“On Refuge Ridge”
by
Gene Stewart
As he mounted the snowy ridge, he glanced down to spot a hand-hold in the wind-scoured granite. He saw a shape wedged under a small ledge. It was a leather-clad journal wrapped in oilcloth, which he discovered once in his cabin in the valley beyond the ridge.
Reading the journal, he grew increasingly amazed, then afraid.
It was his journal, in his own hand. It told of events in the coming year.
He did not know what to make of it, nor did he have anyone to consult. He recognized his own script, even knew the antique fountain pen he’d used… In the future? Outside time?
While mad or asleep? Did people sleep-write?
Alone on his land, isolated from a society he valued less than it valued him, he read an account of madness, a steep descent into barbarity and chaos and a coming nuclear annihilation. “You’ll survive on the south side of the ridge where you found this, under the small ledge; dig. It’s loose fill. The cavern you’ll find is stocked with much else to help.”
That passage had him out next day with pick-axe and spade. Sure enough, he uncovered the entrance to a cavern system. Rooms branched from rooms, each with cannisters, crates, and supplies to last a single man many lifetimes. There were other things; equipment, tools, even toys and games. One room proved to be a hermetically-sealed library, each book in protective case or wrap, each shelf itself sealed with glass set into silicone. There were twenty or thirty thousand books of all kinds, perhaps more. He found data books and many platforms on which to read them. There were microfiches and readers, microfilm and readers, there were dozens of computers. There were thousands of CD-ROMs, thousands of thumb drives. There were antennae, power units, water and air purifiers, there was so much it overwhelmed even as it gave hope.
“Others may come. Accept them or kill them, as you see fit. Plenty of ammo, guns of all kinds, but there is heavier weaponry too, as you’ll see. You could repulse an army if necessary.”
This possibility worried him until, as he read on, he found this passage: “No one knows about the redoubt but chance cannot be trusted, so others may find you. This is all my work over years , before I disappeared from their sick, suicidal world.”
“Our work,” he muttered, the day he found the skeleton in the cot in a sleeping chamber. Was it him, his skull and bones? He shivered, gazed down a long time, then left it in peace.
Who paid for so much? Materiel and excavation, installing filters, fans, power systems, all redundant, so much to pay for. Millions at least — it would cost more than he’d ever earned, more than all members of his family put together had earned.
This, sure enough, was addressed in yet a later passage. The journal seemed to reply to his questions by anticipating them, even down to how they were paced. It had all been written before he found it about a world that had not yet happened, in his (everyone’s?) future.
Which him?
He thought of the bones in the cot.
He began thinking of himself as a man apart and distinct from his found journal self, even though the handwriting, expressions, and mode of thought were all his. Patterns of expression, even quirky slang, were all there.
If he’d done all this and had written the journal in what he now called and bodily considered his future, would that not mean one day soon he would somehow be transported (somehow) to a space-time when he could look back on his less-aware self or selves? Would the not soon need to leave in order to do all this prep work he was benefitting from? He needed to leave to arrive and survive.
Or were these separate lines, the old parallel worlds notion, coming to perch on his shoulders like a vanishing point in a perspective drawing? If there were many, or endless, other worlds in which all possible variations are realized, then surely in an infinite number of them he would be able to reach back to warn, even to protect, himself from a past already gone.
Came a day that a flash x-rayed everything on the surface, an instant when gamma rays, rads, blew molecules apart, a nanosecond in which light preceded sound, air blast, and pressure wave, a second when thunder, rumble, ground shake, and a sky-sized side-swipe simply wiped most of what he knew away, sending everything physical off into dust, the rest to free-fall into a void.
Safe in his redoubt, protected from the immediate horror by distance and mountains, by his ridge and deep caverns, he sighed and caressed the oil-clothed leather-bound journal, treating it as gently as a pet. He carried it always now, in the front belly-pocket of his pullover hood. It comforted him, the lump o weight, a pregnant kind of touch from his Other. He cherished the comradely reassurance.
Well-equipped, secure, he rode out years of underground isolation. Music, recorded audio-visual entertainment, and good food well prepared helped. Machines monitored the surface and told him he could next go outside in a mere ten thousand years or so, if the trends continued.
One evening he sat holding his journal on his lap staring into the fire, reading stories of imagined survival in the flames, when he took a breath, let half out in a surprised squeak, and died, his heart simply refusing further beats. No more work, on strike, I’m outta here.
Hikers found the skeletons, an older one in a hollow of earth like an native burial, and one propped at the entrance of the shallow cave gazing southward from hollow sockets where hallucinating eyes had one final time rolled back. In its lap lay a stone about the size and shape of a loaf of bread. It was wrapped in oilcloth and leather, both rotten.
They wondered if he’d been hungry or thought it treasure.
The hikers left him there, wondering how long the corpse had sat there. They reported their find and its position on GPS with their phones, then went about their business.
Recovery by state archaeologists took him to an unmarked room into a drawer of such specimens, and years later a doctoral student came across the bones and its odd-wrapped stone. After his analysis he declared the body ancient, probably pre-Ice Age, and wrote a well-received doctoral thesis, “A Survey of Cave Dwellers on Refuge Ridge and Their Reverence for River Rocks as Symbols of Life and Survival.”
It was later rewritten for popular consumption, enjoyed good sales, and was made into a National Geographic documentary.
/// /// ///
