“That doesn’t answer my question.”
“I guess it is possible. But we always have somebody on the monitors.”
“So you really don’t know,” said Remirov.
“Not without checking the tapes.”
“Why don’t we check the tapes?” he asked with exaggerated politeness.
Max wandered away to look at the grid. He saw no way to confirm whether she had actually used it. There were no footprints, no marks that told him anything.
Redfern, wearing a buckskin jacket and heavy boots, came into the dome. He spoke briefly with George and the two policemen before he saw Max. “They’re going to organize a search party,” he said.
“Good,” said Max.
A long, uncomfortable silence followed. “George told me she left a note for you. Max, where is she?”
“My guess is she’s dead,” said Max. Saying what he had been thinking ever since he’d heard about the note somehow made it less real.
Redfern’s jaw tightened. “How?” he asked.
Max thought about doing a demonstration, but since each of the icons seemed to work only once, he hesitated. Instead he simply pointed out the grid and the set of triggers, and explained what had happened. “This,” he said, directing the lawyer’s attention to the symbol at the top of the second column, “is the arrow.”
“You’re telling me there’s a device here that anni-hilates things, and you think she used it on herself?”
“That’s what I think,” said Max.
“Son of a bitch,” he said. “Don’t you people have any sense at all?”
“Hey, I didn’t know anything like this was going to happen.”
“Yeah. Well, maybe you should’ve been watching a little closer.”
Max started to protest, but Arky waved it aside. “We can figure out who to blame later. She thought she was going somewhere. How did she expect to get back?”
“I don’t know. She didn’t exactly talk this over with me. But I assume she hoped there’d be a similar device at the other end. If there is an other end.”
Arky turned to George, who had joined them. “How long ago, did you say?”
“She came through the gate at twelve-thirty.”
Arky looked at his watch. Ten after four. “I guess we can assume she isn’t coming back on her own.” He folded his arms. “So where,” he asked accusingly, “do we go from here?”
Max felt like an idiot. Damn you, Cannon.
Arky’s face was dark. The shadows of an internal struggle played at the corners of his mouth and in his eyes. “Maybe it would be best,” he said, “if the tribe did sell. People die a little too easily here.” He got up and headed toward the door. “We’ll let the police go ahead with their search. There is a chance she wandered off and got lost on the mountain.” He hesitated. “Max—”
“Yes?”
“I would like your word that you will not try to follow her.”
The demand embarrassed him. Max Collingwood would never try that kind of stunt. It was flat-out stupid. But in some dark corner of his mind it pleased him that Arky believed he might be capable of it. “No,” he said, meaning it. “I won’t.”
Emotion flickered across the lawyer’s features. “Good,” he said. “Let’s let the search run its course. Meantime, you should find out about her next of kin.”
Next of kin? Max knew very little about April Cannon. He would have to check with Colson Laboratories.
Arky paused at the door. “Max, is there anything else about this place I should know?”
“No,” said Max. “At least, not anything that I know about.”
Max listened to the negative reports coming in from the search parties while the first vague streaks of dawn crept into the sky. The little girl with the brown curls was looking at him again from the cabin window. It was a memory he had thought he’d shut away. Buried.
He liked April Cannon, and he couldn’t bring himself to believe she was gone, vanished into a dark never-never land. The image of the fading chair, the vertical lines just visible through its legs and seat, was paused on each of the monitor bank’s four screens.
The lines might have been anything—a defect in the film, a momentary reflection. Or they might have been a glimpse of another place. They looked vaguely like a column. He pictured the wooden chair set in the portico of a Greek temple.
If in fact it was a transportation system, it had to work in both directions. Why, then, had she not come back?
Because the system was old. After all, the smoke had not worked. Maybe she was simply stranded.
There was a test he could run.
Max installed a filter in his minicam, got a spade and collected a pile of snow, and went back to the Roundhouse. It was empty; the search was concentrated on the surrounding hillsides. His boots crunched on the dirt floor, and it occurred to him that it was the first time he’d been alone in here.
He made a little mound of snow in the center of the grid. Then he propped the camera on a chair, aimed it, and started it.
He pressed the wall over the arrow.
It lit up.
Max backed away, watching the pile of snow, counting down without meaning to.
Above the grid, the air ignited. It burned and expanded and threw off a golden cloud that shimmered and grew so bright he had to look away. Then it winked out.
The snow was gone. Not so much as a trickle of water remained.
Okay. He gathered up the camera, hurried back to the van, and loaded the videocassette into the VCR.
He played it through at normal speed first to be sure he had the entire sequence. And there was no doubt that the snow went transparent before vanishing altogether.
He rewound it and began again. When the effect started, he froze the frame and walked it through. The light brightened, grew misty, and expanded. Within the mist, stars ignited. The luminosity seemed almost to seek the pile of snow. Bright tendrils embraced the snow, and then it began to fade. Frame by frame it grew less distinct, without losing its definition. When it was almost gone, no more than a suggestion, another image appeared.
It paralyzed him.
He was looking at her headless torso. She was crumpled, arms dangling.
A sense of loss engulfed him. And as tears of blind rage began to flow, he realized that it might be only her jacket.
Was only her jacket.
Minnesota Twins. He could read the logo. There was no question. But the front didn’t look right. An object, a cylinder, a tube, something, hung from it.
A flashlight. It was the barrel of a flashlight. Minus its cap.
The barrel looked crushed.
It was one of the standard-issue cheap plastic models they had used at the site. But what had happened to it?
He puzzled over it for several minutes. What would he have done if he were stranded over there, wherever there was? He would try to send a message.
I am here.
And…what?
The flashlight’s broken?
He took a deep breath.
Something’s broken.
The transportation system is broken.
He called Arky. “She made it,” he said. “The thing’s a doorway. A passage.”
“How do you know?”
“Her coat’s on the other side. I’ve got pictures.”
The lawyer seemed to have trouble speaking. Max could picture him shaking his head, trying to make sense of all this. “You’re sure?”
“Yes. I’m sure.”
“So what do we do now?”
It was painfully obvious. “We need a hardware store.”