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.