It was the first day of November, and the mercury thermometer hit fifty-eight at noon. Cyrus had bundled up in a conflicting mix of layers, with a woolen blanket over his legs and a mere tee shirt over his chest as he wheeled his chair around the room, and checked the schematics one more time. He ran his fingers over the spare vacuum tubes he’d put on the workbench. Cyrus had checked their quality as best he could, but for as cheap as he was buying them, there was no guarantee for any of them. It would have been much easier, much lighter if he could have upgraded to using transistors, but that wasn’t in the cards any time soon.
Still, there was some small respite. Cyrus looked out the window to where Mom and Dad were moving through the fields, leading the rest of the family, and gathering the ripe, red spheres of tomatoes.
Dad had taken a real gamble, there. He’d bartered, begged, and taken out a loan on the house to gain the seeds necessary, and planted a wilding crop late on the hope that the summer would be wet enough that the usual rules wouldn’t apply, and enough would survive through the oven of August for a good crop in the late fall. And so it had. Moreover, he was one of the few farms in the region that had dared to take that gamble.
It helped that they’d spent most of the last few months composting. Without that, they never could have done tomatoes. For once, the cattle were earning their keep.
If they had gone for the usual medley of root vegetables, or grain, they would have washed out. Sure, they would have gotten a slightly better crop, but they would have been up against all of their neighbors, who were far, far too smart to literally bet the farm on a long shot like tomatoes. And the price would have been middling, at best. They didn’t have the connections to do business in the more distant markets, not any more. The Colfax farm lived and died with their local connections.
So Cyrus had to admit, grudgingly, that his Dad’s time spent shmoozing was at least a little useful.
But though his parents counted it as a triumph, and the good mood had spread to the entire house, Cyrus knew it was only a bandage. They didn’t let him look at the finances any more, but he was pretty sure they weren’t out of the red. They’d just bought more time. And the weather and markets were fickle enough that the same trick wasn’t likely to work twice.
He’d kept that to himself, though. Cyrus had always taken a pessimistic view of the world, and it hadn’t gained him much good will. Why ruin someone else’s day? He’d learned that over the years. It was one of the reasons why he took comfort in books about fantastical things that could never exist; There, there was always a happy ending, even if it was hard fought, and came with sacrifice.
Here… Cyrus wheeled to the western-facing window, leaving the happy shouts and chatter of his family behind, and scowled at the river bank.
The rest of the family had moved on. Cyrus hadn’t. Beth had stuck around for a bit, but without any new information, without any thing he could follow up on, days had turned into weeks, had turned into months, and now the Colfax House had mourned, and given up on their wayward boy, and Beth had gone back to her business, promising to help any way
But Cyrus hadn’t. And though his parents had quietly asked him a few questions about his mental health and sanity, he knew what he’d seen. And he had the photos to prove it.
Well, to prove something, anyway. He stared at the three best ones, up on the cork board, peeling a bit despite his best efforts to keep them preserved.
Maybe he was a little nuts. But hell, this whole situation was nuts. And while he couldn’t work on THAT, the least he could do was fix something he knew he could improve.
By the time the sun was down lower to the horizon, his hands were aching and Jordan, who had taken Rusty’s duties, had delivered two Colfax special BLT sandwiches for dinner. They were special mainly because the fact that the B stood for buns instead of bacon, but they held body and soul together. The mayo helped, anyway. Cyrus sat back in the wheelchair, tucked his blanket back over his legs where it had shifted after his last trip to the bathroom, and studied the adjustments he’d made in the guts of his prototype.
It should work. It will work, he thought, shaking off his worries.
The main problem he was having with the scope, was that the filter hadn’t been working as well as he needed it to.
The core of it was done. It was a solid night vision scope. It was pretty comparable to what he’d heard some of the techies he’d transported back in Korea talking about. But… that was seven years ago. And though the army was the army, he was pretty sure they had better stuff by now. Which was fine, because he was doing this all with third-rate hardware. This was a proof of concept; if he could get funding and a lab and people to help him, then he was sure he could upscale it to one of the best night vision sights in the world.
But he was trying for more than that. Cyrus had read enough books about patents and history to know that he needed to make a big splash, too big for some rich asshole to steal his ideas and hire labs full of scientists to do it better and pitch THAT to the government. Cyrus knew he had to keep a firm hold on his own tech, because there was always some other greedy bastard looking for an easy buck. And they didn’t have a farm full of Colfaxes to worry about.
Cyrus had decided that the way to do that was to make a scope that could work as a regular scope, even while the sun was in the sky. Even when it was facing in the same general direction as the sun. And to do that and have any chance of doing it without frying very sensitive parts, he needed to get the filters just right.
That had been the last year of his life, more or less. Trying to find ways and combinations of the right materials to give his prototype some form of protection that worked without killing functionality.
And most of it had come to nothing, up until he’d started experimenting with radium.
Cyrus opened up the drawer where he kept the broken clocks, the ones that had been painted with glow-in-the-dark paint, so you could read the numbers in the dark. He pulled out his dust mask, put it over his face, and got to work scraping.
Yeah, adding this stuff to the mix had probably cut a few years off his life, but he was pretty sure he wasn’t going out due to old age, as mangled as he was on both the outside and the inside. And the trick with the radium, was that you didn’t need MUCH of it.
He eyed the window as he worked. Half an hour until the sun was at juuuuust the right angle. Enough time, if he hurried, and by now he knew the process well.
First, scrape the paint. Next, mix up the chemical bath. Put in half the catalyst. Ease the thin sheet of plastic in after, so thin that he had to avoid breathing too hard, or he’d risk warping it. The dust mask helped there. Ease the plastic into the top of the bath, leave a gap. Then sprinkle the radium-based paint flecks in after, like a cook sprinkling soup with spices. Then, and only then, drop in the catalyzing tablet.
Almost like a ritual, he thought, smiling ruefully. But then his smile faded, as Rusty’s laugh echoed in his memories.
Cyrus hadn’t been reading many fantasy books of late.
The thought darkened his mood again. He watched the chemical bath turn greenish, watched the plastic sheet shrink and blacken. And when it was condensed to the right size, he took the two pairs of tweezers, lifted it out with slow, careful movements, and draped it over the inner lens of the scope. Allow a few minutes to let it set, then screw the outer lens in place… and there. He paused a moment to jot down the mix on a new page. This was science. He’d done forty-three different mixes before, each one a little different. And he’d do forty-three hundred more, if that was what it took to get it right.
Cyrus sealed the prototype casing, and wheeled both it and himself over to the window, where the light was now streaming in with nothing between it and him but miles and miles of empty Texas.
And then he turned it on.
It wasn’t dramatic. Cyrus believed that drama was for theaters and television shows, and kept his own work simple and solid. The only noticeable change that happened was that the lights in the room flickered, and the prototype hummed slightly. But the little red light that was supposed to warn him that the filter had failed remained dark, and so he put it up to his remaining eye and took a gander west.
Immediately he could tell he’d be doing a lot more tests. The mix was going in the wrong direction. It blocked out the sun pretty well, but it blocked out a ton of details that prior mixes had revealed. Cyrus put it down, reached for his screwdriver… then sighed, and picked the prototype up again. He’d documented his early tests a little too thoroughly. If he wanted to provide good evidence to the Department of Defense that he’d done his due diligence, he had to keep the reports at relatively the same quality.
So he heaved himself out of his chair, turned off the prototype, and wrestled the boxy tube up onto the tripod, making sure that the wires were well connected. The electrical systems of the house were running a delicate balance right now; it would be all too easy for one of the multiple power plugs feeding into the three wall sockets to jar loose, and fry a fuse. Then that’d be another trip down to the basement, and more time lost for a test that he knew was going to come up as a failed attempt anyway.
Then he turned it on again. It hummed and whined, the electronics inside protesting against the strain, before it evened out. Cyrus exhaled. You had to give it some cooldown between activations. That wouldn’t be a problem when it had a military-grade battery or generator hooked up to it, but here, in his family home, it was a real problem. Strain the circuits the wrong way, and good bye fuse. Hell, if someone turned on the television or put on all the lights right now, it might go pop.
He didn’t expect that to happen, but he worked quickly, nonetheless, putting his eye to the scope and rotating it through the various angles, studying the scenery visible out the back windows as he had so many times before. He pushed the button that took photos of the details he’d photographed again and again, pausing after each one and winding the film through, to be developed later.
And then he paused, staring at the river bank.
There was an odd discoloration there. It almost looked like an oil slick. He ran the sight over it, swiveling it back and forth across the view to make sure that nothing had got on the lens, or that the chemical coating wasn’t breaking down. But no, every time he shifted it away, it went away. And every time he swept that spot, it came back.
Cyrus noted it, and then he remembered where he’d seen something like that before. He pushed himself back from the prototype, sending it rocking, and barely managed to grab it before it fell.
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Then he stood, on wobbling legs, and hauled himself over to the corkboard, bracing on the tables and furniture as he went, sending tools and components and notes clattering and fluttering to the ground. He lurched forward, grabbed a photo off the cork board, ripping away part of it, and hurried back to the scope.
He looked through it, and then, with a shaking hand, held up the photograph.
It was the very location where Rusty had vanished. The blot covered the exact space where Rusty and the stranger had been standing.
He’d seen these rainbow colors before. They had started showing up on the film after Rusty vanished, now that he thought of it, but they suffused the entire area. He’d assumed that they were a result of faulty mixes, and done his best to cut them down, adjusting the batches to get rid of the error.
But it wasn’t an error. There was something there. Some energy, some result of the stranger’s disappearing trick, some arcane remnant he’d left behind…
With trembling hands, Cyrus took the picture. Then he took more, shifting the scope to the sides, getting good shots, feeling joy sing in his brain as he found another piece of proof, proof that he wasn’t crazy, proof that something insane and, well, magical, had happened.
And more than that, hope. Hope that his brother could be found. Could be saved. Hope that Cyrus could maybe somehow reach the place where he had gone, and—
The phone rang in the kitchen.
And every light in the house winked out as the fuses blew.
*****
“Listen,” Barry Dyson told Cyrus, as he pulled into the parking lot of Patman’s bar, “I ain’t one to tell you your business, but this ain’t a place for good folks.”
“Dad likes it well enough,” Cyrus muttered.
“Did I stutter?” Barry chuckled at his own joke. He was a large man, who’d put on a lot of weight since the Germans had given him a gift of a shrapnel chunk in one knee back on the beaches of Normandy. He’d been a friend of the family since way back in the day, and one of the reasons that Cy had gone into the service.
And he was one of the few people that Cyrus could get to drive him, when Dad was out with the Chevy. There was just a hint of guilt in Barry’s eyes whenever Cyrus talked to him, and Cyrus knew that the middle-aged man was wondering if he’d done the right thing, encouraging Cyrus to join up. That was one of the reasons that Cyrus steered clear of him, most days. Barry was a good man. It wasn’t his fault things had worked out the way they had.
“Anyway I’ll be fine,” Cyrus said. “I’m catching a ride from here. So even if I have a couple, I won’t be driving.”
Bill pursed his lips. “Ain’t the beer I’m worried about, the shit Patman sells wouldn’t get a newborn foal tipsy. More worried about the local wildlife.”
“They have no reason to come after me,” Cyrus shrugged. Then he dug in his pockets, and held out a crayon that he’d stowed just for the occasion. “Here you go. A snack for the way back.”
Bill laughed his ass off, helped him out of the car, and drove off grinning. It was an old joke in the service about marines and their appetites for school supplies, but it never failed to get Bill smiling. Once a jarhead, always a jarhead.
Once he was gone, Cyrus leaned heavily on his cane, and shivered in the cold breeze as he considered the bar. The parking lot was pretty well emptied out, with only two vehicles in it. One old red Ford pickup that he’d seen many times before, and a dusty, but newish looking Chevy Bel Air. It was a miracle that nobody here had stripped it for parts.
But then, it was dead tonight. And on a Friday, too. For a second, Cyrus felt his guts twist in a way he hadn’t felt since he’d been out in the far hills, out in Korea, knowing that someone unfriendly was looking for them.
Only for a second, though. Cyrus put it out of his mind. If the friend he was meeting here wanted him dead, he would have been dead many times over already. As far as he knew, there was no one getting a percentage from another dead Colfax.
Still, he felt in his pocket until he felt the snubby barrel of the thirty-eight, tapped it for comfort, and hobbled in, one hand guiding the cane, the other on the grip of the gun.
All of Cyrus’ fears faded, as he stepped in through the screen door, and saw the figure alone at the other end of the room, holding up the table in the corner. He felt a big grin stretch his face, and Kenworth Bartleby offered a slight smile in return, as he hefted a mason jar and mimed toasting him.
“This your friend here, Cy?” Redd Patman asked from the bar.
“Sure is,” Cyrus said. Something in Redd’s tone sounded off, though. Nervous. Cy hesitated in the doorway. “You all right there, Pat? You sound like a goose walked over your grave.”
“Ah, it’s uh, it’s nothing,” Pat flicked his eyes between them. “Listen, I need to head home early tonight. If I leave you the spare keys, reckon you could close down and lock up after you’re done? Just toss’em through the hole in the wall after that’s done.”
Cyrus nodded, easing up. THAT was why the bar was deserted. He nodded, stumping past, losing all his worry as he felt his eagerness grow. “Sure, Pat,” he said, and barely took notice of the bartender getting out of Dodge.
Bartleby rose and turned the chair across from him to one side, before settling back down and pushing his mason jar away, gingerly. “Hello, Cyrus,” he said, those BBC announcer tones seeming thoroughly out of place here in the furthest reaches of the Texas sticks.
“Bartleby,” Cyrus waited until he was sitting down to shake the man’s hand, but that damnfool grin of his wouldn’t die, and some of the good humor broke through Bartleby’s shell of British stoicism, and the man finally offered a grin back. Just a small one. A flash of teeth, nothing more.
But the handshake was firm, and Bartleby relaxed, stared mournfully at the mostly-full mason jar. “Of all the alcohol I’ve ever ingested, that was certainly some of it. Everything I expected and less, really.”
“Redd makes his profits on quantity, not quality,” Cyrus said. “I never touch the stuff myself. Unless I need to strip some paint.”
“Best to buy in bulk then, a bottle would need reinforcements to de-colorize even the smallest disgruntled tin soldier.”
The door shut behind them, but Bartleby held up a finger, waited until the engine of the old pickup coughed to life, and sputtered off into the distance before he relaxed. “There we are. Clear to talk. And I believe that we very much need to have a discussion.”
“Mm,” Cyrus nodded. “I’m hoping you don’t need my services. But I’ve come prepared if that’s the case.”
When people asked him what he did in the army, he was telling the truth when he told them he mostly drove trucks behind the lines.
But nobody thought to ask which side of the lines he’d been behind for most of it.
And Bartleby had been one of many quiet, professional, people from agencies full of letters and numbers that Cyrus knew better than to ask too closely about. It had been Cyrus’ job to drive and guard those people to their meetings and observation points, and to either return them intact, or put a bullet in them if it looked like they were about to be captured alive.
He’d done much of the former and none of the latter, thankfully.
“No, old boy,” Bartleby said, leaning back. His hair was thinning now, Cyrus noted. The man had to be in his late fifties, or maybe well-preserved sixties. Most of his hair was iron-gray, slicked back with pomade. He was tall and lanky, his suit wrinkled but clean. And his eyes were brown and full of guarded concern, as he scrutinized Cyrus. “Quite the opposite. I’m here to help YOU.”
“Help me?” Cyrus blinked his eye. “I’m not sure I’m following. Is something wrong?”
“I’m hoping that it isn’t,” Bartleby said, picking up the mason jar and swirling the rotgut inside, watching dirt and flecks of god knew what swirl in the flickering light of the bulb. “But I want to hear more of your situation, first. Are you trying to go into business for yourself?”
“I’m not sure what you mean,” Cyrus said. “I’m trying to build something to pitch to the army, but it’s a work in progress. So I reckon maybe?”
Bartleby shut his eyes. “Not entirely what I meant, but that’s quite reassuring. I was worried you’d sold out.”
Cyrus snorted. “I don’t have enough intel to sell you out even if I wanted to. Couldn’t tell you much about what y’all were up to. I kept my head down and my nose in those electrical manuals you guys left lying around.”
“I expected that it was a remote possibility, but it’s good to get confirmation from your own lips, dear fellow.” Bartleby smiled, reached into his pocket, and took a swig from a hip flask. Cyrus stretched out his hand, and they shared a snootful of brandy that was probably the best stuff ever to cross the threshold of Patman’s bar. It was an old ritual, a familiar one, and it settled Cyrus’ nerves.
“So what did you say to Redd to get him out of here in such a hurry?” he asked, enjoying the buzz.
Bartleby paused in the middle of digging out a pair of cigars. “Do you mean our esteemed host? Fellow who entrusted you with the keys to his livelihood?”
“That’s the culprit.”
“Nothing. I said nothing to him, after answering his questions about my business in his establishment. He appeared to be troubled, when I arrived, but I rather doubt I was the cause of it.”
“Slowest night I ever seen, I admit. Not that I’m here too often.” Cyrus slid back the hip flask, let out an appreciative belch. “So now you know I’m on the straight and narrow, what’s all this about? I get a phone call from you, you tell me to come here, I’m expecting the worst…”
“Ah.” Bartleby sucked air through his teeth. “Truth be told, I don’t know the full details. But when I see a request for information coming across Five Eyes channels and you’re the topic, then you might understand my concern.”
Cyrus lost a good chunk of his buzz. He had mostly kept his head down and taught himself electronics while the spooks he was ferrying set up their radio sites and monitoring stations. Mostly was the keyword there. Enough of them were talkative out there in the back hills of Korea, that he’d picked up some knowledge. Five Eyes referred to an agreement between American and British intelligence agencies, to share information about mutual problems.
“Am I a problem?” Cyrus asked, after the silence had dragged on for some long seconds.
“Somebody is certainly concerned about the possibility,” Bartleby drawled. “Though I must confess that I wonder about the timing. Why now?”
Cyrus squeezed his eye shut. “It’s my brother. He’s gone.” He told Bartleby everything. And at the end of it, Bartleby was staring at him like he was a ghost.
“You didn’t mention a word of this to me,” Bartleby whispered, and the hip flask clattered against the table as his hand shook.
“No. It sounds crazy, but—”
“It’s not. It happened. You’re sane. And I’m sorry, but you have to write him off. He’s not coming back.”
Cyrus stared at him. “You know something.”
“Walk away,” Bartleby said, rising. “I’ll cover for you, I’ll find a way to stall the report, you can go back to your own life—”
“YOU KNOW SOMETHING!” Cyrus roared, and flipped the table as he rose. Bartleby stumbled back, and Cyrus took one step, two, thrust his arms against the wall to keep Bartleby from escaping, and stared at him from inches away. “What do you know?” he hissed.
Bartleby stared at him, mouth open, the brandy on his breath filling the space between them. “I know that if it’s the unicorn, he might live,” the spy whispered. “But if it’s the lion, then pray that he’s dead.”
Cyrus stared, the anger ebbing from him, replaced by confusion. “What?”
The screen door slammed in its frame, and Cyrus twisted, almost fell. Bartleby grabbed him, helped steady his wobbly legs.
And they turned to see Steve Colfax staring at his son, almost as pale as Bartleby. Cyrus’ Dad didn’t give them a second to gather their thoughts.
“Come with me right now, we gotta stop them! They’re gonna burn Bunktown!”