Minutes later Will pulled up out front with Max and April Cannon. Max did the introductions, but the woman had a hard time keeping her eyes off the boat.
“You wanted to take a look, Dr. Cannon?” said Ginny.
“Please. And call me April.”
“What’s going on?” said Lasker. “What did we find out?”
Max, who enjoyed playing with a mystery as much as anyone, suggested that Ginny give April the tour while he brought Tom up to date. The men went inside and threw another log on the fire.
The women were gone almost an hour, and they looked half frozen when they came back. Lasker poured a round of brandy.
“Well, April,” said Max, “what do you think?”
April sipped her drink. “You really want to know? I don’t see how anyone could have built that yacht.”
Max listened to the fire and watched April struggle with her thoughts.
“I know how that sounds,” she said.
“What exactly do you mean?” asked Max.
“It’s beyond our technology. But I knew that before I came here.”
“Our technology?” said Lasker.
“Way beyond.”
“So you’re saying, what?” said Max. “That the boat was built in Japan? Or on Mars?”
“Maybe Mars. Or a pre-Native American super-high-tech civilization in North Dakota.”
Max glanced at Ginny to see how she was reacting. She looked skeptical but not surprised. They’d had at least part of this conversation outside.
“That’s crazy,” said Lasker.
“Crazy or not, nobody alive today could duplicate the materials in that boat.” She finished off her drink. “I don’t believe it, either.”
“It looks like an ordinary yacht to me,” said Ginny.
“I know. Maybe if it didn’t look so ordinary—” She shook her head.
“April,” said Max, “think about it. Do you really believe they’d manufacture sailboats like that on Mars?”
“The fire feels good.” She dragged her chair closer. A log broke, and sparks flew. “Look,” she said, “it wouldn’t really matter whether you were building it out at Alpha Centauri. There are only a few designs for a practical sailboat. Somebody somewhere built this, and I can guarantee you it wasn’t anyone we’ve ever heard of.”
The wind sucked at the trees. A couple of automobile engines started. “I wish I could have seen it before you took it out of the ground,” said April. “Before it got washed.”
“Why?” asked Lasker.
“We might have been able to make some inferences from the clay. But maybe it won’t matter.” She took a white envelope out of her pocket.
“From the mooring cables,” Ginny explained to Max and her husband. “We found some splinters.”
“What good will that do?” asked Max.
April got a refill of her brandy. “I usually go pretty light on this kind of stuff,” she said. “But today I feel entitled.” She turned to Max. “Each of the cables has a loop at one end and a clip at the other. The clips still work, by the way. I don’t know much about yachts, but this part is simple enough. When you’re tying up, you secure the loop over one of the cleats on the boat. And you tie the other end, the end with the clip, to the pier.”
“So what does it tell us?” asked Max.
“We should be able to figure out what it’s been tied to. And maybe that’ll tell us where it’s been.” She put the envelope back and looked at Lasker. “Tom, was the boat upright when you found it?”
“No,” he said. “It was lying on its starboard side. And angled up.”
“How much?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe thirty degrees.”
“Okay.” April seemed pleased. “The slope of the ridge is close to thirty degrees.”
“Which means what?” asked Max.
“Probably nothing,” she said. “Or maybe that’s where it came to rest.”
“Came to rest?” Lasker was having trouble following the conversation.
“Yes,” said April. “When it sank.”
6
Where lies the final harbour, whence we unmoor no more?
—Herman Melville, Moby Dick
April had almost changed her mind about flying with Max when he showed her the P-38 he intended to use. Although designed as a single-seat fighter, the Lightning could accommodate a second seat behind the pilot. Many of the aircraft purchased by collectors after the war had been modified in this way. White Lightning was among these.
Now, on the return trip, she was too excited even to think about the plane, and she climbed in without a murmur. Max taxied out onto the runway, talking to Jake Thoraldson, who was Fort Moxie’s airport manager and air traffic controller. Jake worked out of his office.
“Max?” she said.
He turned the plane into the wind. “Yes, April?”
“I’d like to take a look at something. Can we go back over the Lasker farm?”
“Sure.” Max checked with Jake. No flights were in the area. “What did you want to see?”
“I’m not sure,” she said.
When they were in the air, he leveled off at three thousand feet and headed west. The day was beginning to turn gray. He had a strong headwind, and the weather report called for more rain or possibly sleet by late afternoon. Probably rain along the border and snow in the south, if the usual patterns held.
The fields were bleak and withered. They had been given up to the winter, and their owners had retired either to vacation homes in more hospitable latitudes or to whatever other occupations entertained them during the off-season.
It was impossible to know precisely where the Lasker property began. “Everything north of the highway for several miles belongs to him,” Max explained. Usually houses were set more or less in the middle of these vast tracts of land. But when Lasker’s father had rebuilt, he’d opted for a site at the southwestern edge of the property, near the highway, and in the shadow of the ridge in which Tom had found the yacht. The idea had been to gain a degree of protection from the icy winds that roared across the prairie.
Beyond the ridge the land flattened again for several miles and then rose abruptly to form the Pembina Escarpment.
The escarpment consisted of a spine of hills and promontories and peaks. Unlike the surrounding plain, they were only very lightly cultivated. Their tops were dusted with snow, and they ran together to form a single, irregular wall. There were occasional houses along the crests and narrow dirt roads that tied the houses to one another and to Route 32, which paralleled the chain along its eastern foot.
“Ten thousand years ago,” April said, “we’d have been flying over water. Lake Agassiz.”
At her direction, Max banked and followed the chain south. She was looking alternately at the crumpled land and at the valley, which was flat all the way to the horizon.
“Where was the other side?” asked Max. “The eastern shore?”
“Out toward Lake of the Woods,” she said. “A long way.”
Max tried to imagine what the world had been like then. A place of liquid silence, mostly. And Canada geese.
“It only lasted about a thousand years,” she continued, “scarcely an eyeblink as such things go. But it was here. That’s all lake bottom below us. It’s why Tom can raise the best wheat in the world.”
“What happened to it?” asked Max.
“The glaciers that formed it were retreating. They finally reached a point where they unblocked the northern end.” She shrugged. “The water drained away.”
They were beginning to run into a light drizzle.
“Some of it is still here,” she continued. “Lake of the Woods is a remnant. And lakes Winnipeg and Manitoba. And a lot of the Minnesota lakes.”
Max’s imagination filled the prairie with water, submerging Fort Moxie and Noyes in the north, Hallock over on Route 75, and Grand Forks and Thief River Falls and Fargo to the south.
“You can find all kinds of evidence in the soil if you look. Remains of shellfish, plankton, whatever.” Her eyes were far away. “I suppose it might come back, for that matter. During the next ice age.”