Ancient Shores Page 7

  “They are odd,” Lisa agreed. “And there’s no language match?”

  “None that we can find,” said April.

  Lisa continued to study the pictures, but her mind shifted to April. The information was so outrageous that she drew back to reassess her old friend. She knew what was coming, and she had to ask herself whether this was an effort to con her. April wouldn’t do it, she was sure. But what about this Collingwood?

  “So what are your conclusions?” she asked. “Where did the element, the boat, come from?”

  April smiled wearily. “Everything’s guesswork beyond what we’ve told you. We have no conventional explanation.”

  “Do you have an unconventional one?”

  “Yours is as good as anybody’s,” said April.

  Lisa nodded, walked over to her desk, and took out a checkbook. “Where do you go from here?”

  “We want to take a close look at the area. See if there’s anything else buried up there.”

  “What do you need to do that?”

  “A ground-search radar. We can rent one at a reasonable price.”

  “But what could you possibly find? Another boat?”

  “Maybe,” said Max.

  “But you’ve already got one. I can understand that two is better than one, but in what way would a second boat advance your knowledge?”

  “There might be remains,” said April.

  “Ah. After ten thousand years? And some of it in the water? I hardly think so. You’d do better to think about where they might have stopped for hot dogs.”

  The chemist leaned forward, and their eyes locked. “Lisa, they had to have a way to get here. There’s a possibility they never went home.”

  Lisa listened to everybody breathe. “How much do you need?”

  When GeoTech’s ground-search radar unit showed up to begin its probe, Max was there. He and the Laskers assumed that if anything was actually still in the ground, they would find it right away. If they found nothing, that would be the end of it.

  Max did not like being associated with UFOs. Didn’t look good for him or for Sundown Aviation, and he resolved to keep a low profile. But on the other hand, if there was anything to it, intense media coverage and maybe a lot of money was not out of the question.

  The GeoTech team consisted of three people working out of a large sand-colored van. The crew chief was an energetic, rather precise young woman who made the company jumpsuit look pretty good. Her name was Peggy Moore, and she opened the conversation by asking Max what they were looking for. “The work order’s a little vague on that point,” she added.

  “Anything unusual,” said Max.

  That was not a satisfactory reply. Moore had intense eyes, a quick frown, and a schedule that kept her far too busy to cope with someone who wanted to mess around. “Try me again,” she said in a tone that bordered on hostility.

  “We’re not sure what we’re looking for,” Max explained. “We think there may be some artifacts buried in the area. We’d like you to tell us what’s in the ground. If anything.”

  “What, generally, are we talking about here, Mr. Collingwood? Arrowheads? Indian burial ground? Old oil cans? It makes a difference in the way we proceed.”

  “They dug up a boat last month.”

  “I saw that on TV. This is the place, huh?”

  “Yeah. We’d like to know if there’s anything else down there.”

  “All right. It saves time,” she said, “when you tell us what we need to know.”

  “Okay,” said Max.

  “We already found a rake. While we were calibrating.”

  The van was lined with computers, printers, display screens, and communications gear. The radar unit itself was mounted on a small tractor. “The images are relayed to the van by radio link,” Moore explained. “It goes up on the main screen. We’ll be watching for shadows, unusual coloring, anything that suggests a formation that isn’t obviously natural.”

  It was by then mid-November, and the day on which the GeoTech crew started was miserably cold. Snow threatened throughout the afternoon, although only a few flakes fell.

  The other two technicians were Charlie Ramirez, a somber-looking man who drove the tractor and ran the radar, and Sara Winebarger, the communications specialist. Sara was stick-thin with straight blond hair.

  Because of the extreme cold, Moore and Charlie rotated assignments on the tractor. Charlie did not like cold weather, and he talked a lot about Nevada. “Only reason I’m here is because they eliminated my job on the southern border. Soon as it opens up again, I’m out of here.”

  Max’s fascination with the project worked on him, and he asked if he could watch from inside the van. “It’s against the rules,” said the crew chief.

  “I wouldn’t create a problem.”

  “I’m sure you wouldn’t, Mr. Collingwood. But there are insurance implications.” Her demeanor was as cold as the weather. “You understand.”

  They laid out a search pattern, and Charlie took off, headed for the top of the hill. He plunged through the windbreak, mounted the ridge and, at a range of about a hundred yards from the site of the original find, executed a sharp right turn. Eventually he completed the first of a series of overlapping rectangles.

  Max went into the farmhouse and took over the Laskers’ dining room, near a window. Outside, the tractor rumbled methodically through the long afternoon.

  8

  This antique coast,

  Washed by time…

  —Walter Asquith, Ancient Shores

  During the course of the afternoon, the GeoTech team found nothing. When at last they quit for the day, Max exchanged reassurances with the Laskers, and flew home. The second day of the search, a Friday, also produced no results, and the operation shut down for the weekend.

  April had encouraged Max and the Laskers to say as little as possible about the find. She had followed her own advice and revealed nothing to her colleagues at Colson. But she needed someone to talk to. Max’s enthusiasm matched her own, and so, during the succeeding days, while the radar unit searched Tom Lasker’s property without result, they found themselves meeting after hours for dinner and drinks and long intense conversations.

  These conversations had the effect of fortifying their hopes and creating an informal alliance. However, they rarely produced specifics about what those hopes really were: hers, that a way might be found to master transuranic technology; his, that there had indeed been unearthly visitors, and that proof might lie nearby. But Max suspected that a more mundane explanation would eventually surface, that April had to have overlooked something. Nevertheless, she could usually, over beer and pizza, allay those doubts. For a time.

  For her part, April had no one to lean on. She considered herself rock-solid, not the sort to be carried away by passion or gulled by ambition. Nevertheless, she would have liked a second opinion, some confirmation from one of the experts in the field. But the stakes were so high that she knew where premature disclosure might lead: The heavyweights would move in and Cannon would be pushed aside.

  She needed someone to talk to. The Laskers, sitting on what might turn out to be the discovery of the ages, seemed to look on the entire business with a degree of complacency that irritated her. They were interested, the possibilities intrigued them, and yet they lacked fire. It was her impression that had Tom Lasker been informed there was a crashed UFO on his land, he’d go look at it, but only after feeding the horses.

  Max was different. And during this difficult period, he became her sole support.

  They tended to approach the more electrifying possibilities obliquely: They joked about the effects they would have on their personal lives. April conjured up an image of Max on the cover of Time, stepping down from the cockpit of the Lightning, his flying jacket rakishly open. Man of the Year.

  And he speculated about a Nobel for the woman who had given the world the lifetime automobile guarantee.

  Meantime, the days passed without tangible re
sult from the ground-radar unit, and Max’s conviction returned that it was all just too good to be true. April pointed out that the search was a long shot, but even if they found nothing else, they already possessed an artifact of incalculable value. “Nothing is ever going to be the same,” she said, adding that she had written a paper revealing her findings. “Which I will not publish until we can be reasonably sure there’s nothing else out there. We don’t want to start a treasure hunt.”

  “I agree,” said Max. They were sitting in a food court in the mall at the intersection of the two interstates in Fargo, splitting a pepperoni pizza. “If there really is something out there, what would you think our chances are of finding it?”

  Her eyes fluttered shut. “Almost nil. There’s too much lake bottom.” She stirred a packet of artificial sweetener into her coffee. “We’re talking about substantial pieces of the U.S. and Canada. For that matter, there could be something here.” She indicated the floor. “The Fargo area was underwater, too, for a while. Who knows?”

  Max looked down at the tiles. “I wonder what the yacht is worth?”

  “If it is what we think it is, Max, you couldn’t put a price on it.” She watched a mother trying to balance a squalling child and an armload of packages. “I hope we can actually get some answers to the questions. Truth is, I have a bad feeling that we’re likely to be faced with a mystery no one will ever solve.”

  “It would be nice,” he said, “to find something that would help pin down who owned the boat.”

  “Remains,” she said. “What we need are remains.” Her manner was so intent that two kids trooping past with balloons turned to stare. “Look. They left the boat. That suggests something unexpected might have happened. A storm. Maybe they were attacked by natives.”

  “Or,” suggested Max, “maybe they just never came back for it.”

  “It’s a nice boat,” said April. “I’d sure take it with me when I left. I wouldn’t just leave it somewhere. No, I think there’s a good chance something went wrong.” Her voice softened, became very distant. “Oh, Max, I don’t know. I hate to speculate about this thing.” She took a bite of pizza and chewed very deliberately before continuing. “If something did go wrong, there’s a decent chance their means of transportation is still here.”

  Max should have been feeling good. The Vickers Museum in South Bend was expected to get a substantial grant, an award that opened serious possibilities for the company. In addition, there had been two good offers for a Catalina flying boat on which Max had an option, and Popular Aviation had notified him they wanted to do an article on Sundown. The company’s condition looked strong enough that he was toying with the possibility of keeping White Lightning.

  Nevertheless, he was restless. The ground-search radar was approaching the western limits of Tom Lasker’s farm with no indication of anything untoward. April had hinted at a vehicle. But maybe they were looking in the wrong place. After all, a vehicle wouldn’t have gone into the lake.

  Maybe they hadn’t thought this out too well. What was it Lisa Yarborough had said? Think about where they might have stopped off for hotdogs.

  The weather stayed cold. He took to watching the Ben at Ten news team out of Grand Forks, which came in on cable. Ben at Ten was covering the Fort Moxie story as a kind of light windup feature each evening. First there was the “devil’s boat” T-shirts. Then there had been footage of angry citizens warning the city council that more people would be frightened away than attracted to Fort Moxie by talk of a devil. They interviewed a man who claimed to have unearthed an intact 1937 Chevrolet in a rock garden in Drayton. They reported on the reactions of out-of-state visitors: The boat was a sign of the last days; it had fallen out of an aircraft; it was a publicity stunt by a boat manufacturer; it was an attempt by the American government to entice Canadian visitors.

  Tom complained on the phone that the tent smelled of elephants and that for the first time in his life he was grateful the wind rarely blew out of the south. April was almost frantic that the boat was not locked away securely and not even kept away from the public, but Tom felt a responsibility to his lifelong neighbors to keep it on display. He also sent along a brochure and a T-shirt with a picture of the yacht and the slogan I Had a Devil of a Time in Fort Moxie. The artwork for the brochure wasn’t bad: The boat lay atop its ridge, silhouetted by a full moon with a devilish aspect. The story of the discovery was told in a few terse lines, below a Gothic leader proclaiming that “scientists are baffled.” There were also photos of the Lasker farmhouse and downtown scenes prominently displaying the Prairie Schooner, Clint’s Restaurant, and the Northstar Motel.

  Max kept thinking they were looking in the wrong place. On the day that the T-shirt and brochure arrived, he decided to investigate the possibility.

  The main branch of the Fargo library is located downtown, at the intersection of First Avenue and Third Street. It’s a square two-story structure, wedged into an area of weary stone-and-brick buildings, softened by trees and occasional shrubbery.

  It was midafternoon, just before rush hour, when Max passed the police station and pulled into a parking place in front of the civic center. The temperature had risen, the snow that had been falling since lunchtime had turned to rain, and the asphalt glistened in a cold mist. The streetlights were on, creating a spectral effect, and a heavy sky sagged into the rooftops. He climbed out of the car, pulled his jacket around him, and hurried the half-block to the library.

  High-school kids crowded the stacks and tables, and the air was thick with the smell of damp cotton. He went back into the reference section, pulled out all the atlases he could find, and dragged them to a table.

  Lake Agassiz had been the largest of the many Pleistocene lakes of North America. It was a sea in every sense of the word, covering at its maximum expanse a surface area of 110,000 square miles. It had formed from the meltwaters of the continental ice sheet near the end of the last ice age. But within a few thousand years those same glaciers, retreating north, had uncovered access to Hudson Bay, and Agassiz had drained.

  The ancient lake lived on in Lake of the Woods, the Assiniboine River, Rainy Lake, Red Lake in Minnesota, the Red River of the North, Lake Winnipeg. But in the days of its greatness, the water had filled the valley to a depth of more than three hundred feet.

  He checked the dates on Native Americans. They had been here early enough to have seen Agassiz. What else had they seen?

  The spruce fibers in the loops of the mooring cables indicated that the boat had been tied up rather than simply anchored. That implied a harbor. Where within a reasonable range of Tom Lasker’s farm had there been a sheltered harbor?

  Where, along the shores of Lake Agassiz, would you build a pier?

  The size of the coastline was dismaying. It stretched from north-central Saskatchewan to St. Anthony’s Falls in Minneapolis. Probably ten thousand miles of shore. Hopeless. But there was a fair chance that the boat had been moored, that it had broken loose, and that it had been driven onto a reef or sunk by a storm shortly afterward. Not a tight chain of reasoning. But it was possible. If so, then the mooring place lay in the neighborhood. Say, along the western coastline between Fargo and Winnipeg.

  He looked a long time at the maps.

  What did a good harbor need? Obviously the water had to be at the right level. That made it a problem of altitude. Okay, he could check that out. It would have to provide shelter from current and wind. And enough depth to tie up without grounding during low tide. That meant no shallow slopes. There couldn’t be too many places like that.

  He hoped.

  Max lifted off, climbed into a clear sky, and turned west, looking for the shoreline. He didn’t find it. The Red River Valley rises in the south, and the escarpment, which is so pronounced near the border, sinks to invisibility. From offshore, the coast would have looked flat. That meant there could have been no deep-water approaches.

  He turned north, flying over a snow-covered landscape marked by silos and occ
asional towns connected by long, quiet two-lane roads. The ancient coast did not appear until he crossed into Cavalier County.

  Near Herzog Dam, Route 5 passes through a cut. He went down to four thousand feet for a better look. The snowfields had been abandoned to winter, and nothing moved in all that landscape save a lone pickup, approaching from the east. It was possible the cut disguised an ancient harbor, and he flew overhead several times without coming to a firm conclusion. Unfortunately, if this was it, he doubted there would be much left to look at. He photographed it and flew on.

  He found another potential landfall south of Walhalla, off Route 32.

  And another candidate in Canada.

  Three possibilities in all.

  The site at Walhalla was closest to the Lasker farm. That one first, he thought, turning east.

  He called April from the plane. “No big thing,” he said. “But it’s a possibility.”

  “Sure.” She didn’t sound particularly enthusiastic. “Anything’s better than what we’re doing now. Who owns the land?”

  “I can find out, if you want me to pursue it.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Go ahead. Get us permission to look around.”

  Tom met him at Fort Moxie International. He was equally unimpressed, but he shrugged and took the same tack. “We can ride over now, if you want,” he said.

  They drove west on Route 11, past the farm, and out to the edge of the Pembina Escarpment, where they turned south on Route 32. The hills and ridges on the west side of the road formed a solid chain, with clumps of forest scattered across their summits and piles of rock at ground level. Walhalla nestled in this section, a prosperous prairie town of frame houses, lumberyards, and feed stores.

  Ten minutes south of town, the trees parted, and they were looking into a horseshoe canyon.