It was headquartered in a big, grungy, domed building downtown. Not exactly ramshackle, but close. The interior was impersonal, drab, damp, not a place where you’d want to work. I’d expected to find pictures of the rescue services in action, skimmers dropping chemicals on blazing trees, emergency technicians tending to victims, patrols chasing a runaway boat through rapids. But the walls were undecorated, save for a few dusty portraits of elderly men and women you probably wouldn’t have wanted to have over for dinner. There’d been a time when I’d thought briefly about doing something like this for a living. The rescue services especially had always seemed glamorous. And it would have been nice to dedicate my life to helping people in trouble. But I either grew out of it or found out the pay wasn’t very good.
“Yes, folks,” said an AI. “What can I do for you?” Sexy voice. This was going to be a unit made up primarily of young males.
“My name’s Benedict,” Alex said. “My associate and I are doing research. I wonder if I could speak with someone for a few minutes? I won’t take much time.”
“May I ask the subject of your research, Mr. Benedict?”
“The forest fire in 1365.”
“That’s a long time ago, sir. Just a moment, please. I’ll see if the duty officer is available.”
The duty officer, despite my expectations, was a woman. She was a tiny creature, early thirties, brown eyes, brown hair. She wore the standard forest green uniform and looked happy to have visitors. “Come on back, people,” she said, leading us down a passageway and into an office. “I understand you want to talk about one of the 1365 fires.”
Uh-oh. “You had more than one?”
She introduced herself as Ranger Jamieson. There was something irrepressible about her. I never saw her again after that interview, but to this day I remember Ranger Jamieson. And I’ve promised myself I’ll find a reason to go back again one day and say hello.
She brought numbers up on her monitor. “Looks like seventeen. Of course, that depends on how you define the term.”
“You had seventeen fires that year?”
She nodded. “It’s about average for this region. We only cover a narrow area, but we get droughts on a regular basis. It has to do with the winds. And we have lots of campers, some of them not too bright. We also get a fair number of lightning strikes. In summer or fall, it doesn’t take much to start a blaze.”
“The one I’m looking for took out the Epstein Retreat.”
She looked blank. “I beg your pardon?”
Well, there you are. We were assuming everybody on the planet knew about the Epstein lab, but as a matter of fact, a few weeks earlier I hadn’t heard of it myself.
Alex explained what it did, who’d worked there, what might have been lost. Its connection with the Polaris incident.
“How about that?” she said when he’d finished. “I know about the Polaris.
That’s the starship that disappeared back in the last century, right?”
“The passengers disappeared. Not the ship.”
“Oh. Yes, of course. That was odd, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, it was.”
“And they never figured out what happened?”
“No.”
Her eyes brushed mine. Okay, so she didn’t exactly know about the Polaris either. That’s not really big news in most people’s lives. “And you think there’s a connection with the fire?”
“We don’t know. Probably not, but the fire happened right after the Polaris left.”
Alex gave her the specific date.
“Well, let’s see what we have, Mr. Benedict.” She sat down in front of a display.
“Thermal events, 1365,” she said. Data appeared, and she began running down the list with her index finger. “You know, the problem here is that we’ve never kept very good records. Especially before 1406.”
“Fourteen oh-six?”
“Don’t quote me.”
“Of course not. What happened in 1406?”
“We had a scandal and there was a reorganization.”
“Oh.”
She smiled. “Well, here we are.” She studied the screen, brought up fresh displays, shook her head. “I don’t think we have anything that’s going to be much help to you, though.” She got out of the way for us, and we looked through the data. It was all technical details, when the fire started, its extent, estimated property loss, analysis of the cause of the blaze, and a few other details.
“What exactly,” asked the ranger, “did you want to know about the fire?”
What did we want? I knew Alex: He was operating on the assumption that he’d recognize it when he saw it. “It says here the cause was careless campers. How much confidence would you have in that conclusion?”
She flicked back and forth in the record, and shrugged. “Actually,” she said, “not much. We always determine the cause of a fire. In the sense that we announce a cause. But-” She paused, cleared her throat, folded her arms. “We’re a little more exacting, now. In those years, if they had lightning on a given night, and later there was a fire, lightning was ascribed as the reason unless there was some specific circumstance indicating otherwise. You understand what I’m saying?”
“They made it up as they needed to.”
“I wouldn’t want to put it quite that way. It was more like taking a best guess.”
She smiled, carefully distancing herself from those long-ago rangers.
“Okay,” Alex said. “Thanks.”
“I wouldn’t want you to think that’s the way we operate now.”
“Of course not,” said Alex. “You wouldn’t have any way of determining where the lab was located, I don’t suppose?”
“I can ask around.”
“It was somewhere along the riverbank,” he said.
She brought up the same news report we’d looked at earlier and zeroed in on a river. “That’s the Big. It’s about forty-five klicks northeast of here. I can give you a marker.”
The marker would allow the skimmer to find it. “Yes, please.”
“Something else. There’s a man you might want to talk to. Name’s Benny Sanchay. He’s been around here a long time. Kind of a regional historian. If anybody can help you, he can.”
Benny was well into his second century. He lived in a small cabin on the edge of town, behind a cluster of low hills. “Sure,” he said, “I remember the fire. There were some complaints later that the rangers let the lab go. Didn’t bother with it because they didn’t think it was important.”
“Was it important?” I asked.
He squinted at Alex while he thought it over. “Must have been. All these years later and here you folks are asking about it.”
Benny Sanchay was small and round. He was one of the few men I’ve seen who had no hair left on his skull. He wasn’t given to shaving, and his eyes were buried in a mass of whiskers and wrinkles. I wondered whether he’d spent too much time looking into the sun.
He invited us inside, pointed to a couple of battered chairs, and put a pot of coffee on. The furniture was old, but serviceable. There was a bookcase and a general-purpose table. The bookcase was sagging under the weight of too many volumes. Two large windows looked out on the hills. The thing that caught my eye was a working range. “That would be worth a fair amount of money,” Alex told him, “if you wanted to sell it.”
“My stove?”
“Yes. I could get you a good price.”
He smiled and sat down at the table. There were pieces of notepaper stacked on it, a pile of crystals, a reader, and an open volume. Down to Earth. By Omar McCloud. “What would I cook with?” he asked.
“Get some hardware, and your AI’ll do it.”
“My AI?”
“You don’t have one,” I said.
He laughed. It was a friendly enough sound, the kind you get when someone thinks you’ve deliberately said something silly. “No,” he said. “Haven’t had one for years.”
I looked around, wondering how he stayed in touch with the world.
He glanced at me. “I’ve no need of one.” He propped his chin on his elbow.
“Anyhow, I enjoy being alone.”
So we were in the presence of a crank. But it didn’t matter. “Benny,” Alex said, “tell me what you know about the loss of the lab.”
“It’s not good for you,” he continued, as if Alex hadn’t spoken. “You’re never really alone if you’ve got one of those things in the house.” I got the sense he was laughing at us. “What was it you wanted to know?”