Nebula Awards Showcase 2006 (22 page)

By now everybody was talking about them. Especially about Maddy. “Parades around practically naked,” my Aunt Ethel, who worked at the Ben Franklin five-and-dime store in town, said to Mama. “She was in the store yesterday. Looked like a you-know-what.”

Uncle Miles even worked them into his sermon the next Sunday. “I’m reminded,” he said, “of the old colored spiritual, ‘Them bones, them bones, them dry bones, now hear the word of the Lord.’ Some people need to quit worrying about a lot of dry bones and start hearing the word of the Lord.”

Next morning I woke up with a head cold. It wasn’t all that bad, but it was enough for Mama to keep me in bed for a couple of days and indoors for the rest of the week. I spent the time reading and listening to the radio and mostly being bored and wishing I could go see David and Maddy again.

Daddy came in from town one evening with a big grin on his face. “That schoolteacher of yours,” he said to me, “I got to say one thing for him, he’s no sissy.”

“What happened?” I asked, and Daddy laughed.

“Damnedest thing,” he said. “Floyd Haney came up to him in front of the diner, drunk as a skunk as usual, and started cussing him out—still going on about that land across the creek—and when the schoolteacher tried to walk past him, Floyd took a swing at him. Next thing you know Floyd was flat on his ass. I saw the whole thing from across the street.”

“Mr. Donovan hit him?”

“Fastest left I ever saw. Deputy Pritchard drove up while Floyd was still laying there, but the schoolteacher said he didn’t want to press charges. Probably right,” Daddy said. “It never does no good, locking Floyd’s kind up. Some folks are just the way they are.”

Finally I got to feeling better and Mama let me out of the house again. Naturally I took off right away for the creek.

Mr. Donovan’s jeep was sitting there when I came down the hill, and as I stopped the bike I saw they were all three up by the trailer sitting under the awning. As I walked toward them I could hear Maddy talking, sounding angry.

“I don’t believe this,” she was saying. “The most important discovery of the century, and you’re acting as if it’s a bomb that’s going to explode in your face.”

“It is,” David said. “Oh, sure, maybe not for you. Your tight little rich-bitch ass isn’t the one on the line, is it? Nobody pays any attention to graduate students.” His voice was getting louder. “I’m the poor son of a bitch with the ink still fresh on his doctorate. If I blow this I’ll be lucky to get a job at City College of Rooster Poot, Arkansas.”

They looked up and saw me, then, and they got all quiet and embarrassed-looking, the way grown people do when kids catch them quarreling. After a second Maddy said, “Why, hello, Raymond.”

I said, “Maybe I ought to go?”

“No, no.” Maddy waved her hands. “I bet you’d like a Coke, wouldn’t you? Why don’t you just go help yourself? The box is just inside the door, you can’t miss it.”

I went over to the trailer and climbed up the little steps and opened the door. Sure enough, there was a refrigerator, the littlest one I’d ever seen, just inside. I could see up into the front part of the trailer, which was mostly taken up by a bed that needed making. I got myself a Coke and went back out just as Mr. Donovan was saying, “Anyway, I hope these are all right.”

I saw now that there was a big yellow envelope on the table and a couple of stacks of big glossy photographs. David was holding a picture up and looking at it from different angles. “Oh, yes,” he said, “this is really first-class work. Thanks, Bob.”

“Been a while since I’ve done any darkroom work,” Mr. Donovan said “Took a couple of hours just to dig out my old equipment and get it dusted off. Glad the prints turned out okay.”

I walked over and looked at the photos while they talked. One of the ones on top was a close-up shot of a skull, half buried in the ground. Another one looked like a full-length view of the whole skeleton. I picked that one up for a closer look and then I saw something that didn’t make any sense at all.

“Hey,” I said. “He’s wearing clothes!”

They all turned and stared at me. I said, “If the skeleton’s as old as you said, wouldn’t they have rotted away by now?”

“Oh, shit,” David said, and reached over and snatched the picture out of my hand. “Bob, why’d you have to bring—”

“Shut up, David,” Maddy said. “Raymond, come here.”

I walked around the table and stood in front of her. She took both my hands in hers and looked right into my face. “Raymond,” she said, “you wouldn’t do anything to hurt us, would you?”

“No, ma’am,” I said. My throat had tightened up till I could barely talk. “No, Maddy.”

“And if you knew something that could cause trouble for us, you wouldn’t tell? I don’t mean anything bad or illegal,” she said quickly. “Just something that could make a lot of trouble.”

“No.” I didn’t know what she was talking about but I would have agreed with anything she said.

“Then come on,” she said, standing up and picking up a big battery lantern that was sitting on the table. “There’s something I want to show you.”

David stood up too, fast. “You will like hell!”

“Don’t be stupid, David,” Maddy said without looking at him. “And for once in your life try trusting someone.”

“Raymond’s a smart boy,” Mr. Donovan said. “He’ll cooperate, once he understands.”

“Oh, all right,” David said, throwing up his hands, “why not? Hell, let’s hold a press conference. Call the White House, invite Truman for a look. Bring in the damn United
Nations.
”

“Watch your step,” Maddy said as we started across the dry creek bed.

It was a long hard walk up the hollow to the cave, and hot even in the deep shade under the trees. By the time we got there, I was wishing I’d brought the rest of that Coke along.

About halfway up the hollow Maddy turned left and started up a steep slope, covered with big loose rocks, to the foot of the bluff. “Here,” she said, and I saw what Sheriff Cowan had meant. If I hadn’t known there was a cave there I’d never have guessed.

“It’s a little rough getting through the brush,” she said, “but we didn’t want to advertise the location by clearing it away.”

She walked around to the side of a gray boulder, big as a good-sized car, that rested against the face of the bluff. She switched on the battery lantern and pushed aside some bushes and disappeared behind the boulder.

“You know,” Mr. Donovan said as we started after her, “I believe this must have been sealed off until recently. Look at all that loose rock and earth down below. There’s been a slide, not too long ago. Maybe that last big rainstorm in May set it off.”

“You could be right,” David said. “There’s hardly any animal sign in the cave.”

I pushed through the brush and found myself in a narrow little space, dark except for the light that was coming from off to my right. “You’ll have to get down and crawl a little way,” Maddy called back. “It’s not too bad.”

It was as far as I was concerned. The light from up ahead helped, but it was still a scary place, and going through the tightest part I could feel the whole world pressing in on me. The air was cold, too, with a creepy dead smell. I wanted to yell but I choked it down because I didn’t want Maddy to think I was a coward. Then the hole got bigger and the light got brighter and there I was in the cave.

“Sorry about the light,” Maddy said as I straightened up. “We usually use carbide lamps, which are brighter. But they’re a pain to get started and I don’t feel like fooling with it.”

It wasn’t a fancy cave like the ones in the books, with stalactites and all. It was just a kind of room, about the size of a one-car garage. It looked even smaller because of all the stuff stacked and piled over by the walls—shovels and trowels, big round screen-wire dirt sifters, boxes and bags and a lot of things I didn’t recognize.

In the middle of the floor, a space had been marked off with wooden pegs and lengths of twine. Inside that, the ground had been dug or scraped down for a foot or so, and in the dug-out space lay the skeleton.

It didn’t look much like the ones in the Halloween decorations. It looked more like a bundle of loose sticks, till you got a good look. It lay on its left side with its knees drawn up part way, and its left arm flung out straight. The right hand was out of sight up near its chest.

And sure enough, it was wearing clothes, and they didn’t look like Indian clothes to me. It was hard to be sure, but it looked more like some kind of one-piece outfit, like the coveralls my cousin Larry wore when he worked at the Texaco station in town. Maddy held the light up higher and now I saw it had on shoes, too. Or rather boots, with big heavy-looking soles. Actually, I could only see one, because the left foot was still buried.

After a minute I said, “I don’t get it.”

David said, “Welcome to the club, kid.”

“Don’t feel bad,” Maddy said. “Neither does anyone else.”

David went around and squatted down by the hole and reached down and touched the right sleeve. “You asked a good question, back there,” he said. “Fabric should have rotted away a long time ago, but just look at this stuff. Oh, it’s deteriorated badly, it’s brittle and flimsy, but it’s still in a hell of a lot better condition than it should be. Than it
can
be.”

“But then,” I said, thinking I got it now, “it must not be as old as you thought. Must be, uh, modern.”

David nodded. “That would be the logical conclusion. The condition of the bones, the partial fossilization, well, there might be some other explanation, chemicals in the soil or something. The Clovis point you saw could have been here long before this guy arrived. But there’s just one other thing.”

He moved a little to one side and motioned to me. “Come look at this.”

I went over and hunkered down beside him, though I didn’t really want to get any closer to that skeleton. He said, “Hold that light closer, Maddy. Look here, Raymond.”

He was pointing at a big long rip in the material covering the right shoulder. He pushed the cloth aside with his fingertips. “See that?”

I saw it. I’d seen one like it a couple of weeks ago, lying on a bed of cotton in a little box on the table by the creek.

“And so,” David said, “what we have here is a man in modern clothes with a ten-thousand-year-old Clovis point embedded in his shoulder. Which, of course, is flatly impossible.”

“Modern is right,” Maddy said. “I cut a tiny little piece from the cuff and studied it under the microscope, and it’s not any natural fiber. In fact it’s not exactly woven fiber at all, it’s more—I don’t know what the hell it is, that’s the truth, I’ve never seen anything like it and textiles are a specialty of mine.”

“The boots are synthetic too,” David said. “And the fasteners are some kind of hard plastic.”

I thought it over for a minute. “But that’s—” I remembered, then, a story in a science fiction magazine I’d had, before Daddy took it away from me and told me he’d whip me if he ever caught me reading that crap again.

I said, “You think he was a time traveler.”

“Did I say that?” David made a big show of looking around. “I didn’t hear anybody say that, did you?”

“Now you see,” Maddy said, “why we’re having to keep this secret for now. David’s got to be careful how he handles this, because a lot of people are sure to call it a fake. It could destroy his career.”

There was something sticking out of the ground just behind the skeleton’s lower back, a dark object about the size of a kid’s book satchel. Or that was my guess, though you really couldn’t see much of it. I said, “What’s this?”

“Once again,” David said, “I’m damned if I know. Looks like some kind of pack he was carrying, but what’s in it I couldn’t tell you. Maybe his lunch, maybe his spare socks, maybe something we wouldn’t even recognize.”

“Like,” Maddy said, “whatever got him here. From wherever—whenever—he came from.”

“I didn’t hear that either,” David said. “Anyway, I haven’t looked inside and I’m not going to. Not even going to dig it out so it
can
be opened. If and when it gets opened, it’s going to be by somebody of absolutely impeccable professional standing, with a bunch of other respected paragons on hand for witnesses.”