Eifelheim

Before Tom could respond to this latest bon mot, I interrupted. “Heinrich is an amateur archeologist. He has excavated several Swabian villages from before the Völkerwanderung.”

“You’re that Heinrich Lurm? The pleasure is mine. I’ve read your reports, father. You’re no amateur.”

Heinrich flushed. “On the contrary, ‘amateur’ comes from the Latin amare, to love. I do archeology for love. I am not paid.”

Heinrich had rented two Japanese pickup trucks. Two men with drooping moustaches waited beside them, talking quietly. There were picks, shovels and other paraphernalia in the bed of the first truck. When the men saw us coming, they climbed into the bed of the second.

“I think there is an old logging road that will take us close to the site,” Heinrich told me. “It ca

We took the Schwartzwald-Hauptstrasse into the mountains, turning off at Kirchzarten. The road began climbing as we drove into the Zastiertal. I rolled the window down and let the cool mountain air blow into the cab. In the back, the workmen laughed. One of them began singing an old country song.

“Too bad that Sharon could not come,” I said.

Tom looked at me briefly. Then he faced forward again. “She’s working on another project. The one I told you about.”

“Ja. The circuit diagram. That was the most remarkable thing of all. Never again will I look at a manuscript illumination in the same way. Think of it, Tom. Could you or I ever have recognized it for what it was, let alone what it meant? Pfaugh.” I waved a hand. “Never. And Sharon. Would she ever have seen it? Medieval manuscripts. No, physicists do not do such things. Only because the two of you were together could it ever have happened the way it did. And if she had not thought of that comment of Sagan’s just before she looked…?”

Tom looked out the side window at the trees whipping past. “It was the wildest sort of coincidence. Who knows what else may be out there, lying in archives and libraries, unrecognized because the right people haven’t looked at it in the right way? Things for which we’ve found safe, acceptable, believable explanations.”

A few kilometers past Oberreid the road became rough and I paid all my attention to my driving. The Feldberg loomed high on our right. Shortly, the Monsignor honked and his arm jabbed out of the leading truck, pointing left. I saw the old logging road and honked to show that I understood. I pulled the floor shift to put us in four wheel drive.

Heinrich drove like the lunatic he was. He seemed unaware that the road was no longer paved. Our truck bounced and shook as I followed him and I wondered if we would lose the two workmen clinging to the back. I silently praised the Japanese quality control workers who had helped make our shock absorbers.

The sun was already high when we reached the area where Eifelheim had once stood. There was no sign of it. I had copies of the satellite images in my hand but, close up, everything looked diiferent. Nature had reclaimed its own; and the trees had had seven centuries in which to grow and die and grow again. Tom bore a bewildered expression as he turned round and round. Where had the village green been? Where the church? We might have walked past the place entirely, except that the American soldiers who had stumbled upon the site had thoughtfully left behind their empty beer cans to mark it.

Heinrich took charge and the rest of us fell quickly into the roles of his assistants. But then he was a field man and we were not.

From among the equipment in his rucksack he took a GPS transceiver. Within moments he had pinpointed our location. He marked the map with a grease pencil, then pointed with it. “The church must be buried under a cruciform mound atop that small hill. The graveyard is most likely to the rear of the chancel; although it might also lie to the side.”

We found the mound quickly enough and split into three teams, each searching the ground in a different direction from the chancel end. It was not long before one of the workmen, Augustus Mauer, found what might have been a headstone, smashed to rubble. We could not be sure. Perhaps they were natural rocks. We resumed our search.

Judy found the grave. I could see her off to my right when she stopped and stared down at the ground. She did not call out, but only stood quietly for a time. Then she crouched and I could no longer see her through the brush.

I glanced around, but no one else had noticed. They continued to pace slowly forward, searching the forest floor. I made my way across and found her kneeling next to a sunk and broken stone. Soil action had claimed the lower half of the stone, but it had sunk at such an angle that the face on it had been partially protected from the elements.

“Is this it?” I asked quietly.

She gasped and sucked in her breath. She turned and saw me and relaxed visibly. “Dr. Zaengle,” she said. “You frightened me.”

“I am sorry.” I crouched beside her, my old bones protesting. I studied the face on the stone. It was worn, as only the breezes of seven centuries can wear. Its outlines were faded with time, obscure and barely visible. How had the soldiers ever noticed it? “Is it the grave?” I asked again.

She sighed. “I believe so. At least, it is the one that the soldiers found.” She held up a cigarette butt to show how she knew. “The inscription is nearly illegible, and parts of the top are broken off; but see here? The letters? …HANNES STE…” She traced them with her fingers.

“Joha

“I know. I’m scared.”

“Scared? Of what?”

“When we dig him up. He won’t be the right shape. He’ll be something wrong.”

I did not know how to answer her. Burgher or alien, whatever the shape, it would be wrong in one sense or another. “Gus found another headstone,” I told her. “So did Heinrich. Both were smashed. Tom thinks that when the Plague swept through here the neighboring villagers came and destroyed the gravestones of the ‘sorcerors.’ Yet, this one — presumably the one that most frightened them — was not touched. Why?”

She shook her head. “There is so much we do not know, and never will know. Where did they come from? How many were there? Were they brave explorers or bewildered tourists? How did they and Dietrich establish communications? What did they talk about, those last few months of life?” Her face, when she turned it up to me verged on tears.

“I imagine,” I said as gently as I could, “that they talked of going home and the great things they would do when they got there.”

“Yes,” she said more quietly. “I suppose they would have. But those who could have told us are long dead.”

I smiled. “We could hold a seance and ask them.”

“Don’t say that!” she hissed. Her fists, clenched tight, pressed on her thighs. “I’ve been reading their letters, their journals, their sermons. I have been inside their heads. They don’t feel dead to me. Anton, most of them were never buried! Toward the end, who was left to turn the shovel? They must have lain on the ground and rotted. Pastor Dietrich was a good man. He deserved better than that.” There were tears on her cheeks now. “As we were walking through the forest, I was frightened that I would meet them, still alive. Dietrich or Joachim or one of the villagers or—”