Текст книги "Ancient Shores"

Автор книги: Jack McDevitt

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Текущая страница: 4 (всего у книги 20 страниц)

His eyes found Floyd, and Floyd produced a folder. He opened it and pulled out several drawings. All featured the boat, in various aspects. But there were several legends. The Devil’s Boat, read one. And My Folks Visited Fort Moxie, ND, and All I Got Was This Lousy T-shirt. Another featured a map of the upper Red River, with the location of the “devil’s boat” site marked with an inset.

“What’s this ‘devil’s boat’ routine?” asked Lasker.

“It was Marge’s idea,” said Charlie. Marge Peterson was the town clerk. “Part of the public-relations initiative.”

“I think it’s a little overboard.”

“Listen,” said Charlie, “people love that kind of stuff. And this whole business does have a kind of Twilight Zone flavor. Right?”

“And it lights up, doesn’t it?” said Floyd. “You find the power source yet?”

Lasker shook his head.

“Good. No known power source. We need to push that, Charlie. And the markings. The markings are good.”

“Yeah.” Charlie reached for his coat. “Listen, enjoyed talking with you, Tom. We’ve already started the ball rolling on this thing. Couple of the boys’ll be out tomorrow to get it going. You just relax. You won’t have to do anything except sit back and watch the money roll in.”

They were up and headed for the door. “Oh, one more thing.” Charlie stopped, and Floyd almost collided with him. “A rest room. We’ll need a rest room.”

“No,” said Lasker.

“It’s okay. We’ll set something up outside. Put it back in the trees. Out of sight.”

They shook his hand, opened the door, and looked out. There were maybe twenty visitors, and two more cars were pulling up. “See what I mean?” Charlie said.

April held the packet where the light from the window could shine through it. “What we have here,” she said, “are a few fibers taken from the mooring lanyards. The fibers are wood. They’re from spruce trees.” She passed it over.

Max squinted at the samples. “What does that tell us? There aren’t any spruce trees around here.”

“Not anymore. But there used to be. At one time they were quite common, as a matter of fact.”

“When?”

“When the lake was here.”

They were in a steakhouse. Max listened to the murmur of conversation, the clink of silverware. “You’re sure?”

“I’m sure.”

Max’s insides churned. A waitress arrived, and he settled for a Caesar salad rather than the club sandwich he’d been planning. “So what we’re saying is that we’ve got a ten-thousand-year-old boat up there?”

April squirmed. “I’d rather not jump to conclusions, Max. Let’s just stick with the facts for now. One, the boat will not rot, rust, or decay over extremely long periods of time. Two, the lanyards that are in the Lasker barn were once tied up to a piece of wood that was cut from a spruce tree. The tree that the wood fibers came from was alive ten thousand years ago.”

“But the boat,” said Max, “is new.”

“The boat will always look new, Max. You could put it back in the ground and dig it up to celebrate your sixtieth birthday, and it would look exactly as it does today.”

“That doesn’t sound possible.”

April nodded. “I know. Look, it’s outside our experience. But that doesn’t make it irrational.” Her voice dropped. “I’m not sure what kind of alternative explanation might fit the facts. The age of the wood fibers is not in dispute. Neither is the composition of the original samples. I think somebody was here. A long time ago somebody with advanced technology went sailing on Lake Agassiz. They tied up at least once to a tree or a pier.”

“So who was it?” asked Max. “Are we talking UFOs? Or what?”

“I don’t know. But it’s a question worth asking.”

Diet Cokes came. Max took a pull at his while he tried to get his thoughts in order. “It doesn’t make much sense,” he said. “Assume for a minute you’re right. Where does that leave us? With the notion that people came here from another world to go sailing? I mean, are we seriously suggesting that?”

“It’s not out of the realm of possibility. Try looking at the big picture, Max. And I mean big. How many water lakes are there, I wonder, within a radius of, say, twenty light-years? Agassiz might have looked pretty good to a load of tourists.” She smiled. “Look, let’s stay away from the speculation and concentrate on what we know. What we know is that we have an artificial element that’s unique in the world.”

“How do we know that?” asked Max.

“I guarantee it.”

“You guarantee it. April, I hate to say this, but a couple of days ago I wouldn’t have known who you were. No offense, but maybe you’re wrong.”

“Maybe I am. In the meantime, Max, consider this: If I do know what I’m talking about, the boat is literally beyond value.” She realized she was getting too loud; she leaned closer and lowered her voice. “Look. You’d like a second opinion. I know we don’t need one. Get a second opinion, and we get a second chemist. I’d just as soon keep this as exclusive as we can. We are sitting on a monumental discovery, and we are all going to be on the cover of Time. You. Me. The Laskers.” Her dark eyes filled with excitement. “There’s another reason to keep this close for the time being.”

“What’s that?” asked Max.

“There might be something else out there.”

Lisa Yarborough had launched her professional career as a physics teacher in a private school near Alexandria, Virginia. But she had been (and still was) an inordinately striking woman who just flat-out enjoyed sex. While she discussed energy and resistance by daylight, she demonstrated after dark a great deal of the former and hardly any of the latter.

Lisa discovered early that there was profit to be made from her hobby. Not that she ever stooped to imposing tariffs, but men insisted on showing her a substantial degree of generosity. Furthermore, indirect advantages could accrue to a bright, well-endowed young woman who had never been shackled by either inhibition or an undue sense of fair play. She left the Alexandria school in the middle of her second year amid a swirl of rumors to take a lucrative position with a firm doing business with the Pentagon; her new company thought she could influence the military’s purchasing officers. She proved successful in these endeavors, using one means or another, and moved rapidly up the corporate ladder. If it was true that, in her own style, she slept her way to the top, she nevertheless refrained from conducting liaisons with men in her own chain of command, and in that way maintained her self-respect.

Eventually she developed an interest in government and took a position as executive assistant to a midwestern senator who twice sought, without success, his party’s presidential nomination. She moved over to lobbying and did quite well for the tobacco industry and the National Education Association. At the law firm of Barlow and Biggs, she functioned as a conduit to several dozen congressmen. She received a political appointment and served a brief tour as an assistant commissioner in the Department of Agriculture. And eventually she became a director in a conservative think tank.

It was in the latter role that Lisa discovered a facility for writing. She had kept scrupulous diaries since she was twelve, a habit that began around the time she’d first retired into the backseat of her father’s Buick with Jimmy Proctor. Jimmy had been her first real connection, so to speak, and she’d found the experience so exhilarating that she’d wanted to tell someone. But her girlfriends at the Chester Arthur Middle School weren’t up to it. And her parents were Baptists.

Lisa should have been a Baptist, too. She had been exposed to the full range of ecclesiastical activities. She’d gone to youth group meetings on Tuesdays and Thursdays, services on Wednesdays and Sundays. But by senior year she’d slept with half the choir.

While she was at the think tank helping demolish Dukakis’s bid for the White House, she’d decided to use her diaries to write an autobiography. Her promise to go into delicious detail about an array of prominent persons throughout government and the media produced a seven-figure advance. The think tank had promptly fired her because she did not confine herself to prominent Democrats.

Old paramours and one-night stands had come to see her, pleading for selective amnesia. When persuasion and bribes didn’t work, they resorted to tears and threats, but she went ahead with the project. “If I don’t tell the truth,” she told a TV talk show host, “what will people think of me?”

The book was Capitol Love. It became a best-seller and then a TV movie, and Lisa bought a chain of autoparts stores with the proceeds. The rest, as they say, is history.

Lisa had first met April Cannon while Lisa was working at the Department of Agriculture. She’d gone to a dinner hosted by an environmental-awareness group. Her date had been one of the speakers, a tall, enthusiastic stag burdened with the conviction that the loss of forests had already exceeded the limits from which recovery might be possible. He also believed that women in general and Lisa in particular could not resist his charms. Lisa, who had planned to cap the evening in her usual style, changed her mind. April had been unimpressed with her date as well, and the two had fled together into the Washington night.

They had been close friends since.

Lisa was therefore not surprised when April called and asked to see her. Her interest grew when her friend refused to state the reason for the meeting.

The day after the phone call, April arrived with a nondescript individual in tow. “Lisa,” she said, “this is Max Collingwood.”

The women knew each other too well to indulge in small talk. April quietly explained what had been happening at Tom Lasker’s farm. When she had finished, Lisa was slow to respond. “You’re certain?” she asked. “How about fraud?”

“There’s no mistake. And fraud is not possible.” April slid a manila envelope onto the table, opened it, and took out a handful of photos. They were pictures of the yacht. Interior. Exterior. Sails. Closeups of rails and stanchions. And the markings.

“They are odd,” Lisa agreed. “And there’s no language match?”

“None that we can find,” said April.

Lisa continued to study the pictures, but her mind shifted to April. The information was so outrageous that she drew back to reassess her old friend. She knew what was coming, and she had to ask herself whether this was an effort to con her. April wouldn’t do it, she was sure. But what about this Collingwood?

“So what are your conclusions?” she asked. “Where did the element, the boat, come from?”

April smiled wearily. “Everything’s guesswork beyond what we’ve told you. We have no conventional explanation.”

“Do you have an unconventional one?”

“Yours is as good as anybody’s,” said April.

Lisa nodded, walked over to her desk, and took out a checkbook. “Where do you go from here?”

“We want to take a close look at the area. See if there’s anything else buried up there.”

“What do you need to do that?”

“A ground-search radar. We can rent one at a reasonable price.”

“But what could you possibly find? Another boat?”

“Maybe,” said Max.

“But you’ve already got one. I can understand that two is better than one, but in what way would a second boat advance your knowledge?”

“There might be remains,” said April.

“Ah. After ten thousand years? And some of it in the water? I hardly think so. You’d do better to think about where they might have stopped for hot dogs.”

The chemist leaned forward, and their eyes locked. “Lisa, they had to have a way to get here. There’s a possibility they never went home.”

Lisa listened to everybody breathe. “How much do you need?”

When GeoTech’s ground-search radar unit showed up to begin its probe, Max was there. He and the Laskers assumed that if anything was actually still in the ground, they would find it right away. If they found nothing, that would be the end of it.

Max did not like being associated with UFOs. Didn’t look good for him or for Sundown Aviation, and he resolved to keep a low profile. But on the other hand, if there was anything to it, intense media coverage and maybe a lot of money was not out of the question.

The GeoTech team consisted of three people working out of a large sand-colored van. The crew chief was an energetic, rather precise young woman who made the company jumpsuit look pretty good. Her name was Peggy Moore, and she opened the conversation by asking Max what they were looking for. “The work order’s a little vague on that point,” she added.

“Anything unusual,” said Max.

That was not a satisfactory reply. Moore had intense eyes, a quick frown, and a schedule that kept her far too busy to cope with someone who wanted to mess around. “Try me again,” she said in a tone that bordered on hostility.

“We’re not sure what we’re looking for,” Max explained. “We think there may be some artifacts buried in the area. We’d like you to tell us what’s in the ground. If anything.”

“What, generally, are we talking about here, Mr. Collingwood? Arrowheads? Indian burial ground? Old oil cans? It makes a difference in the way we proceed.”

“They dug up a boat last month.”

“I saw that on TV. This is the place, huh?”

“Yeah. We’d like to know if there’s anything else down there.”

“All right. It saves time,” she said, “when you tell us what we need to know.”

“Okay,” said Max.

“We already found a rake. While we were calibrating.”

The van was lined with computers, printers, display screens, and communications gear. The radar unit itself was mounted on a small tractor. “The images are relayed to the van by radio link,” Moore explained. “It goes up on the main screen. We’ll be watching for shadows, unusual coloring, anything that suggests a formation that isn’t obviously natural.”

It was by then mid-November, and the day on which the GeoTech crew started was miserably cold. Snow threatened throughout the afternoon, although only a few flakes fell.

The other two technicians were Charlie Ramirez, a somber-looking man who drove the tractor and ran the radar, and Sara Winebarger, the communications specialist. Sara was stick-thin with straight blond hair.

Because of the extreme cold, Moore and Charlie rotated assignments on the tractor. Charlie did not like cold weather, and he talked a lot about Nevada. “Only reason I’m here is because they eliminated my job on the southern border. Soon as it opens up again, I’m out of here.”

Max’s fascination with the project worked on him, and he asked if he could watch from inside the van. “It’s against the rules,” said the crew chief.

“I wouldn’t create a problem.”

“I’m sure you wouldn’t, Mr. Collingwood. But there are insurance implications.” Her demeanor was as cold as the weather. “You understand.”

They laid out a search pattern, and Charlie took off, headed for the top of the hill. He plunged through the windbreak, mounted the ridge and, at a range of about a hundred yards from the site of the original find, executed a sharp right turn. Eventually he completed the first of a series of overlapping rectangles.

Max went into the farmhouse and took over the Laskers’ dining room, near a window. Outside, the tractor rumbled methodically through the long afternoon.

8

This antique coast,

Washed by time…

–Walter Asquith, Ancient Shores

During the course of the afternoon, the GeoTech team found nothing. When at last they quit for the day, Max exchanged reassurances with the Laskers, and flew home. The second day of the search, a Friday, also produced no results, and the operation shut down for the weekend.

April had encouraged Max and the Laskers to say as little as possible about the find. She had followed her own advice and revealed nothing to her colleagues at Colson. But she needed someone to talk to. Max’s enthusiasm matched her own, and so, during the succeeding days, while the radar unit searched Tom Lasker’s property without result, they found themselves meeting after hours for dinner and drinks and long intense conversations.

These conversations had the effect of fortifying their hopes and creating an informal alliance. However, they rarely produced specifics about what those hopes really were: hers, that a way might be found to master transuranic technology; his, that there had indeed been unearthly visitors, and that proof might lie nearby. But Max suspected that a more mundane explanation would eventually surface, that April had to have overlooked something. Nevertheless, she could usually, over beer and pizza, allay those doubts. For a time.

For her part, April had no one to lean on. She considered herself rock-solid, not the sort to be carried away by passion or gulled by ambition. Nevertheless, she would have liked a second opinion, some confirmation from one of the experts in the field. But the stakes were so high that she knew where premature disclosure might lead: The heavyweights would move in and Cannon would be pushed aside.

She needed someone to talk to. The Laskers, sitting on what might turn out to be the discovery of the ages, seemed to look on the entire business with a degree of complacency that irritated her. They were interested, the possibilities intrigued them, and yet they lacked fire. It was her impression that had Tom Lasker been informed there was a crashed UFO on his land, he’d go look at it, but only after feeding the horses.

Max was different. And during this difficult period, he became her sole support.

They tended to approach the more electrifying possibilities obliquely: They joked about the effects they would have on their personal lives. April conjured up an image of Max on the cover of Time, stepping down from the cockpit of the Lightning, his flying jacket rakishly open. Man of the Year.

And he speculated about a Nobel for the woman who had given the world the lifetime automobile guarantee.

Meantime, the days passed without tangible result from the ground-radar unit, and Max’s conviction returned that it was all just too good to be true. April pointed out that the search was a long shot, but even if they found nothing else, they already possessed an artifact of incalculable value. “Nothing is ever going to be the same,” she said, adding that she had written a paper revealing her findings. “Which I will not publish until we can be reasonably sure there’s nothing else out there. We don’t want to start a treasure hunt.”

“I agree,” said Max. They were sitting in a food court in the mall at the intersection of the two interstates in Fargo, splitting a pepperoni pizza. “If there really is something out there, what would you think our chances are of finding it?”

Her eyes fluttered shut. “Almost nil. There’s too much lake bottom.” She stirred a packet of artificial sweetener into her coffee. “We’re talking about substantial pieces of the U.S. and Canada. For that matter, there could be something here.” She indicated the floor. “The Fargo area was underwater, too, for a while. Who knows?”

Max looked down at the tiles. “I wonder what the yacht is worth?”

“If it is what we think it is, Max, you couldn’t put a price on it.” She watched a mother trying to balance a squalling child and an armload of packages. “I hope we can actually get some answers to the questions. Truth is, I have a bad feeling that we’re likely to be faced with a mystery no one will ever solve.”

“It would be nice,” he said, “to find something that would help pin down who owned the boat.”

“Remains,” she said. “What we need are remains.” Her manner was so intent that two kids trooping past with balloons turned to stare. “Look. They left the boat. That suggests something unexpected might have happened. A storm. Maybe they were attacked by natives.”

“Or,” suggested Max, “maybe they just never came back for it.”

“It’s a nice boat,” said April. “I’d sure take it with me when I left. I wouldn’t just leave it somewhere. No, I think there’s a good chance something went wrong.” Her voice softened, became very distant. “Oh, Max, I don’t know. I hate to speculate about this thing.” She took a bite of pizza and chewed very deliberately before continuing. “If something did go wrong, there’s a decent chance their means of transportation is still here.”

Max should have been feeling good. The Vickers Museum in South Bend was expected to get a substantial grant, an award that opened serious possibilities for the company. In addition, there had been two good offers for a Catalina flying boat on which Max had an option, and Popular Aviation had notified him they wanted to do an article on Sundown. The company’s condition looked strong enough that he was toying with the possibility of keeping White Lightning.

Nevertheless, he was restless. The ground-search radar was approaching the western limits of Tom Lasker’s farm with no indication of anything untoward. April had hinted at a vehicle. But maybe they were looking in the wrong place. After all, a vehicle wouldn’t have gone into the lake.

Maybe they hadn’t thought this out too well. What was it Lisa Yarborough had said? Think about where they might have stopped off for hotdogs.

The weather stayed cold. He took to watching the Ben at Ten news team out of Grand Forks, which came in on cable. Ben at Ten was covering the Fort Moxie story as a kind of light windup feature each evening. First there was the “devil’s boat” T-shirts. Then there had been footage of angry citizens warning the city council that more people would be frightened away than attracted to Fort Moxie by talk of a devil. They interviewed a man who claimed to have unearthed an intact 1937 Chevrolet in a rock garden in Drayton. They reported on the reactions of out-of-state visitors: The boat was a sign of the last days; it had fallen out of an aircraft; it was a publicity stunt by a boat manufacturer; it was an attempt by the American government to entice Canadian visitors.

Tom complained on the phone that the tent smelled of elephants and that for the first time in his life he was grateful the wind rarely blew out of the south. April was almost frantic that the boat was not locked away securely and not even kept away from the public, but Tom felt a responsibility to his lifelong neighbors to keep it on display. He also sent along a brochure and a T-shirt with a picture of the yacht and the slogan I Had a Devil of a Time in Fort Moxie. The artwork for the brochure wasn’t bad: The boat lay atop its ridge, silhouetted by a full moon with a devilish aspect. The story of the discovery was told in a few terse lines, below a Gothic leader proclaiming that “scientists are baffled.” There were also photos of the Lasker farmhouse and downtown scenes prominently displaying the Prairie Schooner, Clint’s Restaurant, and the Northstar Motel.

Max kept thinking they were looking in the wrong place. On the day that the T-shirt and brochure arrived, he decided to investigate the possibility.

The main branch of the Fargo library is located downtown, at the intersection of First Avenue and Third Street. It’s a square two-story structure, wedged into an area of weary stone-and-brick buildings, softened by trees and occasional shrubbery.

It was midafternoon, just before rush hour, when Max passed the police station and pulled into a parking place in front of the civic center. The temperature had risen, the snow that had been falling since lunchtime had turned to rain, and the asphalt glistened in a cold mist. The streetlights were on, creating a spectral effect, and a heavy sky sagged into the rooftops. He climbed out of the car, pulled his jacket around him, and hurried the half-block to the library.

High-school kids crowded the stacks and tables, and the air was thick with the smell of damp cotton. He went back into the reference section, pulled out all the atlases he could find, and dragged them to a table.

Lake Agassiz had been the largest of the many Pleistocene lakes of North America. It was a sea in every sense of the word, covering at its maximum expanse a surface area of 110,000 square miles. It had formed from the meltwaters of the continental ice sheet near the end of the last ice age. But within a few thousand years those same glaciers, retreating north, had uncovered access to Hudson Bay, and Agassiz had drained.

The ancient lake lived on in Lake of the Woods, the Assiniboine River, Rainy Lake, Red Lake in Minnesota, the Red River of the North, Lake Winnipeg. But in the days of its greatness, the water had filled the valley to a depth of more than three hundred feet.

He checked the dates on Native Americans. They had been here early enough to have seen Agassiz. What else had they seen?

The spruce fibers in the loops of the mooring cables indicated that the boat had been tied up rather than simply anchored. That implied a harbor. Where within a reasonable range of Tom Lasker’s farm had there been a sheltered harbor?

Where, along the shores of Lake Agassiz, would you build a pier?

The size of the coastline was dismaying. It stretched from north-central Saskatchewan to St. Anthony’s Falls in Minneapolis. Probably ten thousand miles of shore. Hopeless. But there was a fair chance that the boat had been moored, that it had broken loose, and that it had been driven onto a reef or sunk by a storm shortly afterward. Not a tight chain of reasoning. But it was possible. If so, then the mooring place lay in the neighborhood. Say, along the western coastline between Fargo and Winnipeg.

He looked a long time at the maps.

What did a good harbor need? Obviously the water had to be at the right level. That made it a problem of altitude. Okay, he could check that out. It would have to provide shelter from current and wind. And enough depth to tie up without grounding during low tide. That meant no shallow slopes. There couldn’t be too many places like that.

He hoped.

Max lifted off, climbed into a clear sky, and turned west, looking for the shoreline. He didn’t find it. The Red River Valley rises in the south, and the escarpment, which is so pronounced near the border, sinks to invisibility. From offshore, the coast would have looked flat. That meant there could have been no deep-water approaches.

He turned north, flying over a snow-covered landscape marked by silos and occasional towns connected by long, quiet two-lane roads. The ancient coast did not appear until he crossed into Cavalier County.

Near Herzog Dam, Route 5 passes through a cut. He went down to four thousand feet for a better look. The snowfields had been abandoned to winter, and nothing moved in all that landscape save a lone pickup, approaching from the east. It was possible the cut disguised an ancient harbor, and he flew overhead several times without coming to a firm conclusion. Unfortunately, if this was it, he doubted there would be much left to look at. He photographed it and flew on.

He found another potential landfall south of Walhalla, off Route 32.

And another candidate in Canada.

Three possibilities in all.

The site at Walhalla was closest to the Lasker farm. That one first, he thought, turning east.

He called April from the plane. “No big thing,” he said. “But it’s a possibility.”

“Sure.” She didn’t sound particularly enthusiastic. “Anything’s better than what we’re doing now. Who owns the land?”

“I can find out, if you want me to pursue it.”

“Yes,” she said. “Go ahead. Get us permission to look around.”

Tom met him at Fort Moxie International. He was equally unimpressed, but he shrugged and took the same tack. “We can ride over now, if you want,” he said.

They drove west on Route 11, past the farm, and out to the edge of the Pembina Escarpment, where they turned south on Route 32. The hills and ridges on the west side of the road formed a solid chain, with clumps of forest scattered across their summits and piles of rock at ground level. Walhalla nestled in this section, a prosperous prairie town of frame houses, lumberyards, and feed stores.

Ten minutes south of town, the trees parted, and they were looking into a horseshoe canyon.

“Johnson’s Ridge,” said Lasker.

The canyon walls were rocky and almost sheer on the south and west. The northern slope rose more gradually toward the summit. It was heavily wooded, as was the valley floor. Two men were stopped just off the road, cutting firewood, stacking it in the back of a pickup.

The canyon was two hundred yards wide at its mouth and maybe twice as deep. It narrowed by about a third toward the rear wall. An access road left the highway, plunged into the trees, and climbed the northern ridge in a series of hairpin turns.

Lasker pulled over and stopped. The sun was sinking toward the top of the western promontory, which was lower by fifty to a hundred feet than the summits on either side. “Where was the water level?” he asked.

“Depends on which period you’re talking about. It was never high enough that the southern side could have served conveniently as a harbor. But for a long time you could have taken a boat up there”—he indicated the rear wall—“tied up at your dock or whatever, and stepped out onto dry land.”

Lasker squinted through the sunlight. A squadron of birds, too far away for him to see clearly, cruised over the summit. “Could be,” he said. “I think it belongs to the Indians,” he added.

Arky Redfern’s law offices were located in a professional building on the outskirts of Cavalier, the county seat. He was flanked by an orthodontist and a financial advisor. The building was flat gray slate with maybe twenty parking places, about half of which were filled when Lasker pulled in and found an open slot next to the handicapped space.

Inside, a brisk young woman looked up from a computer terminal. “Good afternoon, gentlemen,” she said. “Can I help you?”

She took their names and picked up a phone. Fifteen minutes later they were ushered into an interior office dominated by a mahogany desk, leather furniture, and an array of glass-door bookcases. The walls to either side were crowded with plaques and certificates; the one behind the desk was conspicuously reserved for a hunting bow and a spread of five arrows.

Arky Redfern was a lean young man in a gray tweed jacket. He was of about average height, with dark, distant eyes, copper skin, and thick brown hair. Just out of law school, Max thought. Redfern came through an inner door, greeted Lasker with easy familiarity, asking about his family, and shook Max’s hand.