Kindle leaned out the driver’s window and gave her an apologetic wave.
“YOU COWARD! YOU SELFISH OLD COWARDl”
The camper rolled out onto the highway and began to pick up speed.
Matt took Abby by the shoulders. She pulled away and looked at him bitterly. “Matt, why did you let him do this? We need him!”
“Abby, Abby! I know. But he had his mind set on it. I couldn’t stop him. I don’t think anybody ever stopped Tom Kindle from doing what he wanted—do you?”
She sagged toward him. “I know, but… oh, shit, Matt! Why now?”
He didn’t know how to console her. He had lost too much of his own. But he held her while she cried.
Joey Commoner came running from the truckstop, Tyler and Jacopetti a short distance behind.
Joey cupped a hand over his eyes and watched Kindle’s camper disappearing down the highway. Then he looked at Abby. Figuring it out.
“Son of a bitch,” Joey said. “He’s fucking AWOL!”
Abby regarded Joey as if he’d descended from Mars.
“Calm down,” Colonel Tyler said, to no one in particular.
“Sir,” Joey said, “he didn’t ask permission to go somewhere!”
“Quiet,” Tyler said. In the sunlight, the Colonel was silver-haired, imperial. His eyes lingered a moment on Matt. “We’ll discuss it at the meeting tonight.”
Matt cleared his throat. “Thought you didn’t believe in meetings.”
“Special occasion,” Tyler said.
Tyler put his motion to the Committee before everybody was finished sitting down.
The meeting was held in the truckstop restaurant under a bank of fly-spotted fluorescent lights. Tyler stood against a window with the dark behind him and tapped a knuckle against the glass for attention.
“News over the radio,” he said. “We’ve got some heavy weather across the state border along the Platte. Ohio thinks we ought to stay put for a while, and I agree—but I want a vote to make it official.”
He paused to let this sink in. Everybody was still a little dazed by the departure of Tom Kindle, wary of another crisis.
Matt Wheeler said, “I thought the radio blew up.”
“Call came early this morning, Dr. Wheeler.”
“Did it? Who took it?”
“I did.”
“Did anybody else hear this call?”
“I’m sorry, Dr. Wheeler. I didn’t feel it was necessary to have a witness.” Jacopetti laughed out loud.
Wheeler said, “It would be nice to be able to confirm the message, Colonel Tyler.”
“Mr. Commoner offered to find a replacement for the radio. I’m sure we’ll be up and running in due time. Until then, let’s keep a lid on the paranoia, shall we?”
Abby raised her hand: “A truckstop is hardly a place to spend time.…”
“Agreed. In the morning, we can take a look at the farmhouse to the south of here. I’m sure it’ll be more comfortable.”
Tyler registered, but didn’t understand, the sudden look of concern from the boy, William.
Wheeler again: “Maybe we ought to keep moving—we can always find shelter if the weather turns bad.”
Suspicious son of a bitch refused to drop the issue.
“After what happened to Buchanan,” Tyler said, “I don’t think we want to take any chances with a storm, do you? And there’s another consideration. One of our company chose to leave us today. A particular friend of yours, Dr. Wheeler. All things considered, maybe we should stay in the neighborhood long enough to give Mr. Kindle a chance to change his mind. If he elects to come back to camp, at least he’ll know where to find us.”
This hit home with Abby Cushman, a potential swing vote; she folded her hands in her lap.
“All in favor of staying,” Tyler said. “Show of hands.”
It was an easy majority.
Chapter 31
Night Lights
They filed from the restaurant, subdued and silent, until Tim Belanger stabbed a finger at the sky: “Hey—anybody notice something?”
Tyler looked up. “The Artifact,” he said, and calmly checked his watch. “It should have risen by now.”
By Christ, Matt thought, for once the bastard’s right. That ugly alien moon was overdue.
Missing. Gone.
“Dear God,” Abby said. “What now?”
There was nothing in the sky but a bright wash of stars—no Artifact but the second one still grounded on the southern horizon.
The Earth was alone again. Matt had wanted it so badly, for so long, he hadn’t allowed himself even to consider the possibility. It was the kind of desire you could choke on.
But here, mute testimony, was an empty Wyoming sky.
Too late, he thought bitterly. If they left, they left because their work was finished.
The starlight on the second and motionless Artifact, the so-called human Artifact, was cold and merciless. In scale and design, Matt thought, that object was wholly inhuman, no matter who owned it or what went on inside.
“The aliens are gone?” Abby asked, and Matt said, his voice a whisper, “Why not? We have our own aliens now.”
It was an auspice that couldn’t be read, an indecipherable portent, and they went to bed weary of miracles.
Deep in the cold Wyoming springtime dark, sooner or later, each of them slept…
Except one old woman, one ageless boy.
“William?”
His eyes were wide and moon-bright. “Yes?”
“Don’t you ever sleep?” He smiled. “Sometimes.”
Miriam’s battery-operated bedside clock bled numbers into the night. 3:43. 3:44. There was a fresh new pain in her belly. “The Travellers are gone, aren’t they?”
“Yes.”
“But you’re still here.”
“We’re still here.”
Humanity, he meant. The polis, he had called it, the world contained in that blister on the horizon: Home. “William?”
“Yes?”
“Did I ever show you my journals?”
“No.”
“Would you like to see them?”
His smile was unreadable. “Yes, Miriam, I would.”
She left her bed and took down from their shelf the fat scrapbooks full of clippings from the Buchanan Observer. They had gotten wet in that terrible winter storm and the pages were thick and warped. But the clippings, for the most part, were still legible.
William sat up in his cot and leafed through the books one by one. It was a strange history contained there, Miriam thought. She remembered how everyone had been frightened by the first appearance of the Artifact in the sky. It had been enigmatic, terrifying, an emissary from another world. Now, less than two years later, it was these clippings that seemed like messages from another world.
The universe, Miriam thought, turned out to be a more peculiar place than any of us expected.
William said, “You obviously worked hard at this.”
“Yes. It seemed important at the time.”
“Not now?”
She had fought to protect these journals. But what were they? Tonight they seemed like so much paper and ink. “No… not now.” He looked at them carefully and then put them aside.
Miriam steeled herself to ask the essential, the final question: the question she had postponed, had dared not ask.
Give me strength, Miriam thought. One way or the other. Give me strength.
“William… is it too late for me?”
She trembled in fear of his answer. She closed her eyes, squeezed them tight, tight.
“No, Miriam,” the boy said gently. “It’s not too late. Not yet.” A chaste kiss on the lips.
The neocytes, he said, would work quickly inside her.