The Helper stood here. It had floated into town along the coast highway, made a right turn where the highway crossed Marine, glided past Mart’s office in the Marshall Building and across the railway overpass, and stationed itself on the Turnaround green.
Matt walked toward it through the rain. The rain was cold; he shivered under the wet bulk of his overcoat.
He stopped a short but wary distance from the Helper. He was intimidated by its size—it stood at least seven feet tall—and by its glossless black surface, somehow untouched by the rain.
They called it a Helper. The name, he thought, was grotesque but appropriate. It suggested a blunt, totalitarian benevolence—a meaningless gesture from a humorless tyrant.
Talk to it?
Not possible.
He stood in the park a while longer, listening to the rain as it fell on the grass and watching the clouds roll down from the slope of Mt. Buchanan. Then he turned and walked back to the car.
* * *
Hard times coming. Rachel repeated the warning a few days later. “The Travellers are doing things to the planet,” she said, and Matt experienced a tremor of fear that stitched into the deepest part of him. It wasn’t what she said—though that was frightening enough—but how she said it: blandly, if not happily.
They were sitting in the living room looking past the blank TV set, through the window to a faraway ridge of wet Douglas firs in their dark-green winter coats. It was another rainy December morning.
Matt cleared his throat and asked what “doing something to the planet” might entail.
“Fixing it,” Rachel said. “Restoring it. Reversing all the changes. What we did over the last century or so—what people did—was to set forces in motion we couldn’t control. Global warming, for instance. The Travellers are taking some of the C02 out of the atmosphere and trying to bind it into the ocean.” She turned to face him. “It was worse than we suspected. If the Travellers hadn’t come… it would have been awfully hard for all of us, next century, or the century after that.”
“They care what happens to the Earth?”
“They care because we care.”
“Even if you’re leaving?”
“It’s where we were born,” Rachel said. “It’s our planet. And it won’t be entirely empty.”
“Restoring the balance,” Matt said. “That doesn’t sound so bad.”
“No. But in the short term… Daddy, I can’t explain all the things they’re doing, but in the short term, it could mean some chaotic weather, at the very least. Storms. Bad storms.”
He nodded, grateful for this nugget of hard information. “When?”
“I don’t know… maybe soon. Late winter, early spring.”
“There’ll be some warning?”
“Of course. That’s what the Helpers are for… one of the things they’re for.” Her expression now was not bland at all; she regarded him with a desperate unhappiness. “Daddy, you must talk to the Helper.”
* * *
It had been agreed at the November Committee meeting that they would gather to celebrate Christmas Eve at Tom Kindle’s new house in Delmar Estates. Guests were welcome, even Contactees, especially family, and Matt asked Rachel to come along—but she declined.
He drove to the party through a chill, heavy rain that threatened to turn into hail, along streets grown ragged with winter potholes. He wondered whether he might be the only one lunatic enough to brave the weather. Some party. But there were other cars parked at the house; and Kindle welcomed him inside, took his coat, told him that, in fact, all ten members of the Committee had shown up, but nobody else: “Just us human beings. Which is probably just as well. Come on in, Matt. Everybody else got here early ’cause of the weather, I guess. Abby’s been here since two this afternoon, puttin’ up these goddamn Christmas decorations, plus that little plastic tree in the corner. Had me hangin’ bulbs and lights on it.”
“Looks good, Tom.”
“Looks like a fuckin’ department store, but there was no stopping her.”
Matt remembered the way Buchanan used to dress itself up for Christmas—tinsel across the avenues, pine boughs on the lamp standards.
“The punch is over there,” Kindle said, “but go easy for a while, we got a turkey in the oven and some radio calls coming in from the east—I don’t want anybody throwing up on the microphone.”
* * *
Dinner was festive. Even Paul Jacopetti seemed to have mellowed for the occasion. Matt sat between Chuck Makepeace, who was promoting the idea of a New Year’s reconnaissance trip to the waterworks and the power company, and Abby Cushman, who had taken most of the dinner chores on herself and was away from the table between courses.
Matt noted the way she fluttered over Tom Kindle, served him generously, asked his opinion of the gravy, the dressing, the plum pudding. (“Looks real good to me,” Kindle said. “Real good, Abby.”) She was married, Matt reminded himself, and had a couple of grandchildren living with her—but they were like Rachel, lost to Contact. It was no wonder she had adopted the Committee, and Tom Kindle in particular.
He gave a brief, sober thought to Annie Gates. He hadn’t spoken to her for months. He hadn’t wanted to say all the necessary things. All the things that amounted to: Goodbye, good luck, I loved you in my own fucked-up way but now you’re not human anymore. Surely silence was better than that.
Abby recruited Paul Jacopetti, Bob Ganish, and a reluctant Beth Porter to deal with the dinner dishes. Everybody else adjourned to the living room; Joey Commoner began warming up the transceiver, scouting for stray voices prior to the east-west hookup scheduled for 8:00 Pacific time.
Kindle took Matt aside. “That Abby… she’s a pain in the butt. She’s been over three times this week. Stops to chat. I don’t know how to chat. She brings food. Matthew, she bakes.”
“She seems nice enough,” Matt said.
“Hell, she is nice. If she wasn’t nice it wouldn’t be a problem. She talks about her family—she doesn’t see ’em much anymore. She’s having a hard time and she needs somebody she can latch onto. And, you know, I’m only human. It’s been a while since I had a woman around, barring some Saturday nights in town, and even that’s all finished since Contact. So I think yeah, okay, Abby’s nice… but it’s not fair to her.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’ll leave. The only advantage to getting old is that you learn this shit about yourself. I was married once—little Coast Salish girl up in Canada. Lasted about six months. She went back to the reserve, I came back across the border. And that was pretty much the endurance record for Tom Kindle. Maybe I won’t leave this month, maybe not next month, but I’ll leave. And Abby’s been left too much just now.”
“Maybe you should tell her that.”
“Good advice. Maybe I should just club her down with a stick—it’d be kinder.”
“Or don’t leave. That’s the other choice.”
“Uh-huh.”
“The thing is, you’re useful around here.”
“Right. About as useful as half a crutch. Speaking of which, I’m still limping. Is that normal?”
“You’ll limp a while longer. But don’t put down your own contribution. You’re like an anchor at the Committee meetings. The radio’s been a morale booster, too.”
“Mostly Joey’s work.”
“And Joey, come to that. He’s turning into a human being. You treat him with a certain amount of respect. That’s a new thing for him.”
“You ever see that tattoo on his shoulder?” Matt nodded.
“’Worthless,’” Kindle said. “You suppose he believes that?”
He thought about it. He didn’t know Joey Commoner particularly well. Joey must have been eighteen years old when he had that word dyed into his skin, and it was precisely the kind of thing a pissed-off eighteen-year-old might do. It might mean nothing.
Still, if he had to render an opinion—“I think he might believe it, yes,”
Kindl
e shook his head.
“Shit,” he said finally. “I didn’t sign on to be anybody’s husband… and I sure as hell didn’t sign on to be a goddamn parent”
* * *
Come eight o’clock, Joey established contact with the community of survivors in Toronto. The weather was bad and the signal was poor; voices faded in ghostly fashion. But the contact across all that distance was heartening. Everybody gathered around the microphone and sang “Adeste Fidelis”—they had rehearsed this—and the Canadians sang “Silent Night” through the static. It was snowing there, the Canadian radioman said. The streets were knee-deep and the municipal plows weren’t out this year; the survivors were partying in a downtown hotel: “Lots of rooms and an emergency generator in the basement. We’re cozy.”
The Canadian chorus was bigger than Buchanan’s: perhaps eighty people, almost as large as the nearly one hundred in the Boston community Joey had contacted a few days ago. Which meant, Matt knew, there must be more such groups, but only a few of them had thought to attempt radio communication.
Toronto said “Merry Christmas” and signed off. Joey tried for Boston and a third contact in Duluth, but the weather wasn’t cooperating—“The skip isn’t in,” Joey said.
“We could phone ’em,” Kindle said. “Guy in Boston gave me his telephone number.” But the long-distance exchanges were unreliable these days and, anyway, a phone call wasn’t the same as radio contact; they could wait until tomorrow to pass on Christmas sentiments.
“Telephone service won’t last the winter,” Jacopetti predicted. “Wires go down. Relay towers. I doubt anybody’ll fix ’em.”
Joey went on DXing. Kindle said Joey had twice made brief contacts with other continents—a ham in Costa Rica, and on one memorable clear night a voice speaking what Joey said was Russian but might have been Polish or Ukrainian… the signal faded before he could respond.
Beth Porter, in a gesture that took Matt by surprise, had brought along a VCR and two tapes from the big video store on Ocean Avenue : White Christmas and It’s a Wonderful Life. “Because I used to watch those movies every year. You know, I just thought it would be nice.”
Joey took time away from the radio to hook up the tape machine. Kindle freshened the punch and Miriam Flett, in another surprise move, volunteered to make popcorn.
Somewhere between Bing Crosby and Jimmy Stewart, Matt thought: My God, there are only ten of us. But this might work. This might still work. This might still be a town.
* * *
Sometime after midnight, the rain turned to sleet and the roads began to ice. It’s a Wonderful Life cranked to an end, and in the silence that followed, without warning, Paul Jacopetti began to weep—racking sobs that shook his large body like seizures. Beth retrieved her videotape: “Jeez, I’m sorry, maybe that was the wrong thing to show.”
“It was fine,” Matt told her. “Don’t apologize.”
But the party was over. Kindle offered bedroll space to anyone who wanted to stay the night. Tim Belanger had confined his drinking to Diet Pepsi and offered a drive to those who hadn’t; he left with Bob Ganish and the still-teary Paul Jacopetti.
Joey was still working the transceiver. Beth told him a couple of times she wanted to go home, she was tired, the streets weren’t getting any safer. “Just wait,” Joey said, turning the dial with a relentlessness that looked nearly compulsive to Matt.
Kindle said Beth could take one of the spare rooms, if she didn’t mind sleeping on the floor, but she shook her head and pursed her lips: “I want to go home.”
“I can drop you off,” Matt said. “If it’s okay with Joey?”
Joey shrugged, his back turned. Another voice crackled from the radio speaker: “…read you, Joseph… signal’s faint.…”
“It’s that Colonel Tyler,” Kindle said. “I swear, that son of a bitch never sleeps.”
“ Tyler,” Matt said. “He’s the guy down south?”
“He moves around. Loner type.” Kindle escorted Matt to the door, out of Joey’s earshot. “You should talk to him some night when the signal’s less feeble. Joey thinks the guy is hot shit.”
“You don’t?”
“Well… it’s too soon to be choosy about the friends we make, right? But Tyler’s full of all kinds of ideas. He says we should form a defense committee or something. Says he’s seen some mayhem out on the road. A lot of peculiar people turned down Contact, he says. He keeps talking about some big project out in Colorado he’s heard about… Matt, he claims the aliens are building a spaceship out there. Is that possible?”
“I guess it’s possible. I suspended judgment last August. You don’t believe him?”
“Oh, I believe him, I guess.” Kindle rubbed his chin. “I believe him, all right. I just don’t, you know, trust him.”
“He’s in no position to do us harm.”
“Not at the moment,” Kindle said.
* * *
Beth huddled into the passenger seat. Matt asked her to fasten her seat belt. The roads were slick with sheet ice, and it was easy to imagine his little import sliding into a ditch.
Beth strapped herself in and gazed through the window at dark suburban houses.
He signalled a left turn on Marina, crossing town to Beth’s house, but she touched his arm: “No, keep going… I don’t live there anymore.”
He frowned but crossed the intersection. “Moved out from your family?”
“It never was much of a family, Dr. Wheeler. Mainly just my dad, and he’s—you know. Changed.”
“I guess it’s hard to talk to him.”
“It used to be hard. Now he wants to talk—but it’s worse, in a way. I think part of the deal is that if you want to live forever you have to understand what a shit you were in real life. He figures he kicked me around too much, and he doesn’t know what to do about it. He wants to apologize or make it better somehow.”
“You don’t want that?”
She shook her head fiercely. “I’m not ready for that. Christ, no. It’s hard even being around him since he changed. He even looks different now. You remember how big he used to be? Now he’s almost skinny. None of his clothes fit. He looks—” She chose a word. “Empty.”
She used the nail of her right index finger to draw an oval in the fog on the passenger window. She gave it eyes, eyelashes, a pursed mouth. A self-portrait, Matt thought. “So I’m staying at the Crown Motel. The one by the waterfront, past the ferry dock.”
Matt turned right at the next intersection, toward a blankness of fog and rain, the ocean. “You could have done better than a motel. Look at Tom Kindle.”
“The room is big enough. It has a kitchenette, so I can cook. I get along.”
The rain turned icy again, clattering against the roof of the car. Matt eased past the sign that said CROWN MOTOR INN, the car fishtailing on a slick of ice. He realized he hadn’t seen a single other vehicle during this drive from Tom Kindle’s house-—no traffic of any kind.
A light was burning in Beth’s room. She left it on, she said, so she could find the door at night. “It gets lonely in this big parking lot.” She cocked her head at him. “You want to see the place?”
“The roads aren’t getting any better, Beth.”
“You could walk me to the door, at least.”
He agreed… though it seemed somehow careless to leave the dry enclosure of the car.
Beth had appropriated a ground-floor room. The number on the door was 112. The door wasn’t locked. It opened into yellow light. “Just take a look,” Beth said. “Tell me it’s a nice place. God, it would be nice to have somebody tell me that.”
He stepped inside. The room was hot; the thermostat was turned up. She had decorated this ordinary suite with cheap art prints—pastel water-colors, kittens and farmhouses. A quilt, obviously homemade, had been thrown across the bed. She followed his look. “It’s the only thing I took with me when I left home. I slept under this quilt since I was little. My grandmother made it.” She sat on the bed and
stroked the quilt with one hand. “Do I have to call you Dr. Wheeler? Everybody at the party called you Matt.”
“You can call me Matt.”
“Matt… you can stay here tonight if you want.”
Some part of him had expected the offer. Some part of him was surprised, even shocked.
“Because of the weather,” Beth said. “The weather being so shitty and all.” She began unbuttoning her shirt. “I hardly see Joey anymore. He just plays with that fucking radio over at Kindle’s. It wouldn’t be so bad—I mean, Joey’s hardly a prize—but he was the only person who ever… I mean, he used to say I was pretty.” She paused to gauge his reaction. “Nobody else ever said that.”
She slid out of the shirt. Her skin was perfect, blemishless, flushed pink. Her breasts were small, the nipples almost childlike. There was a line of freckles across her breastbone. Why couldn’t he say anything? He felt as if his mouth had been disconnected from his body. He was mute.
WORTHLESS, said the small blue letters on her shoulder.
“I’m twenty years old,” Beth said. “I guess you’ve seen me naked since I was ten. You never said if you thought I was pretty. I guess doctors don’t say things like that. Matt. Matthew. Matt—do you think I’m pretty?”
“Beth, I can’t stay here.”
She unzipped her jeans and stepped out of them, then sat back on the bed. She frowned. Then she folded her hands in her lap in a gesture that was oddly shy. “I don’t know why I do this shit.” She looked imploringly at him. “It’s hard being alone all the time. The town is empty. It’s not just that no one comes out on the street—I think people are actually missing. And I don’t know what happened to them. And I lie here and I think about that and it’s just so fucking scary. Sad and scary. And I would like not to be alone. But you can’t stay?”
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