Stories: All-New Tales - By Neil Gaiman & Al Sarrantonio Page 0,158

to dive out past the edge of the slot and swim away, might make it to the ice and pull herself out of the water before hypothermia set in, might be rescued by searchers from the Dauntless after they discovered her and the dinghy missing. But curiosity kept her in the boat. As the machine moved her down into the mists and darkness, Nancy was careful to notice everything she heard and saw and smelled. She was an explorer.

TWELVE DAYS AGO, HIS beacon—now out of the closet and sitting on the coffee table in the living room—had started alternating a chartreuse throb with each purple one. Chartreuse meant that someone had entered the station. And the station’s mapping console, assuming it still worked, would give the intruders the precise location of the remote beacon. He thought of getting rid of the device, leaving it on the El or heaving it into the Chicago River, to put the hounds off his scent. But then he admitted, once and for all, that he wants to be tracked down. He craves being found.

And so he has gotten all his documents and images in order, the entire chronicle. He has packed a suitcase, and straightened up the apartment. He has been watching cable news and surfing the Web constantly. Surely it is only a matter of time.

But he’s surprised when the front-door buzzer buzzes. He had expected helicopters and floodlights and grappling hooks and special-ops troopers in black visors and haz-mat suits bursting through the doors and windows with automatic weapons and gas canisters, and had even practiced dropping to the floor and putting his hands over his head. The Obamas’ Hyde Park house is ten minutes from his apartment, which he’d figured would make the brouhaha all the more spectacular. As he stands at the intercom speaker, he looks out the window down at Kimbark Avenue: cars driving past, people strolling by and hanging out as on any summer afternoon, no evacuation of the block, no emergency vehicles, no perimeter secured.

The doorbell buzzes again. He wonders if it’s the UPS guy.

“Yes?”

“Hello?” A woman, sounding tentative.

“Yes?”

“I’m looking for someone who, um, also lives at 86 degrees, 19 minutes, 27 seconds north?”

He grins, and buzzes her in.

Opening the apartment door, he’s surprised all over again: she’s alone, apparently unarmed, and very young. She extends her right hand.

“I’m Nancy Zuckerman.”

“Hello. I’m Nicholas Walker.”

“I’m a scientific researcher,” she says. “From the Arctic.”

“Really?” He smiles, and motions her inside. “So am I! How very fortunate. For the both of us.”

THEY SIT. SHE SETS aside the cardigan he’d handed her, and explains herself in a nervous rush. Why she had been in the Arctic, how she happened to drift over the station and accidentally jimmy the entry system with her oar. How she’d figured, at first, that it must be some military facility, American or Russian or Chinese, but then, as she spent hours exploring the interior—the peculiar materials and shapes and technology interfaces, the very peculiar quality of artificial light, the unrecognizable written language, the images displayed—how she had developed a new hypothesis. How she had photographed everything, including the mapping console with its one, tiny blinking light in the middle of North America, and then, on her computer back in Longyearbyen, had transposed a longitude and latitude grid over her image to find the precise location of the blinking light—41 degrees, 47 minutes, 54.1475 seconds north and 87 degrees, 35 minutes, 41.7095 seconds west, South Kimbark Avenue between 53rd and 54th Streets, Chicago. How she had taken a few things from the station—including a small plastic picture of him, which she had just shown to a lady downstairs in order to find his apartment. She hands him the picture.

“My goodness,” he says, “I was young. So young!” He puts the picture down and turns to look at her. They’ve talked for ten minutes, yet she hasn’t asked where he’s from or what he’s doing here. Which is fine by him. He’s in no particular hurry.

She’s a little flummoxed. “I have to tell you I am incredibly excited. This is beyond surreal. It’s like I’m having a stroke, or been drugged, or gone to heaven. It’s—it’s a new category of excitement.” She takes a deep breath. “I’m also scared.”

“Scared? Of me? Oh, don’t be. No, no, no.”

“No, scared that I haven’t told anyone about any of this—not my colleagues, not my bosses, not any government people, not my mom, no one. I don’t know what the rules are,