McDevitt

McDevitt, książki, po angielsku, m

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THE FORT MOXIE
BRANCH
Jack McDevitt
Jack McDevitt lives in Brunswick, Georgia. He has been
a naval officer, an English teacher, and a customs
officer. He has lived in such diverse places as
Philadelphia; Chicago; Washington, D.C.; Rhode Island;
New Hampshire; North Dakota; and Yokohama, Japan.
He did not begin writing until his mid-forties, and (an
encouragement to all late-bloomers) he deservedly
managed to sell the first story to roll out of his
typewriter.
His short fiction has appeared in a variety of markets,
and his story “Cryptic” was on the final Hugo ballot in
1984. The Hercules Text, his first novel, an Ace Special
published under Terry Carr’s editorship, received the
Philip K. Dick Special Award in 1986 and in a poll of
Locus readers garnered the laurel as best first novel of
 the year. He has also published a colorful novel of
far-future conflict, A Talent for War, and a pair of
stories indicating that war is not inevitable, “Date with
Destiny” in Lewis Shiner’s When the Music’s Over… and
“Valkyrie” in a volume edited by Harry Harrison and
Bruce McAllister and tentatively titled The Peace
Anthology.
McDevitt has a natural, self-effacing prose style that
never raises any barriers between the reader and the
tale being told. And ever since hearing him read at an
SF convention in Atlanta, I can no longer read his work
without hearing his distinctive voice caressing each
word—an eerie, but also a strangely comforting,
experience.
Of “The Fort Moxie Branch,” McDevitt writes: “We ived
for a number of years in Pembina, North Dakota (the
Fort Moxie of the story). The town is smal, population
maybe 600. It ies on the Canadian border, along the
western edge of an ancient shoreine. The inland sea
that once existed there, Lake Agassiz, covered great
parts of the Dakotas, Minnesota, and Manitoba.
“You can stl make out the general coastal
configuration from the air. But Agassiz, in its time the
largest of the Great Lakes, is gone. Lost in the
meltwaters of the retreating glaciers.
“The missing lake has always struck me as something of
an outrage. The ultimate symbol of a relativistic
universe where nothing quite survives. And things get
lost far too easly. So I bult Fort Moxie’s branch of a
very special ibrary. With a lot of help (by the way) from
the story doctors at the Sycamore Hl workshop.”
In many ways, this is a wish-fulflment story for writers,
but it is also a strong psychological study of a good man
and a moving lament for the mutabity—the
perishabity—of our ives and works. No wonder that
“The Fort Moxie Branch” was also a finaist for the Hugo
Award for best short story. As is usualy the case with a
McDevitt story, it resonates in readers’ memories as wel
as in writers’.
 A few minutes into the blackout, the window in the single
dormer at the top of Will Potter’s house began to glow. I watched
it from across Route 11, through a screen of box elders, and
through the snow which had been falling all afternoon and was
now getting heavier. It was smeary and insubstantial, not the way a
bedroom light would look, but as though something luminous
floated in the dark interior.
Will Potter was dead. We’d put him in the graveyard on the
other side of the expressway three years before. The property had
lain empty since, a two-story frame dating from about the turn of
the century.
The town had gone quiet with the blackout. Somewhere a dog
barked, and a garage door banged down. Ed Kiernan’s station
wagon rumbled past, headed out toward Cavalier. The streetlights
were out, as was the traffic signal down at Twelfth.
As far as I was concerned, the power could have stayed off.
It was trash night. I was hauling out cartons filled with copies
of
Independence Square
, and I was on my way down the outside
staircase when everything had gone dark.
The really odd thing about the light over at Potter’s was that it
seemed to be spreading. It had crept outside: the dormer began to
burn with a steady, cold, blue-white flame. It flowed gradually
down the slope of the roof, slipped over the drainpipe, and turned
the corner of the porch. Just barely, in the illumination, I could
 make out the skewed screens and broken stone steps.
It would have taken something unusual to get my attention
that night. I was piling the boxes atop one another, and some of the
books had spilled into the street: my name glittered on the
bindings. It was a big piece of my life. Five years and a quarter
million words and, in the end, most of my life’s savings to get it
printed. It had been painful, and I was glad to be rid of it.
So I was standing on the curb, feeling very sorry for myself
while snow whispered out of a sagging sky.
The Tastee-Freez, Hal’s Lumber, the Amoco at the corner of
Nineteenth and Bannister, were all dark and silent. Toward the
center of town, blinkers and headlights misted in the storm.
It was a still, somehow motionless, night. The flakes were
blue in the pale glow surrounding the house. They fell onto the
gabled roof and spilled gently off the back.
Cass Taylor’s station wagon plowed past, headed out of town.
He waved.
I barely noticed: the back end of Potter’s house had begun to
balloon out. I watched it, fascinated, knowing it to be an illusion,
yet still half-expecting it to explode.
The house began to change in other ways.
Roof and corner lines wavered. New walls dropped into place.
The dormer suddenly ascended, and the top of the house with it. A
third floor, complete with lighted windows and a garret, appeared
out of the snow. (In one of the illuminated rooms, someone
moved.)
Parapets rose, and an oculus formed in the center of the
garret. A bay window pushed out of the lower level, near the front.
An arch and portico replaced the porch. Spruce trees materialized,
and Potter’s old post light, which had never worked, blinked on.
 The box elders were bleak and stark in the foreground.
I stood, worrying about my eyesight, holding onto a carton,
feeling the snow against my face and throat. Nothing moved on
Route 11.
I was still standing there when the power returned: the
streetlights, the electric sign over Hal’s office, the security lights at
the Amoco, gunshots from a TV, the sudden inexplicable rasp of
an electric drill. And, at the same moment, the apparition clicked
off.
I could have gone to bed. I could have hauled out the rest of
those goddamned books, attributed everything to my imagination,
and gone to bed. I’m glad I didn’t.
The snow cover in Potter’s backyard was undisturbed. It was
more than a foot deep beneath the half-inch or so that had fallen
that day. I struggled through it to find the key he’d always kept
wedged beneath a loose hasp near the cellar stairs.
I used it to let myself in through the storage room at the rear
of the house. And I should admit that I had a bad moment when
the door shut behind me, and I stood among the rakes and shovels
and boxes of nails. Too many late TV movies. Too much Stephen
King.
I’d been here before. Years earlier, when I’d thought that
teaching would support me until I was able to earn a living as a
novelist, I’d picked up some extra money by tutoring Potter’s boys.
But that was a long time ago.
I’d brought a flashlight with me. I turned it on, and pushed
through into the kitchen. It was warmer in there, but that was to be
expected. Potter’s heirs were still trying to sell the place, and it gets
too cold in North Dakota to simply shut off the heat altogether.
Cabinets were open and bare; the range had been
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