Asimov's Science Fiction: April/May 2014 (7 page)

The woman threw her hands up at the recollection. "Jee-miny Christmas!"

"What else can you tell me about this group of people?"

The man said, "One of them, not the older gentleman, was carrying a machine. Ran off with it."

"What sort of machine?"

"I'nt know. Some boxy thing."

"How would you describe the older man?" Jimmy had left his book in the car.

"Tall," said the woman, who was peering inside the building now at the sounds of a discussion among the unseen inspectors. "Maybe a Northern accent."

"I'd say he was a Latin... Latino fellow."

The woman turned back. "I thought he looked like Father Michael up at the church. What is he, Lebanese?"

"I could sorta see that."

The woman gave this a satisfied and considered series of nods, her eyes looking about as if she were comparing visible evidence.

"So they just drove off?"

"Um," said the man, and he and the woman looked sideways at each other.

"Go 'head," she said.

"It did look like a car, but it went straight up. Like on the end of a bungee line."

"That's a good description," said the woman.

"I saw it go up from that alley just there. Makes you think about where flying saucers come from. Are you investigating that? Maybe you don't know what all strange things have transpired here. We're kind of famous for another hailstorm. What, eighty or so years ago?"

"My granpap used to talk about it."

"It was record-sized hail. The size of a fist."

"So much for
that
record."

The man said, "If you're investigating this, you should talk to BL. I saw BL talking to that older fellow."

"BL?"

"Bob Law. Always gone by BL."

The woman, still looking through the blasted entrance, nodded. "His folks called him BL."

"I seen him walk around the corner with the old guy. Was there for a minute."

"Do you think BL would talk to me?"

"Oh, sure. He down the street at the
ga
-rage."

Leaving them, Jimmy wondered if he and Bekka would grow to look like each other; then it struck him that the couple might have been brother and sister.

As Jimmy entered the glass-fronted office, the man at the shabby desk behind the counter tore open four packs of sugar at once, then commenced emptying their contents into his short cup of what appeared to be coffee. His black hair ranged about his head like weeds and hung in his face, and he did not look fully awake.

BL did not acknowledge Jimmy's arrival. "Excuse me."

The man plunged his index finger into the cup and stirred. "Be right with you." His deep voice seemed reluctantly tugged from his chest.

"I'm not here for business. I was talking to those folks who own the restaurant that was damaged." "The Stookeys. That's Stookey's Restr'nt."

"Sure. Anyway. They said you might know the elderly man who showed up in town during yesterday's events."

"Hm." He finally withdrew his neglected finger and sucked it. "I'm not sure who you mean."

"There was a man, an old man, tall, dark-complected. He had companions."

"I don't think I can help you." Furtively, from behind strands of hair, BL met his eyes.

"Perhaps," Jimmy said, and steadied his voice. "Perhaps you picked up some idea about where he was going."

BL took a longer pause this time, yet repeated, "I don't think I can help you."

"That's not the same as saying you don't know anything."

"That, my friend, is an accurate statement. Why are you so interested in this... old man?"

"I knew him—That's about all I can say. I spent some time around him. Recently."

"And what did you call him?"

"Beg pardon?"

"By what name," and he paused to sip his coffee, "did you refer to him?"

"We didn't have exactly one name."

"I'm talking 'bout you." He set the coffee down with what appeared to be precision, as if the cup had a place to which it must be returned. That done, he settled his hands in his lap and gave Jimmy his full attention. "What'd
you
call him?"

"Methusaleh."

"Methusaleh."

"I really can't explain further." Jimmy heard himself echoing the other man's resistance.

The hair over BL's eyes twitched when he blinked. "I'm afraid you're wasting your time," he said at last. "Or I'm wasting yours, is another way of seeing it."

At the loose-fitting door, Jimmy spun the knob, then said, over his shoulder, "What
should
I have called him?"

Car door open to let out the heat, Jimmy sat with one foot on the blacktop, pointlessly contemplating the piece of cardboard that crookedly sealed the shop window. BL appeared beside him as if winking into existence at that moment.

"Studdard, Georgia," he said. Jimmy gripped the steering wheel in surprise. "Sorry." BL appeared amused. He blinked against his hair. "I'm letting you know something I believe you ought to know."

"What are you—wait, what did you say?"

"Studdard, Georgia. Unless the Old Man is mistaken. Any clue could be misread." Jimmy didn't move. "Well, that's it," BL said, and as he turned to go, he parted with what might have been a salute. Keys, a grape cluster's-worth of them, jangled from a belt loop. He had, somehow, approached Jimmy without them making a sound.

Weston stood with her fist at her lips, one arm propping the other, to watch a series of proofs play out on the wall-sized screen. Leaning against the door, glowering, Covey moved his massive jaw from side to side ruminatively. Quarles had helped Jimmy assemble video clips that moved both at Methusaleh's pace and an accelerated pace that made his motions more clear.

Weston said "I'll be damned" early on, then held her silence.

"So," said Jimmy when the presentation was complete, not sure whether he needed to say anything more.

Weston spoke across her fist. "Why did no one notice this before?"

Jimmy hesitated.

"He got sloppy," Covey said. "He's old."

"There goes your depression theory," Weston said to Jimmy, lowering her hand.

"Yes, ma'am."

"And there goes any notion that this man's not still a threat," Covey said, pushing away from the door. Jimmy noticed him adjust his protective vest, the man obviously thinking that force might be needed, that anything was possible.

"He's stayed fit all this time," Weston said. "And he's stayed sharp. With what aim in mind? Escape? Overpowering the guards? Is there anything else we've missed?"

She kept her head moving to include all three of them in her questioning. "Coded messages? To whom? Is there any possibility he's palmed anything? A utensil or a container from the MREs? Something from his bedding?"

"We could take it all away," Covey said.

"I'm not comfortable with that. That's not a path we're going down."

Quarles said, "Pardon me, ma'am, but he walks through the scanner on the way to the yard, and we search the room during his showers."

"I want body cavity searches," she said. Covey nodded. "We can do that."

"I'm adding a fourth man to the security detail when he goes outside. Two dogs at all times, not just randomly. Keep them close to him. I also want some increased checks on our perimeter. And not a word about any change in front of him. Let him think he's got us fooled."

"Won't the extra security indicate something?" Jimmy said.

Weston, hands on hips, looked at the floor. "Yeah, probably. And we have to assume he's caught sight of you, so he knows something's different. But I can't maintain the status quo." She said to Jimmy, "Good work. Does this alter your approach, Lieutenant?"

"Actually, this is helpful," said Jimmy. "It's... informative." He now had more words with which to approach the old man waiting at the passageway's end. Yes, what he had learned fit with the existing notions:
powerful, in control, hidden.
He was all of those, in ways they had not fully understood. The true mistake, Jimmy realized, was to see him constrained, managed, confined... in prison. He had never been imprisoned.

Methusaleh lay on the floor, arms at his side. Jimmy used the computer to track down something he had read in high school. Enough of the phrasing came to him to enable a quick search. From Thoreau's essay "On Civil Disobedience," he read:

... as I stood considering the walls of solid stone, two or three feet thick, the door of wood and iron, a foot thick, and the iron grating which strained the light, I could not help being struck with the foolishness of that institution which treated me as if I were mere flesh and blood and bones, to be locked up. I wondered that it should have concluded at length that this was the best use it could put me to, and had never thought to avail itself of my services in some way.

The background on Methusaleh suggested he had countless people to assist him down through the decades. Still strong, still planning, his goals intact, the man might assume that his work continued. Like Thoreau, who knew his ideas extended beyond the walls, he wouldn't think of himself as locked up. Further, Jimmy saw the exercise, the silence, as preparation: He was waiting for a chance. To do what?

He read on.

I saw that, if there was a wall of stone between me and my townsmen, there was a still more difficult one to climb or break through, before they could get to be as free as I was. I did not for a moment feel confined, and the walls seemed a great waste of stone and mortar.

Jimmy looked about his own room. Dimmed, it felt smaller than the room on the viewscreen—smaller, even, from one moment to the next.

He left the room, went along the corridor past Weston's office, waved at the security camera by the front doors, and when the doors opened onto the front walk and the resting desert beyond the fence, he felt that at last he could take in breath. He stepped out of the building's shadow into the day's mild heat. Face toward the blank sky, he shut his eyes and turned sunward. Taking in another breath, he felt the sun's warmth enter him. Heat entering his nostrils, pink light all he saw, a necessary and expanding silence entered his cells, the vast sky finding a home in his body.

This lasted until the guard at the main gate, fifty meters off, sneezed dryly, the sound whipping across the distance and ringing metallically from the cement walls at Jimmy's back. He returned to his body and felt ready for another attempt at reaching the old man.

In the observation room, he found the prisoner gone. After an unsettling moment, he went to the security station. Quarles turned from the wide windows. "They told me you'd stepped out," he said.

"Needed some air," Jimmy said. Outside, Methusaleh stood at the hub of a wheel of four men and two dogs. He drifted to his knees like an object falling in low gravity. His head slowly pitched earthward.

Quarles cleared his throat. "In about an hour we're playing some ball. Sound good? Two on two." "Thanks. I think... I think I need to stay focused." "You change your mind, just show up. You think he's secretly exercising right now? Is that some kind of exercise where you put your head on the ground? He's not
standing
on his head."

Jimmy's own head still felt full of the warm, expansive space beyond the prison. Vaguely, not trying, not even willing it, he reached toward the old man, maintaining the idea of the passageway but not opening it just yet.

Quarles said, "I read about guys in Vietnam, prisoners of war? One guy had a Bible smuggled in and he committed to memory the entire book of Luke. Whole thing. Then he passed the Bible to somebody else and spent the next two years of prison reciting the book back to himself. This other guy memorized the names of all the prisoners in the compound and went through them in alphabetical order every night. Said he'd been trained to do that. And...
and
he'd reconstruct the seating charts from his classes from every school year. Maybe our guy does the same kind of thing."

Jimmy grinned at Quarles, who let one eyebrow nicker up. All the reading Methusaleh must have done. Jimmy imagined his tremendous library, books of every kind; he saw a hand pull a hard-bound book from a high shelf. A mind like his, what might he have committed to memory? His head might be thick with the words of others, providing comfort and encouragement, insight and wisdom. Or images, pictures of the sea depths, roiling with strange fish. The blade-like peaks of mountains. The surface of Mars.

Why had anyone thought these walls could hold him? He could be anywhere he wished.

Radically free, he thought. Here but elsewhere. Pieces of the passageway.

Late afternoon, Jimmy shut his eyes, set aside the physical attributes of his room, and entered the common space he'd already built. The passageway awaited him. He conjured up the prisoner in silhouette, seated and motionless. Jimmy entered the passageway and advanced, telling the prisoner everything he knew of him, probing for connection. When he inhaled, he inhaled their shared experience. Exhaling, he breathed out the words and images that belonged to the man himself, the keys to his character.

A great challenge was to bring no expectations to the process; otherwise, like someone desperately at prayer, Jimmy might hear what he wanted to hear, constructing for himself a voice from the other side of the typically uncrossable barrier from self to self.

The passageway faintly echoed. The mind of the other man whispered back. This was good. Jimmy only listened, hoping to catch a tone of assent on the other side, notes of acceptance, openness—an agreement that Methusaleh would never consciously know had been struck.

Jimmy relaxed more deeply. The passageway became a place of surpassing comfort. Everything felt welcoming.

Then the light at the far end snapped out, and Jimmy came blinking and dry-mouthed from his altered state.

He didn't know why the assay had ended, but his control had certainly slipped. The prisoner sat just as before. Jimmy rose. Later, Jimmy would probe farther. He knew—with a confidence he had never felt before, not during his training nor his time in Iraq—that a bond was established, that all would be well, that right would triumph and the truth would be revealed.