Mysterium

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Sunday, a charter pilot named Calvin Shepperd took off from the air docks at the western end of Lake Merced and flew southeast toward Detroit—or the place on the map where Detroit used to be.

From the air it was easy to see the circle Dex Graham and Howard Poole had mapped. It was as clear as a cartographer’s line. Two Rivers—much of Bayard County—had been transplanted (that was the word that occurred to him: like his wife’s droopy ficus, transplanted) into the kind of white pine forest that must have covered Michigan when Jolliet and La Salle first crossed it. Shepperd, a calm man, understood none of this but refused to be frightened by it; only observed, took note, and filed the information for later reference.

Another troubling piece of information was that his VOR receiver wasn’t registering a signal. Which was okay—Shepperd was old-fashioned enough to have calculated his course with a VFR chart and a yardstick, and his dead-reckoning skills were quite intact, thank you very much. He was not one of these modern pilots: RNAV junkies, lost without a computer. But it was peculiar, this radio silence.

He flew south by compass along the coast of the Lower Peninsula, coming within sight of Saginaw Bay. He should have passed Bay City and he adjusted his course to take him over Saginaw, but neither town seemed to exist. He did see a few settlements—farms, mineheads, and some obvious forestry. So there were people here. But not until he was within sight of the Detroit River did Shepperd encounter anything he would call a town.

Detroit was a town. Hell, it was a genuine city. But it was not Detroit as Shepperd had known it. It was like no city he had ever seen.

There was air traffic here, large but frail-looking planes he could not identify, mainly to the south; but no tower chatter or beacons he could pick up, only hiss in the headphones—which made his presence here a danger. He flew a broad circle low over the city’s outskirts, over long tin-roofed buildings like warehouses hugging the river’s edge. There were taller buildings of some dark stone, narrow streets crowded with traffic, vehicles he didn’t recognize, some of them horse-drawn. Afternoon sun stitched the city with shadows. From Shepperd’s vantage point it might have been a diorama, something in a museum case, not real. Surely to God, he thought, not real.

He had seen enough to make him nervous. He flew home with the sun at his wingtip, trying not to think about any of this; it seemed too fragile to bear the weight of thought. During the long trip back he fretted that he had made some error in his reckoning, or that Two Rivers might have vanished in his absence, that he would be forced to land in the wilderness.

But he knew this terrain, even without its man-made landmarks, as well as he knew his wife Sarah. The land was family. It didn’t betray him. He was back on the calm surface of Lake Merced before nightfall.

He told no one what he had seen; not even Sarah. She might have called him crazy, and that would have been unbearable. He thought about talking to someone in authority—the police chief? The mayor? But even if they believed him, what could they do with this kind of information? Nothing, he thought. Nothing at all.

He decided to repeat the journey, if only to convince himself that it had been real. Monday morning, he refueled at the dock pumps and took off. He charted the same course to the south. But Two Rivers was barely beyond the green line of the horizon when Shepperd turned back, his heart pumping madly and his shirt drenched with sweat.

Something out there had frightened him. Something in the combination of white pine wilderness and dark, angular city had scared him off. He didn’t want to see it again. He had seen too much already.

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Monday afternoon, a formation of three strange aircraft flew over the town of Two Rivers. The noise drew people into the streets, where they shaded their eyes and stared up into the cloudless June sky. Superficially, the aircraft were conventional enough. Certainly they were old-fashioned: single-engine, propeller-driven, their quilted-metal bodies brilliant in the sunlight. The insignia on their wings were too distant to recognize, but most people assumed the planes were military craft of some kind.

Calvin Shepperd thought they looked like World War II-vintage P-51’s, and he wondered what had drawn them here. Maybe it was his fault. Maybe he showed up on some radar screen. No telling what alarm he might have triggered.

But he didn’t like that idea, and like most of his ideas since the accident last Saturday, Shepperd kept it to himself.

He watched the three strange aircraft circle once more and then wheel away to the south, pale dots on a pale horizon.

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Evelyn Woodward had spent the last of her household money on groceries and a set of fresh batteries for her radio. The batteries were a dangerous luxury—money was scarce, and who knew when the bank might open again?—but she still believed in the radio. It was a lifeline. Once or twice in every long winter a snowstorm would send pine boughs plummeting onto the power lines, and the house would grow cold and dark while the linemen battled the weather. During those times, Evelyn would listen to her radio. The blackout would be announced on WGST; the affected counties would be named. The calm of the announcer was contagious. Listening, you knew the problem was temporary; that there were people out there working on it, mending things in the windy dark.

Despite what Dex and Howard Poole had said, despite the length of the crisis, so peculiar in this lovely June weather, Evelyn still nurtured her hope that the radio would revive. Perhaps WGST was unavailable, but there had been that other station, that curious fragment of it, surely not as sinister as Dex had made it seem.

She replaced the batteries and turned up the volume until the kitchen filled with the spit of static, but no voice came through. No matter, she thought. Soon.

The radio was a private thing. She turned it off when anyone came into the kitchen, especially Dex or Howard. She was afraid of seeming stupid or naive. It was too easy to see herself as stupid or naive; she didn’t need anyone’s help. Anyway, time to herself wasn’t hard to find. Evenings, Dex and Howard got together in the front room, where Dex had put the old hurricane lamp, and they talked about the emergency—as if, by talking, they could make it sensible, as if they could bury it under the sheer weight of their words. Evelyn went to the kitchen and sat in the gathering dark with her radio: Sunday night, Monday night.

Monday was the day the planes had flown over, an event that had cheered her considerably. Dex, of course, put some paranoid interpretation on it. To Evelyn, the meaning of the planes was much simpler. The problem— whatever the problem was—had come to someone’s attention. It was being worked on; it was being fixed.

That was the evening the radio began to talk again. When Evelyn heard the voices, faint and laced with static, she smiled to herself. Dex was wrong. Normality was not far off.

She sat at the kitchen table with sunset fading outside her dusty window and the radio close to her ear. She listened to fifteen minutes of a radio play (there were radio plays on this station), about policemen who were religious, or priests who were policemen—she couldn’t tell. The actors all had thick accents. Their accents sounded sometimes French, sometimes English, sometimes just unfamiliar; they used curious words from time to time. It must be a European play, Evelyn thought. Something avant-garde. Then there was an ad for Mueller’s Stone-Pressed White Flour, “our purity is never questioned,” in a similar voice. Then a time check and the news.

According to the news, there had been a naval battle in the Yucatan Channel with tremendous losses on all sides. The Logos was damaged and limping back to Galveston, but the Spanish Narvaez had sunk with all hands. And the land campaign was meeting stiff resistance in the hills around Cuernavaca.

At home, the announcer went on, Ascension Day had been marked by fireworks and public celebrations from coast to coast. On an unhappy note, incendiary displays in New York Harbor had inadvertently set fire to a pitch and tar warehouse on the Jersey shore and caused the death of three night watchmen.

A pacifist demonstration in Montmagny had been broken up by police. Though it was claimed to be a student demonstration, Proctors said the majority of those arrested were either apostates, trade unionists, or Jews.