Cora didn’t lower her gaze. At last, she rose and left the warehouse without a word.
Lawson didn’t see either of them again until the following morning, as they prepared to depart. As he had instructed, the couple left most of their baggage behind. He saw that Cora was carrying a sheaf of papers, and that Russell was clutching his valise with the notes from the trip.
An hour earlier, Lawson had secured the propeller to the nose of the plane. Once the passengers were seated, he headed out into the water, opening the throttle all the way. As he had feared, the propeller wasn’t cutting as much air as usual. Reaching up, he grabbed a cross member over his head to get more leverage, then pulled back on the stick with the other.
At last, he felt the floats rise up on their steps. The pontoons broke loose from the surface of the water, and then they were up and away, the spray wreathing them as they ascended. Lawson exhaled. The hard part was over, and all that remained was to get back to Juneau.
He took them away from the cove. Before circling back toward the Chilkat Range, he looked north, gazing at the mountains in the distance.
For a second, he thought that he saw something outlined on the side of Mount Fairweather. When he blinked, it was gone. It had been just his imagination, or the distortion of the windshield. But in that brief instant, the future had seemed close enough to touch, and it reminded him of something that Russell had said. If the city was sending its image into the past, it might not even know it.
Lawson glanced behind him. He saw that Russell had the map out again, and that he was looking at it sadly. They would not be visiting the towns to the northwest, at least not this time around.
Cora took her husband’s hand. “There will be other chances. Let it go for now.”
“I know. But I’m still sorry.” Russell studied the map. “I would have liked to have seen Valdez. Or—”
He appeared to pick the name of one of the other villages at random. “Or Gakona.”
A military-funded project called the High-Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP), located on remote tundra in Alaska, jumps off the horizon just past mile marker eleven on the Glenn Highway…. What grabs the imagination of most, though, are the couple hundred oversized antennas…. Those fanged metal structures have made the sleepy, rural Alaska village of Gakona, population two hundred, a lightning rod for controversy….
Theories abound about what goes on inside HAARP, which was founded in 1990 to conduct research on the ionosphere, an upper level of the atmosphere…. They’re studying lightning, aurora borealis, and the like. They’ve even learned how to induce both of those on a limited scale, according to a statement included on a Navy defense budget….
Depending on the unpredictable agendas of military scientists [conspiracy theorists claim], this group of technicians must shoot radio waves into the upper reaches of our atmosphere to create missile shields, eviscerate enemy satellites, set off the occasional earthquake, or control the minds of millions of people.
The truth is, though, that the High-Frequency Active Auroral Research Program, or HAARP… is nothing more sinister than a research station….
Four golden crosses are planted… to help a radio receiver measure ionospheric absorption…. A white telescope dome and a gray tangle of poles [are] used to observe the ionosphere’s properties….
But the most striking sight at HAARP is the facility’s largest array: one hundred and eighty silver poles rising from the ground, each a foot thick, seventy-two feet tall, and spaced precisely eighty feet apart. Every pole is topped with four arms like helicopter rotors….
The result is an aluminum cat’s cradle, calibrated to the millimeter, that spreads out over thirty acres. Geometric patterns form and reform in every direction, Athenian in their symmetry.
It looks like a bionic forest…. Or an infinite nave in a futuristic outdoor church.
The House by the Sea
P H Lee
Would you believe me if I told you that they all live together in a house by the sea?
It would only be fair, if they did.
They can’t live in the City, of course. Can you imagine? You’d be walking somewhere, maybe proceeding past the parks and public buildings, perhaps accompanied by a clamor of bells that set the swallows soaring, perhaps on your way to an orgy or a debate or to watch television, and you’d see one of them, and you’d know (of course you’d know, not that there would be anything different, not anything you could point to specifically, there’d just be something, that look—maybe it’s their shoulders?—that look that people have when they’ve spent their childhood locked in the basement for the sake of a utopia). And once you’d seen one of them, of course you’d spend the whole day thinking about it. You’d think about that one awful field trip you took as a child, seeing them locked in a basement, mewling and promising futilely to be good, and you’d spend the whole rest of the day feeling unreasonable and guilty and ashamed. You would get no joy out of the orgies, or the parades, or the philosophy, or the remarkably good television.
And would that be joyous? Would it be the happy city we live in, the happy life we enjoy?
No. Obviously, they can’t live in the City.
So, if you’ll believe me, they live together in a house by the sea.
It’s not a big house—it’s not a mansion—but it’s big enough for all of them to live in comfortably. Everyone gets their own room, and there are enough bathrooms even if some of them are touchy about sharing (some of them are touchy about sharing). They have a library and a living room and a television that doesn’t get all the channels. Outside, there is a garden, and a little trail down the cliffs to the beach.
Do you believe it? Does it seem unreasonable? It wouldn’t be too much to ask—don’t you think?—for them to have a house to themselves with a garden and a library and a television that doesn’t get all the channels.
What did you think happened to that child in the basement? What did you think happened when that child grew up?
Would it help if I told you there are a surprising lot of them living there, in the house by the sea? If you think about it, there must be. It has to be a child, crying alone in the basement that no one talks about. A baby crying in a basement is just a baby crying. An adult crying in a basement probably did something to deserve it (not that there are any prisons in the City, of course, but still).
There is, in fact, a very narrow range of suitable ages. Three-year-olds are much too young, and by twelve, honestly, how innocent could they be? Four through ten is just about right. Right now, in the house by the sea, there are nine of them, each separated by more or less seven years. The youngest is fourteen years old, the next twenty-two years old, then twenty-seven years old, and so on. The oldest is in her sixties.
Once a day an old woman comes out to tidy up, cook a meal, and stock the freezer with burritos in case someone gets hungry in the middle of the night. It isn’t her job, of course. In the City, no one has a job, except the sort of job that is meaningful and personally fulfilling, like medicine or writing novels. Still, she comes out from the City every day. Who can say why? She is an immigrant; she has her own story.
Each of them has their own routine. One of them wakes up before anyone else, walks the little trail down the cliffs to the beach, and dives into the cold gray morning ocean, alone and without fear. Another one gardens. One is writing his fourth novel. He still finishes them, revises them, sends them off, and every publishing house in the City returns them unread. Two more spend their days in the library, reading the encyclopedia out loud to each other. One watches the news. She remembers back before they had a house, and she has strong opinions about municipal politics. She makes every one of them vote, every year.