“Any old minute now, sir,” said Murdoch, who had calculated this somehow.
Tyler focused his attention on the highway where it crossed a low ridge a couple of thousand yards north. The Helper would be coming over that ridge. Well within range. But nothing moved there now, not even traffic. The roads were sparsely travelled these days.
Murdoch popped a can of Dr. Pepper, which made Tyler jump. “Christ’s sake.”
“Sorry, sir.”
Tyler’s mouth was dry. He envied Murdoch that can of pop fresh from the cooler. But he had to be ready to man the TOW. He guessed this was Murdoch’s revenge for not being allowed first shot at a Helper. Tough luck, Tyler thought. I guess I can wait for a cold drink.
“Sir? I think you have a target, sir.”
Tyler stood up on the shooting platform and manned the weapon.
The TOW was manufactured by Hughes, a company Tyler had done some business with. He had a lot of respect for the TOW. It was a wire-guided weapon, almost mind-numbingly complex, but reliable in service. It was designed to penetrate heavy armor plate and render even the best-protected tank functionally unserviceable, i.e., blow it the hell up.
He got his first good look at a Helper through the cross hairs of the 13x optical sight.
The Helper looked like a death-black ball and cone—the aliens seemed to love these Euclidian shapes—and it was travelling well below the speed limit along the slow curve of the road. The image rippled slightly in the heat rising from the asphalt.
The cattle shuffled and raised their heads as if they sensed this presence.
Tyler was suddenly nervous—suddenly this seemed like real combat—but he didn’t let the anxiety affect his timing. He kept the Helper in his sights until it cleared the high spot in the road. He wanted this target clean.
“Sir,” Murdoch said nervously. “We’re a little exposed here.”
“Keep your shirt on, Mr. Murdoch.”
A long pause, then: “Sir?”
Tyler triggered the weapon.
The TOW performed a number of complex tasks between one eyeblink and the next. Tyler’s finger on the firing button ignited a rocket motor, which popped the missile from its launch container. All the rocket fuel was used up before the missile left the tube, which was what protected Tyler, Murdoch, and the vehicle they were sitting in from the backwash. The sound of the launch was blisteringly loud. It was a sound Murdoch had compared to the hiss of Satan’s own steam press.
When the missile was well clear, a sustainer motor ignited; the missile unfolded four wings and accelerated to 900 feet per second.
Tyler’s eyes were on the Helper.
The TOW missile trailed two fine wires attached to the launcher. Tyler actually used the sight and a joystick to drive the missile, which never failed to astonish him, this video-game aspect of it. He steered the missile down a trajectory that seemed eternally long, but was not. He kept the cross hairs centered on the moving Helper. Picture-book launch.
The missile arrived in the vicinity of its target travelling at 200-plus miles per hour.
The warhead was fitted with a standoff probe that exploded fifteen inches from the target.
The main warhead detonated a fraction of a second later. Hell of an explosion, Tyler thought, his ears ringing. “Holy damn!” Murdoch whooped. The cows and crickets had fallen silent.
Tyler had once seen a movie called War of the Worlds, loosely based on the H. G. Wells novel.
Martians land in California and build monstrous killing machines.
Conventional weapons fail. At last, the Air Force drops a nuclear device.
Explosion. Mushroom cloud. Nervous observers wait for visibility to improve. The firestorm abates, the dust settles… The Martian machine is still there.
Tyler leaned against the hot mass of the TOW launcher, scrutinizing the spot on the highway where the missile had detonated.
The smoke swirled up and away in a lazy easterly breeze… And nothing at all was left behind.
Murdoch couldn’t resist driving to the spot, though Tyler’s instinct was to get away as quickly as possible.
He stopped and idled a few feet from the scorch marks.
Nothing remained of the Helper but a fine, sooty-black dust—a thick arc of it clean across the highway.
“Nice shot,” Murdoch said.
“Thank you.”
“Spose you’re right, though, Colonel. Spose we ought to scoot.”
“Commence scooting,” Tyler said.
It was a small beginning. But it was also, Tyler thought, the first human victory after a long humiliation. He closed his eyes as Murdoch raced the Hummer into the cool October air. It had been a genuinely lovely autumn, Tyler thought. A beautiful fall.
After a time, the crickets started up again.
Chapter 17
Two Eagles
Northwest autumn weather moved in from the ocean on the third of October and settled over coastal Oregon like a contented guest. The sky darkened, the rain came in mists and drizzles, dusk began at lunch and lingered till dinnertime.
Matt was afraid this would go on through the winter, that they wouldn’t see the sun again until April. He was happy to be proved wrong. Five days before Halloween, the clouds parted. One last bubble of warm air, drawn across the Pacific from Hawaii, paused above Buchanan. The dew dried on the pine needles and the grass wondered whether it ought to start growing again.
Over breakfast, Matt recalled what Cindy Rhee had told him.
Talk to your daughter.
The child was right, of course.
He had barely spoken to Rachel since Contact. He’d been busy—spending time at the hospital, trying to keep the ER functional, then organizing the Committee.
But even when he was alone with her in the long evenings, too silent, when the sun declined and the Artifact cast its bony light, or the rain talked to the roof… still, he couldn’t bring himself to speak.
Not to say the important things.
He was too much aware of the change in her, of the neocytes, so-called, at work inside her skull.
Changing her. Carrying her away.
To speak of it would be to invite the grief, which he could not allow, because there had been too much grief in his life already. He couldn’t afford more grief. He was tired of grief.
But maybe the time had come.
He found her sitting at the kitchen table eating a bowl of cereal and reading a library book. The book was propped against the cornflake box and braced with her left hand. It was Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, and it seemed to Matt she was turning the pages a trifle too quickly. Better not to dwell on that. Her hair was uncombed and she was wearing a blue nightgown. She looked at him as he entered the kitchen, a look both hopeful and wary.
He moved to the counter and started measuring out coffee. His hands were hardly shaking at all. “Busy today, Rache?”
“No,” she said.
“Feel like a drive? I thought maybe we could ride out to Old Quarry Park. Last nice day of the year, maybe.”
“We haven’t been up there for a long time,” Rachel said. “In the mood for it?” She nodded.
Rachel understood that her father wanted to talk, wanted to make sense of what had happened; and she knew how hard it was for him. She wanted to help but didn’t know how.