held it up to examine it. His eyes widened.
“What?” Mendoza craned her neck to look.
“ Numerus XXXV. Pertinens ad Stationem XVII Experimentalem Hesperidum, ” Lewis read aloud. He tilted the tag so she could see the stylized thunderbolt logo underneath the inscription.
“Hesperides Experimental Station?” Mendoza stared at the tag. “Wasn’t that the old Company base out in mid-Atlantic they had to close when…” She trailed off and was silent for about thirty seconds before turning away and doubling up with laughter. Lewis joined her, laughing so hard he had to lean against a tree. At last he stood, threw his hat in the air and whooped in despair:
“So much for discovering something unknown to Dr. Zeus! Ladies and gentlemen, please take your places for the Causality Quadrille!”
The Catch
The barn stands high in the middle of backcountry nowhere, shimmering in summer heat. It’s an old barn, empty a long time, and its broad planks are silvered. Nothing much around it but yellow hills and red rock.
Long ago, somebody painted it with a mural. Still visible along its broad wall are the blobs representing massed crowds, the green diamond of a baseball park, and the figure in a slide, seeming to swim along the green field, glove extended. His cartoon eyes are wide and happy. The ball, radiating black lines of force, is sailing into his glove. Above him is painted the legend:
WHAT A CATCH ! And, in smaller letters below it:
1951, The Golden Year!
The old highway snakes just below the barn, where once the mural must have edified a long cavalcade of DeSotos, Packards, and Oldsmobiles. But the old road is white and empty now, with thistles pushing through its cracks. The new highway runs straight across the plain below.
Down on the new highway, eighteen-wheeler rigs hurtle through, roaring like locomotives, and they are the only things to disturb the vast silence. The circling hawk makes no sound. The cottonwood trees by the edge of the dry stream are silent too, not a rustle or a creak along the whole row; but they do cast a thin gray shade, and the men waiting in the Volkswagen Bug are grateful for that.
They might be two cops on stakeout. They aren’t. Not exactly.
“Are you going to tell me why we’re sitting here, now?” asks the younger man, finishing his candy bar.
His name is Clete. The older man’s name is Porfirio.
The older man shifts in his seat and looks askance at his partner. He doesn’t approve of getting stoned on the job. But he shrugs, checks his weapon, settles into the most comfortable position he can find.
He points through the dusty windshield at the barn. “See up there? June 30, 1958, family of five killed. ’46 Plymouth Club Coupe. Driver lost control of the car and went off the edge of the road. Car rolled seventy meters down that hill and hit the rocks, right there. Gas tank blew. Mr. and Mrs. William T. Ross of Visalia, California, identified from dental records. Kids didn’t have any dental records. No relatives to identify bodies.
“Articles in the local and Visalia papers, grave with the whole family’s names and dates on one marker in a cemetery in Visalia. Some blackening on the rocks up there. That’s all there is to show it ever happened.”
“Okay,” say the younger man, nodding thoughtfully. “No witnesses, right?”
“That’s right.”
“The accident happened on a lonely road, and state troopers or whoever found the wreck after the fact?”
“Yeah.”
“And the bodies were so badly burned they all went in one grave?” Clete looks pleased with himself. “So…forensic medicine being what it was in 1958, maybe there weren’t five bodies in the car after all? Maybe one of the kids was thrown clear on the way down the hill? And if there was somebody in the future going through historical records, looking for incidents where children vanished without a trace, this might draw their attention, right?”
“It might,” agrees
“What?” Mendoza craned her neck to look.
“ Numerus XXXV. Pertinens ad Stationem XVII Experimentalem Hesperidum, ” Lewis read aloud. He tilted the tag so she could see the stylized thunderbolt logo underneath the inscription.
“Hesperides Experimental Station?” Mendoza stared at the tag. “Wasn’t that the old Company base out in mid-Atlantic they had to close when…” She trailed off and was silent for about thirty seconds before turning away and doubling up with laughter. Lewis joined her, laughing so hard he had to lean against a tree. At last he stood, threw his hat in the air and whooped in despair:
“So much for discovering something unknown to Dr. Zeus! Ladies and gentlemen, please take your places for the Causality Quadrille!”
The Catch
The barn stands high in the middle of backcountry nowhere, shimmering in summer heat. It’s an old barn, empty a long time, and its broad planks are silvered. Nothing much around it but yellow hills and red rock.
Long ago, somebody painted it with a mural. Still visible along its broad wall are the blobs representing massed crowds, the green diamond of a baseball park, and the figure in a slide, seeming to swim along the green field, glove extended. His cartoon eyes are wide and happy. The ball, radiating black lines of force, is sailing into his glove. Above him is painted the legend:
WHAT A CATCH ! And, in smaller letters below it:
1951, The Golden Year!
The old highway snakes just below the barn, where once the mural must have edified a long cavalcade of DeSotos, Packards, and Oldsmobiles. But the old road is white and empty now, with thistles pushing through its cracks. The new highway runs straight across the plain below.
Down on the new highway, eighteen-wheeler rigs hurtle through, roaring like locomotives, and they are the only things to disturb the vast silence. The circling hawk makes no sound. The cottonwood trees by the edge of the dry stream are silent too, not a rustle or a creak along the whole row; but they do cast a thin gray shade, and the men waiting in the Volkswagen Bug are grateful for that.
They might be two cops on stakeout. They aren’t. Not exactly.
“Are you going to tell me why we’re sitting here, now?” asks the younger man, finishing his candy bar.
His name is Clete. The older man’s name is Porfirio.
The older man shifts in his seat and looks askance at his partner. He doesn’t approve of getting stoned on the job. But he shrugs, checks his weapon, settles into the most comfortable position he can find.
He points through the dusty windshield at the barn. “See up there? June 30, 1958, family of five killed. ’46 Plymouth Club Coupe. Driver lost control of the car and went off the edge of the road. Car rolled seventy meters down that hill and hit the rocks, right there. Gas tank blew. Mr. and Mrs. William T. Ross of Visalia, California, identified from dental records. Kids didn’t have any dental records. No relatives to identify bodies.
“Articles in the local and Visalia papers, grave with the whole family’s names and dates on one marker in a cemetery in Visalia. Some blackening on the rocks up there. That’s all there is to show it ever happened.”
“Okay,” say the younger man, nodding thoughtfully. “No witnesses, right?”
“That’s right.”
“The accident happened on a lonely road, and state troopers or whoever found the wreck after the fact?”
“Yeah.”
“And the bodies were so badly burned they all went in one grave?” Clete looks pleased with himself. “So…forensic medicine being what it was in 1958, maybe there weren’t five bodies in the car after all? Maybe one of the kids was thrown clear on the way down the hill? And if there was somebody in the future going through historical records, looking for incidents where children vanished without a trace, this might draw their attention, right?”
“It might,” agrees
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