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Back in the Chiefs office, I remembered Lydia's camera.
Did he have it? He did, along with everything that had been in her pockets. "Then perhaps," I said, "it might be a good idea to have the film developed. She could have got her pictures after all, and they could help the doctors understand what's wrong with her now."
"Of course," he said, and I left. I wanted sleep, but 1 should return the gear Lydia had borrowed first and tell Keith's family what had happened. Then, maybe, I could begin to puzzle over how Lydia had disappeared last night and reappeared yesterday. Time travel was impossible, wasn't it?
The Hutchisons and Jacksons were enraged. With me, with Lydia, with the town, with the school. One boy tost, another ill, but the lost one most on their minds. Jack Hutchison swore he would run against me come the next election, sue me for every pe
And then that fuss died down. The pictures came out.
Lydia had her wendigo. twice. One shot showed a line of shiny boxes stretched down a gleaming tu
I could guess what the wendigo really was. An interstellar freight train, its tracks looping close to Earth at certain times and places, a freight that could be hopped by anyone who got too close to its passing field. "Fetal"? Maybe "ftl," faster than light. By "take yon" had she meant "tachyon"? I read enough to know what that was, how it might fit, and Keith was alive and well. Earth's envoy to other worlds. Lydia, on the other hand, had been sent back on the next train, going faster than light, backward in time just enough to get her home a day before she left.
By the time Lydia stopped raving and returned to her job, Pork Hill could no longer be visited, either by deer poachers or by would-be interstellar hobos. The army had taken it over, and it was now ringed by wire fence and armed guards while the experts tried to find a way to flag some passing train down.
I don't know if they'll succeed. Lydia can't tell us anything, since she now seems to have no memory of her journey, and if it weren't for that last picture of Keith I'd be tempted to compare us to the moose. For years, the rutting bulls would answer train whistles by charging down the tracks into the engine. To the bull moose, it seems, the whistles sounded like the cry of a cow in heat, and they never learned the difference. The slaughter only stopped when the companies changed the note of the whistles.
But we can't be the equivalent of animals ru