The Harvest

Chapter 19 Annie and Bobby

Tom Kindle decided he would stay in Buchanan until the end of the World Series. After that… well, the horizon had an alluring look, these rainy autumn days.

Matt Wheeler didn’t appear to approve of the idea.

Kindle walked with him through the empty hallways of the regional hospital. Some of the overhead fluorescents had burned out; some flickered like candles in a cold wind. The building was increasingly spooky, in Kindle’s opinion. Nobody but Matt came around anymore.

“I’d be happier if you stayed,” Matt said.

Kindle didn’t answer. He was concentrating on the pleasure of locomotion. Christ in a basket, it was good to get out of that wheelchair! It was good to be walking under his own steam.

It hurt like hell, but it was good anyway.

Monday he’d made it halfway to the maternity wing and back; today, all the way to Maternity and far beyond, as far as the fabled corridors of Physiotherapy, where empty sitz baths gleamed like strange idols in dim green rooms.

He stumbled once. Matt took his arm. “Don’t overdo it.”

“No pain, no gain.”

“It was a bad break. At your age, you don’t heal as fast as you used to.”

“Thank you, Dr. Kildare.”

“You want me to lie?”

“Every once in a while it might be nice.”

A pause. Matt said, “You’re serious about leaving Buchanan?”

“Yes.” Kindle gritted his teeth and closed his eyes. “Okay, now we turn around.”

They shuffled back through ancient odors of ether and antiseptic. Kindle wore his old jeans and a cotton workshirt. The doctor wore his hospital gown over a similar outfit. We don’t look all that different, Kindle thought. He caught their reflection in a rainy corridor window. Not doctor and patient. Just two guys who ought to shave more often. Two guys with similar worry lines. Different pain.

Matt said, “You have somewhere in particular to go?”

“It’s a big country… I haven’t seen it all.”

In fact, he was thinking about the Wind River Range, the Tetons, that area. He hadn’t seen Wyoming for about twenty-five years.

“What about the Committee?”

“I never signed on to salvage Buchanan. I barely lived here, you know, before Contact. The Committee’ll get on without me.”

“You said you’d do radio.”

“Yeah, yeah, I’ll do radio. I’m not leaving yet.”

“There’s a meeting at the end of the week.”

“Right, I’ll be there.”

“I want you to talk to me before you leave,” Matt said. “Maybe I can change your mind.”

Kindle promised he would, though it rubbed him the wrong way. No strings attached, damn it. He’d leave when he felt like it. Stay or go as the spirit moved him.

It was how he’d lived his life. Why change now?

Matt left him alone in his room. Kindle checked the TV, but there was nothing but fuzz. All they showed on TV anymore was a couple of hours of news per day. Plus the Major League playoffs.

The first-of-November Committee meeting was brief and morose. Five people showed up in addition to Kindle and Matt Wheeler. Joey Commoner and Beth Porter were two of them. Abby Cushman, the somewhat ditzy farm lady, failed to appear. Paul Jacopetti unfortunately did. The pessimistic ex-tool-and-die maker issued his usual evil-minded prophecies, including a prediction that the Helper recently arrived at the City Hall Turnaround would murder them all while they slept. Poison gas, maybe. Matt seemed too dazed to refute this paranoia, and Kindle listened with disgust.

After that they held their first election. Matt stood for chairman. His single opponent was—inevitably—Paul Jacopetti, who didn’t think Matt should run unopposed, “although of course this whole exercise is futile.” There was a show of hands and Matt took the vote six to one. (“Figures,” Jacopetti said.)

Old business. Kindle promised he would drive down to Causgrove Electronics the next day and look for a ham set.

“A lot of those stores are closed,” Matt reminded him. “Call first. Or call the owner and see if he’ll let you in.”

“Or I could jimmy the lock.”

Matt shot him a disapproving look. “I don’t think it’s come to that.” Maybe, Kindle thought. Or maybe not.

But he did as Matt asked: phoned the store, no answer, phoned three Causgroves out of the book until he found the one who owned the shop.

“You’re right, Mr. Kindle, the front door’s locked. Locked it myself. Force of habit, I guess. -But the back is open. You can get in that way.”

“You want to meet me there?”

“For what purpose?”

“Well, I can write you a check. Unless you want cash.”

“Please, don’t bother. Just go ahead and take what you need.”

“I’m sorry? What?”

“We had a reasonable stock last time I looked. I presume you can find the stockroom, or just root around the displays. If we have what you want, take it.”

“Pardon me. You said—take it?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Just—take it?”

“Yes.”

“Just like that?”

“Yes. I’m happy to see the goods serving a purpose. I thought they’d all turned into scrap metal. Please, take whatever you want. But it’s nice of you to have called, Mr. Kindle.”

The connection broke at the other end. Kindle stared at the phone for a while.

His first experience with a motor vehicle since the accident wasn’t his pickup truck, which had been towed or trashed, but a car Matt Wheeler left for him in the hospital lot: a little blue Japanese device. Kindle was long-legged, and the act of climbing inside this automobile left him feeling like he’d been folded into a mailbox. His knees bumped the wheel until he figured out how to lever back the seat. Everything was digital. The dashboard looked like a cockpit display.

But it was transportation, what the hell. Maybe, when his leg didn’t hurt so damn much, he would take himself to a car dealership. Maybe the price of a new car had dropped since Contact. Maybe to zero. He wondered what it would be like to drive one of those bullet-shaped vans he used to see on the road. It would be nice to have an enclosed space to keep a few things out of the rain.

This morning, a Tuesday morning, the roads were wet and empty. The rain fell in mists; the windshield fogged until he figured out how to run the heater.

Driving west from the hospital, Kindle was impressed with the stillness of the town. It was as if some languorous, fatal calm had settled over Buchanan. He counted the cars he passed—eight altogether, their brake lights making comet-tails on the slick asphalt. No pedestrians. Most of the shops were dark.

It resembled a ghost town, Kindle thought, but no one had really left. What were all those people doing?

He parked in a no-stopping zone. Anarchist outlaws of the world, unite. He extracted himself from the car, moaning when his bad knee knocked against the steering column.

Causgrove had been correct: The front door of the shop was locked, but the door facing the service alley opened at the turn of a knob.

Kindle switched on lights as he entered the building. He realized as soon as he found the dimly daylit front room that shopping was going to be harder than he’d expected. The racks were full of indistinguishable black boxes with endless, cryptic numeric displays. Some of these items were marine radios, some were ham rigs, some served no obvious purpose. “Should have studied up on this,” Kindle said aloud.

“You just have to know what you’re looking for.”

He was startled by the voice, and he turned thoughtlessly on the axis of his left foot. A flare of pain sizzled up the leg. “Ouch, goddamn it!” He steadied himself on a steel rack. “Who’s there?”

It was Joey Commoner.

Joey came out of the shadows behind the cash counter. He looked like a hood, Kindle thought, but not a dangerous one. The kind of suburban white kid who dresses like a drug dealer but doesn’t know any. He stood with his hands in the pockets of his leather jacket and an unreadable expression on his face.

“Knew you’d show up,” Joey said.

“You were waiting for me?”

“What you said at the meeting last night…”

“What about it?”

“Figured you wouldn’t know what you wanted.” Kindle glanced again at the relentless racks. Kid had a point. “So are you here to help or did you just want the fun of watching?”

“You need a transceiver,” Joey said. “Show me one.”

Joey pushed away from the counter and sauntered over to a wall display. Yet more big black boxes. Some of them had microphones attached. Joey said, “How much are you planning to spend?”

“Do you see anybody behind the register?”

“We’re ripping this off?”

“Not exactly. I talked to the owner. He says we’re welcome to take anything we want.”

“What, for free?”

“No money down, no monthly payments.”

“Shit,” Joey said. “That’s weird. I knew these people weren’t human.” He turned his attention to the stock. “So we want the best, right?” He put his hand on a huge rig. There was a Japanese brand name on the face of it, next to more knobs and technical graffiti than Kindle cared to look at. “This is a three-hundred-watt transceiver. They come more powerful, but I don’t think we need it.”

“You know ham stuff? How come you didn’t say anything at the meeting? Save me the trouble?”

“I don’t know much. Mainly theory. I know how radio works. I never got a license or anything.”

“One up on me.”

“Uh-huh. Probably we could use an ARRL Manual, too.…”

“Which?”

“The book on the rack over there? Looks like a phone book?”

Kindle considered his leg. The ache, which never ceased, was cranking up toward real pain. “Tell you what… I’ll carry the book if you carry that machine.”

“It’s a transceiver. Or you can call it a rig.”

“All right, Christ, it’s a transceiver. Can you carry the fuckin’ transceiver?”

Joey smiled. “Should have brought your wheelchair.”

“Smart-ass.”

Joey rooted in the stockroom for a boxed unit with a manual, then loaded it into the trunk of Kindle’s car. “I appreciate the help,” Kindle said. “You’re not done yet.”

“No?”

“Think about it. You want to be a radio station. So you need more than a box. You need—”

“An antenna.” It was obvious. He felt a little stupid. “Well, shit.” He squinted at the kid. “You know about antennas?”

“Could figure it out.”

“They stock ’em here?”

Joey nodded. “But we should come back with a truck or something. We’re talking about maybe a big beam antenna. You got a three-hundred-watt transceiver, so you want a big antenna and a big tower to do it justice.”

“Why don’t I just go home and let you take care of it?”

Joey backed up. “I didn’t volunteer for this.”

“No, hey, I didn’t mean it that way—”

“I mean, fuck you if you want me to do your job.…”

“No—”

“Just wanted to help.”

“So help.” Kindle slammed the trunk shut. “Let’s not stand here in the pissin’ rain. We’ll come back with a truck. But maybe tomorrow, all right? My leg hurts.”

Joey gazed at him. “You broke it?”

“Yeah.”

“How?”

“Fell down a mountain.”

“Uh-huh,” Joey said. “You look too old to climb a mountain.” Kindle sighed and took a pen and notepad from his shirt pocket. “Write down your phone number. I’ll call you about the antenna.”

“Told you I’m not doing your work for you.”

“You don’t have to work, goddamn it, you only have to point.”

“I just like the electronics.”

But Joey wrote his number down.

There was a baseball game on TV that night. There had been a long hiatus after Contact, then the season had picked up where it left off. The World Series would run into cold weather, but with all these domed stadiums Kindle supposed that wasn’t a problem.

He had watched all these games. Everything else on TV since Contact had been bizarre and kind of frightening, even such laudable events as the relief flights to the Third World. The food flights had been good, but they had also been operated with scary precision. There was something unnerving about all those military planes in V formation, even if their cargo bays were filled with wheat.

Now the relief flights appeared to have stopped; the implication was that the refugee populations of the world had found some new way to get along… or had “discorporated,” a word Kindle remembered from his youth. Feeding the poor had been a stopgap effort, a bridge to that great unspoken mysterious millennium Kindle felt bearing down on him like a runaway locomotive.

But baseball went on. The NBA hadn’t started a new season, football was finished, but a decision had been made in some telepathic congress: The World Series would be played out come hell or high water.

Maybe in Spain it was soccer, or in Russia it was hockey or chess or whatever the hell they played over there, but games still mattered. According to Matt, there were still Little League games being played in Buchanan, even some pick-up football on the high school field. Whatever it was people were turning into, they still liked to get out on the turf and chase a ball.

He hadn’t followed baseball since the 1978 World Series, the last time he’d owned a TV. The Yankees took the Dodgers that year, as Kindle recalled. Things had changed since then. He didn’t recognize names. Everybody looked too young. But he had watched the season progress on his hospital Sony, and he was determined to see the end of it.

Tonight it was an AL game, Detroit at New York. He thought Detroit looked good for the Series. He thought it would be a Detroit/Chicago Series, and his money was on Detroit.

The Tigers would take the Cubs, and then Kindle would pack up his possessions and move on.

He spent that night at the hospital, but he wasn’t sick enough to stay longer and he didn’t intend to. It was a charmless place at best. At the same time, it seemed pointless to move back to his cabin. He could get all the isolation he wanted much closer to town.

In the morning he phoned the local realty office. No one answered, but Kindle was ready for that. He knew a guy who worked there, or used to, a guy named Ira who sometimes hired his boat for fishing trips. Kindle reached him at home. Ira’s voice had the detached, bemused quality Kindle had come to expect from a Contactee. Kindle identified himself and came to the point: “Just a question, Ira, seeing as you’re in the business: Are houses free?”

“What do you mean… you want to buy a house?”

“Nope. I just want one. Yesterday I wanted a radio rig and I got one for free. Can I have a house?”

There was a pause. “Well.” Thoughtful. “I know of some empty properties. If you move in, I don’t suppose anybody will mind.”

“You’re shittin’ me!” Kindle couldn’t contain himself.

“Beg pardon?”

“Christ, you’re serious! I can move into any fuckin’ house?”

“Any empty one, I suppose.”

He recalled Joey Commoner’s remark about an antenna. “I want a house on a hill. No obstructions. Nice view all around.”

“Ocean view?”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“I can give you a few addresses.…” Kindle fumbled for his pen.

He spent the next day looking at properties. By mid-afternoon he’d picked one out: A two-bedroom frame house in Delmar Estates, a mildly upscale part of town, overlooking Buchanan and a northerly piece of the bay. The house was empty and unfurnished.

He moved in his single piece of property—the radio transceiver, still boxed. He put it in the middle of the living room floor.

The house had an empty-house smell. He guessed the broadloom had been cleaned before the property went on the market. Maybe the walls had been painted. He breathed in, breathed out.

He had never lived in such a place and never really wanted to… but he guessed a month or so here might be tolerable. Although, at the moment, there was nothing to sit on but the floor.

He drove to the Sears at the nearest mall and found the doors standing open but no one on duty at the cashiers’ stations. What else? He realized with some startlement that he could equip the house with any furniture he happened to like, price being no object. He’d always kind of admired these imitation-leather sofas, for instance. He tried one out, right there in the deserted Home Furnishings department. It was like sitting on a stuffed lizard. Sumptuous but probably sticky in hot weather.

But this was all academic—there was no way he could transport any of this stuff, not at the moment, not without grinding his bad leg down to bloody splinters. He sighed and moved on to the patio furniture. Two folding chairs and a chaise lounge, just about his speed. He tucked them under his arm and carried them to the car.

He went back for fresh clothes—a pair of jeans and an armload of cotton T-shirts and underwear.

It had been a long day and he was beginning to tire, but he made a second stop at the A P, where he picked up canned food, cold cuts, a couple of loaves of bread. The house was equipped with a refrigerator and stove… but hang on, was the electricity working? It hadn’t occurred to him to check the lights. He supposed he could phone the power company. If the phone was connected. If there was a phone. Okay, one more stop, back to the mall to pick up a touchtone telephone.

It was nearly dusk by the time he arrived back at the house.

Electricity, it turned out, wasn’t a problem. The refrigerator was humming vigorously. He switched on the kitchen lights and began putting away the food.

He noticed the wire shelves in the refrigerator were barely cool, and he frowned and checked the freezer. No frost. Not even a trace. Was that significant? Maybe it was a frost-free unit; Kindle had heard of such appliances, though he had never owned one.

But the refrigerator was humming like a son of a bitch. When he was here earlier… had he noticed that sound?

Maybe not.

Maybe, this afternoon, the electricity hadn’t been turned on. He plugged in the phone and called Ira. “Ira, I found a place.”

“I know,” Ira said cheerfully. “Up on Delmar. I was the listed agent on that property, by the way. Good view. I hope you’ll be happy there.”

“Pardon me, Ira, but how the fuck do you know where I picked to live?”

There was a pause. “The neighbors saw you leave some belongings. We assumed you were moving in.”

“What, you talked to the neighbors?”

“Well. In a way.”

By voodoo telegraph, in other words. “So tell me… did the neighbors also talk to the power company?”

“Well, Tom. Everybody more or less talks to everybody.”

“Well, Ira, doesn’t that more or less scare the shit out of you?”

“No. But I apologize if we alarmed you.”

“Think nothing of it.” He put the phone down in a hurry. Unfolded a chair and sat in it.

He’d forgotten to pick up a TV set. Was there a game on tonight? He couldn’t remember.

Kindle went to the kitchen, where the light was brighter, and unpacked the transceiver. Ungainly object. He tried to read the manual, but it was written in some language only theoretically English. “Do not allow to contact with moisture or heavily wet.” Words to live by.

He guessed Joey Commoner would be able to figure it out.

November was rainy; he postponed the chore of erecting an antenna. The ache in his leg retreated some. He began stocking up on groceries, beginning to suspect that Mart’s fears about the food supply were well-founded. The staples were still being trucked in, but luxury items had begun to disappear from the shelves. He stockpiled some of those, too. He felt like making a trophy list. Successfully hunted down in Buchanan, Oregon : Last bag of Oreos. Last bottle of gourmet popcorn.

He ferried down some items from his cabin, mainly tools and books. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire had been sitting where he left it last August and was a little musty, since he’d left the windows open, but still readable. A trudge through Gibbon might not be too bad, given all this rainy cool weather. Then on to Madame Bovary.

The Tigers took the American League pennant late that month.

He called Joey when the skies cleared for a couple of days.

“Been waiting to hear from you,” Joey complained. “I got a lot of tower parts from Radio Shack. And a beam antenna from Causgrove’s. But you weren’t at the hospital.”

Kindle gave the kid his new address. “You can transport all that?”

“Took a van out of the lot at Harbor Ford.”

Must do that myself one of these days, Kindle thought. “Are we talking hard physical labor here?”

“Some,” Joey said. “Bring beer,” Kindle said. “You got it.”

Kindle had worked erecting TV towers back in the sixties, and he remembered enough of that experience to temper Joey’s recklessness. He used a power drill with a masonry bit to anchor the antenna base in a concrete trailer pad in front of the house. He guyed the tower as it went up, extra guys on the first ten feet so Joey wouldn’t come plummeting down. Probably Matt Wheeler would resent being called in on another broken leg. Would resent it even worse if he lost one of his one in ten thousand—even if it was Joey Commoner.

They had the tower stabilized and the antenna installed by dusk. Joey did all the climbing, in deference to Kindle’s leg, a nice thought, or his age, which was insulting; he was careful not to ask.

Joey stood back from his work. “This ought to give us good access to the twenty-meter band, which I guess would be the busiest band under the circumstances, though who knows?”

“I sure as hell don’t.”

Joey had taken off his shirt during the final guying of the tower. As they entered the house, Kindle read the tattoo on his right bicep. Neat blue letters.

WORTHLESS, it said.

“You believe that?” Kindle asked.

Joey shrugged his shirt back on and began fiddling with the back of the transceiver. Kindle cracked a beer, waiting for an answer that didn’t come. This would have been a good time to order in a pizza, he thought, except nobody delivered anymore. He wondered who in Buchanan had eaten the last delivery pizza.

He persisted, “It just seems like a strange thing to write on yourself.”

Joey put his head up from behind the transceiver. “Since when do you give a shit?”

“Don’t get hostile.” Anyway, Kindle’s attention had refocused on the dinner problem. “Maybe I could cook us up some hamburgers on that Jenn-Air in the kitchen.…”

“Cook whatever you want. Fuck!” Joey had jammed a screwdriver into the palm of his hand. He added some other words.

“Shouldn’t have written, ‘worthless,’ ” Kindle said. “Should have written, ‘Bad tempered little SOB.’ ”

“Fuck off,” Joey said. “I thought you liked to do electronics.”

Joey stood up. What was that on his shirt—a skull? Skull and roses? “It’s too many words.”

“Eh?”

“’Bad-tempered little SOB.’ Would have hurt too much.”

“Kid has a sense of humor,” Kindle said.

He cooked up hamburgers the way he liked them, with a startling amount of chili worked into the ground beef, an acquired taste, perhaps, but Joey just ladled on the ketchup and forged ahead. Kindle asked, “When do we power up?”

“I guess after we eat.”

“Might not be anything to hear.”

Joey shrugged. He had absolutely mastered that gesture, Kindle thought. He had a vocabulary of shrugs.

Kindle said, “If it’s one in ten thousand, how many of those are hams or have the sense to rig up a radio? I read a statistic in one of those library books. Maybe one out of six hundred adult Americans has a valid amateur license. So what does that come to after Contact? Fifty people in the continental U.S.?”

“How should I know?”

“Well, we don’t know. But it can’t be very many. And how many of those are on the air?”

“More at night,” Joey said. “Reception’s supposed to be better at night.”

“Even so. Some of them are bound to be out of range or at the wrong angle to the antenna or some damn thing. Some of them maybe tried and gave up. We might not hear a blessed word.”

“Might not,” Joey said.

“What, you don’t give a shit?”

Joey seemed to ponder the question. “I want to work the transceiver,” he said finally. “You need somebody to talk to.”

“So as far as you’re concerned, this isn’t about saving the world.”

“Is that what you think?”

“No,” he admitted. “It’s maybe what Matt Wheeler thinks.”

“Stupid idea,” Joey said. “Is it?”

“Everybody’s gone already. I mean they’re still here, but they’re gone. Some of us just got left behind. We can’t do anything about it.”

“Help ourselves, maybe.”

“If we were that smart, we would have gone to heaven like everybody else. There’s a reason we got left here. All the important people are gone, and we’re still here because basically… because we’re…”

“What?”

Joey smiled. “Worthless.”

Joey switched on the radio, but the twenty-meter band was empty. All that static gave Kindle a chilly feeling. Little crackles of who knows what—interstellar radiation, cosmic noise, like rain on a rooftop, faint as memory. It was like listening to the restless sleep of the world.

It wasn’t just Buchanan that had gone strange, it was the entire planet. You could know that—he had known it for months—and still not feel it. But he felt it now, listening to the radio hiss like waves on an empty beach.

This was the silence of Detroit and Chicago, the silence of Washington, the silence of Ceylon and Baghdad and Peking and London.

We must have been the most talkative species for light-years around, Kindle thought, but tonight the Earth was as still as an empty church.

He heard what he thought was a snatch of voices amidst the static… but when Joey tuned back, there was nothing. “Try putting out a call,” Kindle suggested.

Joey took up the microphone. He cleared his throat. “Calling CQ,” he said, then covered the mike with his hand. “I feel like an asshole!”

“I expect everybody does the first time. Carry on.”

“Calling CQ. This is—” He covered the microphone again. “We don’t have a call number.”

“Just say your name, for Christ’s sake! Say we’re in Oregon.”

“CQ, this is Joseph Commoner in Buchanan, Oregon, calling CQ.”

Joseph?

“CQ, if anybody can hear me, calling CQ.”

Kindle sat through a couple of hours of this, then told Joey he was going to bed. “When you get tired you can crash on the chaise lounge if you want to.”

Not that Joey showed any sign of wanting to sleep. He continued to patrol the twenty-meter band with an obsessive glaze in his eyes.

Kindle brushed his teeth and stretched out on a mattress he had ferried here from the mall. He closed his eyes and listened to the sound of Joey calling CQ in the next room.

He thought about the antenna, about Joey’s radio waves zooming off into the dark night. Seek you, seek you.

Just the idea of it gave him the lonely shivers.

Kindle got up at dawn. Joey, curled on the lawn recliner in the living room, slept till noon. When he woke he came into the kitchen looking smug.

“Any luck last night?” Kindle asked.

“I talked to a couple of people,” Joey said, and checked out Kindle’s reaction with a sideways glance.

“No shit?” Kindle said. “Who?”

“A guy, a ham, in Toronto. That’s in Canada, right?”

“Last time I looked at a map it was. What’s happening in Toronto?”

“He says the situation is about the same as here. We’re supposed to talk again tonight. Ask him yourself. And another guy, down in Georgia.”

“Southerner, huh?”

“Well, he’s travelling around,” Joey said. “He’s an Army Colonel. Name of Tyler.”

Some nights later, Kindle watched the final game of the World Series on his color TV.

It was a Tigers/Cubs series, as he’d predicted. The game was broadcast without narrative, which gave it an eerie atmosphere. The only sound was the crack of the bat, the murmur (not a roar) of a sparse crowd.

All these games had been close. Pitchers’ games, Kindle thought. Scientific. Mistakes were few and counted for much: If a breaking ball stayed up and over the plate, it was bound for glory.

Detroit took the game 2-1 in the eleventh inning, winning the series.

Last at bat for the Boys of Summer.

The final score rode up the screen… then, suddenly, there was static.

Nothing on TV tonight, Kindle thought. Nothing on TV tonight ever again.

He phoned Matt Wheeler and told him he’d stay till Christmas.

Chapter 20 Christmas

Matt Wheeler saw less of his daughter Rachel as winter settled in. She was out of the house much of the time. She seldom told him where she was going or where she slept at night. Matt seldom asked.

They talked occasionally. He appreciated the effort she made, but increasingly it was dialogue across an invisible wall.

“Daddy,” she told him, “you have to talk to the Helper.”

He thought: Talk to it? What—that statue?

The Helper had stood in the City Hall Turnaround like a piece of grim abstract sculpture for weeks now. It neither moved nor spoke. “If you talk to it,” Rachel said, “it’ll talk back.”

“That’s… difficult to believe.”

“You have to talk to it,” Rachel said. “It can tell you things I can’t, and it’ll be here when I’m gone. That’s what it’s for.”

The rain was nearly constant now. On the day he closed the hospital, the second of December, Matt posted a sign at the Emergency entrance. His name and phone number were written in red letters under a waterproof plastic sheath. The number would reach him at home or in his car, as long as the telephone and local cellular system survived. He was considering the possibility of fitting a mobile medical unit in a hospital ambulance, or trying to locate the hospital’s own rural treatment unit, abandoned somewhere after Contact. But there didn’t seem to be a pressing need. The hospital’s facilities were intact if he should need them… though he could foresee a time when the town would exhaust its supply of drugs, of sterile needles—of doctors, perhaps.

On his way home, thinking about what Rachel had said, he stopped at the City Hall Turnaround.

The center of this traffic circle had been developed as a park, planted with grass and equipped with a water fountain and a plaque commemorating the town’s incorporation. Much of Willy’s IWW battle had been fought on this circle of alkaline soil.

The Helper stood here. It had floated into town along the coast highway, made a right turn where the highway crossed Marine, glided past Mart’s office in the Marshall Building and across the railway overpass, and stationed itself on the Turnaround green.

Matt walked toward it through the rain. The rain was cold; he shivered under the wet bulk of his overcoat.

He stopped a short but wary distance from the Helper. He was intimidated by its size—it stood at least seven feet tall—and by its glossless black surface, somehow untouched by the rain.

They called it a Helper. The name, he thought, was grotesque but appropriate. It suggested a blunt, totalitarian benevolence—a meaningless gesture from a humorless tyrant.

Talk to it?

Not possible.

He stood in the park a while longer, listening to the rain as it fell on the grass and watching the clouds roll down from the slope of Mt. Buchanan. Then he turned and walked back to the car.

Hard times coming. Rachel repeated the warning a few days later. “The Travellers are doing things to the planet,” she said, and Matt experienced a tremor of fear that stitched into the deepest part of him. It wasn’t what she said—though that was frightening enough—but how she said it: blandly, if not happily.

They were sitting in the living room looking past the blank TV set, through the window to a faraway ridge of wet Douglas firs in their dark-green winter coats. It was another rainy December morning.

Matt cleared his throat and asked what “doing something to the planet” might entail.

“Fixing it,” Rachel said. “Restoring it. Reversing all the changes. What we did over the last century or so—what people did—was to set forces in motion we couldn’t control. Global warming, for instance. The Travellers are taking some of the C0₂ out of the atmosphere and trying to bind it into the ocean.” She turned to face him. “It was worse than we suspected. If the Travellers hadn’t come… it would have been awfully hard for all of us, next century, or the century after that.”

“They care what happens to the Earth?”

“They care because we care.”

“Even if you’re leaving?”

“It’s where we were born,” Rachel said. “It’s our planet. And it won’t be entirely empty.”

“Restoring the balance,” Matt said. “That doesn’t sound so bad.”

“No. But in the short term… Daddy, I can’t explain all the things they’re doing, but in the short term, it could mean some chaotic weather, at the very least. Storms. Bad storms.”

He nodded, grateful for this nugget of hard information. “When?”

“I don’t know… maybe soon. Late winter, early spring.”

“There’ll be some warning?”

“Of course. That’s what the Helpers are for… one of the things they’re for.” Her expression now was not bland at all; she regarded him with a desperate unhappiness. “Daddy, you must talk to the Helper.”

It had been agreed at the November Committee meeting that they would gather to celebrate Christmas Eve at Tom Kindle’s new house in Delmar Estates. Guests were welcome, even Contactees, especially family, and Matt asked Rachel to come along—but she declined.

He drove to the party through a chill, heavy rain that threatened to turn into hail, along streets grown ragged with winter potholes. He wondered whether he might be the only one lunatic enough to brave the weather. Some party. But there were other cars parked at the house; and Kindle welcomed him inside, took his coat, told him that, in fact, all ten members of the Committee had shown up, but nobody else: “Just us human beings. Which is probably just as well. Come on in, Matt. Everybody else got here early ’cause of the weather, I guess. Abby’s been here since two this afternoon, puttin’ up these goddamn Christmas decorations, plus that little plastic tree in the corner. Had me hangin’ bulbs and lights on it.”

“Looks good, Tom.”

“Looks like a fuckin’ department store, but there was no stopping her.”

Matt remembered the way Buchanan used to dress itself up for Christmas—tinsel across the avenues, pine boughs on the lamp standards.

“The punch is over there,” Kindle said, “but go easy for a while, we got a turkey in the oven and some radio calls coming in from the east—I don’t want anybody throwing up on the microphone.”

Dinner was festive. Even Paul Jacopetti seemed to have mellowed for the occasion. Matt sat between Chuck Makepeace, who was promoting the idea of a New Year’s reconnaissance trip to the waterworks and the power company, and Abby Cushman, who had taken most of the dinner chores on herself and was away from the table between courses.

Matt noted the way she fluttered over Tom Kindle, served him generously, asked his opinion of the gravy, the dressing, the plum pudding. (“Looks real good to me,” Kindle said. “Real good, Abby.”) She was married, Matt reminded himself, and had a couple of grandchildren living with her—but they were like Rachel, lost to Contact. It was no wonder she had adopted the Committee, and Tom Kindle in particular.

He gave a brief, sober thought to Annie Gates. He hadn’t spoken to her for months. He hadn’t wanted to say all the necessary things. All the things that amounted to: Goodbye, good luck, I loved you in my own fucked-up way but now you’re not human anymore. Surely silence was better than that.

Abby recruited Paul Jacopetti, Bob Ganish, and a reluctant Beth Porter to deal with the dinner dishes. Everybody else adjourned to the living room; Joey Commoner began warming up the transceiver, scouting for stray voices prior to the east-west hookup scheduled for 8:00 Pacific time.

Kindle took Matt aside. “That Abby… she’s a pain in the butt. She’s been over three times this week. Stops to chat. I don’t know how to chat. She brings food. Matthew, she bakes.”

“She seems nice enough,” Matt said.

“Hell, she is nice. If she wasn’t nice it wouldn’t be a problem. She talks about her family—she doesn’t see ’em much anymore. She’s having a hard time and she needs somebody she can latch onto. And, you know, I’m only human. It’s been a while since I had a woman around, barring some Saturday nights in town, and even that’s all finished since Contact. So I think yeah, okay, Abby’s nice… but it’s not fair to her.”

“Why not?”

“Because I’ll leave. The only advantage to getting old is that you learn this shit about yourself. I was married once—little Coast Salish girl up in Canada. Lasted about six months. She went back to the reserve, I came back across the border. And that was pretty much the endurance record for Tom Kindle. Maybe I won’t leave this month, maybe not next month, but I’ll leave. And Abby’s been left too much just now.”

“Maybe you should tell her that.”

“Good advice. Maybe I should just club her down with a stick—it’d be kinder.”

“Or don’t leave. That’s the other choice.”

“Uh-huh.”

“The thing is, you’re useful around here.”

“Right. About as useful as half a crutch. Speaking of which, I’m still limping. Is that normal?”

“You’ll limp a while longer. But don’t put down your own contribution. You’re like an anchor at the Committee meetings. The radio’s been a morale booster, too.”

“Mostly Joey’s work.”

“And Joey, come to that. He’s turning into a human being. You treat him with a certain amount of respect. That’s a new thing for him.”

“You ever see that tattoo on his shoulder?” Matt nodded.

“’Worthless,’” Kindle said. “You suppose he believes that?”

He thought about it. He didn’t know Joey Commoner particularly well. Joey must have been eighteen years old when he had that word dyed into his skin, and it was precisely the kind of thing a pissed-off eighteen-year-old might do. It might mean nothing.

Still, if he had to render an opinion—“I think he might believe it, yes,”

Kindle shook his head.

“Shit,” he said finally. “I didn’t sign on to be anybody’s husband… and I sure as hell didn’t sign on to be a goddamn parent”

Come eight o’clock, Joey established contact with the community of survivors in Toronto. The weather was bad and the signal was poor; voices faded in ghostly fashion. But the contact across all that distance was heartening. Everybody gathered around the microphone and sang “Adeste Fidelis”—they had rehearsed this—and the Canadians sang “Silent Night” through the static. It was snowing there, the Canadian radioman said. The streets were knee-deep and the municipal plows weren’t out this year; the survivors were partying in a downtown hotel: “Lots of rooms and an emergency generator in the basement. We’re cozy.”

The Canadian chorus was bigger than Buchanan’s: perhaps eighty people, almost as large as the nearly one hundred in the Boston community Joey had contacted a few days ago. Which meant, Matt knew, there must be more such groups, but only a few of them had thought to attempt radio communication.

Toronto said “Merry Christmas” and signed off. Joey tried for Boston and a third contact in Duluth, but the weather wasn’t cooperating—“The skip isn’t in,” Joey said.

“We could phone ’em,” Kindle said. “Guy in Boston gave me his telephone number.” But the long-distance exchanges were unreliable these days and, anyway, a phone call wasn’t the same as radio contact; they could wait until tomorrow to pass on Christmas sentiments.

“Telephone service won’t last the winter,” Jacopetti predicted. “Wires go down. Relay towers. I doubt anybody’ll fix ’em.”

Joey went on DXing. Kindle said Joey had twice made brief contacts with other continents—a ham in Costa Rica, and on one memorable clear night a voice speaking what Joey said was Russian but might have been Polish or Ukrainian… the signal faded before he could respond.

Beth Porter, in a gesture that took Matt by surprise, had brought along a VCR and two tapes from the big video store on Ocean Avenue : White Christmas and It’s a Wonderful Life. “Because I used to watch those movies every year. You know, I just thought it would be nice.”

Joey took time away from the radio to hook up the tape machine. Kindle freshened the punch and Miriam Flett, in another surprise move, volunteered to make popcorn.

Somewhere between Bing Crosby and Jimmy Stewart, Matt thought: My God, there are only ten of us. But this might work. This might still work. This might still be a town.

Sometime after midnight, the rain turned to sleet and the roads began to ice. It’s a Wonderful Life cranked to an end, and in the silence that followed, without warning, Paul Jacopetti began to weep—racking sobs that shook his large body like seizures. Beth retrieved her videotape: “Jeez, I’m sorry, maybe that was the wrong thing to show.”

“It was fine,” Matt told her. “Don’t apologize.”

But the party was over. Kindle offered bedroll space to anyone who wanted to stay the night. Tim Belanger had confined his drinking to Diet Pepsi and offered a drive to those who hadn’t; he left with Bob Ganish and the still-teary Paul Jacopetti.

Joey was still working the transceiver. Beth told him a couple of times she wanted to go home, she was tired, the streets weren’t getting any safer. “Just wait,” Joey said, turning the dial with a relentlessness that looked nearly compulsive to Matt.

Kindle said Beth could take one of the spare rooms, if she didn’t mind sleeping on the floor, but she shook her head and pursed her lips: “I want to go home.”

“I can drop you off,” Matt said. “If it’s okay with Joey?”

Joey shrugged, his back turned. Another voice crackled from the radio speaker: “…read you, Joseph… signal’s faint.…”

“It’s that Colonel Tyler,” Kindle said. “I swear, that son of a bitch never sleeps.”

“ Tyler,” Matt said. “He’s the guy down south?”

“He moves around. Loner type.” Kindle escorted Matt to the door, out of Joey’s earshot. “You should talk to him some night when the signal’s less feeble. Joey thinks the guy is hot shit.”

“You don’t?”

“Well… it’s too soon to be choosy about the friends we make, right? But Tyler’s full of all kinds of ideas. He says we should form a defense committee or something. Says he’s seen some mayhem out on the road. A lot of peculiar people turned down Contact, he says. He keeps talking about some big project out in Colorado he’s heard about… Matt, he claims the aliens are building a spaceship out there. Is that possible?”

“I guess it’s possible. I suspended judgment last August. You don’t believe him?”

“Oh, I believe him, I guess.” Kindle rubbed his chin. “I believe him, all right. I just don’t, you know, trust him.”

“He’s in no position to do us harm.”

“Not at the moment,” Kindle said.

Beth huddled into the passenger seat. Matt asked her to fasten her seat belt. The roads were slick with sheet ice, and it was easy to imagine his little import sliding into a ditch.

Beth strapped herself in and gazed through the window at dark suburban houses.

He signalled a left turn on Marina, crossing town to Beth’s house, but she touched his arm: “No, keep going… I don’t live there anymore.”

He frowned but crossed the intersection. “Moved out from your family?”

“It never was much of a family, Dr. Wheeler. Mainly just my dad, and he’s—you know. Changed.”

“I guess it’s hard to talk to him.”

“It used to be hard. Now he wants to talk—but it’s worse, in a way. I think part of the deal is that if you want to live forever you have to understand what a shit you were in real life. He figures he kicked me around too much, and he doesn’t know what to do about it. He wants to apologize or make it better somehow.”

“You don’t want that?”

She shook her head fiercely. “I’m not ready for that. Christ, no. It’s hard even being around him since he changed. He even looks different now. You remember how big he used to be? Now he’s almost skinny. None of his clothes fit. He looks—” She chose a word. “Empty.”

She used the nail of her right index finger to draw an oval in the fog on the passenger window. She gave it eyes, eyelashes, a pursed mouth. A self-portrait, Matt thought. “So I’m staying at the Crown Motel. The one by the waterfront, past the ferry dock.”

Matt turned right at the next intersection, toward a blankness of fog and rain, the ocean. “You could have done better than a motel. Look at Tom Kindle.”

“The room is big enough. It has a kitchenette, so I can cook. I get along.”

The rain turned icy again, clattering against the roof of the car. Matt eased past the sign that said CROWN MOTOR INN, the car fishtailing on a slick of ice. He realized he hadn’t seen a single other vehicle during this drive from Tom Kindle’s house-—no traffic of any kind.

A light was burning in Beth’s room. She left it on, she said, so she could find the door at night. “It gets lonely in this big parking lot.” She cocked her head at him. “You want to see the place?”

“The roads aren’t getting any better, Beth.”

“You could walk me to the door, at least.”

He agreed… though it seemed somehow careless to leave the dry enclosure of the car.

Beth had appropriated a ground-floor room. The number on the door was 112. The door wasn’t locked. It opened into yellow light. “Just take a look,” Beth said. “Tell me it’s a nice place. God, it would be nice to have somebody tell me that.”

He stepped inside. The room was hot; the thermostat was turned up. She had decorated this ordinary suite with cheap art prints—pastel water-colors, kittens and farmhouses. A quilt, obviously homemade, had been thrown across the bed. She followed his look. “It’s the only thing I took with me when I left home. I slept under this quilt since I was little. My grandmother made it.” She sat on the bed and stroked the quilt with one hand. “Do I have to call you Dr. Wheeler? Everybody at the party called you Matt.”

“You can call me Matt.”

“Matt… you can stay here tonight if you want.”

Some part of him had expected the offer. Some part of him was surprised, even shocked.

“Because of the weather,” Beth said. “The weather being so shitty and all.” She began unbuttoning her shirt. “I hardly see Joey anymore. He just plays with that fucking radio over at Kindle’s. It wouldn’t be so bad—I mean, Joey’s hardly a prize—but he was the only person who ever… I mean, he used to say I was pretty.” She paused to gauge his reaction. “Nobody else ever said that.”

She slid out of the shirt. Her skin was perfect, blemishless, flushed pink. Her breasts were small, the nipples almost childlike. There was a line of freckles across her breastbone. Why couldn’t he say anything? He felt as if his mouth had been disconnected from his body. He was mute.

WORTHLESS, said the small blue letters on her shoulder.

“I’m twenty years old,” Beth said. “I guess you’ve seen me naked since I was ten. You never said if you thought I was pretty. I guess doctors don’t say things like that. Matt. Matthew. Matt—do you think I’m pretty?”

“Beth, I can’t stay here.”

She unzipped her jeans and stepped out of them, then sat back on the bed. She frowned. Then she folded her hands in her lap in a gesture that was oddly shy. “I don’t know why I do this shit.” She looked imploringly at him. “It’s hard being alone all the time. The town is empty. It’s not just that no one comes out on the street—I think people are actually missing. And I don’t know what happened to them. And I lie here and I think about that and it’s just so fucking scary. Sad and scary. And I would like not to be alone. But you can’t stay?”

“I’m sorry.”

“Is it as easy as that?”

“It’s not easy.”

It wasn’t. She was twenty years younger than Matt… but he wasn’t old, and she wasn’t a child, and the sight of her was deeply arousing. He hadn’t shared his bed with anyone since that August night with Annie Gates. And Beth was right about the town, Matt thought: It was empty, and it was scary, and the touch of another human being would be a powerful magic on a bitter winter night.

But she was vulnerable and too needy, and it was an act that might have unforeseen consequences.

She managed a small, embarrassed smile. “Telling the truth?” She looked him over, perhaps noticed the obvious bulge in his blue jeans. “I guess you’re telling the truth. You want to stay but you think if you stay it might be… dangerous? Can I use that word?”

He managed a nod.

“Hey,” she said. “I’m dangerous.” She stretched out across the bed in a motion that was both sensual and weary. “Maybe I had too much to drink.…”

“Maybe we all did.”

“Or maybe I’m a round-heeled little cunt. As my daddy used to say.”

He drove home on ice, through ice, a night all ice and darkness.

The house was dark when he arrived. The baseboard heaters stuttered and creaked. Rachel wasn’t home.

He hoped she was sleeping in a warm place this Christmas Eve.

But it wasn’t Christmas Eve anymore, Matt realized; it had been December 25 since midnight, since before he left the party. It was Christmas morning.

By Christmas noon, most of the ice had melted from the streets. Matt drove to the City Hall Turnaround and confronted the Helper a second time.

He wore his winter coat and a scarf Celeste had knitted for him in a time so remote it seemed like prehistory. Blades of grass, stiff with frost, crackled under his feet.

He stood close to the Helper—close enough to touch it. Rachel had said the thing could speak; but where was its mouth? Could it see him? Did it have eyes? Did it know he was here?

He supposed it did.

He began by cursing it. He called it a fucking intruder, a monster, a stony heartless motherfucking monument to all the needless cruelty that had been visited on the Earth.

He had to restrain himself from striking it, because he sensed its invulnerability, knew how easy it would be to beat his hands bloody on that unyielding surface.

He cursed it until there was nothing left in him but speechless hatred.

The silence, after that, was almost shocking.

He waited until his voice came back—he had worn it raw.

“Tell me,” he whispered. “Tell me what you know. Tell me what we have to do to survive.”

He took a quick step backward—surprised in spite of himself—when the Helper opened its eyes, or what seemed to be eyes, twin patches of sleeker blackness on the black orb of its head, weirdly mobile, like two slick dots of oil.

And it spoke—a voice deeply resonant, somehow artificial, completely terrifying.

“This is not a safe place any longer,” it said.

Chapter 21 Skin

It was good, at first, cruising through these southern towns, drowsy little November towns in Virginia, North Carolina, parts of Kentucky and Tennessee.

The towns were much alike. Each had its church, its central school, its highway mall—and each town had its Helper, nested at the center of it like a worm burrowed into an apple.

John Tyler personally destroyed several of these devices, and his friend A.W. Murdoch dispatched more. Murdoch was a surer hand at the TOW, much as Tyler disliked to admit it. We each have our talents, he told himself, and Murdoch was an excellent shooter.

At first they took elaborate precautions. Tyler thought the M998 was too obvious a vehicle; to conceal it, they navigated the highways in a stolen eighteen-wheel A P truck with the Hummer and its TOW platform parked in the rear.

Murdoch argued that this was a simpleminded piece of sleight-of-hand, not likely to fool anyone. The Artifact was probably as effective a surveillance tool as the average military satellite, and the Contactees were an unlimited source of information on the ground. “Sir,” Murdoch said, “if they want to get us, face it, they can get us—we’re mostly counting on their pacifism.”

Tyler yielded to the argument. After a week or so they abandoned the container truck and simply drove the Hummer from place to place, along highways and secondary roads that were generally empty, following a route Tyler hoped would seem random but that tended to the south. Tyler had not been warned about the weather, but he had already noticed an odd restlessness of wind and rain; he thought they’d be safer wintering below the snowbelt.

All this, plus his friendship with Murdoch, served to keep despair comfortably distant. At least for a time.

Tyler’s first warning that things had changed came in a little Georgia town called Loftus.

They had driven through dozens of towns like it. These little towns seemed emptier as the days passed, Tyler thought. One seldom saw the populace; either they had gone elsewhere or were locked indoors. Only a few lights came on at night. It was disturbing. It was even, if you let yourself dwell on it, frightening; but at the same time it made travelling easier. They spent nights in deserted motels; they drove freely in the daylight.

They arrived in Loftus at noon. These buildings, the three-story hotel and restaurant, the barber shop bedecked with Wildroot Cream Oil stickers, had probably not changed in any important way since the Korean War. There was a Helper, of course. It stood on a traffic island where the highway passed between a hardware store and a yellow-brick Kresge’s. Murdoch fired the TOW and Tyler watched what he had come to think of as the customary fireworks: an explosion that shattered windows on all sides and left the road littered with glass and black dust.

Murdoch drove on through Loftus in moody silence. Murdoch had been moody since they left D.C., but hadn’t wanted to talk about it. Tyler mentioned that they would need to locate another source of missiles before too long: the munitions they had carried from Virginia were about to run out.

“If there’s any point to it,” Murdoch said. “We’re pissing in the ocean, if you ask me.”

Tyler gave him a hard look. Murdoch’s uniform was ragged, oil-spotted, and torn from working on the Hummer. He wore a jacket he had stolen from a retail shop in an empty mall. His hair was long and matted.

“There’s more of these Helpers than we can ever hope to shoot,” Murdoch added, “and I don’t see any evidence we’re doing any real harm—and shit, Colonel, maybe that’s as it should be.”

“I don’t understand,” Tyler said.

“Don’t you? Are you sure? After Contact, I figured everybody was turned into zombies, it was like a horror movie, Invasion of the Body Snatchers.… I just wanted to kick some ass. Show somebody the human race wasn’t that easy to knock over. You know what I mean?”

“Certainly.”

“But it isn’t like that. Fuck, I knew all along it wasn’t like that.” Murdoch kept one hand on the wheel and used the other to unscrew the lid from the coffee thermos. “Didn’t want to admit it.” He took a long swallow. “But maybe they aren’t getting such a bad shake—all those zombies. Life eternal. Not such a shitty deal.”

“Christ, Murdoch,” Tyler said. “After all our work, you can’t tell me you believe that.”

“Don’t you? I mean, down where it counts? When they came to you that night, didn’t some part of you want to go along? Even if you said no, some part of you thought, shit, I don’t want to live and die and never understand what it’s all about… Wasn’t it like that?”

“Stupid question.”

“Seriously.” He startled Tyler by stopping the vehicle, standing on the brake until they were poised motionless on the white line of this country road. “Cutting all the crap,” Murdoch said.

Tyler just stared.

“What do you think we’d find,” Murdoch pressed, “if we turned around and drove back into that little pissant town?”

“Some evidence of our ability to harass an enemy. Were you asleep when you fired that TOW?”

“So we knocked down one of their ducks. I’m sorry, Colonel, but big fucking deal. How long till they send another Helper? They can have another unit there in a couple of days. Probably hours. They’re that efficient. The more I think about this, the more pointless it seems. The only reason we get away with it is that they don’t care. We’re like fleas on an elephant. Too insignificant even to scratch.”

He jerked the Hummer into a U-turn. Tyler said, “You really mean to go back there?”

“We need supplies. We should have stopped before we fired that missile. Plus I’d like to see just how long it really does take to repair the kind of damage we’ve been doing. Think of it as target assessment.” He gave Tyler another long look. “If you don’t mind, Colonel.”

Tyler minded a great deal, but he didn’t say so. It might be dangerous to linger at the site of an attack, but it might be more dangerous still to override Murdoch when the younger man was in this hostile mood.

Everything since Contact had become a matter of balances, Tyler thought. One thing weighed against another. What was buoyant might suddenly sink; what fell might rise.

They parked the Hummer out of sight— Tyler’s precaution—in the service bay of an Exxon station. Because Murdoch intended to stay the night in this village, they located two adjoining rooms in the brick hotel overlooking the remains of the Helper. The hotel was empty. The afternoon sky was dark and the corridors rattled with the sound of distant thunder.

Murdoch left to scrounge for food. Tyler stayed in his room, dwelling on the problem of the younger man’s doubts.

Maybe he should have seen this coming. Murdoch had been a technician in his old life, more loyal to the weapons he maintained than to the abstractions they served—the country, the Corps, the national defense. It was a thin reed to cling to, and lately Murdoch had grown sullen. The decline had been gradual but marked.

Maybe it was predictable. All the standards had fallen, Tyler thought. There was no propriety anymore, no decency. The norms had become fluid.

It was a frightening thought. Tyler had spent a lifetime negotiating the borderline between sanity and compulsion, and he had learned what Sissy in her madness had forgotten: Appearances matter. In the question of sanity, you were allowed to pretend. You were supposed to pretend. Everyone pretended. We prove we’re sane by pretending to be sane. To fail at the pretense, or not to bother, was the definition of insanity.

But now… it was as if gravity had failed, as if every solid thing had come unhooked from the earth. In an empty world, who was to judge? Where were the boundaries to separate one thought from another? What impulse might surface unobserved? How to distinguish the daylight from the dark?

We’re naked in this place, Tyler thought, and God help us for that.

He dozed for a time on the hotel bedspread and woke with a skull-splitting headache.

Murdoch came in the door with bags of canned food and bottled water. He dumped these on the bureau and took a towel from the bathroom—he was wet, his hair streaming water; it had begun to rain.

“It’s funny,” Murdoch said. “Most of the towns we’ve been through, you see at least a couple of people. This place—I’d swear it’s deserted. Didn’t see a living soul out there. For a while I thought I heard music. But I couldn’t track it down—not in this weather.”

Murdoch toweled his hair vigorously. The window was open a notch, and the room smelled moist and cool.

Murdoch gave him an odd, cautious look. “By the way, Colonel, have you seen the Helper?”

Tyler came alert. “What about it?”

“Well, it’s doing something,” Murdoch said.

“We destroyed it—what could it be doing? ⁷’

“Well, sir, it’s more or less putting itself back together.”

A.W. Murdoch followed Tyler down to the lobby, where the Colonel stood rigidly at the shattered front window and stared across the road at the remains of the Helper… at all that black, sooty dust that had begun to move as if stirred by an imperceptible wind, to heap itself into a crude, wet mound where the Helper had been.

Murdoch hadn’t been too surprised to see the Helper putting itself together. All the Traveller technology seemed to use subordinate but independent parts—the octahedrons, which were part of the Artifact; the Helpers, which were smaller fractions of the octahedrons… and all this. impact dust, which was just the smaller constituents of the Helper, he guessed, mobile and smart enough to crawl back into the original order.

Or the microbes that had infected everybody, come to that. Murdoch supposed those were machines, too, tiny but intelligent. There must be some irreducible level—a disorganization from which a Helper, for instance, couldn’t recover—but they hadn’t achieved that with a simple TOW.

Murdoch thought, It’s like punching mud. We should have known.

But Tyler hadn’t known, and Tyler was plainly horrified. He stood at the frame of the broken window shaking his head. Murdoch approached the older man cautiously. “Colonel?”

“Is it a threat?” Tyler said. “Are we in danger from it? Maybe we ought to move on.”

“I don’t imagine so. I don’t think we really damaged it. I doubt we even annoyed it. If these things carried a grudge, we’d be dead by now.” He felt a little guilty for breaking this news to Tyler in such an abrupt way; he felt he should make up for it. “Sir, we might as well go upstairs. You’re getting all wet. Cook us some food up there. I got some Coors from the grocery.”

When Tyler decided to leave D.C., they had assembled a kit that included a hot plate, pots and pans, plastic cutlery Upstairs, Murdoch plugged in the hot plate and started frying eggs. The hotel room filled with the smell of hot butter.

Tyler cracked open a beer and stared out the window. His manner, Murdoch thought, was frankly a little crazed.

Murdoch had decided weeks ago that Colonel Tyler might not be firing on all cylinders, but so what? Who was? Maybe all the sane people accepted that nighttime offer last August; maybe only a pair of lunatics would be driving around the country taking shots at these machines, like two kids soaping windows on Halloween.

He came to understand that Tyler lived in a world of orders given, rules obeyed, limits respected—a world as fragile as the egg Murdoch had just cracked and as hard to repair. Naturally, Tyler was finding it hard to adjust.

“My father only gave me one piece of advice in his life,” Murdoch said, “and that was to play the hand they deal you. I think he got it from a song. Or Dear Abby. But you can’t argue with it, right? Colonel, we got a shitty hand here. But we’re not dead yet.”

Tyler looked away from the window. “You never talked about your father much, Mr. Murdoch.”

“Not much to say.”

“What did he do for a living?”

“Raised sinsemilla up in Mendocino County.” To Tyler’s uncomprehending look Murdoch added: “He grew marijuana.”

“Christ. Really?”

“Honest to God.”

“He was a drug dealer?”

“Well—more like a bootlegger. That was the spirit of the enterprise.”

Tyler absorbed this information. “He must have hated it when you joined the Marines.”

“I can’t say it pleased him. But he told me it was my life, I should make my own mistakes. When I got on the bus at Ukiah, he said, Try not to shoot anybody!’”

And I never really did, Murdoch thought—unless you count the Helpers. Even then, he hadn’t done them much harm, apparently. Tyler shook his head. “It’s always a surprise. People’s families.”

“You don’t talk about your own family much.”

“No,” Tyler said. “I don’t.” Murdoch let it drop.

He served the eggs; but Tyler put his plate aside. “Sir,” Murdoch said, “speaking frankly, are you all right?”

The Colonel, who had been sitting stoop-shouldered in the chair by the window, drew himself up, almost into a sitting brace, his chin tucked, frowning, as if the question had stung him. “Of course I am.”

And they ate in silence and listened to the hiss of the rain on the window.

Murdoch told the Colonel he thought they should stay in Loftus until the cold rain passed, and Tyler had surprised him by agreeing. It seemed to Murdoch that the Colonel had grown both very unhappy and very agreeable recently.

Privately, Murdoch was curious about this little town. There were some questions that had piqued his interest during this shooting-gallery trek across the South, and he hoped to find some answers here.

For instance, exactly what was happening to the people in these little road towns? Where were they going? They weren’t on the highway, for sure; the highways were deserted. But so—increasingly often—were the towns.

Tyler disliked these questions and refused to discuss them, but Murdoch was simply curious.

In the morning he left the morose Colonel and wandered out into the street.

The rain had eased, but the sky was dark and restless with cloud. While he was asleep, the Helper had achieved a blurry approximation of itself. Minute grains of black dust moved over its surface, giving it the look of something swarmed by insects. It was as strange as anything Murdoch had recently seen, but he was growing accustomed to miracles… he watched for a moment, then shrugged and turned away from all these shattered storefront windows.

Yesterday there had been music. He’d heard it while he was scrounging for food at a grocery store a couple of blocks from here. The music had come very faintly through the rain, and Murdoch guessed it might have been imaginary, the kind of thing you hear when you’re alone in a strange place in a storm… but he remembered it as music, faint but unmistakable.

Today, he stood still and listened.

There was a faraway bark of a dog. A few wind sounds. The grit under his shoes as he shifted back and forth. No music. Spooky.

He turned a corner away from the main street. He had decided that today he would find somebody—a human being or a Contactee, it didn’t matter. Murdoch just wanted to look at a new face, ask some questions. The name of this little street, posted on a rusty sign at the intersection, was elm. Every one of these towns had an Elm, or an Oak, or maybe a Peach or a Magnolia as they pressed on into Georgia. What better place to find out what had happened to everybody? Everybody lived on Elm. He decided to knock on the door of the first house he came to.

The first house on Elm was a little bungalow with a tiny front yard. It had a wooden porch, and on the banister, five terracotta pots of dead flowers. Murdoch stepped up onto the sagging porch and nudged aside a child’s red wagon. He pushed the doorbell and listened as the buzzer rang inside.

Nothing stirred.

He opened the screen and knocked at the door. The sound of his knock seemed to make the silence heavier.

“Hey!” he said. “Hey, anybody in there?”

This was a strange thing to be doing, and he was suddenly aware of himself—a lonely figure, thin in his ragged uniform, his hair grown long and his stubble unshaven. Christ, he thought, I must look like a scarecrow. What if somebody did open the door? One look at me and they’d close it in a hurry.

But no one answered his knock.

He tried the knob. The door was locked.

He looked up and down the street. He’d never broken into a house before. Well, fuck it, he said to himself. I’m coming in there. Heads up, you ghosts.

He put his shoulder against the door and pushed. The door was old, and wood rot had gotten into the framing of it. The latch sheered out of the molding with a creak and a snap. Murdoch peered into the inner darkness.

Who had lived here? Somebody with kids, judging by that wagon. The room inside, now dimly visible in the watery daylight, was dusty but reasonably tidy. A brick-red sofa stood against one wall. Above it hung a framed oil color of a woodland sunset. There was a TV set, a stereo, an empty fish tank. Some kids’ toys were scattered on the floor.

Also on the floor…

Murdoch stared at it a long time before he recognized it for what it was: A human skin.

After he vomited over the porch railing, Murdoch selected a long willow branch from among the windfall on the neighbors’ lawn. He was reassured somewhat by the weight of the stick in his hand. He was otherwise unarmed—but what was there to shoot at?

All up and down this rainy street, nothing moved.

Murdoch clutched the stick and forced himself to climb the three steps up to the porch, to cross the intervening space to the door, open it, step once again into that terrifying dimness.

The skin lay at his feet. It hadn’t moved.

But it was definitely a skin. Fragile, empty—almost transparent. But human, Murdoch thought. Its shape was difficult to discern; it was folded into itself, accordioned together; but one arm projected, a fragile white papyrus, with a hand like an empty glove and five delicate, pale fingers.

It reminded Murdoch of a discarded skin of a spider he had once found in an empty locker—spider-shaped, but so delicate that a breath would carry it away.

He lowered the willow branch until it was almost touching the empty human skin, then pulled it back, revulsion winning out over curiosity.

He stepped over the hideous thing and deeper into the house.

The house was a bungalow with only a few rooms: this living room, the kitchen, two bedrooms, a bath. Murdoch investigated them all, flicking on lights where the daylight didn’t reach.

He found two more skins: one in the kitchen; one—smaller, which made it somehow more horrible—in the child’s bedroom.

Leaving that room, he felt dizzy; and realized he’d been holding his breath as if something in the house might infect him… might suck away his substance, might drain him as thoroughly as these people had been drained of themselves.

He hurried to the door, but stopped there.

He turned back. He took a firm grip on the willow stick and held it with its narrow end pointed at the first of the skins.

The urge to poke at the thing was as strong as the urge to turn and run. There was something childish about this, Murdoch thought. He was like a little child poking at a rattlesnake’s shed skin. He dreaded it… but he couldn’t help wondering about it. Would it crumble or would it fold? If it broke at his touch, would it make a sound? Would it move in leathery fashion, like parchment, or would it rattle like sun-bleached cellophane?

He touched the skin with his stick.

In fact, it made only the faintest noise as he turned it… a whisper of membranous surfaces, like the murmur of leaves in an autumn tree, or the turning of a page in an old dry book.

Murdoch thought he might vomit again. He turned and stumbled to the porch railing.

That was when he saw the girl.

“You don’t look so good,” she said.

Murdoch didn’t think he could stand much more startlement. One more shock and his ventricles might explode. He looked up from the railing with a terrible, emasculating dread.

But it was only a girl, standing on the sidewalk with a frown of concern.

A local girl, judging by her accent. She wore a too-big man’s windbreaker over a yellow T-shirt. Her blue jeans were tight, and she had sneakers on her feet. Murdoch pegged her at about eighteen, but she might have been younger or older. Her head was cocked and she was studying him with patient sympathy.

“You found those skins in the house, huh? First time you seen one?”

She was pretty in a stringy-haired kind of way. Her face was a perfect oval and her eyes were intelligent.

Murdoch tried to reassemble some masculine composure. “First time,” he admitted. “Christ! You’ve seen them before?”

“Yup.”

“Scary as hell.” She shrugged.

The nausea had passed. Murdoch straightened and undamped his hands from the railing. “You, uh, live here?”

“No—not this house. This’s where the Bogens used to live.” She pointed: “I used to live a couple doors down. But I moved out of there. Guess where I live now!”

He felt like saying: Girl, there are three dead people in this building—nothing left but their packaging. Under the circumstances, maybe a guessing game kind of verged on bad taste.

But here was a new face, which was what he’d set out to find, and he didn’t want to chase her away. “I can’t guess.”

“The Roxy,” she said.

The Roxy? A theater? Did this town have a Roxy Theater? Was there an old trestle town like this that didn’t?

“I turned the manager’s office into kind of an apartment,” she said. “And I taught myself how to run the movies.”

He said, “You were running a movie last night? Last night when it was raining?”

She brightened. “How’d you know?”

“Heard the music.”

“It was 42nd Street.There was an old-movie festival playing when Contact came. Those are the only films I can find. I got 42nd Street and Golddiggers of1934 and The Maltese Falcon.I don’t play ’em much. It’s pretty hard work by yourself. And if you see ’em too often, what’s the point? But on a cold night like that…”

“I understand,” Murdoch said.

“Already, I could sing that 42nd Street song in my sleep.”

“Uh-huh. Hey, what’s your name?”

“Soo,” she said. “Two ohs. It’s not short for anything. Soo Constantine.”

“I’m A.W. Murdoch.”

“What’s the A for, A.W.?”

“Abel,” he lied.

“Mmm… I like A.W. better.”

“So do I. Soo, tell me—are there more of those, uh, those—”

“Skins?”

“Are there more of those skins around?”

“Most every house,” she said. “If you look. I hope you’re not planning to look.”

“No, I just… well, Christ, it took me by surprise. I mean, is everybody in town like that?”

“Nearly. ’Cept me.”

“Well, what happened to them? Do you know?”

“They left, A. W.,” she said flatly. “They went away. But not their skins. They just used up their bodies and they left their skins behind.”

“A radio,” Colonel Tyler said. “Maybe that’s something we ought to have.”

Murdoch, cooking dinner over the hot plate, wondered what this might portend. “Sir, a radio?”

“To contact other people. Other human beings.”

Tyler sat in the hotel chair where Murdoch had left him this morning. He hadn’t shaved, which for the Colonel was a serious omission. Murdoch had pegged Tyler for the kind of man who’d shave in a hurricane and stock the storm cellar with Aqua Velva.

“I think we need that contact, don’t you, Mr. Murdoch?”

“Sir, how many of those Coors have you been into?”

Tyler looked at the can in his hand, then set it aside. “What are you suggesting?”

“Nothing.”

Tm not drunk.”

“No, sir.”

“Maybe you should have a drink yourself.”

“Later, sir, thanks.” Murdoch served out equal portions of canned corned beef hash. Tyler liked canned corned beef hash, but Murdoch thought it resembled dog food too closely. It was like ladling out hot Alpo. “Shitty weather, sir.” The rain had returned with a vengeance; there was occasional sheet lightning and a muted, continuous thunder.

Tyler accepted his bowl of hash and held it in his lap. “We’re nothing without a community, Mr. Murdoch.”

“No, sir.”

“A community defines the perimeters of behavior the way a border defines the perimeters of a nation.”

“Mm-hm.” Alpo or not, Murdoch was hungry tonight. He sat opposite the Colonel and gazed past him at the window. Nighttime now. Night came early these days.

Tyler was frowning. “Skins, you say.”

“Yes, sir.”

Murdoch had told the Colonel about the skins he’d found. He’d kept quiet about Soo Constantine, however. Murdoch couldn’t explain his reticence even to himself, but it seemed better that way. Soo was a new and particular discovery. His own.

“Just their vacant… their empty…”

“Skins, sir, yes.”

“Horrible.”

Murdoch nodded.

“What do you suppose happened to their insides, Mr. Murdoch?”

“I think—” Soo had told him this. Best be cautious. “It’s possible they just kind of faded. Disappeared from the inside out. Didn’t you get that hint in Contact, sir? That it would be possible to leave the body behind?”

“I never thought—not like a lizard shedding its scales, no. I wouldn’t have expected anything that repellent.” The Colonel took a halfhearted spoonful of the hash. “And the Helper?”

“Nearly assembled.”

“I would prefer not to linger in this town, Mr. Murdoch.”

“Sir, the weather—”

“You were never scared of rain before we came to Loftus.”

“It’s a cold, dirty rain. Some of these mountain roads could wash out.”

“We can deal with that.”

“Yes, sir. I’d just prefer to deal with it when it isn’t storming.” Tyler showed him a baleful look. “Something in this town attracts you?”

“Shit, no, sir.” But Murdoch felt himself begin to sweat. “Community,” Tyler said. “A human presence.”

“Sir?” Was the son of a bitch psychic?

“We need a radio for the sake of community, Mr. Murdoch. Maybe we can be more effective in numbers than we are individually. Between the two of us, frankly, there isn’t much in the way of discipline. We say the words, but it’s reflex. You don’t respect me as a superior officer.”

Murdoch was startled. “That isn’t—”

“It’s not your fault. On the road, we’re simply two men. All the structure has fallen away. I should have understood that when I talked to the President.

He was in Lafayette Park, Mr. Murdoch, with his shirt undone at the collar. The center cannot hold—isn’t that what the poet said? Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. Anarchy is without structure; it flows like water. Mr. Murdoch, do you suppose we’ve lost structure entirely? Has it gone that far?”

“I—wouldn’t know.”

“If there were more of us,” Tyler said.

“Yes, sir.”

“It’s as if we left our own skins behind. Our skins of propriety. Our skins of good conduct. Suddenly we’re raw; our nerves are exposed. We’re naked. With the right provocation, we could say or do anything.”

“Yes, sir,” Murdoch said, realizing as he spoke that his friendship with Colonel Tyler had also peeled away; that the skin of amicability had been shed in this room and the thing beneath exposed: a queasy mutual fear.

After dinner, he left the Colonel and hurried into the dark street. He was meeting Soo at the Roxy, and he was already late, according to the digital watch on his wrist. Since Contact, Murdoch had kept two watches, one on his wrist, one in his pocket, so when he replaced the battery in one watch he could set it by the other.

The Roxy was easy to find. It was one more peeling Main Street movie theater, its blank marquee shedding rainwater in cold sheets. Murdoch hurried past the empty ticket box, inside to the lobby where Soo had turned on the lights.

She was waiting for him, still wearing her yellow T-shirt, one hand cocked on her hip, standing in the doorway of the auditorium. Murdoch looked at her and felt weak all over.

Probably it was only the effect of a long separation from female company. What it felt like was high-octane, knee-buckling, adolescent lust. She was a compact package of curves and smiles and he wanted to pick her up in his arms and feel her weight. Soo, he thought. Some kind of weird southern name for a young girl. He said it twice to himself. Lord, Murdoch thought, take pity on a soldier.

“You shaved,” she said.

He nodded, blushing.

“There’s no more candy at the popcorn stand,” she said. “But I got some Cokes in a cooler. The movie’s ready to go. It’s 42nd Street.We can watch it from the projection room. Come on, A.W.!”

Speechless, he followed her upstairs.

Between reels she talked about herself; while Murdoch, listening, writhed in a fever of hormonal suspense.

He watched the words come out of her mouth—the way her lips moved when she talked.

“I wasn’t born here. I was born in a town two counties east. Town of Tucum Wash, if you call it a town, really a gas station and a post office. They bused us thirty-five miles to school every day. Well, I hated that place. It’s a common story, I guess. Everybody hates their hometown—especially if they come from a little wide-place-in-the-road like Tucum Wash. So when I graduated high school I came here looking for work. To Loftus, yeah, I see you smiling. Bright lights, big city, right? I guess you must have seen all kinds of places. But I’ll tell you, A.W., I never wanted much more than Loftus. Loftus isn’t bad. I worked at the K mart checkout and two nights a week at the Sandwich Castle in the mall. It’s actually an okay kind of life. I kept myself in TV dinners and I had some fun. Had a boyfriend. Dean Earl was his name. Oh, he’s gone—you don’t have to look so long in the face. Dean didn’t mean that much to me. Except every Friday night or sometimes Saturday we’d come here to the Roxy. I love movies. I won’t watch ’em on video. Like watching a postage stamp. Plus it don’t smell right. You know what I mean? You ever smell a theater? People think, oh, popcorn, but it isn’t the popcorn. In summer it’s that air-conditioning down the back of your neck, smells like cold metal, and the smell of sweaty people comin’ in with their jackets over their shoulders and mopping their faces with handkerchiefs, waitin’ for that chill to shiver up their spine. And when everybody’s cool, the lights go off and the movie starts. Course I can’t make it be like that. But when folks started leaving, you know, leaving, I couldn’t help but think of the Roxy and how nice it would be to come here all by myself. And I did. Maybe you think I’m crazy. But it’s nice here. It’s not the same, but it reminds me of the old days. Well, maybe I am crazy. A.W., let me work this machine! Your hands are cold. You’re still wet from the rain, aren’t you? Shivering like a pup. You want dry clothes? You know, I thought you might get wet. I picked up some clothes at the K mart after we met this morning. Clothes about your size. Bet that A.W. comes out in the rain, I thought. He looks like he’d come out in the rain. Take that shirt off. Your shirt! Well—mine, too, if you like.”

Later, Murdoch felt obliged to tell her about himself.

They shared a mattress on the floor of what used to be the office of the manager of the Roxy Theater. She was naked in the faint light, sitting cross-legged in a curl of woolen blankets. Murdoch was full of quiet wonder at the sight of her. Five minutes ago, they’d been joined in a passion so intense that Murdoch thought they might penetrate each other’s skins, occupy each other’s space. Now she was sitting apart from him, a little aloof, but smiling, in a blur of light from a high window where the rain washed the dusty glass. It was after midnight by the watch on Murdoch’s wrist. He felt a need to justify himself.

So he told her about growing up in Ukiah, leaving home, enlisting, discovering his aptitude for machines. How he had learned the tolerances and mannerisms of small arms, their maintenance and renewal, their weaknesses and strengths. A weapon was a complex environment in which a small event—the squeezing of a trigger, say—led to vastly larger consequences: the discharge of a bullet, the death of a man, the winning or the losing of a war. But only if everything was in balance; only if the weapon was correctly toleranced, unworn, clean and dry here, oiled there. It captured his imagination. In a world Murdoch often found confusing, here was a map he knew how to read.

Soo listened attentively but began to frown, and he hurried to change the subject: “Then came Contact, you know, and then I met Colonel Tyler and we started this little cross-country turkey shoot.”

“ Turkey shoot?”

“Well, you saw the Helper—what happened to it.”

“Uh-huh. Big mess, frankly. Took out the window at the five-and-dime and the rain came in and mint the magazine rack. You guys do that a lot?”

He wasn’t sure whether he ought to boast or confess. “Maybe twenty times, twenty different towns since October.”

“Isn’t it dangerous?”

“The Helpers don’t fight back.” They don’t have to, Murdoch thought. “I mean, dangerous for regular people. Like civilians.”

“We haven’t killed anybody so far.”

She nibbled her thumb. “I don’t want to hurt your feelings, A.W., but it seems kind of pointless. Like, the Helpers almost back together again.”

“We only just found out they can do that. But is it sensible, you mean? Soo, I don’t know. Colonel Tyler thinks so.”

The taste of her skin, her lips, was still in his mouth. Murdoch thought: We smell like each other.

“Going to do it some more?”

“The TOW shoots?” He shrugged. “Maybe I won’t. Colonel Tyler… I can’t speak for him. Sometimes I think…”

“What?”

“He’s maybe not the world’s most stable individual.”

“You didn’t look that stable yourself, this morning.” Her smile was mischievous.

He shook his head at the memory. “Well, Christ… skins!”

“Come on… it’s not so terrible.”

He looked at her sidelong. “You said those people, what, faded away?”

“Kind of. You know, A.W., it was something they decided to do. It’s how they wanted it. Maybe in some other town more people stayed in their flesh. Around here—I guess it sounds stupid, but there isn’t that much to do. You remember Contact? Travellers said in time people might not want the flesh? Well, that’s all this is. Mrs. Corvallis, she used to run the hair salon, she rented me a basement room—I watched her go. We were friends. I sat with her a lot. Toward the end she was just—I don’t know how to describe it—very pale. You could tell she was going. She was like china. Like porcelain. Almost shiny, light as a bag of feathers. The Travellers were holding her together until the end. A.W., you know what they call neocytes?”

He nodded. He’d heard the word from a medic at Quantico, shortly after Contact.

“Well, the neocytes kept her together. Until she was living mainly on the other side, hardly here at all. Then one morning I knocked on her door and nobody answered and when I went in her skin was there, all empty. It wasn’t so bad. She was happy about it.”

But Murdoch couldn’t suppress a shudder. “It was her choice—you honestly think so?”

“I know it.”

“Horrible,” Murdoch said.

“A.W., what’s the alternative? When you die, you know, you leave your skin behind, too… and considerably more than that. It gets buried in the ground and rots. This was cleaner—and it wasn’t death.” She was still smiling, but gently, almost absently. “What was Contact like for you?”

“Same as for everybody,” he murmured—softly, because a terrible suspicion had touched him and lingered a moment before he could dismiss it.

“No,” she said, “for you. I really want to know.”

“The Travellers came that night in August and they made an offer. What else is there to say?”

“You turned them down.”

“Obviously.”

“Any particular reason?”

“I think—no, it’s stupid.”

She focused her large eyes on him. “Tell me, A.W.”

“When we moved from L. A. up to Mendocino County, I used to follow my father around those woods. Big Pacific woods. I was nine or ten years old and it scared the shit out of me—redwoods, helicopters, but not just that: it was the bigness of everything. I got lost once. Only for maybe half an hour. I sat under a tree until my old man found me. But I couldn’t help thinking about the woods rolling on for miles all the way to the sea, the sea big enough to cover up every place I’d ever lived and everyone I knew, and a sky big enough to drown the sea—shit. Does this make any sense?”

Soo nodded gravely.

Murdoch was embarrassed, but he went on talking almost in spite of himself. “I don’t think I trusted anything after that unless I could hold it in my hand or take it apart. Contact sounded real good, you know, in its own way. I’m not ashamed to admit that. But it was like being out in those woods again. Everything was so—” There wasn’t a word for this feeling. “Big.”

“So you said no.”

Murdoch nodded.

“A.W.—did you ever regret it?”

“You mean, would I do it the same way over again? I don’t know.” He thought of the skins. “It still scares the shit out of me, frankly.”

“Maybe if there was somebody with you.”

He looked at Soo a long time in the dim light. “But that’s not possible.”

“I think it might be.”

“They said—the Travellers said—Soo, the neocytes aren’t inside me anymore.”

“A.W., if you want a second chance, I think it could be arranged.”

He backed away across the sheets. “How would you know that? I mean, how would you know?”

She looked deeply worried. “Is it possible to fall in love with someone in less than a day? It wouldn’t surprise me. Because I think I did. Stupid me.” She sighed. “No, they aren’t inside you. But they can be if you want them. It would be as easy as a touch, A.W. A kiss. If you want them. It’s not too late.”

Murdoch couldn’t think clearly. He grabbed his pants and pulled them on, backed against a wall and stared at her. He summoned words and the words spilled out: “I thought you were human!”

“Oh, God. I am! I just wanted to stay this way a while longer. It’s a choice, A.W., it really is. I like my skin. There’s skin in the new life, too, I mean it’s not just angels floatin’ around heaven, but… I wanted to have my Earth skin and be in Loftus a while longer.” She hung her head. She looked weirdly penitent, like a little girl caught stealing cookies. “I should have told you!”

He thought of what he’d seen this morning, dry parchment in the shape of an arm, a hand, fingertips. He looked at Soo. This skin he’d just touched. He imagined it empty and dropping like isinglass, perhaps blowing down the street in a strong wind.

God help me, Murdoch thought, I held her in my arms! And all along…

… all along, she had been one of them…

… one of them, under her skin…

“A.W.,” she said, “please don’t leave. Please! I’ll explain.”

The monster wanted to explain.

Murdoch shook his head and ran for the door. He left most of his uniform behind. He didn’t want his uniform. There were other clothes. He wanted this cold rain to wash him. He wanted it to wash him clean.

John Tyler placed his service revolver on the desk opposite the bed where he could see it. He was reassured by the sight of the weapon. It was substantial and weighty. It was like an investment, Tyler thought, something withheld until its value increased.

He was thinking about loyalty.

Loyalty was the fundamental thing, Tyler thought. Loyalty was normalcy reduced to its essentials. Loyalty allowed no room to maneuver. Loyalty was precise.

He had begun to entertain doubts about Murdoch’s loyalty.

Tyler was sitting at the rainswept window watching the dark main street of Loftus when Murdoch came stumbling back to the hotel.

Murdoch was a ludicrous sight, naked above the waist and barefoot, mincing over patches of broken glass in the midnight rain.

It might have been funny, except for its implications about what Murdoch had said and refrained from saying… implications about this town and about Murdoch’s loyalty to Tyler.

He listened through the wall as Murdoch let himself into the adjoining room. There wasn’t much to hear. The shower ran for a long time before the room grew quiet again.

Tyler eased back into his chair.

He had been without sleep for two days, and he hadn’t left this room since Murdoch took him down to see the Helper rebuilding itself. This was his madness come back again, Tyler recognized, but he had forgotten that madness was also clarity; madness was the ability to see things as they really were, to make decisions he might not otherwise be capable of making.

He could even admit that this might be a form of Sissy’s madness, a madness he had inherited. Sissy had heard voices. Tonight Tyler heard a crowded confusion of voices hovering on the edge of intelligibility; and if he listened closely he thought the sound might resolve into words, the same words, perhaps, that had frightened and exalted his mother. But Tyler wasn’t interested in voices. They were what the doctors called an epiphenomenon, a secondary symptom, like the curious sterility of the yellow light radiating from the room’s electric bulbs, or the sour odor of stale tobacco smoke that had begun to seep from every surface. Perhaps Sissy could be deceived by such trivia; Tyler was different.

What interested him was the clarity, the speed of his thoughts. He was able to see the threads of significance that bound one event to another in a complex web of meaning.

It was both hideous and quite beautiful.

Colonel Tyler examined it, turned it this way and that in his mind, this glittering web, as the hours marched toward daylight. The rain had been falling now for forty-eight hours.

Murdoch knocked on his door early the next morning.

Tyler rose and walked to the door and opened it just as Murdoch was preparing to knock a second time.

“Sir,” Murdoch said, “I’ve reconsidered, and I think you were right. I think we should pull out of this town.”

Tyler surveyed the younger man. “You look shitty, Mr. Murdoch. You look like you haven’t slept.”

Murdoch blinked. “No offense, sir, but you’re no bed of roses yourself.”

“It’s still raining,” Tyler said, savoring this.

“Sir, yes it is, but—”

“You made a convincing case about navigating these mountain roads in the rain.”

“Well, as you yourself said, sir, we shouldn’t be scared by a little rain. I think—”

“No. You were eloquent on the subject. We have to be careful. We can’t phone 911 if we slide off a mountainside. It’s a new world, Mr. Murdoch.”

“Yes, sir, ” Murdoch said miserably. “But—”

“We can afford to stay another day.”

Murdoch seemed to surrender; he bowed his head. “Yes, sir.”

“Or longer.”

“Sir?”

“Depending on the weather.”

Tyler was buoyed by this small victory, and in the afternoon he felt well enough to brave the rain. He ducked across the street to a clothing store, found a yellow rain slicker, and wore it for protection as he explored the immediate neighborhood of the hotel.

The town was small and might not contain what he was looking for… but then again, it might.

He stalked the rain-washed streets of Loftus with his gaze aimed at each shingled roof he passed. He was scouting for an antenna.

Some of these houses were equipped with ancient rooftop television antennas; some had satellite dishes mounted on their lawns like enormous mushrooms. Most, Tyler presumed, were wired for cable. But it wasn’t a TV antenna he was hunting for. Tyler walked on, a strange figure in his yellow raincoat, the only color and motion in these gray and empty streets.

By five o’clock, the light had nearly failed. Tyler was preparing to turn back when he looked east on one of these narrow residential streets and saw a tower silhouetted against the blue-black sky—a radio tower with a beam antenna mounted on it.

Smiling to himself, Tyler hurried down the block to the pertinent house and kicked open the front door. The lights blazed on at the touch of a switch. It was amazing, he thought, and maybe it was more than amazing, that the power hadn’t failed. In every one of these whistlestop towns they’d passed through, the wall plates continued to offer 120 volts of AC as reliably as ever—maybe more reliably. It was a mystery… but Tyler set it it aside for later pondering.

Inside the house, he found two of the skins Murdoch had talked about. He regarded these relics with a faint distaste, probing them with his shoe. The skins were dry and snaky and he understood Murdoch’s alarm.

But they were harmless dead things, too, and Tyler was able to ignore them.

In the basement he found what he’d been looking for: a small room decorated with QSO cards and antique code keys, and on a knotty pine desk, a Kenwood radio transceiver of recent vintage.

Tyler switched on the machine to make sure it worked. The faceplate lit up; static whispered from the speaker.

Who might be out there? Out there even now, Tyler thought, voices buried in this whisper of noise.

Maybe no one, Tyler thought. Or maybe a population of survivors. One in ten thousand Americans was still a large group of people. Such a population would know nothing about him. None of them would know about Stuttgart or any other of his long nights; none of them would know he had held a gun on the President. Among such people, he would have essentially no past. He could be a new thing; he could be what he looked like in a mirror.

He tuned the radio with scrupulous care. He was disappointed by its silence, but he persisted for hours, until long after dark, until he heard the faint sound of Joey Commoner talking to Boston, Massachusetts.

When Tyler analyzed the events that followed, his verdict was: I shouldn’t have played with the pistol. It was the pistol that made things go bad.

When he came back to the hotel he found Murdoch frying hamburgers on the hot plate. Tyler wasn’t hungry; his headache had gotten worse. After dinner, Murdoch hauled a case of beer into the room. Tyler matched him bottle for bottle. It was a stupid thing to do, under the circumstances. The alcohol affected his judgment.

He talked long and volubly and perhaps not too coherently about the large things on his mind: about loyalty and sanity. “In the end,” he told Murdoch, “it comes down to obedience. Obedience and sanity are the same word—wouldn’t you agree, Mr. Murdoch?”

Murdoch—who had been nervous to begin with and seemed no better for his massive intake of Coors—looked at Tyler wearily. “Tell the truth, sir, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“That’s a hell of an admission.”

“Is it? What’s that supposed to mean?” Now Murdoch was angry. “It’s an insult, right? Jesus. I swear I don’t understand you. Half the time you come on like a good old Army boy, half the time you sound like some faggot college professor. I don’t even know why we do this military routine. Aye sir, Colonel sir. Just because you’re walking around like you have a ramrod up your ass. Salute me, I’m wonderful. Well, fuck it. It’s not just stupid, John, it’s not even sane.”

Tyler was stung by the extremity of this.

“Epictetus,” he said.

Murdoch, exasperated: “What?”

“The Discourses. ‘Why, then, do you walk as if you had swallowed a ramrod?’ Epictetus. He was a Stoic. An educated Roman slave. You shouldn’t insult me, Mr. Murdoch.”

“All I meant—”

But Tyler’s attention had strayed to the pistol on the side table. Spontaneously, in a motion that seemed to belong to his hands alone, he picked the weapon up.

Murdoch’s eyes widened.

It was an old-fashioned revolver. Tyler opened it to show Murdoch the chamber. “Empty,” he said. Then he took a single bullet from the tabletop, displayed it between his right thumb and forefinger, and placed it in the pistol.

Or pretended to. In fact, he palmed the bullet… but Murdoch didn’t see.

“One round,” Tyler said.

He spun the chamber without looking at it.

He raised the pistol to his own head. The act was familiar, but he had never performed it in the presence of another man. It made him feel strange, dizzy, not altogether connected to Murdoch or this room or the exterior world in general.

He looked steadily at Murdoch as he pulled the trigger. Click!

He spun the chamber again.

“That’s the advantage I have over you, you lame little fuck. That I’m capable of this.”

Perhaps Murdoch, the weapons specialist, was visualizing the internal working of the pistol, the firing pin as it came down on empty air—or not. Click!

“I can do this without flinching. Now. Can you?”

Murdoch huddled away from the barrel of the pistol. He looked pinned in his chair by an invisible wind. His Adam’s apple bobbed in his throat, a motion Tyler watched with fascination. It looked like there was something inside him trying to get out, something more substantial than a word.

“Christ,” Murdoch said in a strangled voice, “please, Christ Jesus, don’t!”

“This is why you call me sir. You understand?”

“Yes! Yes, sir!”

“I doubt it.” Click!

“Christ, Christ, put the gun away, Jesus, don’t do this to me!” Murdoch was rigid with terror. His hands were clamped on the arms of the chair. In the sterile light of the hotel room, Murdoch’s wristwatch was clearly visible. Tyler watched the numerals blink. He counted thirty seconds, then he lowered the pistol.

He looked at Murdoch and smiled. “We’ll leave in the morning,” he said.

Murdoch opened his mouth but no sound came out.

Tyler put the pistol back on the table. “Maybe you should get your things together, Mr. Murdoch.”

Murdoch blinked until he realized he had been excused, the ordeal was over. Then he stood up on shaky legs, walked to the door, turned, and took a last bewildered look at Tyler before he left and closed the door behind him.

Tyler’s headache was much worse.

Later, it occurred to him to look for the bullet he’d palmed; but it wasn’t beside the chair, nor in his pocket, nor on the tabletop. Finally he opened the pistol and found the bullet resting in the chamber—exactly where he had led Murdoch to believe it was. Which worried him a little. It was a strange sort of mistake to have made.

Murdoch lay awake for what remained of the night with the door of his hotel room locked and chained—eyes open, because when he closed them he saw the barrel of Tyler’s service revolver pointed at him.

Or Soo Constantine, pale and naked in a darkened room.

Or an empty human skin littering the doorway of an old house.

Dear God, he thought, what if Tyler had shot him? He wouldn’t be a skin. He’d be a corpse. A messier object, as Soo had pointed out.

She’d talked about the missing people as if they had really gone somewhere. Had they? True, the Travellers had promised that. The memory of Contact was vague in Murdoch’s mind, a dream that paled by daylight. But he remembered the promise of a new kind of life, both physical and bodiless… an idea that had made sense, somehow, in the intensity of Contact.

It’s not too late, Soo had said.

And why did the words linger on?

Was he actually tempted by the offer? Was such a thing possible? But that’s terrible, Murdoch thought: I don’t want to be an empty skin on some empty street, like a bottle somebody drained and threw away. It’s something they choose. No. Bullshit, Murdoch thought. But she hadn’t seemed like a liar.

He tried to imagine himself travelling on with Tyler, watching the old man sink into outright lunacy, firing missiles at something, anything—trying to make sense of the world by dismantling it.

Christ, Murdoch thought miserably, I don’t even know where I am! I couldn’t find this town on a map. Loftus? Where is it?

I’m lost, Murdoch thought.

Rain tapped on the window.

He tossed and slept a little in the last hour before dawn.

Tyler woke regretting the incident of the night before and tried to act as if it hadn’t happened. He knocked on Murdoch’s door and asked for some help loading up the Hummer. Murdoch nodded—both of them a little sheepish, Tyler thought, in the sober light of morning—and began to assemble the cooking gear.

They carried their personal items to the street, around the corner to the Exxon station where the Hummer was parked under cover. Tyler arranged the baggage in the rear of the vehicle and made sure everything was strapped down. Murdoch, looking baleful and confused, watched from a few feet away.

Then Tyler took the passenger seat and waited for Murdoch to climb in behind the wheel. It was a conciliatory gesture, giving Murdoch the reins, a small apology for the night before.

But Murdoch didn’t move. “Sir,” he said, “I think I left something in the room.”

Tyler took a pair of sunglasses from his breast pocket and polished them on a handkerchief. “What sort of thing, Sergeant?”

“Compass,” Murdoch mumbled.

“Isn’t that with the mess kit? I thought I saw it there.”

“Sir, I don’t think so.” He made no move to look.

The air in the garage was thick. It smelled of gasoline and old solvents. This is a dark place, Tyler thought, an oppressive place.

“It was a cheap compass,” he said. “We can find one like it anywhere.”

“It’s easier if I just go back, sir.”

“Back to the hotel room?”

“Yes, sir.”

Tyler understood the lie and the significance of the lie. It made him feel enormously sad—this shabby little betrayal.

“Well,” Tyler said. “You’d better hurry, then, Sergeant.” Embarrassingly, Murdoch couldn’t hide his relief. “Yes, sir.”

“I’ll be waiting.”

“Yes, sir.”

Colonel Tyler watched his young blond-haired friend leave the Exxon garage. Murdoch was haloed for a moment in the morning light—the rain had finally stopped—then he turned into the shadow of a taller building and was gone.

Soo was in the manager’s office of the Roxy, only just awake, wearing a gray sweatshirt that reached nearly to her knees. She looked up as Murdoch came through the door.

The room was different in the morning light, Murdoch thought. Sunlight came through the small, high window. The floorboards were lustrous and ancient. The mattress looked disheveled, as if the girl hadn’t slept much herself.

“Soo—” he began.

“You don’t have to explain, A.W. I understand.” She stood up. “I know why you’re here. It’s okay.”

He was as scared as he had ever been. More frightened than when Tyler was pointing his pistol at him. The impulse that had brought him here seemed reckless, foolish.

She moved closer.

“I don’t know,” he said, “I mean I’m still not sure if I—”

“It doesn’t hurt or anything.”

That’s what they tell you about vaccinations, Murdoch thought. About dentists.

“It’s just life.” She touched him. She put her hands on his shoulders and tilted up her head. “A new kind of life.”

And Murdoch closed his eyes and kissed her.

He guessed the neocytes entered his body at that moment. There was no sensation, nothing more ominous than the touch of her lips. It reassured him that she still smelled like Soo, still tasted like Soo. The fear began to subside.

She stepped back and smiled at him. “Now we can be together, A.W. Together as long as we want.”

He was about to frame a reply when three things happened almost simultaneously:

The door flew open, striking Murdoch across the ribs and throwing him aside…

And John Tyler strode into the room, his pistol at arm’s length…

And there was a sound like the snapping of an immense tree limb, as Tyler’s weapon kicked and Soo Constantine’s head shuddered in an explosion of blood and tissue.

Tyler put three more shots into the girl’s prostrate body. Bang, bang, bang. He felt the recoil in his arm and shoulder. It felt good.

He had drawn the obvious inference from Murdoch’s silences and night visits, his hysteria and his quicksilver urges to leave or stay. But look, Tyler wanted to say, consider this evidence: She can die after all. She can die as dead as any human being.

Her blood was dark, viscous, and strange, and the sight of the body mesmerized him for a time.

Then he turned and looked for Murdoch; but Murdoch had slipped out the open door.

Not good.

Tyler hurried down to the lobby and into the street.

Murdoch was a block away, frantically rattling the doors of parked cars. Murdoch had forsaken him for the girl. Murdoch himself might be infected; there had been hints, a word or two Tyler had heard through the door. Now we can be together.

Tyler sighted down the barrel of the pistol. Sunlight gleamed on the fenders and windows of these parked cars; Tyler moved to shade his eyes.

Murdoch caught sight of him and ducked away. The pistol bucked and the shot went wide; Tyler saw it kick dust from the brick facing of a muffler shop. Murdoch crouched and hurried on to the next car, an old Ford; Tyler walked out into the street quickly but calmly and assumed a shooter’s stance.

He had begun to squeeze the trigger when the door of the Ford popped open and Murdoch ducked for the interior.

Tyler cursed but followed the motion. The pistol kicked again in his hand.

He saw Murdoch lurch as if he’d been hit—a gout of blood came from the left leg or thigh—then the car door slammed and the engine turned over twice, rattled on the edge of a stall, finally began to roar. Murdoch threw it into gear and Tyler watched helplessly as the vehicle screamed away from the curb. The Ford made a drunken swerve; its rear fender caught a lamp standard on the left side of the street, then it straightened and accelerated west.

Tyler turned and ran back to the Hummer… but the Exxon station was three blocks away; precious time was lost.

He drove west on the highway for an hour without sighting the Ford. Murdoch might have followed one of these dirt side roads, Tyler thought, or hidden the car in a barn, in back of a billboard, even along some back street in Loftus.

But I hurt him, Tyler thought with some satisfaction. In a place without doctors, without medical care, maybe that was enough.

It was a question of principle, Tyler thought. Murdoch had forsaken his humanity. And Tyler was better off without him. Murdoch had seen too many of his lapses. Murdoch had seen him shoot the girl. It was precisely the kind of baggage Tyler wished to leave behind.

He pulled over to the side of the road well beyond the limits of Loftus, in a patch of cool November sunlight, and listened to the silence. It was the new silence of his aloneness in this increasingly empty world. Murdoch was gone. That second voice, second self, was gone. There was only Tyler now, Tyler talking to Tyler ; or those other voices, the Sissy voices, whispering from the trees, the earth, the air.

Murdoch’s wound was more serious than the Colonel had guessed.

The bullet entered his hip, shattered a wedge of bone, and opened a raw round exit wound. Blood instantly soaked the seat of the Ford. The pain was blinding; but Murdoch was sustained by the vivid memory of Soo Constantine dead under the barrel of Tyler’s gun.

He drove two blocks at high speed, turned right, and rolled into the first empty garage he spotted.

The car wouldn’t be invisible here, but it might be inconspicuous in the shadows. Murdoch didn’t have a choice. It was stop now or pass out on the street. The car came up the driveway too fast; he fumbled his right foot ineffectually between the gas and the brake pedal; the Ford coasted into the garage and collided with a stack of pineboard shelves. Murdoch fell against the steering wheel as a pair of garden shears dented the hood of the car and a can of Varsol cracked the windshield.

He managed to turn off the engine before he slipped into unconsciousness, curled in the hot salt smell of his own blood.

The Helper responded promptly to the distress of a soul in transition. The transition had hardly begun; but the neocytes in Murdoch’s body broadcast the terrible news of the organism’s impending death.

Moments after Tyler ran west in the M998, bouncing over buckled tarmac and hunting vainly for Murdoch’s Ford, the reconstructed Helper moved from its place in the center of Loftus and glided to the garage where Murdoch was dying.

It came up swiftly along the driver’s side of the car and stopped there. The only sound was the drip of dilute Prestone from the Ford’s cracked radiator.

The Helper was many awarenesses, some of them human. One of them was Soo Constantine, who had recently been killed by Colonel John Tyler. Her distress was its distress.

The Helper looked at Murdoch’s bloody organism with pity and grief.

If he died—and he was nearly dead now—Murdoch would be dead forever. There hadn’t been time to engineer a transition, to grow a second Murdoch for the Murdoch-essence to inhabit. There was only this fragile plasmic Murdoch with a scant few neocytes inside him. The neocytes had only reproduced a few tens of tens of times. They had not mapped or expanded Murdoch in any significant way.

But Murdoch had made his choice. This was an involuntary death, which the Travellers found abhorrent.

The Helper made an arm and reached out to the window of the car. The window glass shattered and fell away in a fine gray powder. The arm extended further, reached inside the car to Murdoch and touched his damaged body.

Mass surged inward from the body of the Helper, which was proportionately diminished. Multiple millions of its subunits anticipated new tasks—sealing broken blood vessels, containing and fostering the spark of plasmic life.

Soon Murdoch was covered in what appeared to be a featureless black cocoon.

The cocoon was motionless; Murdoch was motionless inside it. Prompt and feverish activity had begun, but it was internal and below the threshold of perception. Superficially, nothing changed.

Days and nights passed. The sky outside the open garage roiled with clouds.

Periodically, that December, there was lightning.

Murdoch woke in January.

The Helper had retreated; he was alone in the car. He opened the door and staggered out into dim daylight.

The sky was gray and threatening. The weather was bleak and dangerous everywhere that winter; he had been warned about storms.

The neocytes were still at work inside him. Murdoch could have chosen to move directly into his new life, his virtual life; but he wasn’t finished with the flesh… Tyler’s gunshot had interrupted him.

There were things he wanted to see.

He couldn’t say precisely what things—literally could not say, to himself or to anyone else. In the aftermath of his injury, he had very nearly died; the flow of blood to the brain had been interrupted for too long. The neocytes were reconstructing that tissue, but much of their work was conjectural and slow, elaborating the holon of Murdoch’s self from its fragmented parts. He was himself, but he was inarticulate and he didn’t trust himself to drive; too much neuromuscular memory remained unreconstructed.

Mute, he walked in the direction of the setting sun.

He walked for weeks.

His legs were unnaturally strong and his stamina seemed unlimited. The weather was only a minor hindrance, and his wordless contact with the Artifact helped him anticipate and avoid the worst winds and lightnings. He sheltered in abandoned buildings, storm cellars, gullies.

Some nights he slept in the rain. His body had been changed on the inside; extremes of hot and cold no longer bothered him. He seldom ate. He didn’t need to, though he drank copiously when there was water.

He crossed the Mississippi at Cairo and passed into the prairies, where the storms were often fierce. One night, crouched in a pipe section where a four-lane bypass had been abandoned in mid-construction, he watched a blizzard unroll from the western horizon like a flat white wall. The wind made a sound like freight trains passing through the sky. After midnight, when the snow had almost blocked the pipe at each end, a wild fox—drenched and miserable—crept inside with him. The fox was terrified of Murdoch but more terrified of the blizzard. Murdoch strengthened his tegument and let the fox chew harmlessly on a finger until the animal was exhausted and no longer afraid of him. Then he cradled the fox against the warmth of his body until both of them were asleep.

In the morning it was gone, but Murdoch was startled and pleased that he had remembered the name of the animal during the night. Fox: the animal was a fox. He said it out loud. “Fox!”

It made his throat hurt. He didn’t care. The pleasure of speech was almost unbearable.

“Fox!”

He walked west and north along a road shrouded in glittering blue-white snow.

“Fox!” he exclaimed from time to time, and the word fell away across the empty winter farmland. “Fox, fox, fox!”

Late that winter, Murdoch passed through Kansas and crossed the state border into Colorado, where he glimpsed for the first time the thing he had come all this distance to see: the Home he had heard about from the Travellers.

This was what had drawn him, this was his reason for clinging to the flesh. Some stubborn fraction of A.W. Murdoch had wanted to see this miracle with his own eyes.

From a great distance it looked like a mountain, a curvature of blue and white nearly lost in the haze of the horizon.

It was Murdoch’s good fortune that the skies had cleared in the eastern lee of the Rockies. With a little more luck, the weather would hold until he was closer. But distances were hard to calculate with such an object. How many more miles to go? How far to the horizon, and how far beyond that?

He walked a day and a night and another day and another night.

Words returned to him piecemeal as the days passed and his neural tissue was restored. The effect was sometimes comic, as when Murdoch would suddenly halt along the verge of an empty road, point his index finger, and announce to the heedless air some newly acquired noun—“Window/” or “Fence!”

Proper names were more elusive. He could barely pronounce his own. “Murdoch,” he said, but it sounded clumsy and grotesque. Nor could he remember the name of the girl he had met in Loftus, though the memory was vivid and he often felt her silent presence. Maddeningly, the name lingered on his tongue but couldn’t be coaxed from his mouth. “Suh-suh-suh…” He worked at it, day after day, until his jaw was sore.

Home stood on the horizon, closer now. It drew the eye irresistibly, a miraculous blue pearl capped with white. The white was snow. Like a mountain, Home rose more than 50,000 feet into the rarified air, up where it was always cold, where the snow never melted.

The Travellers had explained to him, wordlessly but vividly, how the creation of Home had begun. Months ago, on the eve of Contact, a single microscopic neocyte—a kind of seed—had come to rest on this plain of dry, rolling land where Colorado met Wyoming. Instantly, the Traveller organism had begun to reproduce itself. One made two, two made four, four made eight—in less than an hour, a million; two million; four million. The organisms grew themselves from the constituent parts of soil, sand, water, air, and light. When their numbers were large enough—uncountably, inconceivably large—they organized themselves into machines, into devices as big as cities.

Home required immense tonnages of raw matter. The building machines began by digging into the earth, cratering the prairie and displacing the antelope herds. But that was only a modest first step. As Murdoch approached, he felt a series of rhythmic tremors. Under the imponderable substance of Home, he knew, a conduit had been opened into the magma of the earth itself.

The days remained clear, but a cold wind blew steadily from the west. Murdoch felt weaker, the farther he walked.

He understood that he couldn’t get as close to Home as he might have liked. It wasn’t a healthy environment. The wind, curling around a sphere more than thirty miles in circumference, created a turbulence that could sweep.him off his feet. Deadly gases vented from the magma tap, and the heat at the cratered base was well beyond human tolerance.

But he could get a little closer than this.

“Suh,” he pronounced. “Suh—suh—”

It wasn’t good enough.

The snow came back that night.

It was a hard, granular snow, difficult to walk through. Murdoch slept in an empty Best Western motel, in a hallway away from windows that had been broken by the winter storms, and walked on in the morning. His compass—he had pocketed it in Loftus—and his road map kept him aimed in the right direction.

But Home was hidden by the weather.

The weather settled in and showed no inclination to change. He walked for three days blindly… walked until he was forced to stop by a violent tremor and a wind so sulfurous and hot that it melted the snow on the ground.

Murdoch felt himself growing lighter. When he was finished here, there was no reason to cling to the flesh; he understood that. But he worried that the process might be happening too quickly, that he would be gone before the weather cleared.

He curled under a tarpaulin in the rear of a gas station… drifting in and out of sleep, listening to the hard snow sift across the roof, the gas pumps, the empty road.

Time passed. He couldn’t have guessed at day or month; knew only that it was after midnight when the snow stopped.

He woke to a blanketing silence, stood up stiffly, and hurried outside.

The clouds had passed on. There were stars—vivid prairie stars—and a few, faint streaks of cirrus.

And Home.

Murdoch caught his breath.

It was a wall that dominated the sky. Perspective made it seem truncated, a looming dome about to tumble over and crush him. A crescent of snow at its apex reflected the starlight, but most of that part of the sphere was a occluded by its nearer slope. The lower section of Home wasn’t solid; it was a gridwork, a lace of bone-white struts and spars, as fine, from Murdoch’s vantage, as spider silk; but each one must be immense, he thought, columns as wide as towns, as long as highways.

It was illuminated from within by the light—many miles away—of the magma tap, and by the luminescence of the earth’s own toxic gases, pearlous and strange.

Periodically, balls of blue lightning seemed to flow and stutter along the countless struts and spars of the structure. And there was a sound—a distant, continuous thunder that had been obscured by the snow, but echoed now, in the cold night air, across the plain.

A wind blew, and Murdoch anchored himself between the pillars of the gas pumps.

Here was the strangest and most beautiful thing he had ever seen. He felt both fragile and grateful; he had been lifted up, exposed to the elements, abandoned to this vision. His uniform was a rag. He felt his own tenuous existence flickering inside it. This was the moment he had saved himself for.

He opened his mouth to make some exclamation, to vent his human awe. But what came out was: “Suh—suh—Soo!”

He felt her presence.

He felt it so strongly that he looked left, looked right. He was alone, of course. She was with him, but not here; with him in the new life. He was rising now. He was lighter than air.

Murdoch gazed at the Home growing out of the plain, at its astonishing size and its interior lights and its reflection on the snowy plain.

“Soo,” he said faintly, proudly. And she reached for him.

The wind took what was left of Murdoch, took his rags and his skin and carried them away, up beyond the snowbound Colorado flatlands, up and away from the mountains.

Chapter 22 Flesh

On a windy afternoon late in January, Tom Kindle found a human skin snagged on the leafless azalea bush outside his front door.

The skin had been carried some distance by the wind. It was tattered and incomplete, bleached by the weather to so colorless a shade that Kindle thought for a moment it was some old ghost that had fetched up on his doorstep.

Kindle studied the object for a time, then ducked back into the warmth of the house and telephoned Matt Wheeler.

Matt drove the short distance to Delmar Estates with his black bag on the car seat beside him. Not that this was a doctor’s job, if he had understood Tom Kindle correctly. A coroner’s, perhaps.

He examined the skin where it was trapped in the naked branches of the azalea, his expression fixed but emotionless. Then he looked at Kindle. “Do you have a pair of tongs?”

“Pardon me?”

“Kitchen tongs. Barbecue tongs.”

“Well… I think Abby brought over a pair. Hang on.” He disappeared into the house and returned with a pair of kitchen tongs. The handles were cartoon-blue plastic; the business end, stainless steel. Matt used them to lift the tattered skin away from the spindly bush and carry it into the garage, out of the reach of the wind.

He laid out the tissue with some care across the gasoline-stained concrete floor, unfolding it meticulously, layer by layer, until it resembled a nearly transparent pair of body tights torn beyond any utility. One leg ended in frayed nothingness at the knee. One arm was missing entirely. The head—there was very little of the head.

Kindle stood well back. “I wonder who the hell it is? I mean—is it somebody, like a corpse? Or just a piece of somebody?”

Matt crouched over the object. It didn’t frighten or disgust him—he had encountered worse things as an intern. But he was careful not to touch it with his naked hands. “This is the first one I’ve seen.”

“First?” Kindle cocked his head. “There are others?”

“You should have come to the meeting Sunday night. Bob Ganish found a couple of them in his neighbor’s house. Paul Jacopetti says the farms out in his area are all empty—except for these.”

“Jesus, Matthew! Empty skins?”

He nodded.

“What about the people inside?”

“Gone.”

“Gone where?” Matt shrugged.

“So,” Kindle said, “does everybody end up like this?”

“I think so. Eventually. Except us, of course. Abby said she’s worried about her husband, her grandchildren. She says they’re getting… well, thinner. Paler.”

“Jesus,” Kindle repeated. “What about—”

He checked himself. But the question was obvious. What about Rachel?

Matt couldn’t bring himself to form an answer, not even to himself.

Kindle looked back at the fragile envelope arrayed on the floor of the garage. “Matthew, is there something—I mean, what should I do with it?”

“Put it outside. Let it blow away. It won’t last long. A few days in the sun and it’ll turn to dust.”

“Not much to leave behind,” Kindle said.

“What is?”

He drove home to Rachel.

She had arrived at the house this morning and hinted that it might be her last visit. Matt made the obvious connection between this and the discovery of the skins throughout Buchanan. But it was an impossible thought, a thought he must not allow himself. The image of a dry shell of Rachel, of his daughter, abandoned to the wind, lonely and empty in the cold rain—dear God, not this.

He told her what the call from Tom Kindle had been about. He described the skin, described it clinically, made himself the Doctor Machine, because this was his last defense, his only defense. And when the telling was done, he shook his head, dazed at his own story. “It isn’t human, Rachel. I know what you’ve said. But this isn’t—it isn’t something human beings do.”

He expected an argument. She only nodded. “Maybe you’re right.”

She was pale, somehow ethereal; she moved with a certain new lightness—and these observations, too, Matt didn’t care to mark or consider.

“Maybe too much has changed. Maybe the word ‘human’ doesn’t apply anymore.” Her voice was solemn. “I don’t feel different—not basically different. The basic part of me is still Rachel Wheeler. But there’s more now. More layers. More ways of seeing things. If I leave this behind—” Gesturing at herself, her body. “Am I Rachel? Am I human? I don’t know.”

She might have been confessing to some disease, some terrible wasting illness.

She seemed to feel the thought. Lately she had seemed able to interpret the smallest nuance of his expression, although he was laboring to conceal his grief.

“Daddy, I’m not sorry. About any of it. You’re a doctor—you know how many lives were saved. Even at the local hospital, how many terminal cancers were cured? How much heart disease? And in the world, my God, all the starvation, the malnutrition, the crippled lives—”

But Matt could not dispel the memory of the skin that had fetched up, a pathetic and unassailable statement of grim fact, on Tom Kindle’s leafless azalea bush. “Rachel, is this better?”

“Yes.” Firmly. “We couldn’t have gone on, you know, the way we were. The planet wouldn’t support us. We were damaging it beyond recognition, beyond its ability to recover. Something had to change, something human had to change. Do you know who said yes to Contact? Who accepted the offer of eternal life? Almost everybody. Everybody—including dictators, pickpockets, child molesters, murderers… people who killed people for their wristwatches, killed them for their tennis shoes. People who tortured children to death in front of their parents. But it was immortality with a price. They had to understand what it means to hurt someone, to damage someone. And if that didn’t work, if they could witness human pain and understand it intimately and still not care, or worse, enjoy it—that meant they were flawed, broken, not complete. So they had to be repaired.”

“They can’t choose to commit violence?”

“Anyone can choose anything. But only if they understand what they’re choosing and why.”

“Rachel… it sounds like compulsion.”

“Daddy, you’ve told me since I was a baby that there’s no good reason for all the wars, all the bullying, all the hurt in the world.”

It was what one told a child. And, pressed, he would have admitted to believing it himself. But the fact was—as Scott Fitzgerald had written, if Matt remembered his American Literature correctly—the fundamental decencies were parceled out unequally at birth. “There’s no excuse for it. But people don’t seem to know that.”

“Now they do.”

“You can’t change human nature, Rachel—not without taking away the thing that makes people human.”

“Then we’re not human. In a way, that was always the point. Humanity was reaching its limits, facing problems we couldn’t even begin to solve in the usual human way—global problems, planetary problems. And the main victim of our inadequacy was us! Our children*. They were already dying by the millions in Africa, and we were too human to do anything about it!”

Matt bowed his head. This was true, of course. The Contactees had done a better job. At least in the short term. “But what were they saved for, if their humanity wasn’t saved?”

“But it wasn’t lost, either, just outgrown. Do you know what we’re building? Has anyone told you? A spaceship. An Artifact of our own. A human one. Daddy, do you know what’s inside it? The Earth is inside it. Not literally, of course. But a model of it. All of it, every leaf of every tree, every mountaintop.…”

A memory of this was mingled with his own fading memory of Contact. “You mean a simulation. Like a computer program.” Or a paperweight, he thought: the Earth, in a globe of water, with snowflakes.

“More than a simulation. It’s a place, as real as this place, except that it doesn’t occupy a physical space. It’s alive in a very real way. It has winds. It has seasons. We’re human enough to need that—not just immortality, but a place to live.”

“Even if it’s an illusion?”

“Is it? Is an idea an illusion? Is the value of pi a hallucination, just because you can’t touch it?”

“Rachel, it’s not really the Earth.”

“No one pretends it is. No matter where we stand, we’ll know that. Because there will always be a door, not a physical door, but a sort of direction, a way to turn, and through the door is always the bigger world, all our knowledge and the knowledge we inherited from the Travellers—the epistemos, people are calling it; the idea-world.”

“We might have done it by ourselves,” Matt said. “Given time. If we’d survived a couple of centuries without vaporizing ourselves, without poisoning the planet, we might have moved into space. Maybe it seems trivial, but we walked on the moon without anyone’s help. Given time, maybe we could have met the Travellers on their own terms.”

Rachel’s eyes widened. “What a terrible thought!”

“Is it?”

She frowned. “Daddy… I know more human history than I used to. It’s an ugly parade. Infanticide, bloody warfare, human sacrifice—those are the norm. They’re not exceptional at all. And modern history is no better. When I was in school, we studied Roman history and we pretended to be horrified by it. The Romans left unwanted children to die by the side of the road, did you know that? How horrible. Well, it is horrible… but compared to what? The century of Auschwitz, of Hiroshima and the Khmer Rouge? Going into space wouldn’t have civilized us. We’d have had our robots disemboweling Moslems on the surface of Mars. You know we would.”

“Is that how the Travellers saw it?”

“Yes. And it terrified them. There’s no monopoly on power or knowledge. Given time, given our own survival, maybe we could have stopped them… destroyed them before they got close enough for Contact.”

“And that’s why all this is happening? Not because they’re doing us a favor. It’s self-defense.”

“In part. But they didn’t have to go to all this trouble. They had the means to exterminate us. That would have worked, too.”

The coldness of the statement made him feel both frightened and ashamed.

He took a long look at Rachel: who used to be his daughter, who used to be a human being.

“There wasn’t just brutality, Rachel. People lived lives—small, useful lives. Sometimes helped one another. Often loved one another. There was beauty. Sometimes there was even decency.”

Her expression softened. “Daddy, I know. They know. The Travellers know that about us.” She paused. “That’s why they couldn’t exterminate us.”

“Only change us.”

“Yes. Change us.”

A silence filled the room.

Rachel left the house before midnight, after her father had fallen asleep on the sofa.

She had wanted a better goodbye, but she supposed there was no way to say what she meant—no words to encompass her grief and fear.

She loved her father enormously and hated the idea of abandoning him to an empty planet… abandoning him to die.

A cold rain had begun to fall and the wind in the street was sharp and gusty. Rachel adjusted herself so that the temperature ceased to be unpleasant. Then she paused—alone among dark houses—and listened to the trees talk their sibilant winter language.

The wind lifted her hair and waved it behind her like a sad flag. Overhead, high above the streetlights, midnight clouds tumbled and dipped.

It was a stormy night, and there was worse to come. Although it was winter in the northern hemisphere, temperature gradients in the tropical oceans had risen dramatically; winds in the upper atmosphere had shifted. North and east of Hawaii, a low-pressure cell, a vast and powerful weather-engine, had begun to churn above the turbulent ocean. A typhoon—unheard of, this time of year. But all things were new.

Her father would learn about the storm soon enough, because he had begun to talk to the Helper.

Still, Rachel thought, he was so fragile…

She wondered why he had resisted the offer of immortality—why anybody had. But she didn’t submit the question to the Greater World, where there might have been an answer; she didn’t want to dwell on it more tonight.

There was not much left of her time on the cradle Earth, and Rachel wanted to make the most of these hours.

Not everyone relished the flesh. Many had already abandoned it—whole towns, in some cases, some as large as Buchanan. Buchanan itself was largely empty and would be emptier by the day. But some chose to linger… a leavetaking made strange by personal transformation, in some cases, like the group hidden in the basement of the high school, some forty strong, who had elected to share each other’s memories in every detail. They were there still, cross-legged on the floor and welded at the fingertips; motionless, enraptured, waiting to surrender their joined flesh in a single communal act.

Others—mainly but not exclusively the young—just wanted to play a little longer on the surface of the Earth… stay up past bedtime, do what had been forbidden.

Rachel encapsulated her grief and set it aside. She focused all her attention on this January night—the bite of rain on her exposed skin, trickle and drip of water in storm drains, creak of tree limb, rush of wind.

She hiked through the maze of tract housing that had overgrown the northern foothills of Mt. Buchanan. Rainwater streamed off the shingles of silent houses, empty houses where abandoned human skins were crumbling to dust. She paused at every high cul-de-sac that allowed a view. The rain obscured much, but there were still a few lights in Buchanan itself, lonely and far and fog-obscured. And she could sense as much as see the ocean, feel its enormous mass troubled by the climatic adjustments the Travellers had begun to perform.

She was wet to the skin. Her clothes were sodden and heavy. But none of that mattered. It was a cold rain, Rachel knew, but the touch of it was soothing, like the rain that carries away the heat of a summer day.

She walked toward Old Quarry Park, where sleepless others had gathered by unspoken mutual consent to share the pleasure of the night.

It was a long walk, nearly two hours by foot from her father’s house, but Rachel finished it without weariness. She was lighter and stronger than she had ever been before. A year ago, a hike this long in this weather would have left her exhausted and ill. Tonight there was no fatigue at all; only a growing excitement, a first tremulous presentiment of joy.

She followed an empty access lane into the deep green darkness of the park.

But it was not a complete darkness even in the rain, even at two o’clock on a January morning. A faint light radiated from the low wrack of clouds. Douglas firs tossed in ponderous slow motion, like the masts of ancient sailing ships. The rain was everywhere, a silvery presence on lips and skin.

Figures moved in the dim light.

Not human, Daddy had insisted, and Rachel supposed that was especially true here. In the human history of Buchanan, there had never been such a gathering on such a raw January night. Before Contact, no one had come to smell the wet winter earth and walk among the mossy winter trees; no one had come for the caress of flesh against flesh—at least not in the cold, not fearlessly, not openly. It wasn’t human.

But it. seemed very human to Rachel, who had recently been studying the Travellers. The Travellers in their organic form had been almost incomprehensibly strange. She had seen them in borrowed and ancient memories: porous antlery creatures like mobile sponges, slow in the thick atmosphere of their chilly moon. Like humans, their bodies had been cellular in structure, but there the resemblance ended. The Travellers were uninucleate and genetically haploid, more like algae than animals. A mature Traveller was a colony of secondary systems—as if human beings were assembled from cultivated crops of livers, hearts, lungs, brains. The parts reproduced independently of the whole. For the Travellers, “sex” was a series of protracted, continuous events… they spoke of karyogamy the way people talked about middle age.

Human sex had seemed to the Travellers equally strange: a grotesquely foreshortened reproductive whirlwind, allied to something like a repeatable religious trance.

But they understood pleasure. Rachel remembered some of their slow, protracted pleasures. She remembered a glade of crystalline fans, warmed by pale sunlight and enriched by volcanic vents of gaseous water, where an ancient Traveller whose name was a shape had come to bask and root. She remembered the pleasure of hyphae uncoiled in a solitary erotic flowering. The pleasure of germinal sterigmata scattered in glittering clouds to the tidal wind.

Rachel left her soaking-wet clothes at the entrance to the park. Bodies moved along the grassy green, or timidly, like fawns, among the trees. The emerald light made these people seem golden and diffuse.

Rachel opened an eye to the Greater World and saw them, not just as surfaces, but as lives; as shapes of lives, complex and many-colored. She longed for their touch.

She found a man whose life-shape was a pleasing, temperate complexity—his name was Simon Ackroyd, and he had once been the Rector of the Episcopal Church, but he was something else now, a creature as fresh on the Earth as herself.

Infinitely light, lightly wedded to her skin, Rachel touched and joined his rain-wet flesh in the shadows of the great trees, in the cold air after January midnight on the surface of the cradle Earth.

The rain stopped falling sometime after dawn. Matt woke from a fitful sleep on the living room sofa and noted the absence of his daughter and the silence of the rain.

At noon, Tom Kindle and Chuck Makepeace arrived in Chuck’s Nissan. Committee business: The three of them drove to the municipal reservoir at the northeastern end of town.

Next to the stone slope of the reservoir was a white limestone building, the filtration plant, a WPA project as old as the Roosevelt administration. Set in a wide, rolling lawn, it looked to Matt like the temple of some serene religion.

The three men sat in the car gazing at the building from the gravel parking lot, Kindle taking long pulls on a can of Coke. Together they were the Public Works Subcommittee, and their job was to report on the condition of water and power resources inside the county line. Starting here. But none of them seemed to want to move from the car just yet.

All three had recently been spooked. Kindle had found the human skin snagged on his azalea bush just yesterday. Makepeace had discovered a similar relic in a neighbor’s house. And Matt was still troubled by Rachel’s visit last night… worried that he might not see her again; or that, if he did, she might be changed beyond recognition.

But these were common fears and none of the men spoke about them.

Last night’s rain had left a high, cool overcast. The filtration plant, with its whitewashed steel doors, waited with infinite patience in the green.

Kindle said, “You ever see The Time Machine?”

“No,” Makepeace said.

“In the movie, the time machine gets carried off into this building where the Time Traveller can’t find it. Morlocks are in there. Nasty, ugly people. Big old building.”

“You have a point?” Makepeace asked.

“Looked like this building.” Kindle tipped back his Coke. “Funny how they used to build public works in the old days. Like you ought to wear a toga to go inside.”

“You guys are pretty thoroughly out to lunch,” Makepeace said. “I hope you’re aware of that.”

Chuck Makepeace, former City Councilman, former junior member of the town’s second most prestigious law firm, was still wearing three-piece suits. To Matt this seemed deeply neurotic, like formalwear on a lifeboat, but he kept his opinion to himself.

“I was inside there once,” Matt said. “School trip. About twenty-five years ago.”

“Oh?” Kindle said. “What’s it like?”

“There’s a double row of filtration tanks and a walkway in between. I remember a lot of big-diameter pipes and valves.”

“You know how any of it works?”

“Nope.”

Makepeace laughed. “It points up the stupidity of this whole expedition. We don’t know what to look for and we won’t know what it means when we see it.”

“Not necessarily,” Kindle said. “If we go in there and everything’s humming along, we tell the folks they can use the kitchen faucet a while longer. On the other hand, if the floor’s under water and the pipes are broken, we can all put a bucket on the roof and pray for rain.”

“Let’s get it over with, then… if you’re finished with that soda.”

Kindle drained the can and tossed the empty into the backseat.

“Hey,” Makepeace said, “don’t litter my car!”

“You can get a new car,” Kindle said.

Kindle had brought a big iron crowbar with him. The filtration plant was liable to be locked and nobody knew where the maintenance people had gone, much less their keys. But when Matt approached the windowless steel door he found it standing ajar.

Inside was darkness.

No one wanted to reach out and yank the door wide. Certainly Matt didn’t. He heard the muted thump of machinery inside, like a massive heartbeat.

Kindle said, “Did it always sound like that?”

“Maybe,” Matt said. “I was ten years old when I came here last. It could have changed.”

Privately, he thought: No, it wasn’t like that. It had been quiet. This was a high reservoir; the tanks were gravity filters. “Sounds like Morlocks to me,” Kindle said. “Jesus!” Makepeace said. “Open the damn door!” Matt tugged it wide. Moist air gusted out.

There was no light in the great windowless space inside. Once there had been banks of lamps suspended from the ceiling. No more. “Got a flashlight in the car,” Makepeace said. “Get it,” Kindle said.

Makepeace ran for the cherry-red Nissan while Matt and Kindle took a tentative step through the doorway. Neither of them spoke until Makepeace arrived with the flashlight.

The beam probed the farther darkness—once systematically, once wildly.

The filtration plant didn’t look the way it had looked during Mart’s fifth-grade field trip. What had once been copper pipe was now a tangle of fibrous tubing, columns thick and knotted as mangrove roots sweating condensation into the warm interior air. Much of the floor was occupied by a black dome, a pulsating hemisphere attached by ropy ventricles to the looming black filtration tanks.

From this dome came the building’s heartbeat—periodic kettledrum throbs, like a distant organic thunder.

And the room smelted strange. Maybe that was the worst of it, Matt thought. It was not a bad smell, but it was wholly alien—as penetrating as nutmeg and as rich as garden loam.

Silently, the three men backed out into the cold January noon.

Chuck Makepeace drove the coast road back into Buchanan, not talking much, his hands clenched on the steering wheel. The road had grown potholes over the winter; the little Nissan bucked and jumped.

“All I want to know,” Kindle said, “is what’s it doing there?”

“My guess?” Matt said. “It’s filtering and pumping water. That’s all. There aren’t enough people to maintain essential services, so the Travellers grew a machine to do it. If we check out the power company we’ll probably find something similar operating the local grid—all the way back to the power plant.”

“Why would they be so interested in keeping Buchanan going?”

“I don’t suppose it’s only us. If they’re running utilities in Buchanan, they must be doing the same for every other city.” Hoover Dam, Grand Coulee Dam, all the nuclear plants, all our little engineering miracles: He imagined tangled black machines operating the massive turbines. No one had put these devices there; they had just grown, like weeds.

“Matthew, do you suppose all our water flows through that thing?”

“It appears to.”

“Well, Jesus—I drank that water!”

“I don’t think they mean to poison us. They could have killed us a long time ago if they’d wanted to.”

Exterminated was the word Rachel had used. They could have exterminated us.

“But it’s control,” Kindle said. “That much is obvious. If they can turn off the lights and shut off the water, they can tell us what to do… We depend on them.”

“Do we? You can dig a well. Nobody’s stopping you.”

“We could dig wells and press lamp oil, but we aren’t going to, ’cause the faucets still work and the lights are still on. So why do you guess they did it? Civic spirit?”

“Maybe,” Matt said. “Maybe because it’s easy for them, so why not? You remember Contact. I don’t like the fact that they’re here, and I don’t like what they’ve done, but I don’t think they did it because they hate us.”

“You believe that?”

He shrugged. “That’s what it felt like.”

“Sure it did. But only a really lousy lie is gonna feel like a lie. The best lies feel like God’s own truth. That’s the point. And anyway…”

Matt looked at the older man. “Anyway what?”

“Even if they’re Jesus and Buddha in one happy package… who says I want ’em working for me? I mean, how does this go? We get water because the Travellers favored us with a big ugly pump? If it’s a dry spell, do we pray for rain? And if we do, do they send some along?” He shook his head. “I don’t happen to believe in God, Matthew, but if I did, I think I’d prefer the one that works in mysterious ways His miracles to perform. Pray for rain, in other words, but keep the tanning butter handy. It’s more human.”

“We’ll get rain enough to suit,” Chuck Makepeace said, running a red light at the vacant intersection of Commercial and Marine. “I understand there’s a mother-bitch of a winter storm on the way.”

Kindle gave him a sharp look. “How would you know that?”

It turned out Chuck Makepeace had heard the news the same way Matt had: through the agency of the Helper.

Twice since Christmas, Matt had gone to stand before that motionless obsidian giant. He had asked it questions: about the Travellers, Rachel’s transformation, the future of Buchanan.

The Helper had answered concisely in a sedate baritone of neutral accent. Beyond that, it had no discernible personality. It spoke to Matt in colloquial English, but he didn’t doubt that it would answer an Iranian in Farsi or a Brazilian in Portuguese.

It was Rachel who had first hinted to Matt about the weather, but the Helper elaborated that warning, described the new and fiercer storms spinning to life in the altered waters of the tropical seas. Matt had withheld that warning from the last meeting of the Emergency Planning Committee—there had been too much new business and the threat was safely distant—but he had planned to bring it up tonight.

But Chuck Makepeace knew as much about the weather as Matt… because Makepeace had talked to the Helper, too.

Matt arrived at the hospital boardroom unshaven and somewhat lightheaded, five minutes late. He had skipped dinner. Maybe lunch, too; he couldn’t recall. He missed a lot of meals these days. Time seemed to slip past; his attention often wandered.

He had hoped to chair a fairly sedate meeting and introduce the storm-warning during New Business. At this point, the best and simplest strategy was to secure a shelter—maybe the basement of the hospital—and stock it with water, food, Coleman lanterns. It was an important job, but not a difficult or costly one.

But the news had arrived before him. Chuck Makepeace had heard it, and so had Bob Ganish and Abby Cushman. All three had been urged by Contactee friends or family to talk to the Helper. All three had done so. And all three had received the same warning: strange and powerful weather moving eastward from the far Pacific.

The news had spread by telephone the day before the meeting, had spread even farther in the crowd around the coffee machine before the Emergency Planning Committee was gaveled to order. Matt arrived in time to hear Tom Kindle wonder whether he was the only human being in Buchanan who wasn’t having long conversations with that damn robot up at the City Hall Turnaround.

“By no means,” Paul Jacopetti said. “I haven’t talked to it either. Wouldn’t. Not on a bet. I’m with you there, Mr. Kindle.”

“That’s a consolation,” Kindle said.

Matt called the meeting to order. Nine people took seats and gazed at him. There was no use postponing this; he upturned the agenda and asked for debate or resolutions on the subject of the weather emergency.

Abby Cushman expressed her astonishment: “The Travellers are going to a lot of trouble to help us—as Mr. Makepeace mentioned, they’re keeping our water and electricity on line—so why would they create a storm that might kill us? I don’t understand!”

“I don’t think it’ll kill us,” Kindle said. “Not if we’re careful. As for the logic of it—Abby, by any calculation, they’re a superior species. More powerful than us, at least. I knew a guy in Florida one time, ran a hospital for injured birds. He had a wild heron with a broken beak, and he worked real hard on it, taped the injury, fed the bird by hand until it was strong enough to go free. Finally he released it with a metal tab on its leg for some kind of wildlife census. Three months later, he gets back the banged-up tab with a nasty letter from the FAA: Apparently the bird got sucked into the intake of an Alitalia 747.”

Abby looked dismal. “I still don’t understand.”

“Well—the heron got some nice treatment. But that bird shouldn’t have jumped to any conclusions about how safe it is to deal with another species. The fact that we’re getting free electricity doesn’t mean the jets aren’t rolling out onto the tarmac all the same.”

“That’s macabre and terrible,” Miriam Flett announced.

Kindle regarded her mildly. “Do you disagree, ma’am?”

She thought about it. “No.”

Matt proposed a shelter to be provided in the hospital basement and asked for volunteers for a Storm Precautions Subcommittee, then suggested the whole subject be tabled until there was more substantial information: “We have other business pending, after all.”

Agreed, with random grumbling. Matt consulted the minutes. “Okay… is there a weekly report from the Radio Subcommittee?”

Joey Commoner stood up.

“Radio report,” Joey said.

He cleared his throat. If Mart’s memory served, this was the first time Joey had spoken at a Committee meeting. Joey had dressed up for the occasion: there was nothing on his T-shirt more offensive than a tennis-shoe ad.

“This week we logged thirteen calls. Most of those were Mr. Avery Price from the Boston group or Mr. Gardner Deutsch of Toronto. Plus a few from Colonel John Tyler and some one-time contacts like a woman in Ohio and someone in Costa Rica who I didn’t understand.

“Mr. Price says Boston is leaving town in a convoy, and Toronto is also going to leave tomorrow morning according to plan so the two groups can meet in Pennsylvania and travel together. He says—”

Matt banged the gavel. “Joey, what are you talking about? Boston is leaving Boston?” Damn it, this might be important.

Joey glared at him. “Its all written down. I’d like to just read it.”

“Well—carry on. I suppose we can reserve questions until later.”

Joey cleared his throat again. “The Boston and Toronto people are going to an area along the fortieth parallel, probably in Ohio, which their Helpers say will be safe from storms and where they can establish a town and a radio beacon for people to follow. They say this will attract survivors from all over the continent and they’d like us to join them as soon as we can, because there are about enough people in North America to make one good-sized town. They’re carrying mobile radio equipment and they want us to let them know as soon as possible when we’re going to join them.

“Also, Colonel Tyler is travelling toward the northwest looking for survivors and he’ll be passing through Buchanan in a couple of months, or he can rendezvous with us on the road if we decide to join the Boston-Toronto convoy.

“End of report.”

Pandemonium.

Several people wanted to pack up and leave immediately. Bob Ganish, the ex-car dealer, spoke for the group: “We can beat the damn storm, get across the mountains before it finds us. No offense, people, but I like the idea of seeing some new faces.”

Abby raised her hand. “There are things here we’d all hate to leave… but maybe it’s better if we do. Should we put this to a vote?”

Matt argued that they should stay in Buchanan at least for the time being—wait until the Boston group had a more solid plan, have somebody besides Joey talk to them. Weather the storm, then think about moving. It wasn’t the kind of decision that could be made impulsively.

Privately, the idea terrified him. He didn’t want to abandon Buchanan. Christ, not yet!

It was too soon to give up Buchanan. Everything was still intact, still functional, only a little tattered.

There’s hope, he wanted to say. We can salvage something. It’s not over yet.

Kindle moved to postpone debate until more facts came in—“This is the first I’ve heard of it, and I’m half the damn Radio Subcommittee.” With a long sideways look at Joey Commoner.

The motion passed five to two.

Matt listened numbly through three more subcommittee reports and adjourned the meeting at midnight.

He wanted only to go to bed, to sleep, to table for a few hours all his own private debates.

But Annie Gates was waiting when he pulled into his driveway.

She must have walked here, Matt thought; her own car was nowhere in sight. None of these people seemed to drive anymore. He saw them walking sometimes, a curious light stride, not quite human, as Rachel might have admitted.

The sight of Annie filled him with fear.

He had avoided her for months, avoided her because she was one more component in a problem he couldn’t solve… and because he had slept with her when she was human, loved her when she was human, an equation he didn’t care to balance.

But now she scared him, because she was waiting on his doorstep under the hospitality light, dressed too lightly for the cold night air, looking at him with a terrible sympathy, terrible because it was authentic, because she was waiting to speak.

“Rachel’s gone Home,” Annie said. “Matt, she’s not here anymore. She wants me to tell you that.” Annie’s voice was solemn and very sad. “She says she misses you. She says she loves you, and she’s sorry she didn’t say goodbye.”

Annie was not human, but Matt put his head against her pale shoulder and wept.

Chapter 23 View from a Height

It was the winter the oceans bloomed with strange life.

The Travellers, perceiving the thermal imbalance of the planet and the human desire to restore it, dispatched seed organisms into the Earth’s restless hydrosphere.

The organisms multiplied in the shallow surface waters. Like the phytoplankton they resembled, the new organisms fed on mineral material from the upwelling ocean currents, fed on sunlight, but fed also on the water itself, assembling themselves from atoms of hydrogen and oxygen. The ocean was food, and the Traveller organisms increased their tonnage by the minute.

As they multiplied, they began to avoid the coastal waters rich in natural diatoms. Their role in the oceanic ecology was temporary and there must always be enough phytoplankton to feed the krill. They confined their bloom to less nutrient-rich waters far from land.

They grew so numerous that autumn that in places they covered the surface water in crystalline slicks hundreds of miles in diameter, their opalescent coats bouncing rainbows from the swell.

Then they began their significant work: They began to devour atmospheric carbon and bind it to themselves, as the phytoplankton do, but more efficiently—voraciously.

The oceans combed the air of C0₂.

The population of the Earth plummeted daily.

In the Greater World, a few acts remained malum in se but none were malum prohibitum. The inhibitions of a thousand generations had been swept away by Contact. The last devotees of the flesh celebrated their bodies even as their bodies grew pale and light.

They danced to silent music in abandoned mosques, made love in infinite variation in the shadows of cathedrals. They laughed and embraced and surrendered their bodies by the light of Arab sunsets, Oriental noons, African dawns.

Daily, they vanished into the Greater World; and their abandoned skins, like phantom armies, roamed the streets of Djakarta, Beijing, Reykjavik, Capetown, until they crumbled to dust and the dust was borne off by the rising wind.

Matt Wheeler picked up a school notebook at Delisle’s Stationery—where Miriam Flett used to buy Glu-Stiks and paper cutters before the Observer ceased publication in October—and began a private journal.

The next morning, Beth Porter phoned and said she wanted to be a nurse and would Matt be willing to help her?

He asked her to repeat the question. He hadn’t slept much the night before… these days, his eating and sleeping habits didn’t encourage a lucid state of mind. He’d lost fifteen pounds since November. His reflection in mirrors took him by surprise: Who was this skinny, hollow-eyed man?

“I think you should teach me how to be a nurse,” Beth said. “I’ve been thinking about this. You’re the only doctor in town, right? So maybe you need an assistant. At least somebody who knows what to do in an emergency. This storm that’s coming, for instance. Say a lot of people get hurt. Maybe I could at least put on a bandage or stop some bleeding.”

He closed his eyes. “Beth… I appreciate what you’re saying, but—”

“This is not a come-on. Jesus, I hope you don’t think that.” Pause. “I’m serious. Maybe I can save somebody’s life somewhere down the road.”

“Beth—”

“I mean, I feel so useless just sitting here in this room all by myself.”

He sighed. “Do you know CPR?”

“I’ve seen it on TV. But I don’t know how to do it, no.”

“You should.”

Joey Commoner used the handicam he’d stolen from the Newcomb house to videotape Buchanan.

Joey had heard all this talk about the weather. If half the talk was true, there might not be much left of Buchanan in a month or so. He didn’t love this ugly little bay town, but he liked the idea of saving it on videotape while it was still intact. Joey Commoner, the town’s last historian.

So he drove up and down the main streets and some distance into the suburbs, guiding his motorcycle with one hand and running the camcorder with the other. He drove slowly in order to capture all the detail.

The images he played back on his basement VCR were unnerving and strange: empty streets bouncing when the Yamaha bumped over buckled asphalt; empty storefronts, empty sidewalks, empty buildings in whitewashed ranks all the way to the Marina and the cold winter sea. Empty everything.

It made him feel peculiarly alone. It was the feeling you might get, Joey thought, if you were locked inside some big mall at night with the mannequins and the mice.

It made him want to ride over to Tom Kindle’s place and work the radio. But that was probably a bad idea; since the big cities began their migration, Joey had been edged off the radio by Kindle and Bob Ganish and that asshole Chuck Makepeace. Gimme the microphone, this is important. Well, fuck it. He was tired of the radio. He had better things to do than DXing foreigners who couldn’t even speak English.

He videotaped some important personal places. His basement. His street. The street where Beth Porter used to live. The motel she’d moved into.

Hidden behind a highway abutment where she couldn’t see him, he videotaped Beth climbing into a white Volkswagen and driving north.

Beth didn’t have a driver’s license. She had only started driving since Contact, and it was funny how she drove, a clumsy jerk-and-stop. He wondered where she was going.

Where was there to go?

He watched the car bump out of sight.

She might be shopping. Idly curious, or so he told himself, Joey waited a prudent few minutes and then followed on his Yamaha. He checked the empty mall lots along the highway for her car, but it wasn’t there.

Visiting somebody?

So who was to visit?

Slow suspicions formed in Joey’s mind.

Not that he cared what she did. He hadn’t seen her much lately. He wasn’t sure what Beth meant to him or used to mean to him. A few good Friday nights.

But he remembered the way she used to undress for him, shy and bold at the same time. He remembered her shrugging out of an old sleeveless T-shirt in a dark room, unbuttoning her pants with one hand while she watched him watch. The memory provoked a knot of tension in his belly. Not desire. More like fear.

He rode past Kindle’s house, past Bob Ganish’s ugly little ranch house.

No Volkswagen.

Then he drove past the hillside house where Matt Wheeler lived. Her car was in the driveway.

Joey parked his motorcycle in a garage half a block away. He approached the house along a line of hedges and used the camcorder’s zoom to spy on the doctor’s house. But the blinds had all been pulled.

He waited about two hours until Beth came out again, looking somewhat pink in the cheeks.

He taped her climbing into the car and bump-jerking away from the curb.

Bitch, Joey thought.

Among the last things Tom Kindle moved down from his mountain cabin was his Remington hunting rifle, old but sturdy.

He hadn’t used it much in the last few years. Hunting in the coast forests wasn’t what it used to be; too many hobby shooters had moved into what had once been some pretty secluded territory. Every autumn, the woods grew a new crop of chubby CPAs in orange flak jackets. It made for a dangerous situation, in Kindle’s opinion. He didn’t relish getting shot by somebody who carried his ammunition in a nylon fanny pack.

But this talk of storms and travel made him nervous, too. So he brought down the Remington and picked up some shells and took some practice shots at the knotholes of a long-dead slippery elm back of his house.

The crack of the gunshots echoed a long time in the still air; the bullets struck the decayed tree with a different and softer sound, like a mallet head hitting a fence post.

Kindle found his aim was reasonably accurate even after too many lax years. But the rifle kicked harder than he remembered. Of course it wasn’t the rifle that had changed: He was getting old. There was no denying the fact. He bruised too easily, went to bed too early, and pissed too often. Old.

For shooting, he wore the corrective lenses he’d had made up a couple of years ago. Kindle was mildly myopic, which affected his aim, but the condition didn’t seem to have worsened—which was good, because where were the opticians since Contact? Gone to heaven, every one.

He sighted on a circle where the bark had dropped from the tree. Squeezed off a shot and missed by what appeared to be a good half foot.

“Damn,” he said, and massaged his shoulder.

He could have gone inside, where Chuck Makepeace was talking by radio to Avery Price, the Boston guy, but Kindle distrusted this business about Ohio. It was where everybody wanted to go, a new Promised Land, a Place Prepared; worse, it was where the Helpers wanted them all to go. Boston and Toronto were both travelling with Helper guides, and probably so were a bunch of small towns like Buchanan.

At least they called it guiding. Another word for it was herding. All the wild human beings were being assembled in one place—and Kindle guessed there were other such places on other continents, little reservations, little corrals. Barns. Pens.

He didn’t like that idea at all.

No doubt, he thought, the promises were true. Everybody would be defended against the weather; the land would be fertile and the skies would be blue. They would all be well cared for.

Like cattle.

Cattle were well cared for. Cattle were also slaughtered.

He put three more shots into the bole of the tree and then stopped because his right shoulder felt damn near dislocated.

The sky was a high, luminous blue brushed with cloud. The air smelled of brine. There had been ground fogs every morning for the last week. Sunsets had been wide and vivid.

If old bones tell the weather, Kindle thought, then something big was indeed about to break. The last few days he had been sleeping restlessly. This morning, he had woken up at dawn in a cold sweat. His body felt tight, as if it was braced for something.

He turned and squinted across the bay. The water was choppy, whitecaps feathering in a stiff breeze.

The ocean, Kindle thought.

Dear God, what mischief had been committed out there?

Storms were already raking the east coast as the President of the United States prepared to leave the White House.

He was alone in the building. The First Lady had abandoned her skin many weeks before. Elizabeth had been captivated by the Greater World and had wanted to explore it in greater detail, an impulse William understood; in any case, she had never liked bad weather. It frightened her.

William, on the other hand, had been a devotee of thunder, a relisher of storms.

It was not entirely his aim to relish the weather that had already begun to wreak so much destruction. There were still many mortal human beings on the surface of the Earth… and many of them would die, despite the best efforts of the Helpers. But it was the paradox of the senses that they did not make such distinctions. A stormy sky made his skin tingle, his pulse quicken, no matter what the circumstances.

Fundamentally, though, it wasn’t the storms William wanted to see; it was the country—the nation he had once governed, if “govern” was a meaningful verb.

That was why he had clung to the flesh even after Elizabeth went Home. (Besides, she was not really absent, merely less accessible.)

Only a small minority of Contactees had retained their corporate bodies, and many of those, like William, had changed or were changing themselves in some critical way.

After all: it wouldn’t do to go tramping across the landscape in an old man’s cumbersome shell.

Therefore William went to bed for a week; and while he slept the neocytes altered certain genetic instructions and ran his cell division at a feverish pace. He radiated heat, and when he woke he was many pounds lighter than he had been. He was also younger.

He peered at himself in a full-length mirror and saw a face he hadn’t seen since the year the Allies marched into Berlin.

What age would he have guessed this boy to be? Twelve? Thirteen?

Anticipating the change, William had obtained some clothes to fit before he went to sleep. He dressed himself in blue jeans and a T-shirt and fresh running shoes. The shoes were a little loose; he’d had to guess at the size. But how glorious.

He felt newly minted. He felt like a bright penny.

He felt restless and hungry. The White House seemed suddenly bigger and more ridiculous than ever, and he couldn’t wait to get away from its stifling frills and history. He thought of all those miles of America opening out from his doorstep, a continent like a long empty beach.

William laughed a high child’s laugh and ran down the steps of the Main Portico.

The sky that day was heavy and fat with clouds.

By January, the albedo of the planet had risen considerably.

Traveller-engineered phytoplankton laced the surface waters of the tropics. Like crystals of fine glass, they bounced sunlight back into the sky.

Above these vast reflective ocean plains, domes of moisture-laden air punched into the troposphere. Convection clouds the shape of fists rose and flared into cirrostratus.

From orbit, the tropics resembled a fractal image, a fury of greater and lesser whorls. The air above the sea was knotted with hurricane crowns.

Individual pressure cells broke loose and travelled with the prevailing currents like tall ships of wind, wound tighter as they penetrated the cooler latitudes.

Some rode the monsoon drift into India and Asia. Some rode the equatorial currents to Australia or Africa. Some followed the Gulf Stream across the East Indies into the Gulf of Mexico.

A few rode the Kuroshio Current to Japan and then veered eastward, gaining new strength over the phytoplankton-heated North Pacific, and turned at last like lazy giants toward the coast of North America.

Chapter 24 Hard Rain

The storm, once a comfortably distant threat, seemed to hurry closer as the days passed.

Matt organized the men into a work crew, nailing plywood sheets over accessible windows on the first floor of the hospital and crossing the plate glass with duct tape. The hospital was a relatively new building, constructed under a strict State building code for regional emergency centers. Essentially, it was a three-story reinforced-concrete bunker. It stood on high ground in a neighborhood of middle-income residences and tall conifers. The basement contained a records room, generator room, laundry room, heating and plumbing, and a kitchen and staff cafeteria.

Matt chose the cafeteria to serve as shelter. It was a cheerless cinder-block box painted salmon pink, but it was spacious and well away from any exterior walls. Tables were shoved up against the service line to make room for mattresses and bedding. By the first Thursday in March the storm was still a day or two away, according to the Helper, but the shelter was as complete as Matt could make it, and people had already begun to truck in their valuables, protecting photographs, souvenirs, memories against the wind.

Abby Cushman served as coordinator, keeping in close touch with all nine members of the Emergency Planning Committee and relaying Helper updates. She conferred with Matt by telephone and they chose Friday at 6:00 p.m. as the hour when everyone should be in the hospital basement, doors closed, exits bolted.

“Incidentally,” Abby said, “I heard about Rachel. I’m terribly sorry, Matt.”

Matt accepted her condolences. Abby had recently lost her husband and two grandchildren to what Rachel had called the Greater World. For a moment, an unspoken understanding flowed between them. Then Matt was hailed by Bob Ganish, who had run out of duct tape; Abby said, “Tomorrow at six—and everybody better be there!”

The storm was preceded by strange gusts of warm air, flurries of rain, a racing overcast.

Matt had expected something sudden, a burst of weather as quick and violent as a spring thunderstorm. Tom Kindle, ferrying canned food down to the hospital kitchen, told him it wouldn’t be that way. A typhoon—which was what this was, if not something even more powerful, still nameless—wasn’t a localized event. It was a vortex of air, miles wide, slow at the edges, more intense as you moved toward the eye… or as the eye moved toward you. It would not come all at once; but it would come quickly, insidiously.

Friday afternoon, Matt packed up a few things at the house—the family album Rachel had cherished, Celeste’s letters, a change of clothes. It wasn’t much, but the act of selection was both agonizing and more difficult than he had anticipated. By the time he had the trunk full and his car on the road, his watch said 4:45.

The wind plucked at the car like a playful hand as he drove to the hospital. High clouds tumbled inland from the ocean, and the bay was so white with froth it seemed to be boiling. The roads were already littered with twigs and branches.

He parked close to the Emergency entrance but was drenched before he could dash inside with his two cartons of worldly goods. The rain was cold and the wind so intense he had to put his shoulder against the door to close it again.

The basement cafeteria, by contrast, was warm and noisy. He felt unreasonably cheered by the sight of other people, by the babble of their voices. Abby’s deadline was only a quarter of an hour away. If we’re all here, Matt thought, we can nail plywood over the last door and hunker down for the night. He looked for Abby Cushman, meaning to propose a final head count and a battening of the hatches—but Abby was on the phone.

It took him a second to work out the implication.

She waved him over. “It’s Miriam Flett. Miriam won’t leave her house—it’s too stormy to drive, she says. She thinks she’ll be safe where she is.”

Matt checked his watch again. “How about if we send someone to pick her up? Would she be willing to go with an escort?”

“Matt, do we have time? It’s getting bad awfully fast.”

“Ask her if she’s willing.”

Abby took her hand away from the receiver. “Miriam? Miriam, how about if we send somebody? Somebody to drive? Because we’re not sure your house is safe enough. No. But it’s not just the wind, Miriam. There’s the storm surge to worry about. Flooding, yes. You might be too close to the water. I know, but… yes, dear, but… but if we send someone, how would that be?”

Five-fifty, according to his Timex.

Abby covered the receiver again. “She’s willing to go, but she wants to know who to expect.”

“Tell her I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

“Matthew? Are you sure?”

He shrugged. “I’m already wet.”

“Well—you be careful. We can’t afford to lose the town doctor.”

“Tell Miriam to make sure she’s packed.”

“All right. We won’t barricade the door until you’re back.”

“No. But do it if you have to.”

Ordinarily it would have been a five-minute drive from the hospital to Miriam’s bungalow on Bellfountain Avenue. Allowing for the weather, Matt had estimated twice that. Outside, he wondered whether he should have doubled it again.

Coming around Commercial, he managed to stop just short of a toppled Douglas fir. The tree was a giant, old growth left to mature next to a grocery store parking lot; its trunk obstructed the road as neatly as a fence. It would mean a detour, but not a long one: another block south and left to the highway. He backed up, sweating despite the cold.

The fallen tree made the storm seem suddenly real, an immediate danger. For Matt, a kind of emotional electricity always accompanied even a modest summer cloudburst. He used to love the sight of a storm coming in around the crest of Mt. Buchanan, the thunder rolling up the slopes. Grotesque as it seemed, maybe he had been getting the same kind of pleasure from this storm.

But the fallen tree had cut his euphoria as neatly as it divided the road. This wasn’t a cloudburst or an out-of-season thunderstorm. This was something immensely more powerful, an engine wound on a column of air as tall as a mountain. It had the power to lift, to compel, to move, slash, shatter; to destroy. It could pick up his car and spin it like a top—probably would, if not now, then in an hour or two hours. It had already toppled this ancient fir, and the storm had not even begun. This was only its curtain-opener, its prelude.

He circled down to Marina with his high beams on. The storm had blotted up all but the last trickle of daylight; streetlights cast a feeble iridescence into the gloom. Every house he passed was dark. The Contactees had turned out the lights before they left, a universal primness as alien as their means of departure.

Coming toward the highway along a familiar residential road, he was startled to see a house with windows blazing yellow light… even more startled when he recognized it as the house where Jim and Lillian Bix had lived for the last ten years.

He looked at his watch, fretted a moment, then pulled over to the curb.

The house wasn’t fortified against the storm. The windows weren’t taped or shuttered. Matt hoped the building was simply unoccupied, the lights left burning for no good reason—but then he saw a shadow against the downstairs curtains, a motion there and gone again.

He sighed and climbed out of the car. He was instantly wet, wetter than before, the rain drilling through his topcoat. He ran to the shelter of the porch, knocked once, waited, and knocked again.

Jim Bix opened the door.

Matt recognized him immediately, although his friend had changed.

The last time he had seen Jim Bix was when they argued over Lillian’s pregnancy, Jim insisting she didn’t need prenatal medical care: the Travellers would protect her. And Jim had cut his hand, and the blood had been viscous and very dark.

Now Jim stood in the doorway, haphazardly dressed, as tall and ugly as he had ever been… but thinner and inhumanly pale. His skin, Matt thought, didn’t look like skin at all; it looked like some much finer membrane, a transparent sheath drawn over bones as delicate as seashells. His eyes, in their china hollows, were like dusty blue marbles, as if the color of the irises had bled into the whites. The pupils, fixed and small, were the bottomless black of night shadows.

Matt thought of the empty skin he had inspected at Tom Kindle’s house. It looked like his old friend wasn’t far from that condition.

“Thank you for stopping,” Jim said. His voice was a husky whisper. “But it’s not necessary, Matt. We’re fine. You should get under shelter.”

He said, somewhat breathlessly, “So should you.”

“Really—we’re fine.”

“Is Lillian here?”

Jim hesitated, still blocking the doorway. Matt called out, “Lillian? Are you all right?”

No answer—or if there was, it was masked by the roar of the wind along the overflowing eaves.

Lillian would have been three months from her due date by now. “The baby,” Matt said. “Is that why you’re still here when everyone else is gone? Jim, for Christ’s sake, is it the baby?”

The thing that had been Jim Bix peered frowning at him but failed to answer. Frustrated, frightened, Matt pushed past him into the house.

Jim fell away instantly from the pressure, and Matt sensed his lightness, the terrible lack of solid weight behind his ribs.

“Lillian?”

“Matt,” Jim said. “It would be better if you left. Will you leave?”

“I want to see her.”

“She doesn’t need medical care.”

“So you say. I haven’t examined her since Contact.”

“Matt—” His friend looked at him mournfully. “You’re right. It was the baby that kept us here. Lillian wanted to finish the pregnancy. But the storm—it would be awkward to linger past tonight. This is a private moment, Matt. Please leave.”

“What do you mean, finish the pregnancy? You mean she’s having the baby?”

“Not exactly. We—”

“Where is she?”

“Matt, don’t force this on yourself.”

The front door was still open. Distantly, from somewhere down the street, came the sharp sound of a window shattered by the wind.

He felt driven by the need to see Lillian and speak to her; or, if not, to know what had overtaken her, know precisely what maze of transformation she had stumbled into. Maybe he wasn’t being reasonable. He didn’t care. She was his patient.

“Lillian?” He stepped into the kitchen; it was empty. “Lillian!” Shouting up the stairs.

Jim, too fragile to stop this, stood aside and gazed at him with a vast sadness in his cavernous eyes. “Matt,” he said finally. “Matt, please stop. She’s in the bedroom off the hallway.”

He hurried there and threw open the door.

Lillian was naked on the bed.

Her ribs were stark against her papery flesh, and her eyes were as strange as her husband’s, though browner. She raised her head to look at him and seemed unsurprised by his entrance.

Her legs were spread. There was no blood, but Matt recognized with horror that she had delivered… something.

It resembled a shriveled homunculus—a monkey fetus, perhaps, as preserved on the shelf of some medieval apothecary. It was quite dry, quite motionless.

His horror was overtaken by an immense, weary sorrow. He looked at Lillian. Her face was bland. She had wanted a baby very badly. “Lillian,” he whispered. “Dear God.”

“Matt,” she said calmly. “You don’t understand. This is not the baby. You must understand that. This is only an end product. The baby is with us! He’s been with us for some months now. A boy. He’s alive, Matt, do you understand me?” She tapped her head. “Alive here.” And spread her arms. “Here.” The Greater World.

She smiled a bloodless, paper-thin smile. “We named him Matthew.”

He arrived at Miriam Flett’s small house grateful for the anesthetizing noise of the storm. The roar of the wind had become so intense it was hard to think. Which was good. He didn’t want to think.

Miriam met him at the door, a small woman, her spine curved with what Matt diagnosed as a mild osteoporosis. Her expression was grim. “You’re late.”

“I had some trouble on the way over.”

“You look sick, Dr. Wheeler. Are you sick?”

“Miriam, I may very well be, but we don’t have time to worry about it. We have to get you to shelter.”

“I told Abby on the phone—I have shelter.”

It was an invitation to argue that Matt did not accept. “Are these your bags?” Two pale gray Tourister cases.

“Yes,” she admitted. He picked them up. “Well,” she said. “All right. But they’re heavy. Be careful.”

He carried them to the trunk of the car, came back to help her into a bright yellow raincoat. He took her arm, but she resisted. “My journals!”

“What?” The door was open and the wind was shrieking.

“My journals.”

“Miriam, we don’t have time!”

“We would have had time if you hadn’t been late.” She stamped her foot. “I won’t leave without my journals!”

Have mercy, Matt thought. How many minutes back to the hospital? And what were his chances, in that time, of staying on the road? “Damn it, we simply can’t—”

“There’s no call for profanity!” Shouting to make herself heard.

He closed his eyes. “Where are they?”

“What?”

“The journals! Where are they?”

She took him to the kitchen, where it was marginally quieter, and pointed to three shelves of bound notebooks so full of newspaper clippings they were bent as round as bread loaves.

Matt gathered up an armful.

“No!” Miriam shrieked. “They’ll get wet!”

“I can carry them to the car. I can’t make it stop raining.”

“Don’t be testy! Here.” She shrugged out of her raincoat and draped it over the journals.

“Miriam—you’ll be soaked to the bone.”

“I’ll dry out,” she said.

He took her to the car, helped her inside, and piled the journals at her feet. She slammed the door to keep the rain away from the books, narrowly missing the fingers of Mart’s left hand.

He climbed in behind the wheel and advised her to fasten her seat belt. The engine stuttered a little when he cranked it, as if some moisture had crept in where it didn’t belong.

He said as they pulled away from the curb, “Have you talked to Abby? She must be worried.”

The wipers, on double-speed, did very little to improve visibility. The road in front of him was a liquid blur.

“I would have liked to talk to Abby,” Miriam said, “but the phone stopped working twenty minutes ago. Dr. Wheeler, may I ask why you were so late?”

“Believe me, Miriam, it isn’t something you want to know.” She examined him over the rims of her eyeglasses and rendered a judgment: “Maybe you’re right.”

He took a different route back to the hospital, longer but higher; he was afraid of flooding down by the marina. The road rose along the foothills of Mt. Buchanan and Matt was forced to crawl along in the breakdown lane, away from the winds that had begun to sweep up the hillside with devastating force. Many of the houses he passed were already windowless and the road surface was littered with broken glass. Debris rolled past the car at a constant rate—loose garbage bins, cardboard boxes, green matter.

At the apex of the drive, where the road began a descent into the hospital district, the battering rain suddenly eased. Matt spared a glance to the west. The clouds, skimming overhead at a dizzying speed, had briefly lifted. He could see the water of the bay driven up beyond the marina and nearly to Commercial Street, the hulls of overturned pleasure boats bobbing level with the roofs of warehouses and restaurants. The bay itself was a furious caldron, though calmer than the sea beyond, where waves the size of houses battered the stony southern tip of Crab Pot Island. The last daylight came from the west—seemed to come from the storm itself, a strange, weak radiance.

He turned his attention back to the road and swerved to avoid a cartwheeling tree limb. The wind made his steering awkward; it was like driving into a tide of molasses.

“Dear God,” Miriam said suddenly. “Look at that.”

And he looked again, reluctantly, toward the west.

Offshore, the racing overcast had begun to dimple.

Black clouds grew lazy tails, which spiraled toward the sea.

Where they touched, white foam erupted.

Waterspouts, Matt thought. He counted five of them. It was fascinating, almost hypnotic, how they moved. There was something awful about their twisting, like the lash of a cat’s tail, plucking the water here and there, then lifting and falling again. Moving in the dim light. Moving toward shore.

A sudden curtain of rain obscured the view.

“Maybe you had better drive a little more quickly,” Miriam said.

Everything would have been all right, Abby Cushman thought, except for the ventilator ducts.

The storm was way too big, and coming way too fast, and Matt Wheeler was still out there somewhere, hadn’t even arrived at Miriam Flett’s house when the phones went dead… and then the lights in the basement cafeteria began to dim, and Tom Kindle ambled away to some other corner of the building to start up a generator, leaving Abby alone with six more or less terrified people in the flickering dark… and all this would have been endurable, except for what she had begun to think of as the God Damn Noise.

She had no idea how the hospital was ventilated. She knew only that several pressed-tin ducts ran along the ceiling above the fluorescent fixtures, and that the wind had somehow penetrated these conduits. Worse, the wind had begun to play them like a pipe organ. Not any ordinary pipe organ, Abby thought, but a pipe organ for mastodons and great whales; a pipe organ that produced sounds too fundamental for the human ear, perceptible only, like fear, in the hollow of the stomach.

The God Damn Noise had begun a little after six o’clock. It was innocuous at first, almost a whisper; then above that, as the velocity of the wind increased, came an intermittent keening note—eerie, but bearable.

Then the whisper rose to shouting volume, the sound of a bathroom shower running full tilt. And other noises began to creep in along the columns of hammered tin, in particular a low wail that made Abby think, uncomfortably, of a crying child; and periodic creaks and pops, as of sheet metal stressed beyond its tolerance.

She endured that… though it made her feel absurd, serving Oreos and lukewarm coffee to six individuals huddled knees-to-chest on hospital mattresses on a cold linoleum floor. Pollyanna in a pantsuit. She felt like a jennyass, frankly.

But then Bob Ganish began to complain of claustrophobia: It was too close in here, he insisted, especially with the fluorescents out and the damn battery lanterns casting such a dreadful low light—seemed like the air had gone bad. So Abby had to sit with him and share her cookies and change the subject. Hey, what was the best sale he ever made down there at Highway Five Ford? The drop-dead pinnacle of his sales career? And Bob smiled nervously and launched into a description of the near-criminal flogging of a used 1990 Pinto. The monologue lasted twenty minutes, by Abby’s watch, including details on the financing. All the while the ducts screaming and Abby beginning to feel that Ganish’s hysteria, by some reverse osmosis, was draining into her.

Okay, all that, and Dr. Wheeler still out in the storm…

But then the wind made a sound that was, in Abby’s imagination, precisely the sound the last T. Rex might have made, dying in a pool of hot Cretaceous mud…

(—her grandson Cory had been a dinosaur buff—)

…and to top it all off, that was the moment Paul Jacopetti picked to have his goddamn heart attack.

Abby was startled by the sudden commotion of voices. She turned away from Bob Ganish, spilling her coffee onto his pant leg. (“Ouch, Abby, hey!”)

Jacopetti lay face-up on his mattress, his hands clutched over his chest. His face was pale, and he was breathing rapidly, wheezing.

Worse, everyone seemed to expect Abby to do something about it.

She hurried to Jacopetti’s mattress and crouched over him. “Paul? What is it?”

“I’m having a fucking heart attack,” he gasped, “what does it look like!”

Her first impulse—she was instantly ashamed of it—was to slap him. Tell him: Not now! This isn’t the time or the place, you idiot. Have your heart attack later.

Instead she asked, not too intelligently, “Does your chest hurt?”

“Yes, it hurts. Hurts like a son of a bitch.” He closed his eyes and grimaced.

Abby looked up. Everyone had gathered in a circle around the mattress, their attention on Jacopetti, or worse, on her. The ventilator ducts screamed. Abby heard the sound of a window breaking, perhaps up on the second floor, a nerve-wrenching sound conducted directly into her eardrums.

She said, half to herself, “I don’t know what to do.” Then, as the last buckles of restraint broke loose, louder: “I don’t know what to do! Stop staring at me!”

She felt a hand on her shoulder, gently pulling her aside—Beth Porter’s hand.

Abby bit her lip but retreated from the mattress. Dazed, she watched Beth kneeling over Paul Jacopetti. “Mr. Jacopetti?” Beth said. “Mr. Jacopetti, can you hear me?” He opened his eyes. “You… what do you want?”

“Mr. Jacopetti, you have to tell me what’s wrong.” Perhaps the pain had gotten worse—Jacopetti seemed suddenly more malleable. “Chest hurts.”

“Show me where,” Beth said.

Jacopetti raised his right hand and drew a circle on his shirt above the breastbone.

“There in the center?” Nod.

“How about your arm? Does your arm hurt at all?”

“No.”

“How about your breathing?”

“Tight.”

Gendy, Beth levered back the man’s head so his chin jutted up. “Mr. Jacopetti, I know this is a personal question, but are those false teeth?”

“Dentures,” he managed. “Why?”

“Can you take them out? In case you fall asleep or anything. It’s safer. Or I can take them out for you.”

Jacopetti pried out his teeth. Abby had always been a little frightened of this man—his barrel-shaped body, his booming voice, his invincible cynicism. But Jacopetti without his teeth looked altogether less threatening. His cheeks seemed to collapse inward, giving him an old man’s gummy frown.

Jacopetti looked up at his audience. “Thuck you,” he said/Thuck all oth you.”

“We could use some more light,” Beth said hurriedly. “Maybe if everybody would just sit back down?”

They did, though Abby stayed close, mad at herself for failing this test. If it hadn’t been for the noise…

“Mr. Jacopetti,” Beth said, “are you nauseated?”

Nod.

“Feel like you might throw up?”

“Maybe.”

“Could somebody fetch a towel just in case?” Chuck Makepeace dashed for the bathroom.

“Mr. Jacopetti, listen to me… Did you ever have this pain before?”

“Not as bad.”

“But you’ve had it before?” Nod.

“Seen a doctor about it?”

“No.”

“It always went away?” Nod.

“Okay,” Beth said. “That’s good. I think what you have isn’t a bad heart attack. I think it’s angina. It’ll probably pass if you lie still.”

Joey Commoner, leaning against the wall with a strained expression, said: “How would you know?”

“Hush,” Abby told him, and got a sullen glare in exchange.

Bob Ganish, his claustrophobia forgotten—misplaced along with his common sense, Abby thought—offered: “This man should be in a hospital.”

Jacopetti: “I am in a hothpital, you athholel”

Ganish reddened. “I mean, he needs proper medical attention.”

Abby took the salesman aside a second time. “I know he does, Bob, but our proper medical attention seems to be lost in the storm. Let’s sit down, shall we?” She looked at her watch. Seven-forty-five. How much worse could this weather get? Much worse, she supposed. The eye, the Helper had told her, would probably pass directly over Buchanan, possibly around midnight. And that was only half the storm.

“I wish,” she muttered, “somebody would turn off this goddamned noise.”

Matt felt as if he had fallen into some peculiar time warp: The smaller the distance between himself and his destination, the more slowly he was forced to proceed.

The enemy wasn’t so much wind—though that was bad enough—nor even Miriam Flett’s relentless backseat driving. The enemy was visibility. More precisely, invisibility.

All traces of daylight had passed. The rain was continuous and dense as fog. It carried with it tiny particles of salt and something else, a crystalline dust, some sort of sea life, Matt presumed. The effect of this was to obscure his vision so completely that he turned onto Campbell Road, the direct route to the hospital, without any certainty that he had chosen the right intersection. There were no landmarks, nothing perceptible beyond five or six feet from the car even in the high beams. He drove hugging the right side of the road, scanning for the sign that marked the entrance to the hospital, then worrying that he’d passed it—maybe it was set too far back from the tarmac.

A particularly strong wind rocked the car up on its right-hand wheels; Miriam sucked in her breath. “I should have stayed home!”

“Home might be underwater by now,” Matt said. “Try not to worry, Miriam. We don’t have far to go, and we’ll be safe at the hospital.”

“Can you guarantee that?”

“Stake my life on it.”

“Not funny, Dr. Wheeler.”

“Not meant to be.” Desperate, he took the next available right. It looked like the entrance to the hospital—the shrub on the corner seemed familiar.

But it wasn’t the hospital. He identified, on close approach, an unfamiliar yellow speed bump, a parking lot that curved the wrong way; finally, the broken window of the local 7-Eleven.

Miriam’s hands were clenched together in her lap, arthritic knuckles knotted together. She said, “Are we stopping for snacks?”

It wasn’t the hospital, but it was at least a landmark. Matt tried to recall the relationship of the 7-Eleven to Buchanan General. He’d driven this route at least twice a week for years, but when he tried to map it in his head… was the 7-Eleven before the hospital? Certainly. Close to it? He thought so. But how many yards exactly? Was there another store en route, possibly a camera store? He seldom stopped at any of these shops; they were vague in his mind.

He navigated turtle-fashion back to Campbell Road and crawled onward.

Miriam gasped as a yard-long tree limb came whirling out of the darkness and struck the rear left window. The glass starred but didn’t shatter. Miriam whispered something inaudible. Matt clenched his teeth and drove.

He slowed where the curb yielded to a driveway on the right. He exchanged a glance with Miriam, then turned the wheel. This might be the hospital. It probably was. Better be.

The access lane seemed to crawl on forever in front of the car. Matt began to entertain the possibility that he had driven from the 7-Eleven into a horizonless limbo of rain and wind, all landmarks erased. He fought the temptation to check his watch every thirty seconds, try to calculate his progress. He was suddenly aware of the pungent smell of the sealed automobile, his own sweat mingled with the lighter, sourer odor of Miriam and the reek of wet upholstery and wet clothing.

He was grateful when a brick wall loomed up in the twin circles of his headlights—even more grateful when he recognized it as the east wall of Buchanan General.

He pulled abreast of the Emergency entrance. “Thank God,” Miriam said.

Matt switched off the engine but left the lights on. “I’ll come around to your side. Wait for me. We’ll go in together.” He didn’t say it, but he was afraid Miriam was light enough that the wind might simply sweep her away.

She nodded.

The door was wrenched out of his hand as soon as he opened it. The wind, Matt thought, had made everything dangerous, even an ordinary act like opening a car door. The door banged against its stops and bounced back, whacking his hip. Matt stepped aside and pushed it closed, sparing Miriam more than a momentary blast of salty rain.

He fumbled around the hood of the car with his hands braced against the cold metal. The wind was nearly strong enough to lift him up—certainly strong enough to knock his feet out from under him if he took a miscalculated step. The combination of wind and rain was blinding. With his eyes pressed tight in the darkness, every surface of his body awash, it was as if the world had been reduced to some few essential elements: the wind, the automobile, the wet concrete under his feet. Variables in a complex equation.

He groped along Miriam’s side of the car until he found the door handle. Then he steadied himself, took as deep a breath as the wind allowed, and opened the door. Instantly, the door kited into its stops; but this time Matt was ready for it; he wedged his body against the door frame and held it fully open.

He held out his hand to Miriam, but she drew away.

Matt leaned into the meager shelter of the car, where he could see Miriam—blurrily—in the faint illumination of the map light. “What’s wrong?”

She hissed back: “My journals!”

Christ in a red wagon, Matt thought.

“Dr. Wheeler! You can leave what’s in the trunk! But I want my journals!”

The journals were bundled at her feet, still wrapped in her yellow raincoat. Matt leaned over her, conscious of the wet woolen odor of her skirt—it smelled like a wet dog. He tied the arms of the raincoat together to make a sort of bag for the journals, a tedious process that left him plenty of time to reflect on the absurdity of his position, standing ass to the wind in the midst of the most powerful typhoon to approach the Oregon coast since the ice age. The rain was sluicing into the car now, soaking Miriam, but Matt had ceased to care: Let her get wet, she deserved to get wet. He couldn’t shake the memory of those funnel clouds snakedancing toward shore; couldn’t shake a suspicion that one of them might reach down and fold him into the dark wing of the sky.

When the journals were bundled together, he stood and offered Miriam his right hand. This time she took it, moaning as she stepped out of the car. As soon as she was standing he put his right arm around her waist and tugged her, half-lifted her, in the direction of the Emergency door. Only these few steps, Matt told himself. One two three.

But the hospital door resisted when he tried to pull it open. The wind? No—not just the wind.

He banged a fist against it. The door was quarter-inch-thick wire-mesh glass. Inside there was a dim light, perhaps motion… but he couldn’t see much through the blur of rain.

Feeling panic like a third presence, something large perhaps just over his shoulder, Matt pulled the wide handle of the door a third time… and this time it opened outward.

He hurried Miriam inside. She stumbled a few steps, then righted herself and took the package of journals from Matt. “Thank you,” she said breathlessly, not looking at him, brushing water from the raincoat bundle. “That was… harrowing.”

Tom Kindle pulled the door closed behind them.

Kindle held a hammer in his hand. A sheet of plywood and two pine planks were leaning against one wall.

Matt sat down on the tiled floor, panting. Water ran off him in all directions. He looked at Kindle. “You were about to board up that door.”

“Yup.”

“You couldn’t have waited?”

“It didn’t seem wise.”

“Kind of a vote of confidence, isn’t it?”

Kindle smiled. “Welcome back anyway.”

Abby Cushman met him where the stairs opened into the hospital basement. She briefed him on Paul Jacopetti’s medical crisis and added, “He’s resting easier now, though the pain hasn’t entirely gone away.”

“I’ll look at him. But I need to change into dry clothes first. Do me a favor—make sure Miriam gets dried off, too. Maybe you can find some fresh clothes to fit her.”

“All right.” But Abby hesitated. “Matt—I should tell you, I nearly fell apart when Paul got sick. It was a little embarrassing. Well—more than a little.”

“Abby, you’ve done fine. Without you, we wouldn’t all be here. You can’t handle every crisis that comes along—nobody could.”

“But I could have done better. Matt, I don’t know anything at all about first aid! The most I ever did at home was spray Bactine on scraped knees. Maybe sometime you could give us a short course?”

“I will. Should have done it months ago.”

“We’ve all been busy. But speaking of first aid, Beth was a wonder! She didn’t do anything in particular—mainly convinced Mr. Jacopetti to take his dentures out. But she calmed him right down, and it looked like she knew what she was doing. You have a student there!”

“I taught her CPR. Gave her a first-aid manual to read at home.”

“Well, she’s a quick study, anyhow. Bright young woman.”

“When she wants to be,” Matt said.

In clean, dry denim—and despite the shriek of the ventilator ducts, which Abby had warned him about—Matt felt 100 percent better.

It was his experience that bad weather tended to shrink a room. The basement cafeteria, a cavernously large space, had contracted to circles of light around the battery lanterns. It wasn’t just a room anymore. It was a huddling place, a dry cave.

He spoke to Paul Jacopetti and read his blood pressure, which was slightly but not dangerously elevated.

“Doc,” Jacopetti said.

Matt unwound the sphygmomanometer cuff from Jacopetti’s pale arm. It was always the difficult ones who called you “Doc.”

“Yes, Mr. Jacopetti?”

“Can I put my thucking teece back?”

“Certainly. Beth was worried you might pass out. But that doesn’t seem likely at this point.”

And Matt looked away politely while Jacopetti slipped his dentures into his mouth.

“Everybody says angina,” Jacopetti said. “It’s not a heart attack, it’s angina. Okay, good, but how is that better? It feels like a fucking heart attack.”

“They’re not necessarily different. Angina pectoris is the pain you feel when your heart’s not getting enough blood through the coronary arteries. The heart works harder to compensate, and it simply gets tired—the way any muscle hurts if you overwork it. It’s a symptom of coronary disease, but in your case the heart itself seems to be basically sound. We can treat the angina with drugs called beta blockers, which help the muscle ease up a little bit”

Jacopetti was frowning, trying to digest this information. “How long do I take these drugs?”

Probably the rest of your life, Matt thought. If we can find a supply. And keep them from going bad. It was one of those facts of life he still hadn’t grown accustomed to: no new pharmaceuticals. No more free pencils or coffee mugs from drug companies promoting Tofranil or Prozac. No more Tofranil. No more Prozac. No more insulin, come to that, or penicillin, or measles vaccine… not unless he could locate every ounce of every significant drug and store it somehow, refrigerate it, prolong its active life.

Must get this advice to the Boston and Toronto people, Matt thought. Should have done it sooner.

Christ, everything had gotten away from him these last few months. He had been blinkered by his fear for Rachel, transfixed by her slow evolution. But Rachel was gone. It was past time to pick up the fragments of his life, including his work.

“You’ll probably be on medication for some time,” Matt said, “but I can’t tell you for sure until we do a more thorough workup. Not until the storm passes, obviously.”

“If it ever does,” Jacopetti said. “In the meantime… it still hurts.”

“I’ll go up to the pharmacy and find you something. Lie still while you’re waiting, all right? Don’t exert yourself.”

“I’m not going fucking dancing,” Jacopetti said.

Matt checked in with Abby before venturing upstairs.

She might have fumbled the Jacopetti crisis, but she was doing a fine job as den mother. She had helped Miriam Flett into a dry outfit and settled her onto a mattress with coffee and Oreos. Now Abby was contemplating the possibility of a hot communal meal—“Maybe a little later, if Tom gets his generator working and we can run the microwave. I think that would cheer people up, don’t you? It’s hard enough just keeping track of everybody. Some of us want to move into the hallway—it’s quieter there and closer to the bathroom. Would that be all right?”

“I don’t see why not.”

“People are scattering all over. I don’t know where Beth got to. Or Joey, for that matter. Is the whole basement safe?”

“Oh, probably. But we should encourage people to stay together. And I don’t want anyone running around upstairs.”

“Upstairs is dangerous?”

“It could be. If not now, later.”

“But you’re going up there.”

“Only for a moment, Abby.”

“Matt, you look terribly tired. Maybe you should lie down for a while.”

“Soon. I just have to pick up some pills for Mr. Jacopetti.”

“Poor man. Sick on a night like this. Matt, I had the most terrible thought about him.” She lowered her voice. “I thought he was having a heart attack because it was the best possible way to annoy me. For maybe three seconds, I really thought that! Should I be ashamed of myself?”

“Abby, if I’d been here, I might have had the same suspicion.”

She looked pleased and grateful. “Really?”

“Really.”

“Check in when you come back downstairs?”

He promised he would.

At that moment, the thunder began.

The storm was complex, peculiar—a whole inventory of storms, Matt thought, one layer upon another.

The stairs ran upward through a cinderblock stairwell at the southwestern corner of the hospital. The ground-floor fire exit had been boarded over, but there hadn’t been time to seal the second- and third-story windows. One had broken. A trickle of rainwater ran down the stairs between Mart’s feet.

The thunder, a sudden new presence, was continuous. It had taken Matt a moment to identify it as thunder, not the approach of some mechanical leviathan from the west. With the thunder, lightning. The lightning lit the stairwell from above with a diffuse reddish-purple glow. It flickered but was never wholly absent.

Matt supposed Abby was right, he was tired, mortally tired—too tired, at any rate, to be frightened of this new evolution of the storm. It wasn’t even a hurricane, it was something larger, still nameless. Peak winds in a hurricane were what, 200 miles per hour? Maximum. And in this tsunami of wind currently breaking against the flank of the Coast Range? Three hundred miles per hour around the eye wall? More? And how powerful was that? Powerful enough to level Buchanan, Matt supposed. And drown half of it in the storm surge.

As he climbed from the hospital basement to the ground floor, he listened to the wind gusting through the upper reaches of the hospital, slamming doors and rattling gurney carts down vacant corridors. And he listened for the voice of the storm itself, a tympani growl, alive, organic, pervasive.

It was out there devouring his town. Uprooting it and devouring it.

He thought of Jim and Lillian Bix, wholly changed and wholly alien, inhabiting their paper-thin bodies only long enough to consummate some process he didn’t understand or wish to understand, the translation of Lillian’s unborn child and the delivery, incidental and trivial, of its derelict hulk. He supposed Jim and Lillian had abandoned their own skins by now. Their skins, like so many others, must have been carried up by the typhoon wind, perhaps to the high atmosphere, somewhere peaceful above the rain.

Matt shook away these troubling thoughts and concentrated on the task at hand.

Pharmaceuticals were stored at various key points around the hospital so that each floor had an accessible supply. These caches were locked—the drugs stored there included narcotics—but Matt had been carrying a key and a duplicate since September. He followed the corridor from the stairwell and cursed himself for not having had the wits to bring a flashlight. Kindle had hooked up a gasoline generator in the basement, but it was only feeding the emergency lights, incandescent bulbs at ten-yard intervals.

The drug cupboard, a room approximately large enough for one person to stand in without touching the shelves, was dark as night. Inside, Matt stood blinking, hoping his eyes would adjust, boxes and labels would reveal themselves in the faint glow leaking from the corridor. They didn’t.

He stepped back into the hallway, pondering the problem. He could go back for a flashlight, but there was an element of time here. He didn’t trust that elevating rumble of thunder, the new intensity of the storm.

He hurried to the nursing station down the corridor. For years, Hazel Kirkwood had been the clerical day nurse on this station. She had her own desk at the rear, away from the busy corridor. Nurse Kirkwood, Matt recalled, had been notorious for her ten-minute breaks every hour, when she would duck outside—or into the stairwell, furtively, in bad weather—to indulge a cigarette habit.

He rummaged in Nurse Kirkwood’s desk drawers. He found an abundant supply of Bic pens, paperclips, and knobby pink erasers; a stapler and a pocket calculator and a single, lonely, plastic-wrapped tampon… and lastly, at the back of the bottommost drawer, a package of filter Kents with a matchbook tucked into the cellophane.

He took the matchbook into the supply cupboard. One match to home in on the propranolol for Paul Jacopetti. Another match to empty a cardboard box of tongue depressors; a third match as he filled the box with anything nonperishable he hadn’t already crammed into his Gladstone bag: antibiotics, painkillers, a bag of sterile cotton. All the while berating himself for not having done this before the storm.

A last match to double-check his work… then he turned and found Joey Commoner blocking the doorway.

He was too weary to interpret this—Joey’s presence merely baffled him—until he saw the knife.

It wasn’t a big knife, but it caught the faint light from the hallway; the blade glittered as it trembled in Joey’s hand.

Joey said, “I want you to stay the hell away from her.”

His voice was shrill and barely controlled, and it occurred to Matt that, whatever else might be troubling him, Joey was also very frightened of the storm. “You shouldn’t be up here. It’s dangerous up here.”

“I don’t want you near her,” Joey said.

“Can’t we talk about this later?” There was a guncrack of thunder above the general dull roar. “We could end up with a wall on top of us.”

“Fine,” Joey said. “Just tell me you’ll stay away from her and we can go downstairs.”

Matt was suddenly, deeply tired of all this. The storm, Miriam, Jacopetti, Joey. It was all a single phenomenon, and it was too much; it made him weary. He dropped the pharmaceuticals and stepped forward.

Joey thrust the knife wildly. The blade nipped his forearm, slicing his shirt, digging into the skin beneath—a vivid, immediate pain.

Matt stepped back and came up against a shelf. The walls were mercilessly close, there wasn’t room to swing his arms, and Joey was poised at the entrance like a snake.

But Mart’s resentment was irresistible. It propelled him forward. The situation was childish, inappropriate, a frustration not to be borne. He kept his eye on Joey’s knife hand and thought about getting inside the periphery of it, knocking Joey out of the way. In the corridor he would have room to maneuver.

He took a second step forward. Joey shrieked, “Don’t make me do this,” and slashed the air. The knifepoint missed, but narrowly. “Just say you’ll stay away from her! That’s all you have to do! That’s—”

He didn’t finish his sentence. There was suddenly a taller silhouette behind him—Tom Kindle.

Kindle twisted Joey’s arm up behind his back until Joey yelped and opened his hand.

Matt came out of the supply cupboard and backed away from the two men.

Kindle pushed Joey against the wall of die corridor and let him go. Joey spun around. Slowly, Kindle moved away, hands spread. Then he bent and picked up the knife. Peered at it.

“Swiss Army knife,” Kindle said. “Real good, Joey. After you kill him, you can trim his nails.”

“Fuck,” Joey said, rubbing his abused arm, “I didn’t come up here to kill anybody.”

Matt clamped his hand over the cut on his forearm. It was superficial but messy. He’d left a trail of blood spots on the green linoleum floor.

Kindle shook his head. “You came a little too close, in that case. Stupid thing to do. Wave a knife at somebody! There’s only ten of us in town, Joey, is that too many for you?”

No answer.

“Is there some reason you came up here?” Joey nodded. “He fucked Beth.”

Kindle did a small double take. Then he pocketed the knife. “Matt? Any truth to the charge?”

“I taught her CPR,” Matt said. “She’s been getting first-aid training.”

“That’s not what I hear,” Joey said.

“What do you hear?”

“I hear the doctor’s fucking her.”

“Who told you that?”

Self-righteously: “Beth did.”

There was a momentary silence… if you could call it silence, Matt thought, with the wind banging the walls.

Kindle said, “Joey… a woman might say a thing and not mean it. Especially if she thought she was being neglected. A woman might think, What would piss off Joey the most? What could I say to really aggravate this asshole who hasn’t even asked me the time of day since Christmas?”

Joey seemed to ponder the idea. Maybe, Matt thought, on some level, he was flattered by it.

“I just wanted to warn him.…”

“Warn him what? That you’ll kill him if he hangs around your ex-girlfriend?”

“Fuck you,” Joey said mildly.

“Fuck me because I don’t want the town doctor knifed by a jealous asshole? Christ’s sake, Joey, how is it even your business what Beth gets up to? She’s not your wife, and even if she was, adultery’s not a capital crime. You were pissed off and you wanted to wave that knife and make yourself feel better. But that’s so stupid—in the situation we’re in, that’s absolutely suicidally stupid. And that surprises me, frankly, ’cause you’re not as stupid as people think.” Joey looked up, wary of a trap, not sure whether he’d been insulted. Kindle went on: “I know what people say. What they used to say. Nobody held Joey Commoner in high esteem. But that’s changed a little, maybe you noticed. You set up the radio—”

“That shithead Makepeace took it over,” Joey said. “I don’t get close to it anymore.”

“Point is, it wouldn’t be there without you. Who found Boston on the twenty-meter band? Who found Toronto? Shit, Joey, you’re the only individual in town who can read a circuit diagram. You know that. So why do a stupid thing like this? Come up here wavin’ a little red pocketknife just because some girl tickled your nuts?”

“You don’t understand,” Joey said, but there was a note of conciliation in it, a hint of regret.

“Maybe,” Kindle said, “if the doctor agrees—and it’s his call, he’s the one who got cut—maybe we can not mention this incident downstairs. Not ruin your reputation for being smart.”

Joey said nothing. Waited, his eyes averted.

Matt said, “I guess I can go along with that.” Joey looked at him expressionlessly.

“Get on downstairs,” Kindle said, “and consider yourself lucky.”

Matt watched him amble down the corridor to the stairwell. The door opened and closed inaudibly, the sound of it buried under the noise of the storm.

Kindle turned to Matt. “Some medical advice from a civilian? You ought to bind that cut.”

He bandaged it quickly and rolled his sleeve down to cover the evidence. “Since you’re here, maybe you can help me carry some pharmaceuticals.”

“Sure enough,” Kindle said. “I brought a flashlight, by the way. Abby mentioned you’d gone up without one.”

“Thanks. And thank you for what you did with Joey.”

“I didn’t do anything except derail him. I’ve been worried he’d do some shit like this. When Joey gets mad… he gets mad all over. You know what I mean?”

“He said he didn’t come up here to kill me. But it might have happened.”

“It’s not just temper. It’s like some old hurt he never paid back. There’s a button in Joey that shouldn’t get pushed.”

“You did a good job turning him around.”

“Yeah, for now, but in the long run…” Kindle looked unhappy. “People are such shits, Matthew.”

“They can be.”

“Joey sure as hell can be. You’re still shaking.”

“It’s been a long night.”

“Damn noise,” Kindle said. They had been shouting to make themselves heard. His voice was raw. “Matthew… a little more friendly advice? You have to watch out for yourself.”

“I think we all do.”

“Sure we do.” Kindle, looking vaguely embarrassed, gathered a carton of pharmaceuticals from the shelf. “So what do you think, are we gonna live through the night?”

The roar of the storm had increased a notch. It sounded like some disaster more tangible than wind: trucks colliding, trains derailing in the dark.

“Probably,” Matt said. “But we should get downstairs and stay there.”

“Come morning,” Kindle said, “there won’t be much left of this town.”

Matt gave Abby some of the sterile cotton, which she wadded into her ears: “It does help. Though it makes conversation difficult. But no one’s talking much anyhow. Matt? Did you hurt your arm?”

The bandage had seeped a little. “Cut myself on some glass. Nothing serious.”

“Get some rest. If you can!”

He promised he would. He medicated Paul Jacopetti, then found a mattress for himself and stretched out on it. Everybody had moved into the hallway where it was quieter. Beth and Joey were three mattresses apart, glaring at each other from time to time. Tom Kindle wadded towels under the stairway door where some rainwater had begun to trickle through. Everyone else was simply waiting.

Waiting for the storm to peak, Matt thought, or for the ceiling to drop. Whichever came first. And because there was nothing to see of the storm, the temptation was to listen to it… try to decipher every rumble that penetrated the basement.

After a time, Abby consulted Tom Kindle, and the two of them managed to tap enough generator power to run a microwave oven—suddenly Abby was distributing cafeteria trays of steaming instant dinner. She’d been right, Matt thought, about the restorative power of hot food. It was an act of defiance: We may be huddled like rats in a hole, but we don’t have to eat like rats.

Dinner ended with a crash that seemed to shake the concrete under their feet.

“Jesus,” Chuck Makepeace said. “We must have lost part of the building.”

Kindle, who was collecting empty trays, said, “Maybe. More likely something hit us. One of those big trees at the west end of the parking lot, maybe.”

Jacopetti, pain-free but still pale, was impressed by the idea. “What would it take to pick up one of those trees and fling it that distance? What’s a tree like that weigh? Eight, nine hundred pounds?”

“I never weighed one,” Kindle said.

“Pick it up like a stick,” Jacopetti marvelled. “Pick it up and throw it!”

Matt checked his watch. Ten forty-five.

Eleven fifteen: Beth Porter said she thought she smelled smoke… maybe coming down through the ventilators? Kindle said he didn’t think it was likely, but for safety’s sake he was going to shut off the generator. “Get those battery lamps going. Eye of the storm should be overhead soon.”

The hallway seemed colder without the overhead light. Maybe it was colder. Hadn’t been that warm to begin with, Matt thought. He helped Abby distribute blankets.

Another huge crash shook the hallway, and another directly after it. Christ, Matt thought, what must it be like out there? He tried to picture an exterior world so transformed that Douglas firs flew through the air like javelins.

At half past eleven there was a new and even louder crash, a rending roar that shook the foundation—the vibration seeming to come from beneath, up through the concrete, through the bedrock.

“Lost part of the building for sure,” Jacopetti said. “Maybe a whole floor.”

“You may be right,” Kindle said. He added into Mart’s ear, as nearly a whisper as conditions permitted, “I hope you didn’t go to too much trouble to cure this man.”

Abby said, “I think I might scream.” She sat down, pale in the lantern light. “Fair warning, people.”

We must be near the eye wall, Matt thought. A wall of wind harder than brick, wind become a substance: solid, deadly.

He thought of that wind sheering at the broken stump of the hospital and prying at what was beneath—rooting for these few human lives like a terrier digging up a nest of field mice.

The foundation shook again. Matt looked at his watch. Perversely, the battery had chosen this moment to die. The display was blank; when he rapped it, the watch said 13:91. “Abby? Do you have the time?”

It was twelve twenty-five when the wind suddenly paused.

The freight-train roar faded gradually.

The air stirred. Dust rose from the floor of the hallway and danced in the lantern light.

“Eye of the storm,” Kindle said. “The building is exhaling”

“My ears popped,” Abby said.

Matt thought of gradients of air pressure steep as a mountain, the engine of the storm.

“Worse,” Bob Ganish said. “My nose is bleeding.”

There was a dreamlike quality to the stillness. Matt had heard that in the eye of a hurricane you could look up and see stars—it was that clear. He tried to imagine Buchanan, or the ruins of Buchanan, enclosed in a perfect rotating column of cloud… the moon shining on a landscape of wet rubble.

Warmth, what remained of it, seemed to drain from the basement. Matt wrapped his blanket around himself and saw others doing likewise.

Abby appeared hypnotized by the calm. “It’ll come again, won’t it? Just as hard. Maybe harder. And all at once. Like a fist. Isn’t that true?”

Kindle moved onto Abby’s mattress and put an arm around her. “True, but then we’re through the worst of it. After that, Abby, it’s only a question of waiting.”

Bob Ganish said, “I need some cotton for this nosebleed. I’m a bloody mess here.”

Matt attended to it. In the dim light, the blood on Ganish s shirt looked dark. Shiny rust. He worked mechanically, still thinking about moonlight.

“Oh,” Abby said sadly. “I can hear it… it’s coming back.”

Matt breathed shallowly, listening. She was right. Here it came. That freight-train roar. It was advancing across the water, onto the land, marching uphill to Buchanan General. Impossible not to think of it as a living thing. Vast and ponderous and stupid and malicious. Leviathan.

“Best sit down, Matthew,” Kindle said.

My God, he marvelled. Listen to it come.

The Helper—anchored to the high ground where City Hall recently stood—had witnessed the destruction of the town.

It assembled vision from disparate wavelengths, peering deeply into the storm. It saw what no mortal human could have seen.

It saw the storm advance. It saw the ocean flood the lower reaches of the town; it saw tornadoes dipping from the dark shelf of the clouds.

It stood in the calm center of the eye, seeing what Matt Wheeler had only imagined: moonlight shimmering on splintered tree stumps, loose bricks, battered truck bodies, fractured bridge abutments, fragments of drywall, road tar, torn shingles, torrents of rainwater, while the microscopic shells of Traveller phytoplankton hovered in the still air, a silver mist.

Then the eye wall approached once more from the west, eclipsing the moon—a black horn of wind.

The Helper saw Buchanan General Hospital as the eye wall devoured it.

The storm had already sheered away the hospital’s roof and much of its third floor. This new impact was more than the weakened structure could withstand.

Chunks of concrete whirled upward, trailing rust-red structural rods like severed arteries. Pieces of the hospital joined fragments of other buildings in a stew of airborne debris. Lab coats tangled with tree limbs, bedsheets embraced splintered glass.

There were human beings in the hollow under the ruins of the building. But not even the Helper’s powerful eyes could see into the earth.

The building came down in a noise of wind and destruction so intense that Matt didn’t register it as a sound. He was simply battered by it. It knocked him down.

He saw Abby screaming but he couldn’t hear her.

The others shrank into their mattresses, making themselves small.

The cafeteria ceiling collapsed. Fractured concrete poured through, the remains of the west wall of the building. Matt saw this clearly from the hallway through the open cafeteria doors. The doors were open because the storm wind, rushing through the lapsed ceiling, forced them open.

If we had been in there, Matt thought, if we had stayed in the cafeteria—

A gap had been opened to the tortured sky. The wind penetrated the hallway in a single terrible thrust. Tim Belanger took the brunt of the assault. He had laid out his mattress by the entrance to the cafeteria, a mistake. The wind—heavy with dust, wet, almost tarry—cracked his head against the wall and tossed him aside.

The wind picked up the battery lanterns and threw them down the corridor. Tom Kindle managed to snag one, but the rest winked out as they struck the stairwell door. Kindle waved the single lantern, beckoning with it, shouting something inaudible.

Matt fought his way upwind to Tim Belanger. The City Hall clerk was unconscious. Matt took a breath full of grit and dirty rain and began dragging Belanger away from the cafeteria, toward the faint beacon of Kindle’s lamp.

Breathing was the hard part. Everything would be okay, Matt thought, if only he could extract enough oxygen from the moist sludge that had replaced the air. Every breath filled his mouth with grit and drove a dagger into his lungs. He fell into a rhythm of inhaling, hawking, spitting, exhaling. The dead weight of Belanger became an intolerable burden, and several times Matt considered leaving him behind. It would be the wise thing to do, he decided. Save yourself. Maybe Belanger was already dead. But his hands wouldn’t let go of the injured man’s arm. Traitorous hands.

He bumped into Abby Cushman, who gestured left: a doorway. Matt pulled Belanger over the threshold. Kindle was braced against the wall, holding his lantern into the corridor; he saw Belanger and said, “That’s it! Matthew, help me close this door.”

They wrestled it shut. Kindle hawked and spat a black wad onto the floor. “Grab that two-by-four, we’ll nail this thing shut. Then see how people are doing.” Kindle took a hammer from his carpenter’s belt. He drove nails into the framing of the door while Matt braced the two-by-four and struggled to clear his throat.

This was some kind of furnace or plumbing room, from what Matt could see—concrete floor, exposed pipes, a huge water heater. The air in the room was dense with suspended particles, but it was relatively still. Eventually some of this garbage would settle out; in the meantime—“Any of you having trouble breathing, try wrapping a cloth over your nose and mouth.”

Jacopetti, weakly: “This isn’t the linen cupboard.”

“A hank of shirt or something. For those who feel they need it.”

With the door barred, Matt set about investigating injuries. He took the lantern from Kindle and called Beth to help. Tim Belanger first: the City Hall clerk beginning to recover from a bad blow to the head. His hair was sticky with blood, but the injury didn’t appear to be severe—as far as Matt could tell under these primitive circumstances.

Miriam Flett was having trouble catching her breath, but so were they all. He encouraged her to spit if she needed to: “We’re not being formal tonight, Miriam.”

She managed, “I can see that.” She held a ragged plastic shopping bag clutched in her left hand—the journals.

Jacopetti had suffered some recurrence of his angina, but it wasn’t crippling—“That’s normal, right, Doc? I mean if a fucking building falls on you?”

“I think we’re all doing pretty well.”

“We don’t have blankets,” Abby said mournfully. She coughed, gagged, coughed again. “We don’t have anything.”

“There’s water in that tank at the back,” Kindle said. “I checked this place before the storm. Maintenance guys used to come down here for their breaks. We got a card table around the corner and a coin machine full of candy bars.”

“Do we have any change?” Abby asked.

“No,” Kindle said. “But I got this hammer.”

The wind howled on. But the storm was breaking, Matt thought. That was the basic fact. They had come through the worst, and now the storm was wearing itself out on the heel of the continent. Morning would come in a few hours.

Overhead, the wind still gnawed the raw ruin of the building; but the wind had begun to ease.

Tom Kindle joined Matt, sat down wearily with his arms on his knees. Kindle had been a great strength, but he was starting to show his fatigue. His face was caked with dust; his hair was a gray-black tangle.

“If the hospital’s gone,” Kindle said, “there can’t be much left of Buchanan.”

“I guess not,” Matt said.

“Knowing the sentiments of people, once this storm clears, we’ll probably be heading east.”

“Probably.”

“Pity about the town being gone.”

Was it gone? Matt had avoided the thought. But it must be. What could stand up to the wind? Commercial Street: gone. City Hall: gone. The marina: washed out to sea.

Dos Aguilas: gone. Old Quarry Park, a wilderness of mud and fallen trees.

And his house, the house where he had raised his daughter, the house where Celeste had died. Gone. But—

“That isn’t the town,” Matt said. The thought came to him as he spoke it, rising out of his fatigue and his sorrow. “The people in this room are the town. We’re the town.”

“Then maybe the town survived after all,” Kindle said.

Maybe it did, Matt thought. Maybe the town would live to see morning.