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.”