working.
So here he was in this really amazing situation, thirty-two years old and moving straight from his psychiatric residency to a good job in a time when there were no jobs of any kind.
“Dr. Ford, I want to take this opportunity to give you a little additional information.”
They were in facing seats, knee to knee in the compact cabin. “I would appreciate that very much.”
“First, I must apologize about the plane.”
“It’s wonderful, and I’m so grateful for the ride. It could’ve taken days otherwise.”
“This is a fifty-year-old airplane. The only one I have that works. The newer ones—the electronics are ruined, they tell me.”
The sun, of course. Always the damned sun. He noted the implication that she had a number of planes. Extraordinary.
She seemed to brace herself, like somebody bracing for a crash or waiting for an explosion. But when she spoke, her tone was casual, almost offhand. “You do know that Dr. Ullman was the unfortunate victim of a fire.”
Something had opened the position, that had been clear enough. He had not asked, and nobody had explained. “I’m sorry.”
“He was living in the town. Unfortunately, the fire service in Raleigh County has deteriorated. They were too slow.”
It seemed odd to leave information like this to a moment when he was already on his way to the facility, as if the knowledge might have changed his mind. “It was an accident?”
“We assume.”
“Is there anything else I should know? I mean, why are you telling me now?”
“You understand that your quarters will be on the estate?”
“I’ve been told that I have Herbert Acton’s personal suite.”
“Which is one of the most extraordinary interior spaces in this country. In the world, for that matter.”
“That I was told. I’m fascinated. I tried to find pictures online, but—”
“No pictures. We’re not the Donald Trump sort.” She smiled a little. “Mr. Acton met girls in the bedroom you will use. Of course, you’re a bachelor.” Now her face became as hard as flint. “He wasn’t.”
Could she have once met Herbert Acton there? He’d died in 1958. She’d probably been a girl then, a teenager.
She burst out laughing. “It’s just brilliant, you’re going to love it, young man.”
She reached for her drink—they had both been given highballs by the waiter—and as she lifted it to her lips, a blue glow appeared around her arm. She looked at the glow for a moment, then tossed the drink away with a little cry and an electric crackle. David noticed the same glow along his arms, and felt a tingling sensation. He thought,
“Ma’am, it’s Saint Elmo’s fire,” he said. “We’ve got incoming solar energy again.”
She looked pained. “We should have taken the car, Andy.”
“Impossible, Ma’am. Too slow, too dangerous.”
David glanced down at what he supposed was the New Jersey Turnpike far below. There was no sign of movement in the long, gleaming snake of vehicles. He said nothing.
She jabbed the intercom. “What does this Saint Elmo’s fire mean? Is it going to cause a crash?”
“We’re trying a lower altitude.”
“I hate these damned solar flares. It’s hideous, all of it. Hideous.” She twisted about in her seat where she sat, a spidery old creature in silk and diamonds. She looked at him, suddenly as intent as a snake.
“Where’s it all going to end, Doctor, do you know?”
“It’ll fade away eventually.”
“That’s one opinion. But perhaps you haven’t seen this.”
She handed him a document in a beige folder. When he opened it, he saw red classified stamps.
“I can’t read this.”
She waved her fingers at him. “You’d better.”
“I haven’t got a clearance.”
“Don’t you understand, David? That doesn’t matter anymore. All of that’s gone.”
The paper was only three pages long, a quick series of paragraphs. It was from the chairman of the National Security Council, directed to the president.
“Where did you get this?”
“Oh, for God’s sake, young man, read the damn thing!”
According to the paper, the solar system was entering the atmosphere of a supernova—information which was hardly classified. Everybody knew it. But then came a more shocking sentence: “The last time we passed through this cloud 12,600 years ago, debris from the body of the exploded star impacted the glaciers. An area of the great northern glacier, the Laurentian ice sheet, was transformed from ice to superheated steam in under a second. This area was as large as Rhode Island and the impact resulted in enormous icebergs being thrown as far afield as New Mexico. A storm of smaller pieces created the million craters of the Carolina Dells.”
Still, he was not surprised by this. Since the publication of Firestone, West, and Warwick-Smith’s
He read on.
“The ice melted so rapidly that the entire North American continent was flooded. In North America, all human life was destroyed. Elsewhere, man survived, and the catastrophe gave rise to all of the world’s flood legends.”
He looked up. She had knocked back his drink. She regarded him out of shadowed, appraising eyes.
“Does any of this ring a bell?”
“Sure. It’s one of the theories about why the Ice Age ended. Why it would be classified, I can’t imagine. It’s been in the news for years.”
“Read on.”
“As our last advanced civilization was being destroyed by the upheaval, scientists made detailed observations of the stellar debris field. They mapped it and found it to be irregular in shape, and it became clear that we would reenter it in another twelve thousand years. But they could not pinpoint the exact date without taking extraordinary measures.
“There is evidence that they created some sort of substance that enabled them to see very accurately into time itself, and actually looked forward into the future to determine the precise moment of reentry.
“Whatever this was, it is why later users were able to draw glyphs of modern military equipment at the Temple of Hathor in Egypt. But more importantly, some truly exotic use of it may be why certain people, such as many of the priestly class in the late Mayan period, simply disappeared. They went elsewhere in time physically.
“So far, our efforts to determine what this was have failed.
“In any case, its use enabled the people of the past, at some very distant point, to make the exquisitely careful observations that pinpointed the precise date that the danger would return. They marked this as the final end of the world.
“However, they also understood that mankind had much history to live before that day came, and they realized that all of their learning centers, clustered as they were along shorelines that would soon be under hundreds of feet of water, were doomed. They created a calendar now called the Zodiac, that measured the ages. This was further refined as the Mayan Long Count calendar, which revealed the exact moment the solar system would re-enter the cloud.
The tone was ponderous with official importance. But there was a problem—it was based on an absurd notion.
“The ancient civilization they refer to—I assume they mean Atlantis? Plato’s little speculation?”
“What do you remember?”
“About Atlantis? Nothing. It was before my time.” His contempt was growing.
