When we entered his office, he rose and said. "G'moming, Mayor! I thought you were going wendigo hunting yesterday?"
"We did," I said shortly.
"Ah!" He grinned jovially, as if we shared some secret.
"Stealing a march on your great white huntress, hey?"
"Whatever do you mean?" 1 asked. I was irritated by his tone, impatient with what had to be nothing but nonsense.
But his next words sent me back.
"Lydia Seltzer. She didn't go with you."
It didn't sound like a question, but what else could it be?
"Of course she did. That's why I'm here now. She disappeared last night. She and Keith Hutchison."
The Chief plopped his bulk back into his swivel chair. He looked startled. "But,…" Then he paused, looking at Ronny as if for the first time. "What's the matter with him?"
"Shock and exhaustion," I said. "We were up all night, searching for them. Maybe one of your men would get him over to the hospital and tell his parents where he is."
"Of course. Mayor." He pushed a button on his desk intercom- Then he said, "Maybe you'll tell me what happened when…" A patrolman entered, was given his instructions, and left with Ronny. The Chief turned back to me. "Now," he said.
I gave him the story. He nodded when I was done. "The shock I can understand," he said. "But why didn't you get here hours ago?"
"1 didn't think it wise to go stumbling through the woods in the dark. Besides, I hoped we might find something in the morning."
"Not that it really makes a difference. A search party wouldn't do any good."
"Why not? They could still be there someplace! Maybe they fell in a hole we didn't see, or got lost in the woods."
"No." He shook his head and rose again. "C'mon, I'll show you."
He led me back to the small cell block. When we entered the narrow corridor, lined with steel bars, 1 could hear ai noise, a jabbering sound, wordless, random. Or almost random. As he steered me toward the noise, I began to pick our shreds that might hold meaning: "fetal train," "stars and stars," "hopper freight," "take yon train," and more, though those were clearest. I wondered what madman he was holding here. And then we faced the last cell in the row. Through the bars, I made out a form strapped onto the narrow bunk, head tossing, face bruised and scratched, denim and wool clothes torn and soiled. It was Lydia.
The Chief spoke. "We picked her up like that yesterday afternoon. She walked into town, went straight to the school, and tried to get into her classroom, raving all the time, just like this. The substitute called the principal, and he called us.
I'm waiting for the judge to sign the papers now, and then one of the men'll drive her to Augusta."
AMHI. The Augusta Mental Health Institute. Where they would try to bring her back, perhaps with drugs and electric shocks. But what else could anyone do? I turned away.
Back in the Chiefs office, I remembered Lydia's camera.
Did he have it? He did, along with everything that had been in her pockets. "Then perhaps," I said, "it might be a good idea to have the film developed. She could have got her pictures after all, and they could help the doctors understand what's wrong with her now."
"Of course," he said, and I left. I wanted sleep, but 1 should return the gear Lydia had borrowed first and tell Keith's family what had happened. Then, maybe, I could begin to puzzle over how Lydia had disappeared last night and reappeared yesterday. Time travel was impossible, wasn't it?
The Hutchisons and Jacksons were enraged. With me, with Lydia, with the town, with the school. One boy tost, another ill, but the lost one most on their minds. Jack Hutchison swore he would run against me come the next election, sue me for every penny I had, have Lydia fired if she ever regained her wits. But the prospect of no longer being mayor didn't bother me-after all, it didn't pay-and the trip had officially been a school field trip, and the school had insurance to cover lawsuits.
And then that fuss died down. The pictures came out.
Lydia had her wendigo. twice. One shot showed a line of shiny boxes stretched down a gleaming tunnel. The other showed Keith walking away from the camera, hand in hand with a figure that wasn't human, through a vast cavern of a room. The shiny boxes covered the floor of that room, and they were surrounded by machines that bore vague resemblances to freight dollies and forklift trucks.
I could guess what the wendigo really was. An interstellar freight train, its tracks looping close to Earth at certain times and places, a freight that could be hopped by anyone who got too close to its passing field. "Fetal"? Maybe "ftl," faster than light. By "take yon" had she meant "tachyon"? I read enough to know what that was, how it might fit, and Keith was alive and well. Earth's envoy to other worlds. Lydia, on the other hand, had been sent back on the next train, going faster than light, backward in time just enough to get her home a day before she left.
By the time Lydia stopped raving and returned to her job, Pork Hill could no longer be visited, either by deer poachers or by would-be interstellar hobos. The army had taken it over, and it was now ringed by wire fence and armed guards while the experts tried to find a way to flag some passing train down.
I don't know if they'll succeed. Lydia can't tell us anything, since she now seems to have no memory of her journey, and if it weren't for that last picture of Keith I'd be tempted to compare us to the moose. For years, the rutting bulls would answer train whistles by charging down the tracks into the engine. To the bull moose, it seems, the whistles sounded like the cry of a cow in heat, and they never learned the difference. The slaughter only stopped when the companies changed the note of the whistles.
But we can't be the equivalent of animals running head-on against an oblivious technology. After all, who among us would walk out of a railway station hand in hand-or hoof in hand-with a moose?
About The Editors
Isaac Asimov has been called "one of America's treasures." Born in the Soviet Union, he was brought to the United States at the age of three (along with his family) by agents of the American government in a successful attempt to prevent him from working for the wrong side. He quickly established himself as one of this country's foremost science fiction writers and writes about everything, and although now approaching middle age, he is going stronger than ever. He long ago passed his age and weight in books, and with some 310 to his credit, threatens to close in on his I.Q. His novel The Robots of Dawn was one of the best-selling books of 1983 and 1984.
Martin H. Greenberg has been called (in The Science Fiction and Fantasy Book Review) ' 'the King of the Anthologists"; to which he replied, "It's good to be the King!" He has produced more than one hundred of them, usually in collaboration with a multitude of co-conspirators, most frequently the two who have given you Mythical Beasties. A professor of regional analysis and political science at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, he is still trying to publish his weight.
Chaples G. Waugh is a professor of psychology and communications at the University of Maine at Augusta who is still trying to figure out how he got himself into all this. He has also worked with many collaborators, since he is basically a very friendly fellow. He has done some sixty-five anthologies and single-author collections, and especially enjoys locating unjustly ignored stories. He also claims that he met his wife via computer dating-her choice was an entire fraternity or him, and she has only minor regrets.