Eifelheim

Tom’s message piqued my curiosity. I e-mailed that a reply would require several days’ research, at least, and strolled off to the library at the Albert-Louis. There, I found some of the documents he had asked about and compared them to others he had sent. Then I searched out further documents and blew off the centuries and read them as well. Afterward in solitude, I smoked my heavy, carved, schwartzwalder pipe and in the tobacco smoke, I pondered. Dignity, we save for our old age; and what I had of it, I had earned. Yet, Tom was hardly the sort of man to leap to conclusions or to play a prank on a friend.

But a friend is a friend, and you may have noticed that he and I were duzende. We used “du” with each other, and that is no light thing.

So two days later, I sca

“What are you doing up so early?”

Tom started violently; his chair nearly rolled from under him. He caught himself on the edge of his desk and, when he looked around, he saw Sharon standing in the bedroom doorway, rubbing her eyes. “Don’t sneak up on me that way!”

“Why, how should I sneak up on you? Besides, a Mack truck could sneak up on you, you were so intent on that printer.” She yawned. “That’s what woke me up. The printer.”

She padded in her bare feet into the kitchen and turned on the tea kettle. “Time to get up anyway,” she called back over her shoulder. “What are you up to at this hour?”

Tom pulled the last sheet from the printer and sca

“Anton Zaengle? How is the old dear?”

“He’s fine. He wants me to come to Freiburg.” Tom flipped through the stack of printouts, riffing them with his thumb. “This is the bait to lure me there.”

She poked her head around the kitchen archway. “Freiburg? Why?”

“I think he thinks what I think.”

“Oh. Well, I’m glad you cleared that up.”

“It would take too long,” he said, “and sound absurd.”

“That hasn’t stopped you before.” She wiped her hands on a dish towel and crossed the room, where she stood behind him, leaning with both her hands on his shoulders. “Tom, I’m a physicist, remember? Next to strange, charming quarks nothing sounds ridiculous.”

Tom pulled on his lower lip. After a moment, he tossed the printouts into his desk basket. “Sharon, why would a medieval, backwoods priest need two hundred feet of copper wire?”

“Why… I don’t know.”

“Neither do I; but he ordered it specially made.” He leaned forward and pulled a sheet from the stack. It was underlined heavily in red. “And during the summer of 1349, monks in a monatery near Oberhochwald heard thunder when there were no clouds in the sky.” He put the sheet down. “And peccatores Eifelheimensis, the Sins of the Eifelheimers. Something Anton found. It denounces the heretical notion that there could be men with souls who were not descended from Adam.”

Sharon shook her head. “I’m still asleep. I don’t get it.”

Tom was suprised to discover how reluctant he was to say his thoughts aloud. “All right,” he said. “About seven hundred years ago, sentient beings from another world were stranded near Oberhochwald, in the Black Forest.”

There. He’d said it. He held up a hand to forestall Sharon, whose mouth had dropped open. “Their vessel malfunctioned. I think it traveled through Nagy hypospace. They weren’t killed, but it was enough to start a forest fire and injure some of them.”

Sharon had found her voice. “Wait a minute, wait a minute. What proof…”

“Let me finish. Please.” Tom gathered his thoughts and continued. “The aliens’ sudden appearance out of nowhere and their physical features — yellow, bulging eyes, for example — frightened many of the villagers, who fled, spreading rumors of demons to the nearby towns. Others, including the village priest, Pastor Dietrich, saw that the aliens were creatures in need of help. Just to be safe, he obtained a carefully worded ruling from his bishop; something he could do in Latin without giving the show away.

“The aliens lived in Oberhochwald for many months. While Fra Joachim and others were accusing them of sorcery and demon worship, the villagers tried to help the aliens repair their damaged vessel. I should have seen that in the business with the copper wire. What possible use would that have been to earthly travelers? They also flew. Were they winged creatures? Did they have anti-gravity? Perhaps they had a way to harness that vacuum energy you talk about. In his letter, Pastor Dietrich carefully denied only that his guests flew by supernatural means.”

He had run out of breath. He studied Sharon’s face for a hint of her reaction.

“Go on,” she said.

“The aliens were immune to the Plague — different biochemistry — and repaid the villagers’ kindness by caring for them. At least some did. Others, I’m sure, had succumbed to apathy by then. Dietrich even converted a few. We have a record of at least one baptism. Joha

“The aliens, too, began to die. Not from Plague, but from the lack of some vital nutrient. That different biochemistry again. ‘They eat, but take no nourishment’ was how Dietrich put it.

When his friend Hans died — this is a guess, now. When Hans finally died, Dietrich buried him in the churchyard and had a carving of his face put on the stone so that future generations would know. Only he didn’t realize how many generations that would be; or that the village itself would vanish.

“The taboo? Easy. There really were ‘demons’ there. And shortly after Joachim cursed the place, it was struck by Plague. Impressive enough for superstitious peasants. Were the demons really dead, or just sleeping? Waiting for new victims? People shu

There it was. All out in the open now. A lot of it was surmise, inference. He had no primary sources on Brother Joachim, for example, but I had found him a memoire by an abbot at the Strassburg friary which quotes Joachim as saying, “The great failure at Oberhochwald brought the most terrible of curses on their heads, about which I had warned them repeatedly,” which seemed clear enough evidence of his damnation.

She stared at him, her head spi

“And you think this scenario is true?” she asked when he had finished.

“Yes. And so does Anton.” He showed her a note that had come with the printouts. “And he is nobody’s fool.”

She read the note quickly. “He doesn’t come out and say so,” she pointed out.

Tom gri

“That’s better left to you, I suppose. What I’d like to know is why you dragged Nagy space into it. If you’re determined to ruin your own reputation, can’t you leave mine out of it?”