argument to get me to return. For the good of the project, of course. And Kelly's safety. That and a huge bonus I could put aside to finance my medical bills if I ended up with cancer in a decade or two.
It all seemed worth it with Kelly glad to see me. Perhaps it was just the basic human need for companionship, but I was happy to delude myself into thinking it was more.
By our third year at Emerald Lake, it began to appear that the world had forgotten us. Over the winter, attempts to breach park security had dwindled to nothing, and even with the arrival of spring and the second anniversary of the appearance of the dimple, there had been less than half a dozen. Of course, I still spoke with headquarters nearly every week. We also had occasional contact with maintenance personnel and an RCMP trooper by the name of Sergeant Perry who actually came by on horseback when the weather was good and sometimes brought us old newspapers. I went back to Maryland regularly for my quarterly mission reviews and radiation assessments, and we were connected with the outside world through the Internet, but for the most part we were alone.
Me, Kelly, and the dimple.
She looked at that damn dimple every day as if Nick Maclnnes was going to come walking out of it and embrace her. I just looked at it.
And so we hadn't become lovers. To me she was a widow, but Kelly thought of herself as a wife.
An extremely loyal wife.
We got along well enough, had even become friends of sorts. That is if you disregarded the fact that I dreamed about the scent of her every night.
It was a warm day in late August when I finally asked the question. 'So, why are we still here?'
Kelly and I sat in front of the lodge on a little pebbled strip of land too modest to call a beach. The dimple punctuated the lake in front of us, and the mountains loomed high in the sky around it. For a change it was warm enough that I didn't have to wear a jacket.
'Why are you still here?'
I shrugged. 'You're my job.' You and Nick, I thought, but I tried to say his name as little as possible. 'According to my boss, they don't have anything else for me.'
She placed her left hand on my right forearm, a rare moment of physical contact between us. 'Oh, surely there's more for you to do than wait by a lake. You Americans, you always have some mess to go fix. Or make.'
I didn't move a muscle, afraid to dislodge her touch. 'I wouldn't have to be here all the time just to oversee the security of the site. Your husband achieved something no one ever did before him, and there are a lot of people who want to know what he didn't tell us.' What you're not telling us. 'Marge sent me here to find out why you're still keeping such a sharp eye on the dimple.'
Kelly smiled, one eyebrow arched. 'Marge?'
'Sure. Not everyone is as afraid of first names as you are.'
She moved her hand away. Me and my big mouth. My arm still tingled where her fingers had been.
'Actually,' she said, 'I'm waiting for another message from him.'
I couldn't help laughing. 'Another phone call?'
She grinned. 'No, no. Nick promised to set a sign in the heavens.' Despite her grin, I had the strange feeling that she was serious.
After the snows melted the next spring, Kelly started bugging me to go into the center of the dimple with her, a squint of worry around her eyes. The thing had never frozen over, even as the ice crusted around the edges. A heavy snow could cover it for a day or so, before the snow blanket sagged into the warm water beneath. The dimple was there like a great blind eye in the water, staring at the sky, trapping us in its unseeing gaze.
I studied the curious phenomenon that had become such an everyday part of life. 'How do you propose we get back out if we go down in there?'
Kelly gazed at me speculatively. 'How good a swimmer are you, Bruce?'
I shook my head. 'No, no way.'
She gave me her wide smile. I could almost believe I had imagined the worry- but only almost. 'If we had a long enough rope with us, you could belay the boat back for sure. You're strong. I bet you're a good swimmer.'
'I was all-New England in prep school,' I admitted. 'But I'm still not going to do it.'
'Why not?'
Oh, Christ, Kelly. 'One, I don't want to drown in those damned waterfalls. Two, I don't want to put my body near that thermal gradient without a boat between me and it. The overflight data suggested ice layers down there, at the reverse end of the heat rise. That's why we have cameras and instrument packages.'
'Sometimes there's nothing like a first-hand look.'
'No.'
'You're already exposing yourself to constant radiation,' she pointed out, flirting and pleading at the same time. I hadn't thought her capable of either. 'Why worry about a simple mascon?'
This time I said it out loud. 'Christ, Kelly.'
She let loose a lovely peal of laughter and took my elbow. 'Besides, it's not like you have anything else to do this summer.'
When Kelly realized I wasn't going to get into that water for her anytime soon, she decided we needed to build a 'dimple observatory.' We spent several days hauling lumber from the park's maintenance shed to a beautiful old rock maple right up by the water with just the right spread of branches. Kelly's big laugh echoed between the trees and the mountains more often than I had ever heard it as we messed with ropes and nails, building our tree fort.
I had thought I was lost in love before, but I hadn't known how charming, how fun she could be.
Our Mountie showed up while we were up there hammering away. He regarded us-seriously for a moment from his big bay mare, like a critical parent.
Kelly took the nail out of her mouth and called down to him. 'Come on, Sergeant Perry. Don't you want to work on a tree fort again?'
He cracked a smile and gave us a few hours of his time. I finally thanked him for his help when I noticed him watching his dosimeter more carefully than he was watching the hammer in his hand.
One night Kelly and I were grilling hot dogs over a campfire next to our 'observatory' when she gave me that look again. 'Bruce, won't you at least take me out to the surface of the dimple? I want to see it for myself.'
'Christ, Kelly.' I pulled my dog out of the fire and tried to brush off some of the burned spots. What the hell. I'd already signed up for cancer for her sake, had been throwing away red-lined dosimeters for a while. 'Sure.'
She tackled me with a squeal that made it all worthwhile.
I hoped.
'How deep can you dive?'
I looked up from the gear I was stowing in the Ranger Cherokee. I hadn't done any diving in years. 'Now wait a minute - '
'If you're going into the water anyway, you could also see if you could get down to the mascon.'
I straightened, shaking my head. 'The anomaly is in thirty meters of water. I don't think I can hold my breath more than ninety seconds. That's not enough.'
'So we tie a fifteen meter rope to your ankle, drop you over with something heavy to take you down fast, and you push a pole down the rest of the way.'
I laughed. 'And do what? Tap?'
She smiled her real smile. 'You come back up, tell me what you saw, what it felt like. What's down there.'
'You were planning on asking me this all along, weren't you?'
Her smile took on a guilty cast. 'Well, yes.'
I sighed. How much did it matter now? There wasn't much I could do to compete with her rich, dead genius husband. At least I could do this for her.
I wired the butt of an ancient oak post to the end of a twenty-foot aspen pole, then made a wrist loop at the other end of the pole out of an old bootlace. I would jump headfirst out of the bass boat clutching an old wheel rim to weigh me down and follow the pole toward the bottom. First I smeared my body with a mixture of Vaseline and mud-we didn't have enough of the petroleum jelly around the lodge to use it straight up, but I was worried about the cold.
