The First Interbellum (1918-1939)

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

Jurgensen had already been making efforts to prepare himself against that coming
day, indeed, his hidden plot within the events of the previous years had been in the
service of just that goal. Now both his work for the Unity and his private agenda
had been shattered. Indeed, Jurgensen had been seeking the site of the old Refuge
for decades, so it could fairly be said that many years of preparation and work had
been shattered by the inexplicable success of the American group.

Grimly, Jurgensen now concluded that he could no longer regard his long-sensed
prescient dread around this man as being anything but an urgent issue. Somehow,
this man seemed to have an uncanny ability to disrupt his plans and agendas. So,
something had to be done about him.

The problem, of course, was that though Jurgensen had seen his face, he still had
no name to go with it, nothing to identify him. He had no idea where the man was
to be found, where he lived, he knew nothing much about him other than he had
the leadership of a group of well-armed men. He knew there was some sort
of connection with the American government, but not its nature. Jurgensen was
almost completely in the dark, and that was not a situation he found comforting.

With all this in mind, it is not to be wondered at that his mental state in April of
1926 was perilous. That peril fell on several unfortunates, who served as foils
for his sadistic tendencies. Stress and worry always intensified these impulses,
and his self-control was not what it usually was. Several woman, of various
ages and backgrounds, and a few males as well, paid the price of this in the early
months of 1926.

Still, Jurgensen was a past master at intelligence work and secret dealings, and he
now began pulling his remaining strings, seeking information. As he did, he also
became aware that someone else, someone very highly connected in the American
government, was doing the same thing with regard to him.

Which was of course true. Even as Jurgensen had begun his own search for data,
Robert McLaird was putting his own secret resources and connections to work in
a search for more information about the mysterious individual who had caused so
much trouble for the Seven Aces, and the United States Government.

The two parallel efforts were both hindered by the need for extreme secrecy.

Neither group had a photograph of the subject of their curiosity. On the other hand,
both Conners and Jurgensen had faced each other no more than a meter apart, more
than once, by this point. Both men had excellent memories and both men were well
trained observers. It was straightforward for each men to bring in an artist to sketch
a very good likeness of the man they had seen. Thus each side did have that much
to work with, and both sides had extensive money and connections.

For McLaird and the Seven Aces, the problem was no so much finding people who
had seen the man in question. As they and their proxies began to ask quite questions,
beginning in Chicago, they began to find people who recognized the face. They also
began to attach names to the face. In fact, they rapidly linked several names to
the face in question, especially after Howard Lake thought to suggest deliberately
trying variations on the sketch, to represent plausible disguises.

They also made inquiries of other organizations, such as the Bureau of Investigation
and the Illinois State authorities, and the intelligence wings of the various military
branches. Over the course of several months, a list of names came together, and that
led in turn to new people to question, new places to investigate, and trails began to
emerge, trails leading to Chicago, to New York City, to Los Angeles, to London,
to Paris, to Madrid and Dublin and Venezuela and Mexico and Russia and Germany.

Especially Germany.

This last was hardly a surprise, in itself. Conners and Adams had encountered the man
in Germany at the end of the Great War, and the conversations that they had been able
to overhear between the man and his personnel had tended to be in German. McLaird
and Conners had already started with the working hypothesis that their quarry was from
Germany, or at least had some strong connections to Germany.

What didcome as a surprise was when some of those trails led, rather than where.

MORE LATER.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

At first the various clues seemed at least reasonable, if various. The Seven Aces
became fairly sure that the man in question was known to the bootlegging
underground by various names, apparently he had a considerable hand in the illegal
manufacture of alcohol, as well as illegal importation.

Another line of evidence and witnesses put them man in Berlin, under at least two
different identities. One was a respected businessman, the other a functionary in
the political circles of the Wiemar Republic. McLaird and his inner circle were in
little doubt that others existed there, however.

Yet another identity appeared to be in use in Russia. They already knew, from the
incident in Petrograd, that their quarry had interests and activities there, but now
they knew of another face and another assumed name, this one usually in Moscow.

As they probed deeper, they uncovered signs of activity by their man in many and
diverse places. It was surprising how wide-ranging his activities seemed to be, but
the truly disturbing thing was that they began to find trails leading into the
past. Farther into the past than any reasonable person would have expected.

A woman in London recognized the face, and mentioned that she had known him
some twenty years before. This seemed odd, that he would have looked so much
like their current drawing so far back, but she insisted that this man looked almost
exactly like that when she knew him. Other witnesses would corroborate this.

At about that time, another report came in from Paris, where a witness also placed
the man in the drawing...remembering him from some meetings in 1872. If
the report from London seemed improbable, the account from Paris seemed utterly
impossible. Yet their witness had no reason to lie, and was by all accounts credible.

Then, to make matters even more strange, their contacts in Paris found records of
the man from old hotel registries, or rather, of the man their witness remembered
seeing, and when the signatures were compared with hotel registries from Chicago
in 1925...the handwriting matched. The names were different, but the handwriting
was a very nearly perfect match, confirmed by several different handwriting
experts that McLaird and his men consulted.

Fifty-three years...yet the evidence did seem to suggest that their mystery man was
alive that long before, and apparently looked much the same than as he had in 1925.
It seemed quite impossible, and yet the evidence also seemed reasonably certain.

By the time Conners and his wife were heading for southern Illinois for a long and
badly needed rest, the organization for which he worked was in its largest stir since
the Seven Aces were founded.

In the mean time, however, we can rejoin Conners and his wife on their trip through
the countryside, on a fine spring day in April of 1926.

“We’re almost there,” Conners said to his wife, who had fallen
asleep with her head on his shoulder as they drove through the
countryside.

“Wh-what?” she said sleepily, then she came awake and sat up.

“Sorry, Nate,” she said with a blush. “I was up pretty late last
night packing for our trip.”

“I’m not complaining, my love,” he said fondly. “But we are
almost to the farm.”

“What time is it?”

“About two,” he said. “We’ll be there in about five minutes.”

A few minutes later, their borrowed Chevrolet came to a stop in
front of a very nicely maintained two-story white farmhouse,
which fronted the narrow country lane. Behind the house, and
stretching out to a distant line of windbreak trees, was a broad
swath of half-tilled land.

“Home again, home again,” Conners said softly as he looked
at the farmhouse in which he had lived his first decade of life.
“Or at least, just as much home as good old New York City.”

Even as they were getting out of the car, however, Conners and
his wife saw people coming out to greet them. There was David
Conners, his younger brother and current owner of the family
farm, his sister-in-law Betty, and trailing behind Betty was their
six year old daughter Elisabeth.

While Nathaniel and his wife begin their stay in the old family farmstead, we might
well take a moment to look in on another of the Aces.

MORE LATER.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

Even as Conners was arriving in his ancestral home, his teammate and best friend
Charles Adams was standing on the second floor of a modest house in Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania, looking out at a sunny spring day in the city of his birth.

Charles Adams was not in a good mood, and he could not say
exactly why that was the case. It was true that he was back in
what had once been his home city for the first time since 1923.
It was also true that his last visit here had been for less than
entirely happy reasons, specifically the funeral of his father.

Still, most of his memories of Pittsburgh were good, or at least
not unpleasant. His life here as a child had been no worse than
that of anyone else. True, his family had been poor, and his
parents had worked brutally hard to support their six children.
But that was no different than any of countless such families.

He remembered playing sandlot baseball as a boy, in the rare
afternoons when he was not either in school or at work. Once
upon a time, Adams had harbored dreams of playing baseball
professionally, but there again, he mused, that was no different
than any other youth of his time.

The house he now stood is was empty. The furniture was all
long since sold, the house had sat empty for three years. He
supposed he should have sold it, but part of him was reluctant
to part with the last link to his childhood, and he had been so
busy in the subsequent years that he had hardly had time even
to think about the matter anyway.

It was late afternoon, and the sunlight was fading.

His thoughts turned to other memories of Pittsburgh. A smile
came to his face as he remembered his girlfriend from before
the War. He had been sure they were destined to spend their
lives together, with the naive confidence of teenaged emotion,
and he had been torn apart when she married another man. He
had heard about it while he was in France, and at the time he
had been certain he would never get over the pain.

She did me a favor, Adams thought, with a certain amusement
and even some remembered affection. We were infatuated,
nothing more, and if I’d come back here instead of joining the
Aces, I’d have missed out on some of the most amazing things
anyone could imagine. Of course I’d also have missed out on
being shot at, tortured, hunted, scared out of my skin...but I
think I came out of the deal ahead.

It was then that something in his mind crystallized, and Adams
suddenly understood why his mood was melancholy.

Gloria.

Adams had been dating a young woman in Miami for about a
year, her name was Gloria Fenton, and in the course of a year
she had gone from being an acquaintance to a friend to very
dear friend, he knew what he felt for her was far more real
and more serious than his infatuation with his teenaged love.
Moreover, he was fairly certain that he and Gloria were well
suited to each other.

Dad always told me that love by itself doesn’t amount to all
that much, Adams thought, as he looked out the window.
It doesn’t make two people who don’t mesh magically any
different, it doesn’t make problems with work, family, or
conflicts of faith or goals and beliefs go away. I sure didn’t
want to believe what he was saying, when I was sixteen.

I realize now he thought Alice and I were a bad match, and he
was afraid I was about to get into a bad marriage and ruin my life.
He was probably right about that.

So, I wonder if he’d approve of me and Gloria? I mean, it’s
not like we’re two kids caught up in a big crush like Alice
and me...but it’s not like I live the life of a normal family man,
either. That’s why I’m fretting about this so much.

I’ve been mulling over asking Gloria to marry me...but can I do
that with a clear conscience? Should I do it? What should I tell
her about what I really do? How much? How much do I have
the right to keep from her and still marry her?

Inevitably, Adams found his thoughts turning toward his best
friend and commander, and the tensions he knew existed in that
marriage that derived from their work. Adams was not certain
exactly how much Conners had told his wife, but he did know
that there were inevitable problems in a marriage in a life such
as his.

Of course, he mused, there was always the option of leaving the
Aces. But he was not sure himself if he could bring himself to
do it...and if he could not, what did that say about his relationship
with Gloria?

He did not know the answer...and thus his mood.


Even as Charles Adams was pondering his personal problems in Pittsburgh, far to
the south and east, Howard Lake was contemplating a rather arcane puzzle.

MORE LATER.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

Far to the south and east of Pittsburgh we find the city of Miami, Florida. As the
Sun drops below the horizon, and the electric lights of this expanding and young
city begin to light the falling night, we turn our attention to a non-descript building
in an ordinary neighborhood. There we find what appears from the outside to be
the headquarters of a modest but profitable shipping company. If we now look
within, we find that behind the outer offices and public areas are several hidden
compartments and chambers, of various sizes and sorts.

In one part of this hidden interior volume, we find a set of rooms containing several
chambers full of laboratory equipment, connected to rooms full of shelved books
and documents. In one such chamber, lined on four sides with shelves groaning
under the load of various books of myriad ages and origins, we find Howard Lake,
sitting at an old oaken table, peering down at a book of very exotic origin indeed.

Howard Lake was simultaneously deeply frustrated, fascinated,
and utterly exhausted. The first was because of how very little
progress he had made in understanding the ancient book he was
studying. The second because the ancient book was one of the
most important artifacts of Atlantean origin known to exist.

The third was the case because he had been awake for nearly
twenty-two hours, engaged in his study, interrupted only by a
few short breaks for food and other necessities. He knew that
he would have to sleep soon, one way or another, but found it
difficult to pull himself away from his task.

The book was anachronistic. As far as most history taught, the
binding of pages into ‘books’ had not even been invented until
well after the beginning of modern recorded history. Lake, of
course, already knew better. The Antediluvians had done such
things long before that. Still, this books was unusual.

Lake had managed, at great risk and by the barest of margins,
to retrieve a few items from the lost library that they had
discovered in the depths of the jungles of Brazil. Even now,
as he thought about the lost treasure-trove, he was moved to
the edge of tears, but the items he had saved were proving to
be puzzling enough on their own.

The book was bound in metal plates, of an unfamiliar alloy.
The ‘spine’ was a set of metal rings of the same alloy, the pages
within were flexible, but made of no form of paper or other
printing material familiar to Lake. It was flexible, indeed, if less
so than conventional paper, but it also gave every impression of
a nigh-impossible durability. It was tough, each sheet thinner
than ordinary writing paper and yet clearly stronger than any
equivalent thickness of rubber or leather. The markings were
made of an ink that was also unfamiliar, though the writing was
unquestionably at least some thousands of years old, the bright
yellow marks on the gray ‘paper’ looked almost as if they were
new. There was no trace of sign of decomposition or staining.

The language was Atlantean, of that much Lake was certain. He
had a limited ability to read Atlantean, learned from some few
other scholars who shared this obscure and dangerous interest.
This text, however, was subtly different. Lake was not sure if
this indicated a different dialect or other such issue, or if it was
a matter of his own limited comprehension.

The matter was made the worse because it was reasonably clear
that the book had multiple authors. It was enormous, Lake had
counted over three thousand pages, and each page was over a
foot high and a foot wide, with lines of tiny text. The text was
printed, not hand-written, but the tiny size made it hard to make
out the individual symbols even so.

Of course, Lake thought with sour tired self-amusement, it
doesn’t help that my eyes have been getting far-sighted.

As for the contents of the book, Lake had only been able to get a
very vague and limited sense of it. Some parts of the book were
in a form of Atlantean that he could discern some meaning out of,
others were so written that he could read individual words but
could get no sense of the overall content.

He had recognized what he thought was a discussion of some
unknown region, he recognized descriptions of rivers and lakes,
the word for mountains, but not enough to pin it down to any one
location in the modern world. Another section seemed to be some
kind of treatise about trees and forestry...or at least, that was what
it seemed to be talking about, though Lake was sure he had
misread one line.

After all, the author simply could not have intended to make
a reference of trees over one thousand feet tall...could he?

It was in the midst of that thought that exhaustion caught up with Howard Lake,
and he passed out asleep in his chair.

MORE LATER.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

Let us leave Howard Lake to his overdue sleep, and step forward a few hours, and
northward and westward by some distance. There we find Nathaniel Conners and
his wife Melissa, in the pre-dawn darkness of April the 13th.

The bedroom was dark, quiet, and the bed was warm in the chill
of the morning. Conners awakened to the sound of people moving
around in the kitchen on the ground level, and to feel of his wife
lying against his side. The peace, quiet, and warmth of the bed
made him reluctant to move, especially considering that he was
still exhausted after that business in Brazil.

Still, it was no use pretending that morning was not about to break.
It might have been dark outside the window, but Conners knew
it was only a matter of a short time before light would begin to
rise on the eastern horizon. It was time to get up.

As Conners slid out of bed, Melissa stirred sleepily next to him,
and complained, “What it is with your family that they think they
have to start the day before the sun even wakes up?!”

Her voice was good-natured, as she got out of bed, rubbing her
eyes sleepily. “I mean what time is it, anyway?!”

“About four o’clock in the morning,” Conners said, looking at
his pocket watch after he lit the lantern. “Farmers start the day
early, my love. Comes with the territory.”

Conners moved over to the other lantern and lit it as well, just
managing to use the same match for both.

“I imagine my brother will appreciate a little help with the
morning milking,” Conners said with a laugh. “Feel up to
helping my sister-in-law with breakfast?”

“It’s too early to even think about food,” Melissa said with
a good-natured grumble. “But I guess I could manage.”

A short time later, Conners and his younger brother entered the
barn, where several milk cows waited patiently for their morning
ritual. Conners had rarely engaged in this activity since he had
left Grandfield as a child, only on occasions such as this, but the
skill quickly returned.

“Seems like you have more cattle than the last time I was here,
Dave,” Conners commented as they worked. “Or am I just
imagining things?”

“No, we’ve added a few,” David replied, as he worked. “And I
have a few other things to show you today, too! Especially if you
feel up to helping me plow the eastern acreage.”

“Of cou-what eastern acres?”

“That’s one of the things I wanted to show you,” David said with
a proud smile. “After breakfast.”

Conners could not get anything else out of his brother just then,
they spent the rest of the time before breakfast chatting about
ordinary things, including what had happened in Grandfield in
the time since Conners had last visited.

Breakfast came at about six in the morning, after they had made
a finish of the milking, fed the animals, and completed some
other minor chores. Conners and his brother entered the old
kitchen and took their places at the heavy old table, and after the
blessing, dug into a breakfast of eggs, bacon, freshly made
biscuits and hot milk gravy, and fried potatoes. It was a much
larger meal than Conners was accustomed to starting the day
with, but he was making no complaints about that.

After breakfast, Nathaniel and David headed out to the fields,
and two men hitched horses to a pair of plows. Nathaniel was
surprised at the presence of the second plow, and the extra
horses, both additions since the last time he had visited.

“We’re thinking hard about buying a tractor,” David told him,
as the two men led their teams to the fields. “But if we do that
will be a matter for next year.”

The eastern acres turned out to be an addition to the land, the
family farm had been expanded by an additional ten acres on
the eastern side of the former property boundary. Conners
was surprised anew, he had not realized that the family farm
had been doing quite that well.

They worked hard for hours, it was early spring and the task of
getting the ground ready for planting was pressing. It was the
hardest purely physical work Nathaniel had done in a long
time, but there was a certain pleasure in the simplicity of it. No
one was shooting at him, it was pure physical work, a task that
had a beginning and an end.

“So how come nobody told me things were going this well?” he
asked his brother, as they stopped in midday and headed back to
the house for the noon meal. “I had no idea you were doing
this well!”

“Well...we’ve done all right with the last two years’ crops,” David
said. “Enough that we were able to get the loan we needed.”

Nathaniel had been heading up the steps of the back porch when
heard those words, and he paused in surprise to look at David
in surprise. Part of him had trouble believing what he had heard.

Why was Nathaniel Conners so surprised to hear what his brother had just said?

MORE LATER.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

Let us rejoin the conversation between Nathaniel and David Conners on that fine
morning in April of 1926.

"What?" David asked, seeing the surprised look his brother had
not managed to conceal.

"Did you mortgage the farm?"

"Sure," David replied, slightly too casually. "It was the only
way to get the money."

“I was just thinking about what Grandpa always used to say
about bankers and land,” Nathaniel said slowly.

“Grandpa never got over almost losing the original farm, back
in the seventies,” David replied. “He never could think clearly
about the idea of borrowing money after that.

“We’ve got a huge opportunity here,” David went on, making
an expansive gesture at the acres of newly-plowed land around
the two men. “The only way to take advantage of it is to be
smart and clever with the money, make it work for us instead
of just sitting there.”

“How much did you stake?” Conners asked, a nervous twist
in his stomach accompanying the words. It was true that he
had lived most of his life in cities, the farm was in the hands
of his brother and his family, but even so, there was a sort
of attachment to it.

“All of it,” David replied. “And that was none too much to
get the money we needed to buy the extra land! But at the rate
the prices are rising, we ought to be able to have the loan paid
back within five years.”

“If the prices keep rising, the crops don’t fail, the weather is
cooperative, nobody gets sick, and the Devil doesn’t yank the
rug out from under you,” Nathaniel responded.

“What if something goes wrong?” Nathaniel continued his
question. “Grandpa Phillip didn’t think that he had to worry
either, until the flood wiped out his crop and he fell behind on
his payments. Once he got back on his feet, he never could
catch up, it was all he could do to run in place for a while, and
we almost lost the land several times. Grandpa Phillip just about
ruined his health doing the running, too.”

“Yeah, but that was half a century ago!” David said. “It’s a
whole different world now. Grandpa thought the railroad
was going to come through the land he gambled by buying,
it was a wild gamble on a rumor and the family had to pay
for it for years. Things are different now.”

“Droughts happen,” Nathaniel pointed out. “Insects happen.
Blights happen. People get sick. Seems to me like you’re
taking a pretty big gamble here, Dave.”

“It’s a risk,” David admitted. “I know that. I’m not blind to it,
and I’m not casual about it, Nate. But it’s not that big a
one! You have to weigh the risk against the reward, too, and
the reward could be huge. Damn it, we could get rich!”

There was a look in his eyes, and a note in his voice, when he
said this last that Nathaniel did not like.

At about the same time that Nathaniel and David were having their discussion about
farm prospects and the risks of borrowing money, a conversation was occurring back
at the farmhouse between the wives of the two men, as they worked to stitch up some
old overalls that had gaps and rents worn through them.

Melissa was not nearly as experienced a seamstress as her sister-
in-law, but she had had some practice, and as the two women
worked, her skills were already improving. As they worked and
chatted, six year old Elisabeth watched, and Betty would
intersperse her comments to Melissa with instructions to Elisabeth
about how to sew.

It still struck Melissa, who had grown up in a city, how vast the
gap between the rural world into which her husband had been
born, and the world she had been born into, really was. Young
Elisabeth was still very much a small child, but already she was
beginning to learn the practical skills she would need in life as
a farm wife, or even a small-town woman.

“It goes back over one hundred years,” Betty was saying to her
sister-in-law as they continued to mend the old work clothes.
“The rivalry, I mean.”

“I’m not sure what you mean,” Melissa said. “What rivalry?
I thought we were talking about the man who sold you folks
that new land they’re out their plowing.”

“We are,” Betty replied, as she pressed the needle through the
denim to start a new line of stitches. “But the thing you need
to know is that there’s an old, old rivalry between the Conners
family and the Coake families. By one version I heard it goes
all the way back to when the first families were settling Illinois,
down south of here.

“Supposedly,” Betty went on, after pausing to show her daughter
a trick with the needle, “two men were wooing one girl, and ended
up hating each other over it. Down south, like I said, one of the
first towns in the State, place called West Eden.

Elisabeth listened closely, eager to hear more about the family and background
of a husband she still was learning to know.

MORE LATER.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

Let us continue to listen in on the discussion between Melissa and her sister-in-law
Betty, as they discuss some of the history of the Conners family and their town.

“So which one got the girl?” Melissa asked, as she adjusted her
pace to produce a smoother seam.

“Neither,” Betty replied. “She ended up marrying somebody else
and heading out further west, or so the story goes. But those two
men continued to hate each other even after that, it turned really
personal, and their sons picked it up.

“Maybe it would have passed,” Betty went on after pausing for
a moment to put more thread on her needle, “but both men did
end up fathering sons who picked up some of their fathers’ own
dislike of each other. As the story goes, when the Civil War
broke out, both younger men in the Army.”

“One on each side?” Melissa asked.

“No,” Betty replied. “Both in the northern army, and in fact both
in the same unit since they were enlisted from the same county
force. But something happened while they were stationed with
the northern forces at Gettysburg, and nobody knows just what it
was. Each man apparently told a different version of whatever it
was when they came back, and nobody any more remembers just
was it was in the first place. They both ended up settling here
at the time that Grandfield was founded, right after the war, and
one went into the cloth trade and one became a farmer. Both
became fairly successful, too.”

“But,” Betty went on, “both men remained bitter enemies until
their dying breaths. And their wives picked it up, and so did
their offspring, and it happens that they both had big families,
even by the standards of the time. One man fathered eight kids,
the other one ten by two subsequent wives.

“Some of ‘em were more motivated than others, of course,”
Betty continued, “but by 1900 everybody around here knew
that the Conners family and the Coake family don’t get on,
or usually don’t. There were a few that did, and a couple of
times a Conners even married a Coake, but that was always
the exception, and usually made both families mad.”

“And you say nobody even remembers what started all this?”

“Not anymore,” Betty nodded. “Somewhere or other it got
lost, there are all kinds of stories about what might have
happened but nobody really knows anything for sure.”

“And the feud is still going on?” Melissa asked, adjusting her
hold on the material to begin a new seam.

“More or less,” Betty nodded. “I should mention that there
are also some Koakes in Grandfield, spelled with a ‘k’, they
aren’t related to the Coakes and they get on fine with the
Conners. Just so you know.

“But feud might be too strong a word,” Betty went on,
“It’s not violent, or rarely has been worse than a fist
fight. It’s more like undercutting each other’s businesses,
trying to steal each other’s customers, rivalry over girls
or men or elections or whatever they get into.

“But where it gets close to home is that to buy that land
on the east side,” Betty said, “we had to borrow the money
from the main bank in Grandfield...and that’s run by one
of the Coakes.”

“I...see,” Melissa said slowly, considering what that might
mean. “And is he one of the ones your family doesn’t get
on with?”

“Well...” Betty said, “That’s kind of complicated.”


MORE LATER.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

"Complicated how?" Melissa asked. There had been something
in the voice of the other woman that sounded hesitant.

“Well, Henry Coake is a respected banker, he’s the grandson of
one of old Brandon Coake, the man who came back from the
war hating the Conners. But he’s always been polite enough,
and friendly, and nobody’s ever said anything bad about him
that I’ve heard. The loan went through normally enough, and
it’s not that big, even if we did have to put up the farm against
it. It’s not like we’re taking that big a chance...”

“But it bothers you.”

“Yes,” Betty said with a tight smile. “But it’s worth the risk
for her sake.”

Betty nodded in the direction of her daughter, who had gone to
get more worn clothing for her mother and aunt to repair.

“This is a chance to leave her a real inheritance,” Betty went on,
“a farm and an estate as good as any in the county. Sometimes
you just have to take the risk to get the reward.”

Betty sounded sincere enough, but something in her manner, or
her tone, made Melissa wonder if her sister-in-law really, truly
believed what she was saying, or if she was simply trying
to convince herself that she did.

One thing was certain, Melissa mused. Her sister-in-law was
not as confident and relaxed about the situation as she wanted
to appear. She could tell that much from her manner.


Let us now turn our attention elsewhere in space and elsewhen in time, the ‘where’
being Miami, Florida, and the ‘when’ being about two days after the conversation
between Melissa and Betty. On a bright sunlit afternoon, sitting in his library at the
disguised headquarters of the Seven Aces, we find Howard Lake, sitting at a table
beside a third-story window, reading the same book we saw him studying a few
days before, when sleep had overtaken him.

Better rested now, seated with the open book on the table and huge stacks of sundry
reference materials and stacks of scribbled notes facing him, Lake was pondering
his work and trying to make sense of what he thought the book might hold.

Lake carefully reviewed the lines he had copied from the book,
as he compared them for symbol matches, for patterns, looking
for thinks to give him a sense of their meaning. He found that
by now he could understand most of the individual words, they
were mostly either familiar (at least to him!) Atlantean words,
or variations on those words. Sometimes they seemed strangely
altered from the forms within which Lake was familiar, but the
words were still at least mostly recognizable.

What they seemed to mean was another matter entirely.

Even at the best times, the limited amounts of written text in the
old Atlantean language seemed strangely...incomplete. Even with
the few fairly large samples of the old writing, there always was
a sense that the material was missing something fundamental. A
factor in that might have been the side-symbols that went with so
much of the text, and about which nothing was understood. [1]

Even so, Lake thought he had pieced together something coherent
from the references he was studying. The problem was that the
meaning he thought he had pieced together seemed utterly insane,
as if the writings had been the ravings of a madman.

Yet they were coherent, orderly, there was no trace of irrationality
in the writings other than the apparently impossible meaning.

The section of the book in question seemed to be about trees. The
words for concepts like ‘tree’, ‘root’, ‘bark’, ‘leaves’, even ‘forest’
and ‘wood’ were all present, and used in a coherent way. It seemed
in fact to be about some specific kind of tree.

What made the references so maddening were other symbols, also
familiar in themselves, that made no sense in context. The trees in
question, if Lake had translated the symbols for scale correctly, if
he had the numbers right, would have been about three hundred or
so yards in height, perhaps seventy yards in diameter at the trunk!

No tree on Earth is that tall, Lake mused to himself, shaking his
head in disbelief. The tallest trees I can find a reference to are
maybe a third of that, at most, and they’re extreme exceptions as
trees go! But I know that I translated those numbers right.

To make matters worse, there were other symbols that described
these supposed trees, symbols that did not fit with ‘tree’ at all.
Symbols that simply made no sense. Some of them Lake could
not translate at all, others seemed to refer to the root words for
concepts like ‘blood’ or ‘thought’.

It would have been easy to dismiss it as the work of a madman,
but somehow Lake did not think so. Something about the work,
the dry, direct writing style, the simple straightforwardness of it,
spoke of sanity.

If only it made sense.

Lake was correct, the work he was reading was far from the ravings of any madman.
Many years would pass yet, though, before he would understand what it actually
meant, and the stranger truth that lay beneath the strange writings in the ancient book.

MORE LATER.


[1] These symbols referred to the part of the meaning that would have been
carried by telepathic communication in conversational Atlantean, but Lake had no
way to know that at that point in time.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

While Nathaniel and Melissa spend time with his relatives in Grandfield, and Howard
Lake struggles to understand the things he retrieved from Brazil, let us turn our
attention briefly far to the west, specifically to San Francisco, California, and a burned
out building in a neighborhood that the local citizens would not consider the best the
city had to offer. In the dim hours before dawn, we find a small group of men engaged
in a rather furtive activity in the shadow of an abandoned building.

“Damn it, doesn’t this place ever dry out?” one man asked.

“Usually, it’s not too bad in April,” a second man asked. This
latter man had a calm, relaxed delivery and a voice that might
have seemed more at home in a classroom lectern than coming
from a hulking, two meter tall mass of muscle dressed in black
and gray. Perhaps the physical form might have seemed not too
out of place on the lectern, but the jagged, badly-healed scar on
his left cheek and the missing fingers of his left hand would have
been rather more noticeable in an academic setting.

Here, though, he seemed more or less in his element.

“Usually?” the first man, an equally tall but more slender figure,
commented. “So we’re just lucky?”

“Mostly,” the second man said laconically. “Frisco gets her
share of fog, everybody knows that, but usually it’s in the summer.
But I guess it can come early if it wants to. No use arguing with
Mother Nature.”

“What’s keeping Sammy?” the first man asked. “It’s almost
sunup.”

“I had to take the long way,” a third voice said suddenly, as the
first two men jumped in surprise. The second man half-pulled
a gun from his jacket before recognizing the source of the voice.

“Don’t do that, Sammy” the second man advised. “Good way
to get yourself ventilated.”

The third man, ‘Sammy’, was short and slender, dressed in the
same plain black and gray clothing as the first two, but he moved
rather differently. He footsteps seemed to make little sound, even
in the echoing quiet of the fog-bound San Francisco night, he had
a way of moving that seemed almost liquid. When he spoke, his
voice sounded softer than the other two men, but at the same time,
less inflected, less animate. His words were crystal clear, quiet
and spoken with no trace of accent.

“I’ll risk that,” ‘Sammy’ replied, “as opposed to blundering in
the dark like a drunken elephant. Let’s get this job done, it’s
getting late and we’re burning the night.”

The three men entered the open door at the back of the old
building, which had once been a fairly high-class hotel. In
the immediate aftermath of the 1906 earthquake and fire, the
city had been rebuilt at a tremendous pace, but some of the
rebuilt areas had fared less well than others.

For a few years this hotel had been prosperous, but then a series
of bad decisions by the management, combined with some bad
fortune, had brought it down. The entire neighborhood had fallen
on ‘hard times’ in recent years, and the hotel had been abandoned
since 1922. It was in bad shape structurally, to the point that it
was rarely used even by the vagrants in bad weather.

Or at least, that was why it was supposedly left mostly empty
even when the skies threatened. In fact, it was known to a few
people in the city that there were other reasons more persuasive
than the danger of falling pieces of plaster and wood.

It was not that the danger of falling structural members and
pieces of ceiling was not real. As the three men entered the
back door, which had once been used by kitchen staff, they
found themselves in a short hallway that led to the kitchen.
Now, it led more directly to the basement, through a section
of collapsed floor.

The men cross the hole using a pair of heavy boards that had
been laid in place for the purpose, then crossed through the
former kitchen, past the remains of facilities able to prepare
food for hundreds of guests at a time, now inhabited only by
insects and the occasional rodent.

The very occasional rodent.

Beyond the old kitchen, the trio moved past the remains of the
grand staircase that had once graced a luxurious lobby, and to
which none of the three would have now cared to risk their weight.
Beyond that, they went through another door, this one half-off of
its hinges, and descended a narrow stair into the basement of the
former hotel.

The first man now lit an oil lantern to light their way, as the
stairwell would otherwise have been utterly dark. In the dim light
from the flickering flame, they saw that the dust on the stairs had
been recently disturbed, but that in itself did not disturb them,
because it was they who had passed that way several time in the
recent past.

To the bottom of the stair they descended, and into the basement
of the building. There, in the flickering light of the oil lantern,
they saw a motley assemblage of bits and pieces, old junk from
the better days of the hotel, the occasional item thrown down to
the basement through the openings in the floor by passerby seeking
to dispose of one thing or another, and in one corner, the remnants
of what had once been a coal furnace and a coal bin.

“This way,” Sammy said, lighting another lantern and taking the
point as the trio crossed the basement. Overhead, the dim light of
the lanterns revealed the occasional opening in the ceiling, places
where the ground level had collapsed. Utter darkness filled the
chambers above, however, and the trio showed little interest in
their contents. Their attention was on the furnace and coal bin.

As the three of them approached the remains of the furnace, it
so happened that the first man stumbled in the near-darkness,
fell against one wall, and moments later, a crashing sound
filled the basement as a huge chunk of the ceiling came down!


MORE LATER.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

The roar faded, and the three men looked at each other in relief,
realizing that they had managed to escape injury, mostly by luck.

The word ‘mostly’ is appropriate because, while the second man,
and Sammy, avoided injury by chance, the first man avoided it
because Sammy had reacted, with tremendous speed and that
strange grace he seemed to possess, to pull the first man out of
the path of a large piece of broken pipe from above.

“Be careful!” Sammy said, his voice still calm and level but at
the same time heavy with implied warning. “This place is not
too far from crashing down, you just brought part of the ground
floor down just by falling against a wall! We don’t want to end
up buried down here if we bring the whole place down, and that
could happen if we stumble around like drunken buffalo!”

“I-I get the message,” the first man said, shaken by the sudden
close call.

“I hope so,” Sammy said. “For all our sakes!”

“Let’s get this done,” the second man said, sounding more than
slightly shaky himself. “The sooner we get it the sooner we can
be out of here!”

“And get paid,” the first man added.

“That’s the spirit,” Sammy said. “It should be behind the coal
bin, there’s about a six inch gap and the latch should be about
two feet past the edge, if my memory serves. Hold the lantern,
Bill.”

Handing the lantern to ‘Bill’, as he called the second man, Sammy
reached behind the coal bin, feeling in the dark for the latch he
had mentioned. After a moment, he said, “I have it, but it’s not
wanting to turn. It’s been too long since it was used.”

“Great,” the first man said. “The sun’s going to be up any minute,
if it isn’t already. What do we do now?”

“Look around the place,” Sammy instructed. “Find me some
kind of lever, something made of metal that I can use to try and
unjam this thing! There ought to be something down here
we can use!”

A few minutes searching through the basement, by the flickering
and all too dim light of the lanterns, produced pieces of wood,
plaster, and tile, small slivers of metal, but nothing that appeared
to be long enough or strong enough for their requirements. Then
the first man laughed aloud suddenly in the near-dark, leading
both Sammy and Bill to look at him rather oddly.

“Are you okay, Ed?”

“I think so,” Ed replied. “I just remembered something. Just a
few minutes ago I almost got brained by a piece of falling pipe.
If I can find it again, it might be just what the doctor ordered!”

The pipe proved to be half-buried in the rubble, but they managed
to get a grip on it and pull it free, and to their pleasure it looked
to be about two meters long and perhaps just narrow enough for
their needs.

“It might just do,” Sammy nodded, examining the item. “It’s
good heavy iron, it might be strong enough to force the lever!”

“If it doesn’t break it off,” Bill muttered glumly, as they carried
the very narrow but heavy piece of pipe over to the coal bin.

It required considerable effort to lift the heavy pipe into place,
holding it up while guiding it into the narrow slot between the
latch lever and the wall, and then more effort to work it back
and forth. They dared not press too hard, for fear of damaging
the latch, but all three were acutely aware of the press of time.
They made several attempts, but each time the latch held, until
finally, after the fifth attempt, Sammy tried again and said, his
voice still as calm and level as ever, “I think we have it! It’s
starting to move...now if the mechanism is just still good...”

Suddenly, the basement vibrated, and a section of wall a few
meters to their left slid outward and revealed a doorway. The
motion shook the old walls, and for a moment the trio feared the
entire edifice was about to come down in an unstoppable, life-
crushing avalanche of debris!

At last, though, after what seemed to the three men like a slow
eternity, and was in reality perhaps thirty seconds to a minute,
the shaking calmed, and though some additional bits and pieces
of detritus did come down into the basement, the old hotel held.

“Damn!” Ed said., “I can not wait to get out of this place!”

“Let’s see if it’s still in there,” Bill said.

Holding their lanterns, the three men carefully made their way
over the rubble and junk to the opening, and held the lanterns
up to illuminate the contents of what proved to be more or less
of a hidden closet, perhaps slightly larger than a wardrobe.

Within was nothing at all...other than a single item. One single,
very peculiar item, an ellipsoid of faceted yellow glass, about
the height of a tall man, with strange groves on either end. In
the dim light of the oil flames, it seemed to glimmer and sparkle
dully, and the air around it from the closet seemed oddly cold.

“There it is,” Sammy said with calm satisfaction. “After all
these years, right where they left it.”

MORE LATER.