Mysterium

“That’s not all,” the truck driver said. “Even the trees don’t match. This side’s been burned off a couple of times, I think. Over there it’s all old growth. Go a little ways in that direction, there’s an old pine sliced right up the middle. All the heartwood exposed and the sap leakin’ out. The bugs aren’t at it yet, so it must have happened just recently. Like last night.”

Dex said, “You come from out of town?”

“Yeah, but I spent the night in Two Rivers. Had the alternator replaced. I sure as hell wish I could leave, but it’s the same at the other end of the highway, about three miles beyond the quarry. Dead end. I think we’re locked in, unless there’s some side road they missed.”

“They?”

“Whoever did this. Or whatever. You know what I mean. Maybe there’s still a way out of town, but I doubt it.”

The woman repeated, “How is that possible?” By the expression on the truck driver’s face, Dex guessed she had been saying it for a while now.

He couldn’t blame her. It was the right question, he thought. In a way, it was the only question. But he couldn’t answer it; and he felt his own great fear treading on the heels of the mystery.

∞

Howard Poole chased the ladder company as far as the old Ojibway reserve. As he came over the rise where Chief Haldane and his crew had recently been, and as he saw the research installation in its veil of blue light, a memory came to him unbidden.

It was a memory of something Alan Stern had said to him one night —Stern the physicist, who might have perished in the trouble last night; Stern, his uncle.

Howard had been sixteen years old, a math prodigy with a keen interest in high-energy physics, about to be launched into an academic fast track that both excited and frightened him. Stern had come to visit for a week that summer. He was a celebrity: Alan Stern had appeared in Time magazine, “preeminent among a new generation of American scientists,” photographed against a line of radio telescopes somewhere out west. He had been interviewed on public television and had published journal articles so dense with mathematics that they looked like untranslated Greek papyruses. At sixteen, Howard had worshiped his uncle without reservation.

Stern had come to the house in Queens, bald and extravagantly bearded, infinitely patient with family gossip, courteous at the dinner table and modest about his career. Howard had learned to cultivate his own patience. Sooner or later, he knew, he would be left alone with his uncle; and the conversation would begin as it always began, Stern smiling his strange conspirator’s smile and asking, “So what have you learned about the world?”

They sat on the back porch watching fireflies, a Saturday night in August, and Stern dazed him with starry sweeps of science: the ideas of Hawking, Guth, Linde, himself. Howard liked the way such talk made him feel both small and large—dwarfed by the night sky and at the same time a part of it.

Then, when the talk had begun to lull, his uncle turned to him and said, “Do you ever wonder, Howard, about the questions we can’t ask?”

“Can’t answer, you mean?”

“No. Can’t ask.”

“I don’t understand.”

Stern leaned back in his deck chair and folded his hands over his gaunt, ascetic frame. His glasses were opaque in the porch light. The crickets seemed suddenly loud.

“Think about a dog,” he said. “Think about your dog—what’s his name?”

“Albert.”

“Yes. Think about Albert. He’s a healthy dog, is he not?”

“Yes.”

“Intelligent?”

“Sure.”

“He functions in every way normally, then, within the parameters of dogness. He’s an exemplar of his species. And he has the ability to learn, yes? He can do tricks? Learn from his experience? And he’s aware of his surroundings; he can distinguish between you and your mother, for instance? He’s not unconscious or impaired?”

“Right.”

“But despite all that, there’s a limit on his understanding. Obviously so. If we talk about gravitons or Fourier transforms, he can’t follow the conversation. We’re speaking a language he doesn’t know and cannot know. The concepts can’t be translated; his mental universe simply won’t contain them.”

“Granted,” Howard said. “Am I missing the point?”