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.”
“That’s a hell of an admission.”
“Is it? What’s that supposed to mean?” Now Murdoch was angry. “It’s an insult, right? Jesus. I swear I don’t understand you. Half the time you come on like a good old Army boy, half the time you sound like some faggot college professor. I don’t even know why we do this military routine. Aye sir, Colonel sir. Just because you’re walking around like you have a ramrod up your ass. Salute me, I’m wonderful. Well, fuck it. It’s not just stupid, John, it’s not even sane.”
Tyler was stung by the extremity of this.
“Epictetus,” he said.
Murdoch, exasperated: “What?”
“The Discourses. ‘Why, then, do you walk as if you had swallowed a ramrod?’ Epictetus. He was a Stoic. An educated Roman slave. You shouldn’t insult me, Mr. Murdoch.”
“All I meant—”
But Tyler’s attention had strayed to the pistol on the side table. Spontaneously, in a motion that seemed to belong to his hands alone, he picked the weapon up.
Murdoch’s eyes widened.
It was an old-fashioned revolver. Tyler opened it to show Murdoch the chamber. “Empty,” he said. Then he took a single bullet from the tabletop, displayed it between his right thumb and forefinger, and placed it in the pistol.
Or pretended to. In fact, he palmed the bullet… but Murdoch didn’t see.
“One round,” Tyler said.
He spun the chamber without looking at it.
He raised the pistol to his own head. The act was familiar, but he had never performed it in the presence of another man. It made him feel strange, dizzy, not altogether connected to Murdoch or this room or the exterior world in general.
He looked steadily at Murdoch as he pulled the trigger. Click!
He spun the chamber again.
“That’s the advantage I have over you, you lame little fuck. That I’m capable of this.”
Perhaps Murdoch, the weapons specialist, was visualizing the internal working of the pistol, the firing pin as it came down on empty air—or not. Click!
“I can do this without flinching. Now. Can you?”
Murdoch huddled away from the barrel of the pistol. He looked pinned in his chair by an invisible wind. His Adam’s apple bobbed in his throat, a motion Tyler watched with fascination. It looked like there was something inside him trying to get out, something more substantial than a word.
“Christ,” Murdoch said in a strangled voice, “please, Christ Jesus, don’t!”
“This is why you call me sir. You understand?”
“Yes! Yes, sir!”
“I doubt it.” Click!
“Christ, Christ, put the gun away, Jesus, don’t do this to me!” Murdoch was rigid with terror. His hands were clamped on the arms of the chair. In the sterile light of the hotel room, Murdoch’s wristwatch was clearly visible. Tyler watched the numerals blink. He counted thirty seconds, then he lowered the pistol.
He looked at Murdoch and smiled. “We’ll leave in the morning,” he said.
Murdoch opened his mouth but no sound came out.
Tyler put the pistol back on the table. “Maybe you should get your things together, Mr. Murdoch.”
Murdoch blinked until he realized he had been excused, the ordeal was over. Then he stood up on shaky legs, walked to the door, turned, and took a last bewildered look at Tyler before he left and closed the door behind him.
Tyler’s headache was much worse.
Later, it occurred to him to look for the bullet he’d palmed; but it wasn’t beside the chair, nor in his pocket, nor on the tabletop. Finally he opened the pistol and found the bullet resting in the chamber—exactly where he had led Murdoch to believe it was. Which worried him a little. It was a strange sort of mistake to have made.
Murdoch lay awake for what remained of the night with the door of his hotel room locked and chained—eyes open, because when he closed them he saw the barrel of Tyler’s service revolver pointed at him.
Or Soo Constantine, pale and naked in a darkened room.
Or an empty human skin littering the doorway of an old house.
Dear God, he thought, what if Tyler had shot him? He wouldn’t be a skin. He’d be a corpse. A messier object, as Soo had pointed out.
She’d talked about the missing people as if they had really gone somewhere. Had they? True, the Travellers had promised that. The memory of Contact was vague in Murdoch’s mind, a dream that paled by daylight. But he remembered the promise of a new kind of life, both physical and bodiless… an idea that had made sense, somehow, in the intensity of Contact.
It’s not too late, Soo had said.
And why did the words linger on?
Was he actually tempted by the offer? Was such a thing possible? But that’s terrible, Murdoch thought: I don’t want to be an empty skin on some empty street, like a bottle somebody drained and threw away. It’s something they choose. No. Bullshit, Murdoch thought. But she hadn’t seemed like a liar.
He tried to imagine himself travelling on with Tyler, watching the old man sink into outright lunacy, firing missiles at something, anything—trying to make sense of the world by dismantling it.
Christ, Murdoch thought miserably, I don’t even know where I am! I couldn’t find this town on a map. Loftus? Where is it?
I’m lost, Murdoch thought.
Rain tapped on the window.
He tossed and slept a little in the last hour before dawn.
Tyler woke regretting the incident of the night before and tried to act as if it hadn’t happened. He knocked on Murdoch’s door and asked for some help loading up the Hummer. Murdoch nodded—both of them a little sheepish, Tyler thought, in the sober light of morning—and began to assemble the cooking gear.
They carried their personal items to the street, around the corner to the Exxon station where the Hummer was parked under cover. Tyler arranged the baggage in the rear of the vehicle and made sure everything was strapped down. Murdoch, looking baleful and confused, watched from a few feet away.
Then Tyler took the passenger seat and waited for Murdoch to climb in behind the wheel. It was a conciliatory gesture, giving Murdoch the reins, a small apology for the night before.
But Murdoch didn’t move. “Sir,” he said, “I think I left something in the room.”
Tyler took a pair of sunglasses from his breast pocket and polished them on a handkerchief. “What sort of thing, Sergeant?”