12
A little gleam of time between two eternities; no second chance to us forever more!
—Thomas Carlyle, Heroes and Hero Worship, V
Temperatures fell to minus twenty on the Fahrenheit scale the day after the press conference. The ground froze, people came down with frostbite, and Mac Eberly, a middle-aged farmer who’d brought half his family with him to the ridge, suffered chest pains. During the holidays the weather deteriorated further, and April reluctantly gave up and closed the operation for the season. She paid a generous bonus and announced they would restart the project when they could. In the spring, she added.
The following day a blizzard struck the area. And the wind-chill factor on New Year’s Eve touched a hundred below. The story quickly dropped out of the newspapers, shouldered aside by the run-up to the Super Bowl, a major banking scandal involving lurid tales of sex and drugs, and a celebrity murder trial.
April published her findings, and, in accordance with tradition, the new element was named cannonium in her honor. The NAACP awarded her its Spingarm Medal, and the National Academy of Sciences hosted a banquet in her honor. She was, of course, ecstatic. But nevertheless the long delay weighed on her spirits.
Max returned to Fargo, resumed his life, and proceeded to cash in on his newfound fame. People who were interested in buying, selling, or restoring antique warplanes were making Sundown their preferred dealer. Furthermore, Max found he was now in demand as a speaker. He’d never been comfortable speaking to groups of people, but offers were in the range of a thousand dollars for a half-hour. He took lessons in public speaking and learned that, with experience, he was able to relax and even became good enough to command interest and get a few laughs. He talked at Rotary Club affairs, business luncheons, university award presentations, and Knights of Columbus gatherings. When he found out April was getting an average of six thousand per appearance, he raised his price and was surprised that most groups were willing to meet it.
He spent a weekend with his father. The colonel was delighted. For the first time in Max’s memory, his father seemed proud of him and was anxious to introduce him to friends.
April, meantime, became a regular dinner companion. Somewhere during this period Max recognized a growing affection for her and made a conscious decision to maintain a strictly professional relationship. He told himself that the Johnson’s Ridge project was potentially too important to risk the complications that might come out of a romantic entanglement with the woman who had emerged as his partner in the venture. Or it might have been more complicated, a mix of race and Max’s reluctance to get involved and a fear that she might keep him at arm’s length. She had, after all, done nothing to encourage him. But when she introduced him to a police lieutenant she was dating and confided to Max that she really liked the guy, he was crushed.
Occasionally they took out the Lightning and flew over the escarpment. The blowing snow had filled in most of the excavation; only heaps of earth remained as evidence of the frenetic activity on the ridge. It was almost as if they had never been there. On one occasion, a cold, frozen day in late January, she asked him to land.
“Can’t,” he said.
“Why not? Ceil landed here.”
“I don’t know how deep the snow is. Ceil had an inch. We might have a foot. And there’s probably ice underneath.”
“Pity,” she said.
Unseasonably warm weather arrived in February. After several successive days in the fifties, April drove to Fort Moxie, picked up Tom Lasker, and toured the excavation with him. It was too early in the year to start again, and they both knew it. But she could not bear the prospect of waiting several more weeks. “Maybe we’ll get lucky,” she said. “When it gets cold, we can work around it.”
Lasker said he didn’t think it was a good idea. But April cleared it with Lisa Yarborough, and the spring drive got underway.
The weather held for eight days. The excavation teams returned and took full advantage of their opportunity. They dug the snow out of the trenches and dumped it into the canyon. They attacked the hard ground with a will and methodically uncovered a wide area of roof. They worked their way down the front of the structure, exposing a curved wall of the same emerald-green color and beveled-glass texture. To everyone’s disappointment, no doorway or entry was visible.
They had assumed that the front, the portion that looked out over the edge of the precipice, would provide an entrance. But its blank aspect was disappointing. There was considerably more work to be done, and because it was on the lip of the summit, the effort would be both slow and unsafe.
The roundhouse curved to within three feet of the void, from which it was separated by a shelf of earth and loose rock. This shelf covered the channel they’d seen on the radar printouts. The channel might provide a quick entrance but its proximity to the edge of the cliff rendered it dangerous. Before April would consent to excavating the channel, she wanted to dig out the rest of the structure. Surely somewhere else they would find a door.
They also erected several modular buildings to serve as storage and communications facilities.
The workers had got into the habit of bringing flashlights with them, which they periodically used to try to peer into the cannonium shell. Several swore they could see through, and a couple even claimed that something looked back. The result was that the ridge began to acquire a reputation that at first lent itself to jokes and later to an inclination by many to be gone by sunset.
On Washington’s birthday, the weather went back to normal. The Red River Valley froze over, and Max celebrated his own birthday on the twenty-third with April and the Laskers during a driving snowstorm. But the winds died during the night, and the morning dawned bright, clear, and cold. So cold, in fact, that they were forced by midafternoon to send everyone home.
By then they had almost freed the roundhouse from its tomb. Earth and rock still clung to it, but the structure was attractive in its simplicity. The wall was perfectly round and, like the bubble roof, it glistened after it had been washed.
Max was watching the first cars start down the access road when he heard shouting and laughter out of sight around the curve of the roundhouse.
A small group was gathered near the rear of the building. Two men were wiping the wall. Others were shielding their eyes against the sun to get a better look. Several saw Max and waved excitedly.
They had found an image buried within the wall.
A stag’s head.
It was clear and simple: a curved line to represent a shoulder, another to suggest an antler. Here was an eye, and there a muzzle.
The image was white, contrasting sharply with the dark cannonium shell. Like the structure itself, its most compelling characteristic was its clean fluidity. There was no flourish. No pretense.
April unslung a camera from her shoulder and studied the roundhouse in the failing light. “Perfect,” she said. Snow drifted down through the somber afternoon.
She snapped the shutter, changed her angle slightly, and took a second picture.
The snow whispered against the wall. “It’s lovely in the storm,” she said. They walked slowly around the perimeter while she took more pictures. “In our whole history,” she continued, “this is only going to happen once.” She shot the roundhouse, the stag’s head, the surrounding hills, the parking lot. And Max. “Stand over here, Max,” she told him, and when he demurred, she laughed and dragged him where she wanted him, told him to stay put, and took more pictures. “All your life, you’re going to remember this,” she said. “And there’ll be times when you would kill to be able to come back to this moment.”
Max knew it was true.
And he took her picture with the great building crouching behind her like a prehistoric creature. “Good,” she said. “That’s good.”
And when he least expected it, she fell into his arms and kissed him.
The TV crews returned in force the next day. They interviewed everybody and showed particular interest in the stag’s head. Max stayed late on the summit that evening, working. There was still some light on the escarpment when Tom Brokaw led into the final feature of the evening news broadcast, which was traditionally chosen to leave a positive impact. “In North Dakota, a team of researchers has begun digging again at the site of a very mysterious object,” he said. Aerial and ground pictures of the excavation site and the roundhouse appeared. “The object you are looking at was discovered several months ago a few miles from the Canadian border. The people who are directing the excavation aren’t talking much, but persons close to the effort think it may have been left by extraterrestrial visitors. Was it?” Brokaw smiled. “Carole Jensen, of our affiliate KLMR-TV in Grand Forks, has the story.”
Closeup. Jensen stood in front of the curving wall, wrapped in a stylish overcoat. She was wearing no hat, and the wind played havoc with her hair. She looked cold. (It was hard to believe that elsewhere in the country pitchers and catchers were reporting to spring training.) “Tom, we’ve heard a lot of speculation about this site since we first found out about it last November. Experts across the country are saying that the test samples that were taken from the object they call the roundhouse should not be possible. They are also saying that they have no idea how such an element could be manufactured. But it’s here. And a small group of amateur archeologists has begun digging again. Before it’s over, we may have the first convincing evidence of a visit by extraterrestrials.”
Yeah, thought Max. That’s good. As long as we’re not the ones saying it.
The other networks took the same approach. They were all cautious. But it was a great story, and the media, once they were reasonably assured that nothing was amiss, would be trumpeting it.
Max pulled on his coat and went outside. Moonlight fell on the excavation, illuminating the roundhouse, throwing shadows across the circular cut in which it stood. Peggy Moore’s theory that the cut was artificial, that someone had sliced a piece out of the rock to accommodate the structure, now seemed beyond question. The rocky shore had been too high above water level, Max thought, visualizing the ancient lake. So they’d removed a piece, installed their boathouse, and cut a channel through the last few feet.
Eventually the inland sea had gone away, leaving the thing high and dry. And over ten thousand years the wind had filled everything back in.
Might it be possible to find the piece they had taken out? He walked close to the edge and peered down.
Harry Ernest was Fort Moxie’s lone delinquency problem. He’d acquired a passion for spray-can art in Chicago and had come to North Dakota to live with relatives when his mother died. (Harry never knew his father.)
Harry’s major problem was that in a place like Fort Moxie, no free spirit can hide. He was the only known vandal north of Grand Forks; and consequently when an obscene exhortation showed up on the water tower or on one of the churches or at the Elks hall, the deputy knew exactly where to go to lay hands on the culprit.
To his credit, and to his family’s dismay, Harry was dedicated to his art. But since he knew he would inevitably have to pay the price, he learned to choose his targets for maximum impact. When the roundhouse showed up on TV, Harry experienced a siren call.
Tom Brokaw had hardly signed off before Harry was collecting the spray paint he’d hidden in the attic. Gold and white, he thought, would contrast nicely with the object’s basic color.
He gave a great deal of consideration to the appropriate message and finally decided that simple was best. He would express the same sentiments he’d left on countless brick walls in and around Chicago. Harry’s response to the world.
At around eleven o’clock, when the house had settled down, he took the car keys from the top of his uncle’s bureau, climbed out his bedroom window, and eased the family Ford out of the garage. A half-hour later he discovered that a police presence had been established at the access road. He therefore drove past and parked a half-mile beyond. From there he cut through the woods, intercepted the access road, and walked up.
The roundhouse was a dark cylindrical shadow cast against subdued starlight. It overlooked the valley, and whatever he wrote would be spectacularly visible from Route 32 when the sun hit it.
Several temporary buildings had been erected around the thing. He noted lights in one and somebody moving inside. Otherwise the area was deserted.
He strolled across the summit, whistling softly, enjoying himself. In the shadow of the roundhouse he paused to check his spray cans. It was getting cold again, but they worked okay. Satisfied, he stood for a minute letting the wind blow on him. Yeah. This was what life was about. Wind in your hair. Snow coming. And sticking it to the world.
He smiled and walked out onto the narrow strip of rock across the front of the roundhouse. The void beside him did not touch his sensibilities. He reached the center, turned to survey his canvas, and backed up until his heels ran out of shelf. Fortunately, the wind was coming from the west, so the structure protected him. That was important if you were trying to work with a spray can.
He was relieved to note that the wall was made of beveled glass. There had been some disagreement on the TV about that. But people had been talking about glass, so he’d brought enamel.
He pointed his flashlight at the wall, and the beam seemed to penetrate. He moved in close, tried to see inside. It occurred to him that there might be no inside, that the object might be solid.
He shrugged and took out his spray can.
He would do the first word in gold. He looked up and measured his target with his eye. The angle wasn’t so good because he was too close. But there was no help for that.
The only sounds were the wind and a far-off plane.
He aimed and pressed the nozzle. Paint sprayed out of the can in a fine mist, and the satisfying sense of changing pressures flowed down his arm.
But unlike water towers and churches, the roundhouse tended to resist interaction with the world. The mist did not cling. Some of it liquefied and dribbled down the face of the wall. Some very little of it lodged in chinks and seams. But the bulk of it skimmed off into the air and formed a golden cloud.
The cloud held its shape only briefly and then began to dissolve and descend.
Harry could not have understood what was happening. He knew only that his face was suddenly wet. And his eyes stung.
He dropped the can, cried out, and fell to his knees. His fists were in his eyes, and he scraped his arm against something in the dark, and he knew where he was, could not forget where he was. Then the ground was gone and he was falling. In his office a hundred yards away, Max heard the scream, poked his head out the door, and assigned it to an animal.