Free Infinity Beach by Jack McDevitt

we run into something, we’ll beat it off with a stick.”
    “Good,” she grinned. “Nothing like being prepared.”
    They pushed through thick brambles and shrubbery, crossed glades, and eventually found a trail that seemed to be going in their direction.
    They passed a collapsed house, entangled in new-growthtrees, almost invisible until they were within a couple of meters. And a bench, incongruously set off to one side of the trail. “This was probably the way to the beach at one time,” Solly said.
    She looked at her map. “Yes. Here it is.”
    “How’re we doing?”
    “Headed in the right direction. It’s not much farther.”
    “You don’t think we ought to come back and do this in the morning?”
    “We’re here now, Solly. Let’s just take a quick look, so I can say I’ve been here, and then we can head out.”
    After Tripley’s disappearance, the villa and its furnishings had been willed to Sara Baines, his mother. According to the reports, Sara had closed up the house, but had been unable to sell it. The town was emptying out; people had too many bad memories, there were doubts whether the rest of the mountain might come down, the dam could go at any time.
    So nobody had really lived in the house since Tripley came back from that last flight.
    They left the trail at a glade with a tumbled shed, clumped through a stream, skidded down a slope, and got confused about directions because nobody had thought to bring a compass. “Don’t blame me,” said Solly. “I thought we were going to sit in the flyer and look at the lake.”
    Kim was now in the lead. The trees closed in again. In some places the snow was too deep for her hiking shoes. It got down her ankles, and her feet got cold.
    It was hard to keep a sense of direction. On one occasion they came out in a swampy area along the lake shore. They turned back, retraced their steps for about a hundred paces, and struck off in a new direction. Kim had never been a hiking enthusiast, and she was beginning to have second thoughts when the ground started to rise.
    “This might be it,” she said. “The place was on the brow of a low hill.”
    It was a slippery climb. They took turns falling down and suddenly they were tumbling in the snow and Solly, whoprobably would have preferred to look irritable, couldn’t resist laughing.
    But they got to the summit, and there it stood!
    Whatever lawn might have once existed behind a peeling wooden fence had been swallowed by bushes, weeds, and shrubbery. The villa itself lay in a tangle of spruce and oak trees. Vines had grown over it and the wind had taken the roof off. The front door was missing.
    She played her lantern across it and compared it with pictures she’d brought. “Yes,” she said. “This is it. No question.”
    They circled around to the rear. A side wall had collapsed. Windows were broken, frames shattered. An oak was threatening to push over the east wing.
    It was made mostly of brick. Two stories, glass dome, oval windows, rotunda, turret. None of that cheap mass-produced stuff for Kile Tripley. Kim stood in the snow, transfixed by the ruin.
    “What are you thinking?”
    “About transience, I guess. I was wondering if Emily was ever here.”
    Followed by Solly, she stepped over the threshold into the rotunda. It was good to get out of the wind. She flashed her beam around the interior, which the elements had destroyed. Overhead, two stories up, the dome was covered with dirt and vegetation. During Tripley’s time it would have revealed the stars.
    The walls were mottled and crumbling. A sagging staircase arced up to the second floor where it became a circular balcony. There were several doorways on both levels, and a fireplace on the lower.
    One door hung out of its frame. Others were missing altogether. A central corridor opened off the rear of the rotunda directly in front of her and ran to the back of the house. Solly pointed his lamp into it, and they saw at the far end a flight of