Contents
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Michael Crichton
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Introduction
Corazón
He should never . . .
Halfway to Gallup . . .
In the hospital . . .
Seen through the . . .
Officer James Wauneka . . .
Dordogne
The helicopter thumped . . .
Edward Johnston, Regius . . .
Some thought Marek . . .
The next day . . .
The restored medieval . . .
The following morning . . .
In the afternoon . . .
They had arranged . . .
The generator chugged . . .
The room was . . .
In the farmhouse . . .
The following day . . .
Dark clouds hung . . .
The jet engines . . .
Black Rock
The night was . . .
Doniger walked quickly . . .
They walked down . . .
Lie on your . . .
Diane Kramer looked . . .
Stern sat with . . .
The room was . . .
In the control . . .
Blackness . . .
Castelgard
37:00:00
36:49:19
36:30:00
36:13:17
33:12:51
32:16:01
31:40:44
31:15:58
30:40:39
29:10:00
26:12:01
11:01:59
09:10:23
05:19:55
03:10:12
01:22:12
00:36:02
00:09:04
00:05:30
00:01:44
Doniger Strode back . . .
He awoke, hearing . . .
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
Copyright
FICTION
A Case of Need
The Andromeda Strain
The Terminal Man
The Great Train Robbery
Westworld
Eaters of the Dead (or The 13th Warrior)
Congo
Jurassic Park
Sphere
Rising Sun
Disclosure
The Lost World
Airframe
Twister (with Anne-Marie Martin)
Timeline
Prey
State of Fear
Next
NON-FICTION
Five Patients
Jasper Johns
Electronic Life
Travels
Michael Crichton was born in Chicago in 1942. His novels included The Andromeda Strain, The Great Train Robbery, Congo, Airframe, Jurassic Park and Disclosure. He was also the creator of the television series ER.
An old man wearing a brown robe is found wandering disoriented in the Arizona desert. He is miles away from any human habitation and has no memory of how he got to be there, or who he is. The only clue to his identity is the plan of a medieval monastery in his pocket.
This mystery will catapult a group of young scientists back to the middle Ages into the heart of the Hundred Years’ War.
Imagine the risks of such a journey. Imagine the impossible.
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A typical episode of private warfare occurred in 1357. Sir Oliver de Vannes, an English knight of nobility and character, had taken over the towns of Castelgard and La Roque, along the Dordogne River. By all accounts, this “borrowed lord” ruled with honest dignity, and was beloved by the people. In April, Sir Oliver’s lands were invaded by a rampaging company of two thousand brigandes, renegade knights under the command of Arnaut de Cervole, a defrocked monk known as “the Archpriest.” After burning Castelgard to the ground, Cervole razed the nearby Monastery of Sainte-Mère, murdering monks and destroying the famed water mill on the Dordogne. Cervole then pursued Sir Oliver to the fortress of La Roque, where a terrible battle followed.
Oliver defended his castle with skill and daring. Contemporary accounts credit Oliver’s efforts to his military adviser, Edwardus de Johnes. Little is known of this man, around whom a Merlin-like mythology grew up: it was said he could vanish in a flash of light. The chronicler Audreim says Johnes came from Oxford, but other accounts say he was Milanese. Since he traveled with a team of young assistants, he was most likely an itinerant expert, hiring himself out to whoever paid for his services. He was schooled in the use of gunpowder and artillery, a technology new at that time. . . .
Ultimately, Oliver lost his impregnable castle when a spy opened an inside passage, allowing the Archpriest’s soldiers to enter. Such betrayals were typical of the complex intrigues of that time.
From The Hundred Years
War in France
by M.D. Backes, 1996
For Taylor
“All the great empires of the future will be empires of the mind.”
WINSTON CHURCHILL, 1953
“If you don’t know history, you don’t know anything.”
EDWARD JOHNSTON, 1990
“I’m not interested in the future. I’m interested in the future of the future.”
ROBERT DONIGER, 1996
RAIN SLASHED ACROSS the gray English landscape. The windshield wipers snicked back and forth. In the driver’s seat, Edward Johnston leaned forward and squinted as he tried to see through the rain. Outside were low, dark green hills, demarcated by dark hedges, and everything blurred by the rain. The last farm had been a couple of miles back.
Johnston said, “Elsie, are you sure this is the road?”
“Absolutely,” Elsie Kastner said, the map open on her lap. She traced the route with her finger. “Four miles beyond Cheatham Cross to Bishop’s Vale, and one mile later, it should be up there, on the right.”
She pointed to a sloping hill with scattered oak trees.
“I don’t see anything,” Chris said, from the back seat.
Kate said, “Is the air conditioner on? I’m hot.” She was seven months pregnant, and always hot.
“Yes, it’s on,” Johnston said.
“All the way?”
Chris patted her knee reassuringly.
Johnston drove slowly, looking for a mileage marker at the side of the road. The rain diminished. They could see better. And then Elsie said, “There!”
On the top of the hill was a dark rectangle, with crumbling walls.
“That’s it?”
“That’s Eltham Castle,” she said. “What’s left of it.”
Johnston pulled the car over to the side of the road, and cut the ignition. Elsie read from her guidebook. “First built on this site by John d’Elthaim in the eleventh century, with several later additions. Notably the ruined keep from the twelfth century, and a chapel in the English Gothic style, from the fourteenth. Unrelated to Eltham Castle in London, which is from a later period.”
The rain lessened, now just scattered drops in the wind. Johnston opened the car door and got out, shrugging on his raincoat. Elsie got out on the passenger side, her documents encased in plastic. Chris ran around the car to open the door for Kate, and helped her out. They climbed over a low stone wall, and began climbing up toward the castle.
The ruin was more substantial than it had seemed from the road; high stone walls, dark with rain. There were no ceilings; the rooms were open to the sky. No one spoke as they walked through the ruins. They saw no signs, no antiquities markers, nothing at all to indicate what this place had been, or even its name. Finally Kate said, “Where is it?”
“The chapel? Over there.”
Walking around a high wall, they saw the chapel, surprisingly complete, its roof rebuilt at some time in the past. The windows were merely open arches in the stone, without glass. There was no door.
Inside the chapel, the wind blew through cracks and windows. Water dripped from the ceiling. Johnston took out a large flashlight, and shone it on the walls.
Chris said, “How did you find out about this place, Elsie?”
“In the documents, of course,” she said. “In the Troyes archives, there was a reference to a wealthy English brigand named Andrew d’Eltham who had paid a visit to the Monastery of Sainte-Mère in his later years. He brought his entire family from England, including his wife and grown sons. That started me searching.”
“Here,” Johnston said, shining his light on the floor.
They all walked over to see.
Broken tree branches and a layer of damp leaves covered the floor. Johnston was down on his hands and knees, brushing them away to expose weathered burial stones that had been set in the floor. Chris sucked in his breath when he saw the first one. It was a woman, dressed demurely in long robes, lying on her back. The carving was unmistakably the Lady Claire. Unlike many carvings, Claire was depicted with her eyes open, staring frankly at the viewer.
“Still beautiful,” Kate said, standing with her back arched, her hand pressed into her side.
“Yes,” Johnston said. “Still beautiful.”
Now the second stone was cleared away. Lying next to Claire, they saw André Marek. He, too, had his eyes open. Marek looked older, and he had a crease on the side of his face that might have been from age, or might have been a scar.
Elsie said, “According to the documents, Andrew escorted Lady Claire back to England from France, and then married her. He didn’t care about the rumors that Claire had murdered her previous husband. By all accounts he was deeply in love with his wife. They had five sons, and were inseparable all their lives.
“In his old age,” Elsie said, “the old routier settled down to a quiet life, and doted on his grandchildren. Andrew’s dying words were ‘I have chosen a good life.’ He was buried in the family chapel in Eltham, in June 1382.”
“Thirteen eighty-two,” Chris said. “He was fifty-four.”
Johnston was cleaning the rest of the stone. They saw Marek’s shield: a prancing English lion on a field of French lilies. Above the shield were words in French.
Elsie said, “His family motto, echoing Richard Lionheart, appeared above the coat of arms: Mes compaingnons cui j’amoie et cui j’aim, . . . Me di, chanson.” She paused. “‘Companions whom I loved, and still do love, . . . Tell them, my song.’”
They stared at André for a long time.
Johnston touched the stone contours of Marek’s face with his fingertips. “Well,” he said finally, “at least we know what happened.”
“Do you think he was happy?” Chris said.
“Yes,” Johnston said. But he was thinking that however much Marek loved it, it could never be his world. Not really. He must have always felt a foreigner there, a person separated from his surroundings, because he had come from somewhere else.
The wind whined. A few leaves blew, scraping across the floor. The air was damp and cold. They stood silently.
“I wonder if he thought of us,” Chris said, looking at the stone face. “I wonder if he ever missed us.”
“Of course he did,” the Professor said. “Don’t you miss him?”
Chris nodded. Kate sniffled, and blew her nose.
“I do,” Johnston said.
They went back outside. They walked down the hill to the car. By now the rain had entirely stopped, but the clouds remained dark and heavy, hanging low over the distant hills.
Our understanding of the medieval period has changed dramatically in the last fifty years. Although one occasionally still hears a self-important scientist speak of the Dark Ages, modern views have long since overthrown such simplicities. An age that was once thought to be static, brutal and benighted is now understood as dynamic and swiftly changing: an age where knowledge was sought and valued; where great universities were born, and learning fostered; where technology was enthusiastically advanced; where social relations were in flux; where trade was international; where the general level of violence was often less deadly than it is today. As for the old reputation of medieval times as a dark time of parochialism, religious prejudice and mass slaughter, the record of the twentieth century must lead any thoughtful observer to conclude that we are in no way superior.
In fact, the conception of a brutal medieval period was an invention of the Renaissance, whose proponents were at pains to emphasize a new spirit, even at the expense of the facts. If a benighted medieval world has proven a durable misconception, it may be because it confirms a cherished contemporary belief—that our species always moves forward to ever better and more enlightened ways of life. This belief is utter fantasy, but it dies hard. It is especially difficult for modern people to conceive that our modern, scientific age might not be an improvement over the prescientific period.
A word about time travel. While it is true that quantum teleportation has been demonstrated in laboratories around the world, the practical application of such phenomena lies in the future. The ideas presented in this book were stimulated by the speculations of David Deutsch, Kip Thorne, Paul Nahin and Charles Bennett, among others. What appears here may amuse them, but they would not take it seriously. This is a novel: time travel rests firmly in the realm of fantasy.
But the representation of the medieval world has a more substantial basis, and for it I am indebted to the work of many scholars, some of whom are identified in the bibliography that follows. Errors are mine, not theirs.
I’m grateful as well to Catherine Kanner for the illustrations, and to Brant Gordon for the computer-generated architectural renderings.
Finally, my particular thanks to historian Bart Vranken for his invaluable insights, and for his companionship while tramping through little-known and neglected ruins of the Périgord.
A hundred years ago, as the nineteenth century drew to a close, scientists around the world were satisfied that they had arrived at an accurate picture of the physical world. As physicist Alastair Rae put it, “By the end of the nineteenth century it seemed that the basic fundamental principles governing the behavior of the physical universe were known.”fn1 Indeed, many scientists said that the study of physics was nearly completed: no big discoveries remained to be made, only details and finishing touches.
But late in the final decade, a few curiosities came to light. Roentgen discovered rays that passed through flesh; because they were unexplained, he called them X rays. Two months later, Henri Becquerel accidentally found that a piece of uranium ore emitted something that fogged photographic plates. And the electron, the carrier of electricity, was discovered in 1897.
Yet on the whole, physicists remained calm, expecting that these oddities would eventually be explained by existing theory. No one would have predicted that within five years their complacent view of the world would be shockingly upended, producing an entirely new conception of the universe and entirely new technologies that would transform daily life in the twentieth century in unimaginable ways.
If you were to say to a physicist in 1899 that in 1999, a hundred years later, moving images would be transmitted into homes all over the world from satellites in the sky; that bombs of unimaginable power would threaten the species; that antibiotics would abolish infectious disease but that disease would fight back; that women would have the vote, and pills to control reproduction; that millions of people would take to the air every hour in aircraft capable of taking off and landing without human touch; that you could cross the Atlantic at two thousand miles an hour; that humankind would travel to the moon, and then lose interest; that microscopes would be able to see individual atoms; that people would carry telephones weighing a few ounces, and speak anywhere in the world without wires; or that most of these miracles depended on devices the size of a postage stamp, which utilized a new theory called quantum mechanics—if you said all this, the physicist would almost certainly pronounce you mad.
Most of these developments could not have been predicted in 1899, because prevailing scientific theory said they were impossible. And for the few developments that were not impossible, such as airplanes, the sheer scale of their eventual use would have defied comprehension. One might have imagined an airplane—but ten thousand airplanes in the air at the same time would have been beyond imagining.
So it is fair to say that even the most informed scientists, standing on the threshold of the twentieth century, had no idea what was to come.
Now that we stand on the threshold of the twenty-first century, the situation is oddly similar. Once again, physicists believe the physical world has been explained, and that no further revolutions lie ahead. Because of prior history, they no longer express this view publicly, but they think it just the same. Some observers have even gone so far as to argue that science as a discipline has finished its work; that there is nothing important left for science to discover.fn2
But just as the late nineteenth century gave hints of what was to come, so the late twentieth century also provides some clues to the future. One of the most important is the interest in so-called quantum technology. This is an effort on many fronts to create a new technology that utilizes the fundamental nature of subatomic reality, and it promises to revolutionize our ideas of what is possible.
Quantum technology flatly contradicts our common sense ideas of how the world works. It posits a world where computers operate without being turned on and objects are found without looking for them. An unimaginably powerful computer can be built from a single molecule. Information moves instantly between two points, without wires or networks. Distant objects are examined without any contact. Computers do their calculations in other universes. And teleportation—“Beam me up, Scotty”—is ordinary and used in many different ways.
In the 1990s, research in quantum technology began to show results. In 1995, quantum ultrasecure messages were sent over a distance of eight miles, suggesting that a quantum Internet would be built in the coming century. In Los Alamos, physicists measured the thickness of a human hair using laser light that was never actually shone on the hair, but only might have been. This bizarre, “counterfactual” result initiated a new field of interaction-free detection: what has been called “finding something without looking.”
And in 1998, quantum teleportation was demonstrated in three laboratories around the world—in Innsbruck, in Rome and at Cal Tech.fn3 Physicist Jeff Kimble, leader of the Cal Tech team, said that quantum teleportation could be applied to solid objects: “The quantum state of one entity could be transported to another entity. . . . We think we know how to do that.”fn4 Kimble stopped well short of suggesting they could teleport a human being, but he imagined that someone might try with a bacterium.
These quantum curiosities, defying logic and common sense, have received little attention from the public, but they will. According to some estimates, by the first decades of the new century, the majority of physicists around the world will work in some aspect of quantum technology. fn5
It is therefore not surprising that during the mid-1990s, several corporations undertook quantum research. Fujitsu Quantum Devices was established in 1991. IBM formed a quantum research team in 1993, under pioneer Charles Bennett.fn6 ATT and other companies soon followed, as did universities such as Cal Tech, and government facilities like Los Alamos. And so did a New Mexico research company called ITC. Located only an hour’s drive from Los Alamos, ITC made remarkable strides very early in the decade. Indeed, it is now clear that ITC was the first company to have a practical, working application employing advanced quantum technology, in 1998.
In retrospect, it was a combination of peculiar circumstances—and considerable luck—that gave ITC the lead in a dramatic new technology. Although the company took the position that their discoveries were entirely benign, their so-called recovery expedition showed the dangers only too clearly. Two people died, one vanished, and another suffered serious injuries. Certainly, for the young graduate students who undertook the expedition, this new quantum technology, harbinger of the twenty-first century, proved anything but benign.
fn1 Alastair I. M. Rae, Quantum Physics: Illusion or Reality? (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1994). See also Richard Feynman, The Character of Physical Law (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1965). Also Rae, Quantum Mechanics (Bristol, Eng.: Hilger, 1986).
fn2 John Horgan, The End of Science (New York: Addison-Wesley, 1996). See also Gunther Stent, Paradoxes of Progress (New York: W. H. Freeman, 1978).
fn3 Dik Bouwmeester et al., “Experimental Quantum Teleportation, Nature 390 (11 Dec. 1997): 575–9.
fn4 Maggie Fox, “Spooky Teleportation Study Brings Future Closer,” Reuters, 22 Oct. 1998. For Jeffrey R. Kimble, see A. Furusawa et al., “Unconditional Quantum Teleportation,” Science 282 (23 Oct. 1998): 706–9.
fn5 Colin P. Williams and Scott H. Clearwater, Explorations in Quantum Computing (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1998). See also Gerard J. Milburn, Schrödinger’s Machines (New York: W. H. Freeman, 1997) and The Feynman Processor (Reading, Mass.: Perseus, 1998).
fn6 C. H. Bennett et al., “Teleporting an Unknown Quantum State via Dual Classical and Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Channels,” Physical Review Letters 70 (1993): 1895.
“Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory does not understand it.”
NIELS BOHR, 1927
“Nobody understands quantum theory.”
RICHARD FEYNMAN, 1967
“The glory of the past is an illusion.
So is the glory of the present.”
EDWARD JOHNSTON
“Risk everything, or gain nothing.”
GEOFFREY DE CHARNY, 1358
“Nothing in the world is as certain as death.”
JEAN FROISSART, 1359
HE SHOULD NEVER have taken that shortcut.
Dan Baker winced as his new Mercedes S500 sedan bounced down the dirt road, heading deeper into the Navajo reservation in northern Arizona. Around them, the landscape was increasingly desolate: distant red mesas to the east, flat desert stretching away in the west. They had passed a village half an hour earlier—dusty houses, a church and a small school, huddled against a cliff—but since then, they’d seen nothing at all, not even a fence. Just empty red desert. They hadn’t seen another car for an hour. Now it was noon, the sun glaring down at them. Baker, a forty-year-old building contractor in Phoenix, was beginning to feel uneasy. Especially since his wife, an architect, was one of those artistic people who wasn’t practical about things like gas and water. His tank was half-empty. And the car was starting to run hot.
“Liz,” he said, “are you sure this is the way?”
Sitting beside him, his wife was bent over the map, tracing the route with her finger. “It has to be,” she said. “The guidebook said four miles beyond the Corazón Canyon turnoff.”
“But we passed Corazón Canyon twenty minutes ago. We must have missed it.”
“How could we miss a trading post?” she said.
“I don’t know.” Baker stared at the road ahead. “But there’s nothing out here. Are you sure you want to do this? I mean, we can get great Navajo rugs in Sedona. They sell all kinds of rugs in Sedona.”
“Sedona,” she sniffed, “is not authentic.”
“Of course it’s authentic, honey. A rug is a rug.”
“Weaving.”
“Okay.” He sighed. “A weaving.”
“And no, it’s not the same,” she said. “Those Sedona stores carry tourist junk—they’re acrylic, not wool. I want the weavings that they sell on the reservation. And supposedly the trading post has an old Sandpainting weaving from the twenties, by Hosteen Klah. And I want it.”
“Okay, Liz.” Personally, Baker didn’t see why they needed another Navajo rug—weaving—anyway. They already had two dozen. She had them all over the house. And packed away in closets, too.
They drove on in silence. The road ahead shimmered in the heat, so it looked like a silver lake. And there were mirages, houses or people rising up on the road, but always when you came closer, there was nothing there.
Dan Baker sighed again. “We must’ve passed it.”
“Let’s give it a few more miles,” his wife said.
“How many more?”
“I don’t know. A few more.”
“How many, Liz? Let’s decide how far we’ll go with this thing.”
“Ten more minutes,” she said.
“Okay,” he said, “ten minutes.”
He was looking at his gas gauge when Liz threw her hand to her mouth and said, “Dan!” Baker turned back to the road just in time to see a shape flash by—a man, in brown, at the side of the road—and hear a loud thump from the side of the car.
“Oh my God!” she said. “We hit him!”
“What?”
“We hit that guy.”
“No, we didn’t. We hit a pothole.”
In the rearview mirror, Baker could see the man still standing at the side of the road. A figure in brown, rapidly disappearing in the dust cloud behind the car as they drove away.
“We couldn’t have hit him,” Baker said. “He’s still standing.”
“Dan. We hit him. I saw it.”
“I don’t think so, honey.”
Baker looked again in the rearview mirror. But now he saw nothing except the cloud of dust behind the car.
“We better go back,” she said.
“Why?”
Baker was pretty sure that his wife was wrong and that they hadn’t hit the man on the road. But if they had hit him, and if he was even slightly injured—just a head cut, a scratch—then it was going to mean a very long delay in their trip. They’d never get to Phoenix by nightfall. Anybody out here was undoubtedly a Navajo; they’d have to take him to a hospital, or at least to the nearest big town, which was Gallup, and that was out of their way—
“I thought you wanted to go back,” she said.
“I do.”
“Then let’s go back.”
“I just don’t want any problems, Liz.”
“Dan. I don’t believe this.”
He sighed, and slowed the car. “Okay, I’m turning. I’m turning.”
And he turned around, being careful not to get stuck in the red sand at the side of the road, and headed back the way they had come.
“Oh Jesus.”
Baker pulled over, and jumped out into the dust cloud of his own car. He gasped as he felt the blast of heat on his face and body. It must be 120 degrees out here, he thought.
As the dust cleared, he saw the man lying at the side of the road, trying to raise himself up on his elbow. The guy was shaky, about seventy, balding and bearded. His skin was pale; he didn’t look Navajo. His brown clothes were fashioned into long robes. Maybe he’s a priest, Baker thought.
“Are you all right?” Baker said as he helped the man to sit up on the dirt road.
The old man coughed. “Yeah. I’m all right.”
“Do you want to stand up?” he said. He was relieved not to see any blood.
“In a minute.”
Baker looked around. “Where’s your car?” he said.
The man coughed again. Head hanging limply, he stared at the dirt road.
“Dan, I think he’s hurt,” his wife said.
“Yeah,” Baker said. The old guy certainly seemed to be confused. Baker looked around again: there was nothing but flat desert in all directions, stretching away into shimmering haze.
No car. Nothing.
“How’d he get out here?” Baker said.
“Come on,” Liz said, “we have to take him to a hospital.”
Baker put his hands under the man’s armpits and helped the old guy to his feet. The man’s clothes were heavy, made of a material like felt, but he wasn’t sweating in the heat. In fact, his body felt cool, almost cold.
The old guy leaned heavily on Baker as they crossed the road. Liz opened the back door. The old man said, “I can walk. I can talk.”
“Okay. Fine.” Baker eased him into the back seat.
The man lay down on the leather, curling into a fetal position. Underneath his robes, he was wearing ordinary clothes: jeans, a checked shirt, Nikes. He closed the door, and Liz got back in the front seat. Baker hesitated, remaining outside in the heat. How was it possible the old guy was out here all alone? Wearing all those clothes and not sweating?
It was as if he had just stepped out of a car.
So maybe he’d been driving, Baker thought. Maybe he’d fallen asleep. Maybe his car had gone off the road and he’d had an accident. Maybe there was someone else still trapped in the car.
He heard the old guy muttering, “Left it, heft it. Go back now, get it now, and how.”
Baker crossed the road to have a look. He stepped over a very large pothole, considered showing it to his wife, then decided not to.
Off the road, he didn’t see any tire tracks, but he saw clearly the old man’s footprints in the sand. The footprints ran back from the road into the desert. Thirty yards away, Baker saw the rim of an arroyo, a ravine cut into the landscape. The footprints seemed to come from there.
So he followed the footsteps back to the arroyo, stood at the edge, and looked down into it. There was no car. He saw nothing but a snake, slithering away from him among the rocks. He shivered.
Something white caught his eye, glinting in the sunlight a few feet down the slope. Baker scrambled down for a better look. It was a piece of white ceramic about an inch square. It looked like an electrical insulator. Baker picked it up, and was surprised to find it was cool to the touch. Maybe it was one of those new materials that didn’t absorb heat.
Looking closely at the ceramic, he saw the letters ITC stamped on one edge. And there was a kind of button, recessed in the side. He wondered what would happen if he pushed the button. Standing in the heat, with big boulders all around him, he pushed it.
Nothing happened.
He pushed it again. Again nothing.
Baker climbed out of the ravine and went back to the car. The old guy was sleeping, snoring loudly. Liz was looking at the maps. “Nearest big town is Gallup.”
Baker started the engine. “Gallup it is.”
Back on the main highway, they made better time, heading south to Gallup. The old guy was still sleeping. Liz looked at him and said, “Dan . . .”
“What?”
“You see his hands?”
“What about them?”
“The fingertips.”
Baker looked away from the road, glanced quickly into the back seat. The old guy’s fingertips were red to the second knuckle. “So? He’s sunburned.”
“Just on the tips? Why not the whole hand?”
Baker shrugged.
“His fingers weren’t like that before,” she said. “They weren’t red when we picked him up.”
“Honey, you probably just didn’t notice them.”
“I did notice, because he had a manicure. And I thought it was interesting that some old guy in the desert would have a manicure.”
“Uh-huh.” Baker glanced at his watch. He wondered how long they would have to stay at the hospital in Gallup. Hours, probably.
He sighed.
The road continued straight ahead.
HALFWAY TO GALLUP, the old guy woke up. He coughed and said, “Are we there? Are we where?”
“How are you feeling?” Liz said.
“Feeling? I’m reeling. Fine, just fine.”
“What’s your name?” Liz said.
The man blinked at her. “The quondam phone made me roam.”
“But what’s your name?”
The man said, “Name same, blame game.”
Baker said, “He’s rhyming everything.”
She said, “I noticed, Dan.”
“I saw a TV show on this,” Baker said. “Rhyming means he’s schizophrenic.”
“Rhyming is timing,” the old man said. And then he began to sing loudly, almost shouting to the tune of the old John Denver song:
“Quondam phone, makes me roam,
to the place I belong,
old Black Rocky, country byway,
quondam phone, it’s on roam.”
“Oh boy,” Baker said.
“Sir,” Liz said again, “can you tell me your name?”
“Niobium may cause opprobrium. Hairy singularities don’t permit parities.”
Baker sighed. “Honey, this guy is nuts.”
“A nut by any other name would smell like feet.”
But his wife wouldn’t give up. “Sir? Do you know your name?”
“Call Gordon,” the man said, shouting now. “Call Gordon, call Stanley. Keep in the family.”
“But, sir—”
“Liz,” Baker said, “leave him alone. Let him settle down, okay? We still have a long drive.”
Bellowing, the old man sang: “To the place I belong, old black magic, it’s so tragic, country foam, makes me groan.” And immediately, he started to sing it again.
“How much farther?” Liz said.
“Don’t ask.”
He telephoned ahead, so when he pulled the Mercedes under the red-and-cream-colored portico of the McKinley Hospital Trauma Unit, the orderlies were waiting there with a gurney. The old man remained passive as they eased him onto the gurney, but as soon as they began to strap him down, he became agitated, shouting, “Unhand me, unband me!”
“It’s for your own safety, sir,” one orderly said.
“So you say, out of my way! Safety is the last refuge of the scoundrel!”
Baker was impressed by the way the orderlies handled the guy, gently but still firmly, strapping him down. He was equally impressed by the petite dark-haired woman in a white coat who fell into step with them. “I’m Beverly Tsosie,” she said, shaking hands with them. “I’m the physician on call.” She was very calm, even though the man on the gurney continued to yell as they wheeled him into the trauma center. “Quondam phone, makes me roam. . . .”
Everybody in the waiting room was looking at him. Baker saw a young kid of ten or eleven, his arm in a sling, sitting in a chair with his mother, watching the old man curiously. The kid whispered something to his mother.
The old guy sang, “To the plaaaaace I belongggg. . . .”
Dr. Tsosie said, “How long has he been this way?”
“From the beginning. Ever since we picked him up.”
“Except when he was sleeping,” Liz said.
“Was he ever unconscious?”
“No.”
“Any nausea, vomiting?”
“No.”
“And you found him where? Out past Corazón Canyon?”
“About five, ten miles beyond.”
“Not much out there,” she said.
“You know it?” Baker said.
“I grew up around there.” She smiled slightly. “Chinle.”
They wheeled the old man, still shouting, through a swinging door. Dr. Tsosie said, “If you’ll wait here, I’ll get back to you as soon as I know something. It’ll probably be a while. You might want to go get lunch.”
Beverly Tsosie had a staff position at University Hospital in Albuquerque, but lately she’d been coming to Gallup two days a week to be with her elderly grandmother, and on those days she worked a shift in the McKinley Trauma Unit to make extra money. She liked McKinley, with its modern exterior painted in bold red and cream stripes. The hospital was really dedicated to the community. And she liked Gallup, a smaller town than Albuquerque, and a place where she felt more comfortable with a tribal background.
Most days, the Trauma Unit was pretty quiet. So the arrival of this old man, agitated and shouting, was causing a lot of commotion. She pushed through the curtains into the cubicle, where the orderlies had already stripped off the brown felt robes and removed his Nikes. But the old man was still struggling, fighting them, so they had to leave him strapped down. They were cutting his jeans and the plaid shirt away.
Nancy Hood, the senior unit nurse, said it didn’t matter because his shirt had a big defect anyway; across the pocket there ran a jagged line where the pattern didn’t match. “He already tore it and sewed it back together. You ask me, pretty lousy job, too.”
“No,” said one of the orderlies, holding up the shirt. “It’s never been sewn together, it’s all one piece of cloth. Weird, the pattern doesn’t line up because one side is bigger than the other. . . .”
“Whatever, he won’t miss it,” Nancy Hood said, and tossed it on the floor. She turned to Tsosie. “You want to try and examine him?”
The man was far too wild. “Not yet. Let’s get an IV in each arm. And go through his pockets. See if he’s got any identification at all. If he doesn’t, take his fingerprints and fax them to D.C.; maybe he’ll show up on a database there.”
Twenty minutes later, Beverly Tsosie was examining a kid who had broken his arm sliding into third. He was a bespectacled, nerdy-looking kid, and he seemed almost proud of his sports injury.
Nancy Hood came over and said, “We searched the John Doe.”
“And?”
“Nothing helpful. No wallet, no credit cards, no keys. The only thing he had on him was this.” She gave Beverly a folded piece of paper. It looked like a computer printout, and showed an odd pattern of dots in a gridlike pattern. At the bottom was written “mon. ste. mere.”
“‘Monstemere?’ Does that mean anything to you?”
Hood shook her head. “You ask me, he’s psychotic.”
Beverly Tsosie said, “Well, I can’t sedate him until we know what’s going on in his head. Better get skull films to rule out trauma and hematoma.”
“Radiology’s being remodeled, remember, Bev? X rays’ll take forever. Why don’t you do an MRI? Scan total body, you have it all.”
“Order it,” Tsosie said.
Nancy Hood turned to leave. “Oh, and surprise, surprise. Jimmy is here, from the police.”
Dan Baker was restless. Just as he predicted, they’d had to spend hours sitting around the waiting room of McKinley Hospital. After they got lunch—burritos in red chile sauce—they had come back to see a policeman in the parking lot, looking over their car, running his hand along the side door panel. Just seeing him gave Baker a chill. He thought of going over to the cop but decided not to. Instead, they returned to the waiting room. He called his daughter and said they’d be late; in fact, they might not even get to Phoenix until tomorrow.
And they waited. Finally, around four o’clock, when Baker went to the desk to inquire about the old man, the woman said, “Are you a relative?”
“No, but—”
“Then please wait over there. Doctor will be with you shortly.”
He went back and sat down, sighing. He got up again, walked over to the window, and looked at his car. The cop had gone, but now there was a fluttering tag under the windshield wiper. Baker drummed his fingers on the windowsill. These little towns, you get in trouble, anything could happen. And the longer he waited, the more his mind spun scenarios. The old guy was in a coma; they couldn’t leave town until he woke up. The old guy died; they were charged with manslaughter. They weren’t charged, but they had to appear at the inquest, in four days.
When somebody finally came to talk to them, it wasn’t the petite doctor, it was the cop. He was a young policeman in his twenties, in a neatly pressed uniform. He had long hair, and his nametag said JAMES WAUNEKA. Baker wondered what kind of a name that was. Hopi or Navajo, probably.
“Mr. and Mrs. Baker?” Wauneka was very polite, introduced himself. “I’ve just been with the doctor. She’s finished her examination, and the MRI results are back. There’s absolutely no evidence he was struck by a car. And I looked at your car myself. No sign of any impact. I think you may have hit a pothole and just thought you hit him. Road’s pretty bad out there.”
Baker glared at his wife, who refused to meet his eye. Liz said, “Is he going to be all right?”
“Looks like it, yes.”
“Then we can go?” Baker said.
“Honey,” Liz said, “don’t you want to give him that thing you found?”
“Oh, yes.” Baker brought out the little ceramic square. “I found this, near where he was.”
The cop turned the ceramic over in his hands. “ITC,” he said, reading the stamp on the side. “Where exactly did you find this?”
“About thirty yards from the road. I thought he might have been in a car that went off the road, so I checked. But there was no car.”
“Anything else?”
“No. That’s all.”
“Well, thanks,” Wauneka said, slipping the ceramic in his pocket. And then he paused. “Oh, I almost forgot.” He took a piece of paper out of his pocket and unfolded it carefully. “We found this in his clothing. I wondered if you had ever seen it.”
Baker glanced at the paper: a bunch of dots arranged in grids. “No,” he said. “I’ve never seen it before.”
“You didn’t give it to him?”
“No.”
“Any idea what it might be?”
“No,” Baker said. “No idea at all.”
“Well, I think I do,” his wife said.
“You do?” the cop said.
“Yes,” she said. “Do you mind if I, uh . . .” And she took the paper from the policeman.
had