But now… it was as if gravity had failed, as if every solid thing had come unhooked from the earth. In an empty world, who was to judge? Where were the boundaries to separate one thought from another? What impulse might surface unobserved? How to distinguish the daylight from the dark?
We’re naked in this place, Tyler thought, and God help us for that.
He dozed for a time on the hotel bedspread and woke with a skull-splitting headache.
Murdoch came in the door with bags of canned food and bottled water. He dumped these on the bureau and took a towel from the bathroom—he was wet, his hair streaming water; it had begun to rain.
“It’s funny,” Murdoch said. “Most of the towns we’ve been through, you see at least a couple of people. This place—I’d swear it’s deserted. Didn’t see a living soul out there. For a while I thought I heard music. But I couldn’t track it down—not in this weather.”
Murdoch toweled his hair vigorously. The window was open a notch, and the room smelled moist and cool.
Murdoch gave him an odd, cautious look. “By the way, Colonel, have you seen the Helper?”
Tyler came alert. “What about it?”
“Well, it’s doing something,” Murdoch said.
“We destroyed it—what could it be doing? 7’
“Well, sir, it’s more or less putting itself back together.”
A.W. Murdoch followed Tyler down to the lobby, where the Colonel stood rigidly at the shattered front window and stared across the road at the remains of the Helper… at all that black, sooty dust that had begun to move as if stirred by an imperceptible wind, to heap itself into a crude, wet mound where the Helper had been.
Murdoch hadn’t been too surprised to see the Helper putting itself together. All the Traveller technology seemed to use subordinate but independent parts—the octahedrons, which were part of the Artifact; the Helpers, which were smaller fractions of the octahedrons… and all this. impact dust, which was just the smaller constituents of the Helper, he guessed, mobile and smart enough to crawl back into the original order.
Or the microbes that had infected everybody, come to that. Murdoch supposed those were machines, too, tiny but intelligent. There must be some irreducible level—a disorganization from which a Helper, for instance, couldn’t recover—but they hadn’t achieved that with a simple TOW.
Murdoch thought, It’s like punching mud. We should have known.
But Tyler hadn’t known, and Tyler was plainly horrified. He stood at the frame of the broken window shaking his head. Murdoch approached the older man cautiously. “Colonel?”
“Is it a threat?” Tyler said. “Are we in danger from it? Maybe we ought to move on.”
“I don’t imagine so. I don’t think we really damaged it. I doubt we even annoyed it. If these things carried a grudge, we’d be dead by now.” He felt a little guilty for breaking this news to Tyler in such an abrupt way; he felt he should make up for it. “Sir, we might as well go upstairs. You’re getting all wet. Cook us some food up there. I got some Coors from the grocery.”
When Tyler decided to leave D.C., they had assembled a kit that included a hot plate, pots and pans, plastic cutlery Upstairs, Murdoch plugged in the hot plate and started frying eggs. The hotel room filled with the smell of hot butter.
Tyler cracked open a beer and stared out the window. His manner, Murdoch thought, was frankly a little crazed.
Murdoch had decided weeks ago that Colonel Tyler might not be firing on all cylinders, but so what? Who was? Maybe all the sane people accepted that nighttime offer last August; maybe only a pair of lunatics would be driving around the country taking shots at these machines, like two kids soaping windows on Halloween.
He came to understand that Tyler lived in a world of orders given, rules obeyed, limits respected—a world as fragile as the egg Murdoch had just cracked and as hard to repair. Naturally, Tyler was finding it hard to adjust.
“My father only gave me one piece of advice in his life,” Murdoch said, “and that was to play the hand they deal you. I think he got it from a song. Or Dear Abby. But you can’t argue with it, right? Colonel, we got a shitty hand here. But we’re not dead yet.”
Tyler looked away from the window. “You never talked about your father much, Mr. Murdoch.”
“Not much to say.”
“What did he do for a living?”
“Raised sinsemilla up in Mendocino County.” To Tyler’s uncomprehending look Murdoch added: “He grew marijuana.”
“Christ. Really?”
“Honest to God.”
“He was a drug dealer?”
“Well—more like a bootlegger. That was the spirit of the enterprise.”
Tyler absorbed this information. “He must have hated it when you joined the Marines.”
“I can’t say it pleased him. But he told me it was my life, I should make my own mistakes. When I got on the bus at Ukiah, he said, Try not to shoot anybody!’”
And I never really did, Murdoch thought—unless you count the Helpers. Even then, he hadn’t done them much harm, apparently. Tyler shook his head. “It’s always a surprise. People’s families.”
“You don’t talk about your own family much.”
“No,” Tyler said. “I don’t.” Murdoch let it drop.
He served the eggs; but Tyler put his plate aside. “Sir,” Murdoch said, “speaking frankly, are you all right?”
The Colonel, who had been sitting stoop-shouldered in the chair by the window, drew himself up, almost into a sitting brace, his chin tucked, frowning, as if the question had stung him. “Of course I am.”
And they ate in silence and listened to the hiss of the rain on the window.
Murdoch told the Colonel he thought they should stay in Loftus until the cold rain passed, and Tyler had surprised him by agreeing. It seemed to Murdoch that the Colonel had grown both very unhappy and very agreeable recently.
Privately, Murdoch was curious about this little town. There were some questions that had piqued his interest during this shooting-gallery trek across the South, and he hoped to find some answers here.
For instance, exactly what was happening to the people in these little road towns? Where were they going? They weren’t on the highway, for sure; the highways were deserted. But so—increasingly often—were the towns.
Tyler disliked these questions and refused to discuss them, but Murdoch was simply curious.
In the morning he left the morose Colonel and wandered out into the street.
The rain had eased, but the sky was dark and restless with cloud. While he was asleep, the Helper had achieved a blurry approximation of itself. Minute grains of black dust moved over its surface, giving it the look of something swarmed by insects. It was as strange as anything Murdoch had recently seen, but he was growing accustomed to miracles… he watched for a moment, then shrugged and turned away from all these shattered storefront windows.
Yesterday there had been music. He’d heard it while he was scrounging for food at a grocery store a couple of blocks from here. The music had come very faintly through the rain, and Murdoch guessed it might have been imaginary, the kind of thing you hear when you’re alone in a strange place in a storm… but he remembered it as music, faint but unmistakable.
Today, he stood still and listened.
There was a faraway bark of a dog. A few wind sounds. The grit under his shoes as he shifted back and forth. No music. Spooky.
He turned a corner away from the main street. He had decided that today he would find somebody—a human being or a Contactee, it didn’t matter. Murdoch just wanted to look at a new face, ask some questions. The name of this little street, posted on a rusty sign at the intersection, was elm. Every one of these towns had an Elm, or an Oak, or maybe a Peach or a Magnolia as they pressed on into Georgia. What better place to find out what had happened to everybody? Everybody lived on Elm. He decided to knock on the door of the first house he came to.