report and label it Eschatos.

The mound of yellow clay claimed his attention and he followed the gutter through the grass to the cistern, wanting to photograph it. He still marveled at finding a Nabataean artifact thrust forward into the twenty-first century, and he suspected Arthur Saltus was responsible: it had been copied from the book he’d lent Saltus, from the pages of Pax Abrahamitica. With luck, it would trap and hold water for another century or so, and if he could measure the capacity he would probably find the volume to be near ten cor. Saltus had done well for an amateur.

Chaney turned to the grave.

He would not photograph that, for the picture would raise questions he didn’t care to answer. Seabrooke would ask if there’d been an inscription on the crossarm, and why hadn’t he photographed the inscription? Katrina would sit by with pencil poised to record his verbal reading.

A ditat Deus K

Down there: Arthur or Katrina?

How could he tell Katrina that he’d found her grave? Or her husband’s grave? Why couldn’t this have been the final resting place of Major Moresby?

A bird cried again in some far off place, pulling his gaze up to the distant trees and the sky beyond.

The trees were in new leaf, telling the early summer; the grass was soft tender green, not yet wiry from the droughts of midsummer: a fresh world. Gauzy clouds were gathering about the descending sun, creating a mirage of reddish-gold fleece. Eastward, the sky was wondrously blue and clean — a newly scrubbed sky, disinfected and sterilized. At night the stars must appear as enormous polished diamonds.

Arthur or Katrina?

Brian Chaney knelt briefly to touch the sod above the grave, and mentally prepared himself to go home. His depression was deep.

A voice said: “Please… Mr. Chaney?”

The shock immobilized him. He was afraid that if he turned quickly or leaped to his feet, a nervous finger would jerk the trigger and he would join Moresby in the soil of the station. He held himself rigidly still, aware that his own rifle had been left in the cart. Oversight; carelessness; stupidity. One hand rested on the grave; his gaze remained on the small cross.

“Mr. Chaney?”

After the longest time — a disquieting eternity — he turned only his head to look back along the path.

Two strangers: two almost strangers, two people who mirrored his own uncertainty and apprehension.

The nearer of the two wore a heavy coat and a pair of boots taken from the stores; his head and hands were bare and the only weapon he carried was a pair of binoculars also borrowed from the stores. He was tall, thin, lanky — only a few inches less than Chaney’s height, but he lacked the sandy hair and muscular body of his father; he lacked the bronzed skin and the silver filling in his teeth, he lacked the squint of eye that would suggest a seafarer peering into the sun. He lacked the buoyant youthfulness. If the man had possessed those characteristics instead of lacking them, Chaney would say he was looking at Arthur Saltus.

“How do you know my name?”

“You are the only one unaccounted for, sir.”

“And you had my description?”

Softly: “Yes, sir.”

Chaney turned on his knees to face the strangers. He realized they were as much afraid of him as he was of them. When had they last seen another man here?

“Your name is Saltus?”

A nod. “Arthur Saltus.”

Chaney shifted his gaze to the woman who stood well behind the man. She stared at him with a curious mixture of fascination and fright, poised for instant flight. When had she last seen another man here?

Chaney asked: “Kathryn?”

She didn’t respond, but the man said: “My sister.”

The daughter was like the mother in nearly every respect, lacking only the summer tan and the delta pants. She was bundled in a great coat against the chill and wore the common boots that were much too large for her feet. A pair of binoculars hung around her neck: he felt closely observed. Her head was bare, revealing Katrina’s great avalanche of fine brown hair; her eyes were the same soft — now frightened — delightful shade. She was a small woman, no more than a hundred pounds when free of the bulky boots and coat, and gave every appearance of being quick and alert. She also gave the appearance of being older than Katrina.

Chaney looked from one to the other: the two of them, brother and sister, were years beyond the people he had left in the past, years beyond their parents.

He said at last: “Do you know the date?”

“No, sir.”

Hesitation, then: “I think you were waiting for me.”

Arthur Saltus nodded, and there was the barest hint of affirmation from the woman.

“My father said you would be here — sometime. He was certain you would come; you were the last of the three.”

Surprise: “No one else, after us?”

“No one.”

Chaney touched the grave a last time, and their eyes followed his hand. He had one more question to ask before he would risk getting to his feet.

“Who lies here?”

Arthur Saltus said: “My father.”

Chaney wanted to cry out: how? when? why? but embarrassment held his tongue, embarrassment and pain and depression; he bitterly regretted the day he’d accepted Katrina’s offer and stepped into this unhappy position. He climbed to his feet, avoiding sudden moves that could be misinterpreted, and was thankful he hadn’t taken a picture of the grave — thankful he wouldn’t have to tell Katrina, or Saltus, or Seabrooke, what he’d found here. He would make no mention of the grave at all.

Standing, Chaney searched the area carefully, looking over their heads at the weedy garden, the parking lot, the company street beyond the lot and all of the station open to his eye. He saw no one else.

Sharp question: “Are you two alone here?”

The woman had jumped at his tone and seemed about to flee, but her brother held his ground.

“No, sir.”

A pause, and then: “Where is Katrina?”

“She is waiting in the place, Mr. Chaney.”

“Does she know I am here?”

“Yes, sir.”

“She knew I would ask about her?”

“Yes, sir. She thought you would.”

Chaney said: “I’m going to break a rule.”

“She thought you would do that, too.”

“But she didn’t object?”

“She gave us instructions, sir. If you asked, we were to say that she told you where she would wait.”

Chaney nodded his wonder. “Yes — she did that. She did that twice.” He moved back along the path by way of the cistern and they carefully retreated before him, still uncertain of him. “Did you do this?”

“My father and I dug it, Mr. Chaney. We had your book. The descriptions were very clear.”

“I’d tell Haakon, if I dared.”

Arthur Saltus stepped aside when they reached the parking lot and allowed Chaney to go ahead of him. The woman had darted off to one side and now kept a prudent distance. She continued to stare at him, a stare that might have been rude under other circumstances, and Chaney was very sure she’d seen no other man for too many years. He was equally certain she’d never seen a man like him inside the protective fence: that was her apprehension.

He ignored the rifle resting in the cart.

Brian Chaney fitted the keys into the twin locks and swung the heavy door. His two lanterns rested on the top step, and as before a rush of musty air fell out into the waning afternoon sunlight. Chaney paused awkwardly on the doorsill wondering what to say — wondering how to say goodbye to these people. Only a damned fool would say something flippant or vacuous or inane; only a damned fool would utter one of the meaningless clichés of his age; but only a stupid fool would simply walk away from them without saying anything.

He glanced again at the sky and at the golden fleece about the sun, at the new grass and leaves and then at the aging mound of yellow clay. At length his gaze swung back to the man and woman who waited on him.

He said: “Thank you for trusting me.”

Saltus nodded. “They said you could be trusted.”

Chaney studied Arthur Saltus and almost saw again the unruly sandy hair and the peculiar set to his eyes — the eyes of a man long accustomed to peering against the sun-bright sea. He looked long at Kathryn Saltus but could not see the transparent blouse or the delta pants: on her those garments would be obscene. Those garments belonged to a world long gone. He searched her face for a moment too long, and was falling head over heels when reality brought him up short.

Harsh reality: she lived here but he belonged back there. It was folly to entertain even dreams about a woman living a hundred years ahead of him. Hurtful reality.

His conscience hurt when he closed the door because he had no more to say to them. Chaney turned away and went down the steps, putting behind him the quiet sun, the chill world of 2000-plus, the unknown survivors beyond the fence who had fled in terror at sight and sound of him, and the half-familiar survivors within the fence who were sharp reminders of his own loss. His conscience hurt, but he didn’t turn back.

The time was near sunset on an unknown day.

It was the longest day of his life.

SEVENTEEN

The briefing room was subtly different from that one he’d first entered weeks or years or centuries ago.

He remembered the military policeman who’d escorted him from the gate and then opened the door for him; he remembered his first glance into the room — his lukewarm reception, his tardy entrance. He’d found Kathryn van Hise critically eyeing him, assessing him, wondering if he would measure up to some task ahead; he’d found Major Moresby and Arthur Saltus playing cards, bored, impatiently awaiting his arrival; he’d found the long steel table positioned under lights in the center of the room — all waiting on him.

He had given his name and started an apology for his tardiness when the first hurtful sound stopped him, chopped him off in mid-sentence and hammered his ears. He had seen them turn together to watch the clock: sixty-one seconds. All that only a week or two ago — a century or two ago — before the bulky envelopes were opened and a hundred flights of fancy loosed. The long journey from the Florida beach had brought him twice to this room, but this time the lantern poorly illuminated the place.

Katrina was there.

The aged woman was sitting in her accustomed chair to one side of the oversized steel table — sitting quietly in the darkness beneath the extinct ceiling lights. As always, her clasped hands rested on the tabletop in repose. Chaney put the lantern on the table between them and the poor light fell on her face.

Katrina.

Her eyes were bright and alive, as sharply alert as he remembered them, but time had not been lenient with her. He read lines of pain, of unknown troubles and grief; the lines of a tenacious woman who had endured much, had suffered much, but had never surrendered her courage. The skin was drawn tight over her cheekbones, pulled tight around her mouth and chin and appeared sallow in lantern light. The lustrous, lovely hair was entirely gray. Hard years, unhappy years, lean years.

Despite all that he knew a familiar spark within him: she was as beautiful in age as in youth. He was pleased to find that loveliness so enduring.

Chaney pulled out his own chair and slid down, never taking his eye off her. The old woman sat without moving, without speaking, watching him intently and waiting for the first word.

He thought: she might have been sitting there for centuries while the dust and the darkness grew around her; waiting patiently for him to come forward to the target, waiting for him to explore the station, fulfill his last mission, end the survey, and then come opening doors to find the answers to questions raised above ground. Chaney would not have been too surprised to find her waiting in ancient Jericho if he’d gone back ten thousand years. She would have been there, placidly waiting in some temple or hovel, waiting in a place where he would find her when he began opening doors.

The dusty briefing room was as chill as the cellar had been, as chill as the air outside, and she was bundled in one of the heavy coats. Her hands were encased in a pair of large mittens intended for a man — and if he bent to look, he would find the oversize boots. She appeared bent over, small in the chair and terribly tired.

Katrina waited on him.

Chaney struggled for something to say, something that wouldn’t sound foolish or melodramatic or carry a ring of false heartiness. She would despise him for that. Here again was the struggle of the outer door, and here again he was fearful of losing the struggle. He had left her here in this room only hours ago, left her with that sense of. dry apprehension as he prepared himself for the third — now final — probe into the future. She had been sitting in the same chair in the same attitude of repose.

Chaney said: “I’m still in love with you, Katrina.”

He watched her eyes, and thought they were quickly filled with humor and a pleasurable laughter.

“Thank you, Brian.”

Her voice had aged as well: it sounded more husky than he remembered and it reflected her weariness.

“I found patches of wild strawberries at the old barracks, Katrina. When do strawberries ripen in Illinois?”

There was laughter in her eyes. “In May or June. The summers have been quite cold, but May or June.”

“Do you know the year? The number?”

A minute movement of her head. “The power went out many years ago. I’m sorry, Brian, but I have lost the count.”

“I don’t suppose it really matters — not now, not with what we’ve already learned. I agree with Pindar.”

She looked her question.

He said: “Pindar lived about twenty-five hundred years ago but he was wiser than a lot of men alive today. He warned man of peering too far into the future, he warned of not liking what would be found.” An apologetic gesture; a grin. “Bartlett again: my vice. The Commander was always teasing me about my affair with Bartlett.”

“Arthur waited long to see you. He hoped you would come early, that he might see you again.”

“I would have liked — Didn’t anyone know?”

“No.”

“But why not? That gyroscope was tracking me.”

“No one knew your arrival date; no one would guess. The gyroscope device could not measure your progress after the power failed here. We knew only the date of failure, when the TDV suddenly stopped transmitting signals to the computer there. You were wholly lost to us, Brian.”

“Sheeg! Those goddam infallible engineers and their goddam infallible inventions!” He caught himself and was embarrassed at the outburst. “Excuse me, Katrina,” Chaney reached across the table and closed his hands over hers. “I found the Commander’s grave outside — I wish I had been on time. And I had already decided not to tell you about that grave when I went back, when I turned in my report.” He peered at her. “I didn’t tell anyone, did I?”

“No, you reported nothing.”

A satisfied nod. “Good for me — I’m still keeping my mouth shut. The Commander made me promise not to tell you about your future marriage, a week or so ago when we returned from the Joliet trials. But you tried to pry the secret out of me, remember?”

She smiled at his words. “A week or so ago.”

Chaney mentally kicked himself. “I have this bad habit of putting my foot in my mouth.”

A little movement of her head to placate him. “But I guessed at your secret, Brian. Between your manner and Arthur’s deportment, I guessed it. You put yourself away from me.”

“I think you had already made up your mind. The little signs were beginning to show, Katrina.” He had a vivid memory of the victory party the night of their return.

She said: “I had almost decided at that time, and I did decide a short while afterward; I did decide when he came back hurt from his survey. He was so helpless, so near death when you and the doctor took him from the vehicle I decided on the spot.” She glanced at his enfolding hands and then raised her eyes. “But I was aware of your own intentions. I knew you would be hurt.”

He squeezed her fingers with encouragement. “Long ago and far away, Katrina. I’m getting over it.”

She made no reply, knowing it to be a half-truth.

“I met the children—” He stopped, aware of the awkwardness. “Children they are not — they’re older than I am! I met Arthur and Kathryn out there but they were afraid of me.”

Katrina nodded and again her gaze slid away from him to rest on his enveloping hands.

“Arthur is ten years older than you, I think, but Kathryn should be about the same age. I am sorry I can’t be more precise than that; I am sorry I can’t tell you how long my husband has been dead. We no longer know time here, Brian; we only live from one summer to the next. It is not the happiest existence.” After a while her hands moved inside his, and she glanced up again. “They were afraid of you because they’ve known no other man since the station was overrun, since the military personnel left here and we stayed within the fence for safety. For a year or two we dared not even leave this building.”

Bitterly: “The people out there were afraid of me, too. They ran away from me.”

She was quickly astonished, and betrayed alarm.

“Which people? Where?”

“The family I found outside the fence — down there by the railroad tracks.”

“There is no one alive out there.”

“Katrina, there is — I saw them, called to them, begged them to come back, but they ran away in fear.”

“How many? Were there many of them?”

“Three. A family of three: father, mother, and a little boy. I found them walking along the railroad track out there beyond the northwest corner. The little fellow was picking up something — pieces of coal, perhaps — and putting them in a bag his mother carried; they seemed to be making a game of it. They were walking in peace, in contentment until I called to them.”

Tersely: “Why did you do that? Why did you call attention to yourself?”

“Because I was lonely! Because I was sick and hurt at sight of an empty world! I yelled out because those people were the only living things I’d found here, other than a frightened rabbit. I wanted their company, I wanted their news! I would have given them everything I owned for only an hour of their time. Katrina, I wanted to know if people were still living in this world.” He stopped and took tighter rein on his emotions. More quietly: “I wanted to talk to them, to ask questions, but they were afraid of me — scared witless, shocked by sight of me. They ran like that frightened rabbit and I never saw them again. I can’t tell you how much that hurt me.”

She pulled her hands from his and dropped them into her lap.

“Katrina—”

She wouldn’t look up at once, but steadfastly kept her gaze on the tabletop. The movement of her hands had left small trails in the dust. He thought the tiny bundle of her seemed more wilted and withdrawn than before: the taut skin on her face appeared to have aged in the last few minutes — or perhaps that age had been claiming her all the while they talked.

“Katrina, please.”

After a long while she said: “I am sorry, Brian. I will apologize for my children, and for that family. They dared not trust you, none of them, and the poor family felt they had good reason to fear you.” Her head came up and he felt shock. “Everyone fears you; no one will trust you since the rebellion. I am the only one here who does not fear a black man.”

He was hurt again, not by her words but because she was crying. It was painful to watch her cry.

Brian Chaney came into the briefing room a second time. He was carrying another lantern, two plastic cups, and a container of water from the stores. He would have brought along a bottle of whiskey if that had been available, but it was likely that the Commander had long ago consumed the whiskey on his successive birthdays.

The old woman had wiped her eyes dry.

Chaney filled both cups and set the first one on the table before her. “Drink up — we’ll drink a toast.”

“To what, Brian?”

“To what? Do we need an excuse?” He swung his arm in an expansive gesture which took in the room. “To that damned clock up there: knocking off sixty-one seconds while my ears suffered. To that red telephone: I never used it to call the President and tell him he was a dunce. To us: a demographer from the Indiana Corporation, and a research supervisor from the Bureau of Standards — the last two misfits sitting at the end of the world. We’re out of place and out of time, Katrina: they don’t need demographers and researchers here — they don’t have corporations and bureaus here. Drink to us.”

“Brian, you are a clown.”

“Oh, yes.” He sat down and looked at her closely in the lantern light. “Yes, I am that. And I think you are almost smiling again. Please smile for me.”

Katrina smiled: pale shadow of an old smile.

Chaney said: “Now that is why I still love you!” He lifted his cup. “To the most beautiful researcher in the world — and you may drink to the most frustrated demographer in the world. Bottoms up!” Chaney emptied the cup, and thought the water tasted flat — stale.

She nodded over the rim of her cup and sipped.

Chaney stared at the long table, the darkened lights overhead, the stopped clock, the dead telephones. “I’m supposed to be working — making a survey.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Have to keep Seabrooke happy. I can report a family out there: at least one family alive and living in peace. I suppose there are more — there has to be more. Do you know of anyone else? Anyone at all?”

Patiently: “There were a few at first, those many years ago; we managed to keep in touch with some survivors by radio before the power failure. Arthur located a small group in Virginia, a military group living underground in an Army command post; and later he contacted a family in Maine. Sometimes we would make brief contact with one or two individuals in the west, in the mountain states, but it was always poor news. Each of them survived for the same reasons: by a series of lucky circumstances, or by their skills and their wits, or because they were unusually well protected as we were. Their numbers were always small and it was always discouraging news.”

“But some survived. That’s important, Katrina. How long have you been alone on the station?”

“Since the rebellion, since the Major’s year.”

Chaney gestured. “That could be—” He peered at her, guessing at her age. “That could be thirty years ago.”

“Perhaps.”

“But what happened to the other people here?”

She said: “Almost all the military personnel were withdrawn at the beginning; they were posted to overseas duty. The few who remained did not survive the attack when the rebels overran the station. A very few civilian technicians stayed with us for a time, but then left to rejoin their families — or search for their families. The laboratory was already empty in Arthur’s year. We had been ordered underground for the duration.”

“The duration. How long was that?”

The sharp old eyes studied him. “I would think it is ending just now, Brian. Your description of the family outside the fence suggests it is ending now.”

Bitterly: “And nobody around but you and me to sign the peace treaty and pose for the cameras. Seabrooke?”

“Mr. Seabrooke was relieved of his post, dismissed, shortly after the three launches. I believe he returned to the Dakotas. The President had blamed him for the failure of the survey, and he was made the scapegoat.”

Chaney struck the table with a fist.

“I said that man was a dunce — just one more in a long line of idiots and dunces inhabiting the White House! Katrina, I don’t understand how this country has managed to survive with so many incompetent fools at the top.”

Softly-spoken reminder: “It hasn’t, Brian.”

He muttered under his breath and glared at the dust on the table. Aloud: “Excuse me.”

She nodded easily but said nothing.

A memory prodded him. “What happened to the JCS, to those men who tried to take Camp David?”

She closed her eyes for a moment, as if to close off the past. Her expression was bitter. “The Joint Chiefs of Staff were executed before a firing squad, a public spectacle. The President had declared a business moratorium on the day of the execution; government offices closed and the children were let out of school, all to witness the spectacle on the networks. He was determined to give the country a warning. It was ghastly, depressing, and I hated him for it.”

Chaney stared at her. “And I have to go back and tell him what he’s going to do. What a hell of a chore this survey is!” He hurled the drinking cup across the room, unable to stifle the angry impulse. “Katrina, I wish you had never found me on the beach. I wish I had walked away from you, or thrown you into the sea, or kidnapped you and ran away to Israel — anything.”

She smiled again, perhaps at the memory of the beach. “But that would have accomplished nothing, Brian. The Arab Federation overran Israel and drove the people into the sea. We wouldn’t have escaped anything.”

He uttered a single word and then had to apologize again, although the woman didn’t understand the epithet. “The Major certainly jumped into the beginning of hell.”

She corrected him. “The Major jumped into the end of it; the wars had been underway for nearly twenty years and the nation was on the brink of disaster. Major Moresby came forward only in time to witness the end for us, for the United States. After him, the government ceased to be. After twenty years we were wholly exhausted, used up, and could not defend ourselves against anyone.”

The old woman spoke with a dry weariness, a long fatigue, and he could listen to her voice and her spirit running down as she talked.

The wars began just after the Presidential election of 1980, just after the field trials into Joliet. Arthur Saltus had told her of the two Chinese railroad towns blown off the map, and suddenly one day in December the Chinese bombed Darwin, Australia, in long-delayed retaliation. The whole of northern Australia was made uninhabitable by radiation. The public was never told of the first strike against the railroad towns but only of the second: it was painted an act of brutal savagery against an innocent populace. Radioactivity spread across the Arafura Sea to the islands to the north, and drifted toward the Phillipines. Great Britain appealed to the United States for aid.

The re-elected President and his Congress declared war on the Chinese Peoples’ Republic in the week following his inauguration, after having waged an undeclared war since 1954. The Pentagon had privately assured him the matter could be terminated and the enemy subdued in three weeks. Some months later the President committed massive numbers of troops to the Asian Theater: now involving eleven nations from the Philippine Republic westward to Pakistan, and to the defense of Australia. He was then compelled to send troops to Korea, to counteract renewed hostilities there, but lost them all when the Chinese and the Mongolians overran the peninsula and ended foreign occupation.

She said tiredly: “The President was re-elected in 1980, and again for a third term in 1984. After Arthur brought back the terrible news from Joliet, the man seemed unable to control himself and unable to do anything right. The third-term prohibition was repealed at his urging, and some time during that third term the Constitution was suspended altogether ‘for the duration of the emergency.’ The emergency never ended. Brian, that man was the last elected President the country ever had. After him there was nothing.”

Chaney said bitterly: “The meek, the terrible meek. I hope he is still alive to see this!”

“He isn’t, he wasn’t. He was assassinated and his body thrown into the burning White House. They burned Washington to destroy a symbol of oppression.”

“Burned it! Wait until I tell him that.”

She made a little gesture to hush him or contradict him. “All that and more, much more. Those twenty years were a frightful ordeal; the last few years were numbing. Life appeared to stop, to give way to savagery. We missed the little things at first: passenger trains and airliners were forbidden to civilian traffic, mail deliveries were cut back to twice a week and then halted altogether, the news telecasts were restricted to only one a day and then as the war worsened, further restricted, to only local news not of a military nature. We were isolated from the world and nearly isolated from Washington.

“Our trucks were taken away for use elsewhere; food was not brought in, nor medicines, nor clothing, nor fuel, and we fell back on the supplies stored on station. The military personnel were transferred to other posts or to points overseas, leaving only a token crew to guard this installation.

“Brian, that guard was compelled to fire on nearby townspeople attempting to raid our stores: the rumor had been spread that enormous stockpiles of food were here, and they were desperately hungry.”

Katrina looked down at her hands and swallowed painfully. “The twenty years finally ended for us in a shocking civil war.”

Chaney said: “Ramjets.”

“They were called that, once they came into the open, once their statement of intent was publicized: Revolution And Morality. Sometimes we would see banners bearing the word RAM, but the name soon became something dirty — something akin to that other name they were called for centuries: it was a very bitter time and you would have suffered if you had remained on station.

“Brian, people everywhere were starving, dying of disease, rotting in neglect and misery, but those people possessed a leadership we now lacked. Ramjets had efficient leadership. Their leaders used them against us and it was our turn to suffer. There was revolution but little or no morality; whatever morality they may have possessed was quickly lost in the rebellion and we all suffered. The country was caught up in a senseless savagery.”

“That’s when Moresby came up?”

A weary nod.

Major Moresby witnessed the beginning of the civil war when he emerged on his target date. They had chosen the same date for the outbreak of the rebellion — they had selected the Fourth of July as their target in a bid for independence from white America and the bombing of Chicago was intended to be the signal. Ramjet liaison agents in Beijing had arranged that: Chicago — not Atlanta or Memphis or Birmingham — was the object of their greatest hatred after the wall. But the plan went awry.

The rebellion broke out almost a week earlier — quite by accident — when triggered by a riot in the little river town of Cairo, Illinois. A traffic arrest there, followed by a street shooting and then a wholesale jail delivery of black prisoners, upset the schedule: the revolt was quickly out of control. The state militia and the police were helpless, depleted in number, their reserve manpower long since spent overseas; there was no regular army left standing in the United States except for token troops at various posts and stations, and even the ceremonial guards at national monuments had been removed and assigned to foreign duty. There was no remaining force to prevent the rebellion. Major Moresby climbed out of the vehicle and into the middle of the holocaust.

The agony went on for almost seventeen months.

The President was assassinated, Congress fled — or died while trying to flee — and Washington burned. They burned many of the cities where they were numerically strong. In their passion they burned themselves out of their homes and destroyed the fields and crops which had fed them.

The few remaining lines of transportation which were open up to that moment ceased entirely. Trucks were intercepted, looted and burned, their drivers shot. Buses were stopped on interstate highways and white passengers killed. Railroad trains were abandoned wherever they stopped, or wherever the tracks were torn up, engineers and crews were murdered wherever they were caught. Desperate hunger soon followed the stoppage of traffic.

Katrina said: “Everyone here expected the Chinese to intervene, to invade, and we knew we could not stop them. Brian, our country had lost or abandoned twenty million men overseas; we were helpless before any invader. But they did not come. I thank God they did not come. They were prevented from coming when the Soviet turned on them in a holy war in the name of Communism: that long, long border dispute burst into open warfare and the Russians drove on Lop Nor.” She made a little gesture of futility. “We never learned what happened; we never learned the outcome of anything in Europe. Perhaps they are still fighting, if anyone is left alive to fight. Our contact with the Continent was lost, and has never been restored to our knowledge. We lost contact with that military group in Virginia when the electricity failed. We were alone.”

He said in wonder: “Israel, Egypt, Australia, Britain, Russia, China — all of them: the world.”

“All of them,” she repeated with a dull fatigue. “And our troops were wasted in nearly every one of them, thrown away by a man with a monumental ego. Not more than a handful of those troops ever returned. We were done.”

Chaney said: “I guess the Commander came up at the end — seventeen months later.”

“Arthur emerged from the TDV on his target date, just past the end of it: the beginning of the second winter after the rebellion. We think the rebellion had ended, spent and exhausted on its own fury. We think the men who assaulted him at the gatehouse were stragglers, survivors who had managed through the first winter. He said those men were as surprised by his appearance, as he was by theirs; they might have fled if he had not cornered them.” Katrina laced her fingers on the tabletop in familiar gesture and looked at him. “We saw a few armed bands roaming the countryside that second winter. We repaired the fence, stood guard, but were not again molested: Arthur put out warnings he had found in the book you gave him. By the following spring, the bands of men had dwindled to a few scavengers prowling the fields for game — but after that we saw no one. Until you came, we saw no one.”

He said: “So ends the bloody business of the day.”

EIGHTEEN

Katrina peered across the table and sought to break the unhappy silence between them.

“A family, you said? Father, mother, and child? A healthy child? How old was he?”

“I don’t know: three, maybe four. The kid was having himself a fine time — playing, hollering, picking up things — until I scared off his parents.” Chaney still felt bitter about that encounter. “They all looked healthy enough. They ran healthy.”

Katrina nodded her satisfaction. “It gives one hope for the future, doesn’t it?”

“I suppose so.”

She reprimanded him: “You know so. If those people were healthy, they were eating well and living in some degree of safety. If the man carried no weapon, he thought none was needed. If they had a child and were together, family life has been re-established. And if that child survived his birth and was thriving, it suggests a quiet normalcy has returned to the world, a measure of sanity. All that gives me hope for the future.”

“A quiet normalcy,” he repeated. “The sun in that sky was quiet. It was cold out there.”

The dark eyes peered at him. “Have you ever admitted to yourself that you could be wrong, Brian? Have you even thought of your translations today? You were a stubborn man; you came close to mocking Major Moresby.”

Chaney failed to answer: it was not easy to reassess the Eschatos scroll in a day. A piece of his mind insisted that ancient Hebrew fiction was only fiction.

They sat in the heavy silence of the briefing room, looking at each other in the lantern light and knowing this was coming to an end. Chaney was uneasy. There had been a hundred — a thousand — questions he’d wanted to ask when he first walked into the room, when he first discovered her, but now he could think of little to say. Here was Katrina, the once youthful, radiant Katrina of the swimming pool — and outside was Katrina’s family waiting for him to leave.

He wanted desperately to ask one more question but at the same time he was afraid to ask: what happened to him after his return, after the completion of the probe? What had happened to him? He wanted to know where he had gone, what he had done, how he had survived the perilous years — he wanted to know if he had survived those years. Chaney was long convinced that he was not on station in 1980, not there at the time of the field trials, but where was he then? She might have some knowledge of him after he’d finished the mission and left; she might have kept .in touch. He was afraid to ask. Pindar’s advice stopped his tongue.

He got up suddenly from his chair. “Katrina, will you walk downstairs with me?”

She gave him a strange look, an almost frightened look, but said: “Yes, sir.”

Katrina left her chair and came around the table to him. Age had slowed her graceful walk and he was acutely distressed to see her move with difficulty. Chaney picked up a lantern, and offered her his free arm. He felt a flush of excitement as she neared him, touched him.

They descended the stairs without speaking. Chaney slowed his pace to accommodate her and they went down slowly, one cautious step at a time. Kathryn van Hise held on to the rail and moved with the hesitant pace of the aged.

They stopped at the opened door to the operations room. Chaney held the lantern high to inspect the vehicle: the hatch was open and the hull of the craft covered by dust; the concrete cradle seemed dirty with age.

He asked suddenly: “How much did I report, Katrina? Did I tell them about you? Your family? Did I tell them about that family on the railroad tracks? What did I say?”

“Nothing.” She wouldn’t look up at him.

“What?”

“You reported nothing.”

He thought her voice was strained. “I had to say something. Gilbert Seabrooke will demand something.”

“Brian—” She stopped, swallowed hard, and then began again. “You reported nothing, Mr. Chaney. You did not return from your probe. We knew you were lost to us when the vehicle failed to return at sixty-one seconds: you were wholly lost to us.”

Brian Chaney very carefully put the lantern down and then turned her around and pulled her head up. He wanted to see her face, wanted to see why she was lying. Her eyes were wet with threatened tears but there was no lie there.

Stiffly: “Why not, Katrina?”

“We have no power, Mr. Chaney. The vehicle is helpless, immobile.”

Chaney swung his head to stare at the TDV and as quickly swung back to the woman. He wasn’t aware that he was holding her in a painful grip.

“The engineers can pull me back.”

“No. They can do nothing for you: they lost you when that device stopped tracking, when the computer went silent, when the power failed here and you overshot the failure date. They lost you; they lost the vehicle.” She pulled away from his hard grasp, and her wavering gaze fell. “You didn’t come back to the laboratory, Mr. Chaney. No one saw you again after the launch; no one saw you again until you appeared here, today.”

Almost shouting: “Stop calling me Mr. Chaney!”

“I am… I am terribly sorry. You were as lost to us as Major Moresby. We thought…”

He turned his back on the woman and deliberately walked into the operations room. Brian Chaney climbed up on the polywater tank and thrust a leg through the open hatch of the TDV. He didn’t bother to undress or remove the heavy boots. Wriggling downward through the hatch, he slammed it shut over his head and looked for the blinking green light. There was none. Chaney stretched out full length on the web sling and thrust his heels against the kickbar at the bottom. No red light answered him.

He knew panic.

He fought against that and waited for his nerves to rest, waited for a stolid placidity to return. The memory of his first test came back: he’d thought then the vehicle was like a cramped tomb, and he thought so now. Lying on the webbed sling for the first time — and waiting for something spectacular to happen — he had felt an ache in his legs and had stretched them out to relieve the ache. His feet had struck the kickbar, sending him back to the beginning before the engineers were ready; they had been angry with him. And an hour later, in the lecture room, everyone heard and saw the results of his act: the vehicle kicked backward as he thrust out his feet, the sound struck his eardrums and the lights dimmed. The astonished engineers left the room on the run, and Gilbert Seabrooke proposed a new study program to be submitted to Indic. The TDV sucked power from its present, not its past.

Chaney reached up to snug the hatch. It was snug. The light that should have been blinking green stayed dark. Chaney jut the heavy boots against the bar and pushed. The red light stayed dark. He pushed again, then kicked at the bar. After a moment he twisted around to peer through the plastic bubble into the room. It was dimly lit by the lantern resting on the floor.

He shouted: “Goddammit, go!” And kicked again.

The room was dimly lit by lantern light.

He walked slowly along the corridor in the feeble light of the lantern, walked woodenly in shock tinged with fear. The failure of the vehicle to move under his prodding had stunned him. He wished desperately for Katrina, wished she was standing by with a word or a gesture he might seize for a crutch, but she wasn’t visible in the corridor. She had left him while he struggled with the vehicle, perhaps to return to the briefing room, perhaps to go outside, perhaps to retire to whatever sort of shelter she shared with her son and daughter. He was alone, fighting panic. The door to the engineering laboratory was standing open, as was the door to the storeroom, but she wasn’t waiting for him in either place. Chaney listened for her but heard nothing, and went on after the smallest pause. The dusty corridor ended and a flight of stairs led upward to the operations exit.

He thought the sign on the door was a bitter mockery — one of the many visited on him since he’d sailed for Israel a century or two ago. He regretted the day he had read and translated those scrolls — but at the same time he wished desperately he knew the identity of that scribe who had amused himself and his fellows by creating the Eschatos document. A single name would be enough: an Amos or a Malachi or an Ibycus.

He would hoist a glass of water from the Nabataean cistern and salute the unknown genius for his wit and wisdom, for his mockery. He would shout to the freshly scrubbed sky: “Here, damn your eyes, Ibycus! Here, for the lohg-dead dragons and the ruptured fence and the ice on the rivers. Here, for my head of gold, my breast of silver, my legs of iron and my feet of clay. My feet of clay, Ibycus!” And he would hurl the glass at the lifeless TDV.

Chaney turned the keys in the locks and pushed out into the chill night air. The darkness surprised him; he hadn’t realized he’d spent so many bittersweet hours inside with Katrina. The parking lot was empty but for the cart and his discarded rifle. Katrina’s children hadn’t waited for him, and he was aware of a small hurt.

He stepped away from the building and then turned back to look at it: a massive white concrete temple in the moonlight. The barbaric legions had failed to bring it down, despite the damage caused elsewhere on the station.

The sky was the second surprise: he had seen it by day and marveled, but at night it was shockingly beautiful. The stars were bright and hard as carefully polished gems, and there were a hundred or a thousand more than he’d ever seen before; he had never known a sky like that in his lifetime. The entire eastern rim of the heavens was lighted by a rising moon of remarkable brilliance.

Chaney stood alone in the center of the parking lot searching the face of the moon, searching out the Sea of Vapors and the pit known as Bode’s Crater. The pulsating laser there caught his eye and held it. That one thing had not changed — that one monument not destroyed. The brilliant mote still flashed on the rim of Bode’s Crater, marking the place where two astronauts had fallen in the Seventies, marking their grave and their memorial. One of them had been black. Brian Chaney thought himself lucky: he had air to breathe but those men had none.

He said aloud: “You weren’t so damned clever, Ibycus! You missed that one — your prophets didn’t show you the new sign in the sky.”

Chaney sat down in the tilted cart and stretched out his legs for balance. The rifle was an unpleasant lump under his spine and he threw it aside to be rid of it. In a little while he leaned backward and rested against the bed of the cart. The whole of the southeast sky was before him. Chaney thought he should go looking for Katrina, for Arthur and Kathryn, and a place to sleep. Perhaps he would do that after a while, but not now, not now.

The stray thought came that the engineers had been right about one thing: the polywater tank hadn’t leaked.

Elwood Station was at peace.