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.