“Oh?” Kindle said. “What’s it like?”
“There’s a double row of filtration tanks and a walkway in between. I remember a lot of big-diameter pipes and valves.”
“You know how any of it works?”
“Nope.”
Makepeace laughed. “It points up the stupidity of this whole expedition. We don’t know what to look for and we won’t know what it means when we see it.”
“Not necessarily,” Kindle said. “If we go in there and everything’s humming along, we tell the folks they can use the kitchen faucet a while longer. On the other hand, if the floor’s under water and the pipes are broken, we can all put a bucket on the roof and pray for rain.”
“Let’s get it over with, then… if you’re finished with that soda.”
Kindle drained the can and tossed the empty into the backseat.
“Hey,” Makepeace said, “don’t litter my car!”
“You can get a new car,” Kindle said.
Kindle had brought a big iron crowbar with him. The filtration plant was liable to be locked and nobody knew where the maintenance people had gone, much less their keys. But when Matt approached the windowless steel door he found it standing ajar.
Inside was darkness.
No one wanted to reach out and yank the door wide. Certainly Matt didn’t. He heard the muted thump of machinery inside, like a massive heartbeat.
Kindle said, “Did it always sound like that?”
“Maybe,” Matt said. “I was ten years old when I came here last. It could have changed.”
Privately, he thought: No, it wasn’t like that. It had been quiet. This was a high reservoir; the tanks were gravity filters. “Sounds like Morlocks to me,” Kindle said. “Jesus!” Makepeace said. “Open the damn door!” Matt tugged it wide. Moist air gusted out.
There was no light in the great windowless space inside. Once there had been banks of lamps suspended from the ceiling. No more. “Got a flashlight in the car,” Makepeace said. “Get it,” Kindle said.
Makepeace ran for the cherry-red Nissan while Matt and Kindle took a tentative step through the doorway. Neither of them spoke until Makepeace arrived with the flashlight.
The beam probed the farther darkness—once systematically, once wildly.
The filtration plant didn’t look the way it had looked during Mart’s fifth-grade field trip. What had once been copper pipe was now a tangle of fibrous tubing, columns thick and knotted as mangrove roots sweating condensation into the warm interior air. Much of the floor was occupied by a black dome, a pulsating hemisphere attached by ropy ventricles to the looming black filtration tanks.
From this dome came the building’s heartbeat—periodic kettledrum throbs, like a distant organic thunder.
And the room smelted strange. Maybe that was the worst of it, Matt thought. It was not a bad smell, but it was wholly alien—as penetrating as nutmeg and as rich as garden loam.
Silently, the three men backed out into the cold January noon.
Chuck Makepeace drove the coast road back into Buchanan, not talking much, his hands clenched on the steering wheel. The road had grown potholes over the winter; the little Nissan bucked and jumped.
“All I want to know,” Kindle said, “is what’s it doing there?”
“My guess?” Matt said. “It’s filtering and pumping water. That’s all. There aren’t enough people to maintain essential services, so the Travellers grew a machine to do it. If we check out the power company we’ll probably find something similar operating the local grid—all the way back to the power plant.”
“Why would they be so interested in keeping Buchanan going?”
“I don’t suppose it’s only us. If they’re running utilities in Buchanan, they must be doing the same for every other city.” Hoover Dam, Grand Coulee Dam, all the nuclear plants, all our little engineering miracles: He imagined tangled black machines operating the massive turbines. No one had put these devices there; they had just grown, like weeds.
“Matthew, do you suppose all our water flows through that thing?”
“It appears to.”
“Well, Jesus—I drank that water!”
“I don’t think they mean to poison us. They could have killed us a long time ago if they’d wanted to.”
Exterminated was the word Rachel had used. They could have exterminated us.
“But it’s control,” Kindle said. “That much is obvious. If they can turn off the lights and shut off the water, they can tell us what to do… We depend on them.”
“Do we? You can dig a well. Nobody’s stopping you.”
“We could dig wells and press lamp oil, but we aren’t going to, ’cause the faucets still work and the lights are still on. So why do you guess they did it? Civic spirit?”
“Maybe,” Matt said. “Maybe because it’s easy for them, so why not? You remember Contact. I don’t like the fact that they’re here, and I don’t like what they’ve done, but I don’t think they did it because they hate us.”
“You believe that?”
He shrugged. “That’s what it felt like.”
“Sure it did. But only a really lousy lie is gonna feel like a lie. The best lies feel like God’s own truth. That’s the point. And anyway…”
Matt looked at the older man. “Anyway what?”
“Even if they’re Jesus and Buddha in one happy package… who says I want ’em working for me? I mean, how does this go? We get water because the Travellers favored us with a big ugly pump? If it’s a dry spell, do we pray for rain? And if we do, do they send some along?” He shook his head. “I don’t happen to believe in God, Matthew, but if I did, I think I’d prefer the one that works in mysterious ways His miracles to perform. Pray for rain, in other words, but keep the tanning butter handy. It’s more human.”
“We’ll get rain enough to suit,” Chuck Makepeace said, running a red light at the vacant intersection of Commercial and Marine. “I understand there’s a mother-bitch of a winter storm on the way.”
Kindle gave him a sharp look. “How would you know that?”
It turned out Chuck Makepeace had heard the news the same way Matt had: through the agency of the Helper.
Twice since Christmas, Matt had gone to stand before that motionless obsidian giant. He had asked it questions: about the Travellers, Rachel’s transformation, the future of Buchanan.
The Helper had answered concisely in a sedate baritone of neutral accent. Beyond that, it had no discernible personality. It spoke to Matt in colloquial English, but he didn’t doubt that it would answer an Iranian in Farsi or a Brazilian in Portuguese.
It was Rachel who had first hinted to Matt about the weather, but the Helper elaborated that warning, described the new and fiercer storms spinning to life in the altered waters of the tropical seas. Matt had withheld that warning from the last meeting of the Emergency Planning Committee—there had been too much new business and the threat was safely distant—but he had planned to bring it up tonight.
But Chuck Makepeace knew as much about the weather as Matt… because Makepeace had talked to the Helper, too.
Matt arrived at the hospital boardroom unshaven and somewhat lightheaded, five minutes late. He had skipped dinner. Maybe lunch, too; he couldn’t recall. He missed a lot of meals these days. Time seemed to slip past; his attention often wandered.
He had hoped to chair a fairly sedate meeting and introduce the storm-warning during New Business. At this point, the best and simplest strategy was to secure a shelter—maybe the basement of the hospital—and stock it with water, food, Coleman lanterns. It was an important job, but not a difficult or costly one.