I tried. For three whole days I tried. I drove myself and got some writing done. When I read it over, I tore it up and wrote it once again. The second draft was no better than the first.
While I sat working at the kitchen table I could feel the saddle in the closet sneaking up on me. I took it out of the closet and, dragging it down the hill, chucked it in a deep ravine. It didn’t help; it still sneaked up on me.
So I went down into the ravine and retrieved it, throwing it back into the closet.
Running out of groceries, I went to the Trading Post. Humphrey was sitting outside the door, his chair tipped back against the building. I picked up the groceries and a letter from Neville. I sat an hour or two with Humphrey while he talked about the mine. I let him do the talking; I was afraid to say anything for fear I’d make a conversational slip and tip him off to what I knew about it.
The letter from Neville was short, written by a man who was in a hurry.
He was off for Greece, he wrote—«I need to see Marathon again.»
Returning home with the groceries, I bundled up the notes and drafts I had been working on and jammed them in the briefcase, then went fishing.
Fishing helped, I think. If I could have gone on fishing, it would have been all right. If I could have spent the summer fishing, I might have worked it out. But the fishing didn’t last long.
I had picked up three fairly good trout by the time I reached the place from which, sitting on a log, I had spotted the protruding log ends that had led me to the mine.
Standing in the stream and looking up the hill, I could see the entrance to the mine, and a short distance below it the rock shelter into which the squirrel had dived.
Then my mind played a sneaky trick on me. Looking at the rock shelter, the thought struck me—that hidden, obscure bit of evidence that had been lying in the back part of my mind, unnoticed until now. I have often wondered since why it could not have passed me by, why it would not have remained hidden, why the computer in my brain felt compelled to haul it forth.
When I had glanced into the shelter, I recalled, I had seen the drifting feathers and the chalky droppings of the birds that had used it for a shelter, while toward the farther end there had been a small rockfall. And it was something about this rockfall that my mind had pounced upon—something that at the time I must subconsciously have noted, but which my brain, in the excitement of the moment, had tucked away for consideration later.
Now, suddenly, it brought forward for consideration the fact that while the roof of the shelter had been limestone, the rockfall had not been limestone, but green shale instead. Green shale, the kind of stone that could be picked from this very stream bed, chunks of soft, smooth rock eroded from the Decorah beds that lay atop the Platteville. The shale could not have been the product of the rockfall; it had been carried there.
Incredible as it may seem, I believe that in that moment I sensed exactly what had happened—an incredible hypothesis rising full-blown out of an incredible situation.
I rebelled against it. To hell with it, I thought; I have had enough; I don’t need any more. But even so, I knew I had to have a look; I would never rest until I’d had a look. Not knowing would haunt me. I hoped, I think (it’s hard to remember now), that I would find the fall was limestone and not shale at all.
When I went to look, I found my subconscious had been right. The rock was shale, worn smooth by water action. And underneath the little pile of rocks were hidden two of Stefan’s photographic cubes.
I squatted there and looked at them, remembering back to what Charles had said. A psychopath, he’d said. A psychopath and he did this filthy thing, then hid the cubes away so we couldn’t find them.
Strangely, I couldn’t be absolutely sure of the words he had used. Had he said psychopath? Had filthy been the word he had used, or some other word that was very much like it? I remembered he had said violence, but realized he had meant something more than violence, something perhaps so subtle that he could not explain it to me in terms I would understand. And that was the crux of it, of course, illustrative of the gulf between his time and mine.
I tried to imagine a twentieth-century social worker attempting to explain compassion for the poor to an aristocrat of Rome who only thought in terms of bread and circuses, then knew the analogy was a bad one, for the gulf of understanding between the social worker and the Roman would have been narrow compared to the gulf between myself and Charles.
So here, this day, I sit at the kitchen table, nearly done with writing, with the two cubes beside the pile of paper. I wonder at the blind course of circumstance that could have led me to them. And I wonder, too, rather bitterly, about the burden of knowledge that one man must carry, knowing it is true and yet unable to speak a word of it, condemned to write of it in secret for his own salvation (and I’m beginning to think it is no salvation).
I wonder, as well, why I cannot feel compassion for these people of the future, why I cannot see them as our descendants, children of our children many times removed. Why I cannot wish them well. But, no matter what I do, I can’t. As if they were alien, as alien as that other people who had broadcast cylinders to the stars—aliens in time rather than space.
Now about the cubes.
One of them, I am fairly certain, although I cannot be entirely sure since I’m no historian, contains a photo of that moment on Christmas Day in the Year of Our Lord 800 when Charlemagne was crowned by Leo III as emperor of the West. Charlemagne (if it indeed is he) is a thug, a massive brute that one dislikes instinctively, while Leo is a fussy little person who seems more overwhelmed by the situation than is Charlemagne.
I cannot be sure, of course, but a number of things make me believe the photo is of Charlemagne and Leo, not the least of which is that this would be, in historic context, the one coronation that a man going into time would want to photograph. Or, rather, perhaps the coronation a man of my own time would want to photograph. I realize that with Stefan there can be no telling. If his thinking and his viewpoint were as twisted as the viewpoint of the others of his time, God knows what his reasons might have been for doing anything at all. Although he did photograph Marathon—and the thought occurs to me that his doing so may mean he did think somewhat along the lines we do and may possibly supply a clue to his so-called psychosis. Could the fact that he was believed psychotic by the people of his time mean no more than that he was a throwback?
I find small comfort in the thought. I would prefer to think he was not a throwback. Knowing he was not, I could feel more comfortable about the remaining cube.
I wish now I had taken the time to know Stefan better; as it stands, no one really knew him. He had been around for years, and all we ever did was wave at him as we went driving past. He was a difficult man, of course.
Humphrey said he was the sort of man who would not even tell his name.
But we, all of us, could have made a greater effort than we did.
Sitting here, I try to reconstruct him. I try to envision his sneaking down the hollow to hide his cubes. He must have been on the way to cache the Marathon cube when he met his death. Illogical as it may seem, I have even wondered if he was engaged in some ghastly joke, if he had deliberately planted an intentional clue by being killed just below the bridge to enable me, or someone else, to find the hidden cubes. Could there have been two authentic and historic cubes that were intended to lend some credence to the third? This is all insane, of course, but under stressful circumstances a man thinks insanity.
My own thinking must be going faulty; I am clutching at any evidence that will enable me to discount the third cube.
The photograph shows a crucifixion. The cross is not a tall one; the feet of the man upon it are no more than two feet or so above the ground. The wrists are nailed to the crossbar, but the ankles are tied to the post, with no support for the feet. To support the body so that the nails will not tear out, a wooden peg had been passed beneath the crotch and driven into the post. In the distance lies an ancient city. Half a dozen bored and listless soldiers—I take them to be Roman soldiers—lounge about, leaning on their spears, there apparently to prevent interference with the execution. Besides the soldiers there are only a few others, a small band of silent men and women who simply stand and watch. A dog sniffing at the post and one knows, instinctively, that in a little while he’ll lift his leg against it.