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.