Alex Benedict 07 - Coming Home (33 page)

Truth lacks the privilege of being employed at all times and under every circumstance. As noble as it is, it has its limits.

—Michel de Montaigne,
Essays
, 1588
C.E.

Southwick came down and met us in the bar. The relaxed, no-problem manner was gone. There was tension in his eyes, and his face was pale. “Glad to see you, Alex,” he said, barely able to get the words out. He eased himself into a chair and sent a weak smile across the table. “Hello, Chase. I guess this has been a long haul for you guys.”

“You could say that,” said Alex.

Piano music drifted through the room. A lazy, quiet rhythm from another era. “I’m sorry. I wish there’d been another way.”

Alex lifted his glass, tasted the drink, and put it back down. “Why don’t you tell us what’s going on?”

Southwick’s eyes closed briefly. A waiter arrived, and he ordered something. I don’t recall what it was, except that he asked for it
straight
. Then he glanced around to see if anyone was close enough to overhear us. “I’m sorry about the problems. I’d have avoided it all if I could have.”

“I’m sure you would,” said Alex, with a level tone.

“I met Garnett a long time ago. More than half a century. He was one of the finest people I’ve ever known. Totally honest. You could always count on him if you needed anything. I loved the guy. He saved my life once, and it killed me when we lost him.”

Alex’s eyes caught mine. We both wanted Southwick to get to the point, but the message for me was to be patient. Southwick continued for several minutes about Baylee’s virtues. The ultimate stand-up guy. Eventually, his drink arrived. He literally snatched it from the waiter, but he set it down on the table without trying it. “Nothing in his life mattered as much as the Golden Age. And the Apollo artifacts. They represented who we were. Not only the beginning of the space age, but he saw them as symbolic of the beginning of the human family. It was ultimately, he used to say, those early years, when science was on the march, and a world culture was developing as a result of the rise of global communications, that imposed a sense of empathy on us. That drew us together. Showed us who we were. During the early years of the scientific renaissance, people did not believe that the human race would ever come together. Science just provided bigger bombs. But Baylee always said it was the development of new forms of communication that gave everyone a voice and that, after a rocky start, provided us with the kind of world we have now.

“It wasn’t a straight line, of course. Sometimes things went badly. Dictators continued to show up. Civilization came close to collapse on several occasions and finally went under. They got through the Dark Age, only to have some of the colony worlds get into wars with each other. But Baylee maintained that once we were seriously able to talk to each other, a reasonable existence for everyone was inevitable. Which is why he so desperately wanted to find the Apollo artifacts. They marked, in his view, the launch point.” Finally, he picked up his drink, tossed it down his throat, and smiled. “I know you’re wondering why I’m going on like this. But you need to understand the man to understand what happened.”

Alex sat unmoving.

“He was hunting for them when I first met him. But people had been looking for them for thousands of years. The assumption was that they were simply gone. I don’t know how many times I told him it was all a waste. But then he came across the Marco Collins histories at Bantwell University. I don’t know whether you saw them. But there it was: He’d given the artifacts to Larissa.

“I guess there was a problem in translation there, but he recognized the name. He knew that Zorbas was originally from that area in Greece, of course. But he couldn’t believe there’d be any point in hiding the artifacts there. As far as we knew, it was just as unstable as the Dakotas. But a lot of people in that era, those who could, were establishing themselves on asteroids. Getting away from the civil conflicts. And he
knew
about the Larissa asteroid. Knew that one of Zorbas’s friends, Quincy Abbott, was supposed to have had a retreat there. It would have been the perfect place.”

“How did he find that out?”

“In Russell Brenkov’s
It Never Happened
. Brenkov was, I think, a late-Fourth-Millennium historian, somewhere in there, who specialized in discounting historical myths. Abbott led the fight in the Dakotas against the thieves and rebels during the Dark Age. He was believed to have returned from an asteroid home on Larissa when everything started to break down. Brenkov argued that the story was untrue, that Abbott had never lived on an asteroid. But it didn’t matter to Garnett, of course. What mattered was that the story established the existence of Larissa.”

I remembered the book from the Albertson Museum. In fact, I’d held it in my hands.

Southwick took a deep breath. “I’ll never forget the night he showed up at the dig site.”

“What dig site is that?” Alex asked.

“We were working in the London area. And suddenly he was there, out of nowhere, telling me he was pretty sure he knew where the Apollo cache was.”

“Wait a minute,” I said, “assuming he suspected everything was hidden on Larissa, how did he know which asteroid that was?”

“He spent almost twenty years tracking that down. He eventually came across a two-thousand-year-old fragment of Les Carmichael’s
Last of the Giants
, which was a substantive scientific history of the first two centuries of the Third Millennium. Unfortunately, most of it was illegible. But it included a list of the asteroids as they were originally known, matching them with their modern designators. Larissa was among them.” He finished his drink. Our glasses were all empty by then. Alex ordered another round, but I passed for the obvious reason that I would probably be on the bridge of the
Belle-Marie
before the night ended.

“
Last of the Giants
,” said Alex. “I never saw anything like that among his papers. Or in his library.”

“I’m not sure where he found it. Or what happened to it. But once he knew where it was, he came to me at the London site. I’ll never forget the way he looked that day. I’ve never seen
anyone
so happy and so excited. I suggested we get Heli to take us there.”

“Why Heli?”

“We could trust her to keep her mouth shut. We didn’t want to invite any scavengers.”

The music stopped. And started again.

Alex examined his glass. “Whose idea was it to sink the boat?”

Southwick made a noise deep in his throat. “Heli suggested it. But I was responsible for the decision.”

“We could have been killed.”

“Heli assured me they could work everything out. That they wouldn’t do it if there was any danger.”

That got a growl from me. “I wish you’d been there,” I said.

“I know. It was stupid. At the time, it seemed like a good idea. We hoped it would scare you off. I guess we should have known better. I think about it now, and I don’t know where my head was. Anyway, I apologize.”

“Did you have to buy them a new boat?”

“No.” He smiled. “Insurance covered it. They never really asked any questions.”

“Okay.” Alex glanced at me. Keep cool. “So the three of you went to Larissa.”

“Yes.”

“And did you find the artifacts?”

Southwick swallowed. Tried his drink again. “Yes.”

“And what happened?”

“The Zorbas family, or somebody, had built a house out there. A nice place, three stories, a mansion, really. They moved the smaller artifacts to the asteroid. They made no effort to take the shuttles or anything like that. Probably didn’t have that capability. But the small stuff tends to be what’s really valuable. Personal items, plaques, cups with mission names emblazoned on them, uniforms, helmets, journals. It was an ideal place because the vacuum inhibited decay. The objects would damned near last forever. It was a brilliant idea.

“We needed almost four days to get there. I think it was the longest four days of my life, Alex. But we
did
get there, and when we did—” He stopped, looking past me at whatever it was he’d seen that night. “Garnie was so excited he could barely contain himself.

“Then Heli told us there was a building. It was a dome, with a house inside.
Somebody
had lived on the asteroid. Maybe Abbott, maybe not. I don’t know whether I’ve ever seen anyone as ecstatic as Garnie was. He pounded his chair and shook my hand and tried to kiss the top of Heli’s head, but she told him to stay clear as long as the engines were running.

“I’d never seen him so ecstatic. And when I told him that it might be a good idea not to get too excited until we saw what we actually had, he laughed and said he knew it was still a long shot but how he was by God going to enjoy the moment anyhow. And if it really turned out just to be an old house in a strange place, then so be it.

“Heli brought us down onto the asteroid, about fifty meters from the dome, off to one side of the house. Garnett and I were both in our pressure suits by then. Heli wished us luck and said how she hoped we’d find what we were looking for. And then we went outside.

“I’d never been on an asteroid before. It was all crags and craters and broken rock. Garnett led the way. We went over to the dome, found a hatch, and pushed the entry pad. The pad glowed a little bit, but nothing else happened. He produced a cutter and told me to stand back.

“I told him it wasn’t a good idea. That ancient power systems tend to get unstable when they’re not shut down.

“He said not to worry. That he’d gone through a lot of old airlocks and never had a problem. ‘It’s a myth,’ he said. He told me if I wanted to, we could go back to Galileo and see if we could hire a good electrician. Then he went on about how I shouldn’t worry and aimed his cutter at the hatch. I backed off.

“I just stood and watched while he cut a hole in the thing, tried again to open it, gave up, and enlarged the hole until it was big enough for us to get inside the airlock. Then he did the same thing with the inner hatch, and that got us into the dome.

“There’d been a garden at one time. The trees were still there. Frozen, of course. And a bench. A walkway led up to the house.

“We pointed our lamps at it. The windows, except for one, were still intact. The place had a porch. We climbed up onto it and looked through the windows into an ordinary living room, with a sofa, a coffee table, and a couple of chairs. There were pictures on the walls of people posing and waving. And another of a young couple standing in front of a house surrounded by trees.

“We walked over to the front door. Garnie pushed the pad that should have opened it but nothing happened. So he aimed the cutter at it. The beam touched the door, and lights came on both inside and out. They flickered a couple of times and went off again. Then electricity rippled across everything, and the place ignited. We both jumped away from it and landed on the ground probably fifteen meters away. We were lying there trying to decide what was happening when something exploded inside. The house literally erupted. We were on the ground below the level of the deck, which is the only reason we survived. Pieces blew past us. Some hit the dome and ricocheted around.

“When it was over, everything went completely dark. Heli was screaming at us over the radio asking whether we were still alive, telling us to hold on, she was coming, and Garnett was lying on his back asking God what he had done.” He fell silent.

“The artifacts were inside the house?”

“Yes. Everything was wrecked. They’d put the artifacts into a couple of storage rooms in back. Both were blown out and flattened. The contents were scattered around inside the dome. If it hadn’t been there, most of the material would probably have been blasted into space. Garnett staggered around in the wreckage, trying to find something,
any
thing, screaming curses, and finally collapsing in tears. ‘My God,’ he said again and again, ‘I can’t believe I did this.’ He got onto his knees and began sweeping up charred metal and plastics. At one point he lifted a blackened helmet like the ones they’d worn on the Apollo missions. We found frames, but there was no way to know what they’d held. The only thing we came across that was reasonably intact was the transmitter. Ironically, it was in a closet on the far side of the house. Everything around it was scorched and burned, but the transmitter looked okay.” His eyes were closed. “He told me he wished he hadn’t survived.”

Alex looked pale. “You were lucky to walk away from it.”

“Yes. We looked through the wreckage, hoping to salvage something, but Garnett was hurt. He was limping from the blast, and I wasn’t in very good shape either.”

“Why did you keep it quiet?” Alex asked. “To protect Baylee’s reputation?”

“And mine. Yes. I didn’t really have a reputation to protect, I guess. But Garnie did. He pleaded with me not to say anything.”

“And that’s what this was all about?”

“He was a friend, Alex. I gave him my word. And now I have to ask you again: Are you willing to keep this quiet? It will cost you nothing, and it will preserve the reputation of a good man.”

Alex looked in my direction. He knew I’d been keeping notes and planning another memoir. “I can’t do that,” he said.

“Why not?” Southwick’s tone took on a sharp edge. “Is it because you want some publicity? Son of a bitch, Alex, how can you be so selfish?”

“It’s all right, Alex,” I said. “Whatever you want to do is okay with me.”

That earned me a glare from Southwick. “Do you have a veto?” he asked.

“She’s not involved,” said Alex.

Southwick took a deep breath. “Alex,” he said, “do you still want to go out to look at the asteroid?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll take you there, on condition that you and Chase agree to say nothing.”

“Look, Baylee’s reputation won’t suffer. He did exactly what every other archeologist I’ve ever known would have done. If anything, he’ll become an icon. They’ll make a movie about him. But that’s not the point.”