“How can you possibly believe that?”
“And how can you possibly believe otherwise? Oh, I know how entrenched the globularist heresy has become, but-”
“But to believe as you do now, after men have walked on the moon. Or was that…”
“After my time?” I shook my head. “The moon walk happened three years ago. Well, more like twenty-eight years ago, come to think of it. I could explain it in Planoterrestrial terms, but I don’t expect it would convince you. Anyway, the real point of the Flat Earthers hasn’t got that much to do with the shape of the planet. It’s philosophical, and it’s about trusting one’s own interpretation of evidence and not…”
“And not what?”
“And not swallowing everything the Establishment tells you. The only reason you believe the world is round – or spherical, really – is that’s what they told you in school. And the only reason I believe I spent twenty-five years colder than a welldigger’s ass in the Klondike is because you told me so. Now I can’t imagine why you’d want to lie to me, and I don’t think that’s what’s happening, but I’d feel a lot more in tune with my Flat Earth principles if you could show me some supporting evidence.”
He started to say something, then decided to humor me and slipped out of the room. The woman asked if I really thought they were making this up to fool me. I didn’t, and told her so. “But if I see something concrete,” I said, “it’ll help me believe it.”
Fischbinder came back with a copy of the New York Times. The date was right – March 14, 1997 – and there was a front-page story about the president, who did indeed seem to be named Clinton. There was turmoil in the Middle East, for a change, and there was trouble as well in Zaire and Bosnia. There was a map, and Bosnia seemed to be a country, and not just a province of Yugoslavia. In fact they all seemed to be countries, Bosnia and Croatia and Macedonia and Serbia and Slovenia.
Could I be dreaming? Because I had dreamed of the day when all the parts of Yugoslavia would be sovereign nations, I and my brothers in a handful of disparate groups. If the newspaper was to be believed, the day had come while I lay frozen and unknowing. And now, from the looks of things, the citizens of all these new republics were busy killing one another. Not quite the heaven on earth I’d had in mind, but still…
“I don’t suppose it would be that difficult,” I said, “to have a newspaper printed.”
They exchanged glances again. Neither of them actually said the word paranoia, but I could almost hear it just the same. And I guess I knew I was being unrealistic. They might have dummied up the front page of a newspaper, with some imaginative headlines over blocks of jumbled type. They do that all the time in the movies. But this was a whole copy of the New York Times, pages and pages of it, with ads and photos and stories all the way through.
And it cost sixty cents, I noticed. The last time I bought it, all it set me back was a quarter.
“I’m being silly,” I admitted. “I think I believed you from the beginning, and the paper’s a convincer, even if it does raise two questions for every one it answers. But, see, I look the same. You both probably look a lot older than you did in 1972, but I didn’t know you then, so you couldn’t prove it to me. You know what they say, seeing is believing, and if I could just see something that would cut through this inner skepticism of mine…”
Wordless, Fischbinder took me by the arm and led me to a window. We were evidently on a high floor, facing south and west, and we had a good view of the city. And it was New York, of course, and there were buildings I recognized – the Chrysler building, the Empire State – but there were also plenty of buildings that had not been there the last I looked.
I took it all in in silence, my mind racing yet standing still. I could feel myself struggling to adjust to this new reality. Because that’s what it was – reality. Seeing isn’t necessarily believing, not all the time, but I was seeing and I was believing. It was 1997 – for God’s sake, just three years short of the millennium – and Yugoslavia was five different countries, and I was sixty-four years old. I’d lived a mere thirty-nine years, but I was sixty-four all the same.
I said, “Why?”
“Why?”
“Why me? Well, why anybody, but I’m the person it happened to, and I can’t figure out why. Why did someone think it was a good idea to freeze me like a package of breaded shrimp and hide me away from the world for all these years?”
“Nobody knows.”
“Somebody has to,” I said.
“There was a letter,” he said, “but no one could read it. Then a man from Washington came to collect it. I suppose they found somebody there who could make it out, but they haven’t sent us word as to what it said, and somehow I don’t think they will.”
“Not unless things have changed a lot in the past twenty-five years,” I said.
“But I kept a copy.”
“They let you do that?”
“I’d already made a copy,” he said, “before they turned up, and I kept it. It seems to be some Germanic language, but it’s definitely not German.”
It was Old Norse, and I could see why they’d have had to take it to an expert to get it translated. I missed a few words here and there myself, but I got enough to make sense out of it, if you want to call it that.
“Harald Engstrom was not the man he pretended to be,” I said.
“Harald Engstrom? Was he the man-”
“Who gave me the brandy? Uh-huh. And he was supposed to be an activist in SKOAL, working to bring about the independence of Southern Sweden. But actually he was an agent provocateur of the Stockholm government.”
“Oh?”
“He wanted to learn just how committed I was to the cause,” I went on, “and evidently I convinced him of the depth of my feelings, and that meant I was a dangerous man. He saw it as his patriotic duty to nullify me.” I read some more, shook my head. “But he couldn’t just slit my throat and leave it at that,” I said. “He was too Scandinavian.”
“Too Scandinavian?”
I nodded. “Too civilized. Too highly evolved. Too humane. No more death penalty, not even for enemies of the state. He couldn’t kill me, but he had to neutralize me, and that meant putting me on ice.”
“For twenty-five years?”
“Forever, if the folks in Union City hadn’t taken up the basement floor. But I don’t think it was supposed to go on that long. As soon as SKOAL was eliminated as a political force, he’d have had me thawed and returned to society. But I think something must have happened to him. Maybe he got hit by a bus. Or maybe some players on the other side decided that he was dangerous, and he’s tucked away in a meat locker somewhere, hovering at zero degrees. That would be poetic justice, wouldn’t it?”
“And the people who owned the house?”
“Engstrom’s friends?” I tapped the letter. “He mentions them. They didn’t even know about his little excavation project beneath the furnace room, let alone that they were harboring a low-temperature guest. So if anything happened to Engstrom, I would just stay there until hell froze over.” I frowned. “That’s the wrong metaphor, but you get the idea.”
“What I don’t get,” Laura Westerley said, “is why he was afraid of you. Something about Swedes and Danes?”
I gave her a very brief rundown of the aims of SKOAL and the grievances of the southern Swedes, and she seemed understandably incredulous. “It was never a movement with a whole lot of political credibility,” I said, “but neither was Slovenian separatism, for God’s sake, and they’ve got their own country now. My God, it just occurred to me. There wasn’t anything in the paper, not that I noticed, but it could have happened anytime in the past twenty-five years. But did it?”