Fade Out

by Patrick Tilley

  Weissman’s reaction to Bodell may have lacked a certain cool, legal objectivity, but his description of Bodell’s place was right on the nose. The one-storey wood-frame house had been constructed from the weathered remnants of several abandoned claimshacks. The effect was messy, but it looked solid enough. It would need to be. In the winter, the wind that swept across eastern Montana cut like a riptoothed buzz saw.

  Volkert turned the car around so that it pointed downhill. This also put Connors between him and the house. No doubt it could prove useful if they had to drive away in a hurry. Connors didn’t say anything.

  ‘Better let me go up ahead of you,’ said Volkert, then added with engaging candour, ‘If he sees that suit he might think you’re another of them Jewboy hustlers.’

  Connors nodded towards the pines that acted as a windbreak for the house and covered the flanks of the ridge above. ‘How come there are so many trees around here?’

  ‘Bodell,’ said Volkert. ‘He planted them. Been doing it for years.’

  ‘What does he do with them – cut them down for lumber?’

  ‘Nope. He just keeps putting ’em in.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Connors.

  Volkert shrugged. ‘I guess he must like trees.’

  Brown and white chickens scattered in front of them as they picked their way across the junk-littered yard. A pair of stained, patched long johns swung limply from a line. The line was tied to the cab of a gutted ’52 Ford pickup that had weeds growing through the chassis.

  As they ducked under the line, a voice said, ‘That’s far enough.’

  Connors felt the skin quiver on his back. Volkert stopped, eased up the brim of his stetson and scanned the front of the lifeless house. ‘Just turn around nice and slow,’ he said quietly. He didn’t look at Connors.

  Bodell stepped out from behind the truck. He had an old Winchester pump shotgun cradled in his left arm. His right hand was on the trigger. His US Army-issue shirt and braces looked as if they had been around since Pearl Harbor, his trousers even longer. Thick with grease and black as crankcase oil, they hung around his thin legs like crumpled stovepipes. A khaki-coloured baseball cap was pulled hard down over deepset eyes.

  ‘Morning, Luke,’ said Volkert. ‘This gentleman here’s from Washington and he’s got some mighty important business that concerns you and Sarah.’

  ‘I sure as hell hope he ain’t come here to try and buy nothing.’ Bodell’s wind-whipped face was as friendly as a clenched fist.

  ‘No, he’s brung you a letter from the President of the United States of America. And that’s a fact, Luke. I seen the envelope myself and your name and Sarah’s is right there on the front of it.’

  Connors pulled the envelope out of his inside pocket and held it out for Bodell to see. Bodell took a couple of steps forward and gingerly took the envelope. He read his name and address with a frown, then turned over the envelope to look at the Presidential seal on the flap. He considered it for a while, then looked at Connors.

  ‘Why the hell would he sit down and write to me? I don’t even know the man.’

  ‘Well, he knows you, Mr Bodell. Your name’s in the history books of World War Two.’

  ‘What’s he care about that? He weren’t nowhere near bein’ President then.’

  ‘No,’ said Connors. ‘But he was on Okinawa.’

  Bodell considered the letter again. He lowered his shotgun. ‘Does he remember that?’

  ‘Yes, he does.’

  ‘I think maybe we should go inside,’ said Bodell.

  The one big barnlike room was partitioned off with old curtains hung on lines that doubled as wardrobes. What furniture there was had been salvaged from junk heaps. There were also books. Piles of them, everywhere. Some on shelves made out of old planks and upended bricks, but most of them on the floor. All kinds of books, secondhand battered books, books with covers missing, books still tied together with string that looked as if they had been bought by weight, still covered with the dust from someone’s attic.

  Connors noticed a Mobil Calendar for 1947 on the wall. Whoever tore off the pages had stopped at the month of November. It wasn’t as bad as Weissmann had said, but Connors felt a long way from home.

  Bodell’s wife Sarah had pale, wispy hair tied tight at the back with baling twine. She was wearing a washed-out, nine-dollar-fifty mail-order dress with an apron over it. Her elbow and wrist bones seemed to be two sizes too big for the rest of her body.

  She hurriedly dusted a chair for Connors, then he sat down at the table with her and Bodell. In the middle of the table was a bunch of yellow wild flowers in a pickle jar. Volkert leaned against the porch door with his arms folded.

  Bodell had the kind of hands that could skin a rabbit in under a minute, but it was painful to watch him trying to open the envelope.

  He studied the letter line by line with the frowning concentration of a graduate reading an exam paper, his mouth half-forming the words. When he had finished, he passed the letter to his wife.

  Despite the piles of books, Connors wasn’t sure whether Bodell or his wife could read very well. Maybe they used them to feed the stove. He decided to explain things rather than risk causing them any embarrassment.

  ‘You see, every year since the President has been in office, he has invited one or more holders of the Congressional Medal of Honor and their wives to be his guests at the White House.’

  ‘What outfit was he with on Okinawa?’ asked Bodell.

  ‘The Air Force,’ said Connors. ‘He flew one of the first bombing missions to Japan after you Marines had secured the island.’ It was a lie, of course, but only a small one. The President’s squadron of B-29s didn’t arrive on Okinawa until after the Enola Gay had dropped the big one on Hiroshima, August 6, 1945.

  ‘That was quite a fight,’ said Bodell.

  His wife Sarah got up from the table, went behind one of the curtained partitions and brought back a bundle of red cloth.

  Bodell carefully unwrapped it and it became a tattered, blood-stained Japanese flag. Connors found himself hoping that he wasn’t in for a rerun of World War Two, then hated himself for thinking that, and thought of how to short-circuit the conversation. All he wanted was to get Bodell on the hook, and up and out of there. The President would do his snow job, and the way would be clear to get at Crusoe.

  Inside the flag were two medal cases, a folded photograph and a string necklace of dog tags. Bodell opened the cases. One was the Medal of Honor, the other the Purple Heart with cluster. They gleamed on the velvet like newly-minted coins, the ribbon colours bright and clear, untouched by time.

  ‘Harry Truman handed them to me,’ said Bodell.

  ‘He was a good man,’ said Connors.

  ‘Yes, he was. They had good men around then.’

  Mrs Bodell had been looking at the photograph. She put it back on the table. It was a news syndicate picture of a young soldier and a girl on the grounds of the White House. A young marine holding an open medal case. The smiling girl, in a shoulder-padded dress and Andrews Sisters haircut, holding another. The medals were the only thing Connors could recognize.

  Bodell fingered the necklace of dog tags like a rosary. ‘They was all my buddies,’ he said. ‘Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima. Okinawa… I was the only one who made it.’

  ‘I know it’s short notice,’ said Connors. ‘But if you’d like to accept his invitation, I could arrange for a car to pick you up tomorrow. There’ll be a plane standing by to fly you to Washington.’

  He gave them both his look of statesmanlike concern. ‘As you and your wife will no doubt appreciate, the President’s schedule is pretty tight. But one thing I can promise you –’ Connors touched the folded photograph. ‘The President will be in the picture with you this time.’

  Bodell looked at his wife for a long moment, then closed the medal cases. ‘Should I take these along with me?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Connors. ‘I think you should.’

  As Bodell rolled his souvenirs
back into the folded flag, Connors knew he had it all wrapped up. Tomorrow, Bodell and his wife would be on their way to Washington, and on Monday, the Corporation would be up on Crow Ridge.

  Volkert took Connors back from Bodell’s house to Broken Mill with the speedometer needle wavering between fifty and sixty. Pebbles from the loose, gravelly surface spurted from under the tyres and whacked against the arches and subframe like machine-gun fire. Behind them, a trail of dust hung in the air. Volkert drove with his left elbow out of the window and his right hand resting on the bottom of the rocking steering wheel. Several times Connors thought they were going to bounce out of the ruts and into the ditch on his side of the car.

  ‘Do you have to take it this close?’

  Volkert looked across at him with a grin. ‘If you’re plannin’ on drivin’ round here, Rule One is to git yourself just as far over to the right as she’ll go without cuttin’ hay.’

  ‘Why’s that?’ asked Connors.

  “Cause the cowboys take their half out of the middle.”

  Having conjured up the spectre of a head-on collision with a speeding car hidden in a dip in the road, Volkert put his foot on the floor and surged towards the next rise at over sixty.

  Connors, who had made the mistake of watching all the slow-motion crash tests on TV, tightened his safety belt into a tourniquet across his stomach and tried not to think of himself curving through an exploding windscreen like those chamois-leather-faced dummies.

  Volkert’s twentieth-century trail lore was sound. As they crested yet another rise, Connors suddenly found himself looking down the throat of a red GMC pickup coming at them up the slope, right out of nowhere. Five seconds slower coming over the top and one foot over to the left and they’d have taken him right in the kisser.

  ‘Whoo-eee…’ said Volkert laconically. His left elbow was still hanging out of the window as they ploughed back on to the road. ‘See what I mean?’

  Connors did – and could have done without the demonstration. This was obviously a Montana version of Russian roulette – probably played for his benefit. It was only four more miles back to Broken Mill but it seemed like four hundred.

  They found the waiting Air Force helicopter surrounded by a small crowd of young kids. The two pilots were doing a great recruiting job.

  Volkert shepherded the kids back out of the way as Connors climbed gratefully into the cabin. Up front, the pilot wound up the rotors to takeoff speed, then lifted off, nose down over the patrol car and away in a steep climbing turn towards the north.

  Connors saw the kids wave to him and waved back. When he’d been young, it was always something he’d wanted people in aeroplanes to do.

  GLASGOW AFB/MONTANA

  Greg Mitchell was waiting by the landing pad when the helicopter touched down at Glasgow AFB. He ducked in under the whirling blades and escorted Connors over to the same Air Force Chevy.

  ‘General Clayson’s over in the Base Commander’s office with a couple of aides.’

  ‘Have you talked to him?’

  ‘No, but Arnold’s over there.’

  ‘Did that guy Volkert get through to you with my message about Bodell?’

  ‘Yes. I’ve fixed up transportation. We’ll have them out on schedule.’

  They rode the rest of the way to the Base Commander’s office in silence. The two-man KP detail sweeping the path stood aside to let them through. Connors shook his head. ‘We’ve barely started and already there are more people involved than on de Mille’s Ten Commandments. How are we going to keep them all from sounding off?’

  ‘We could always recruit them on to the project.’

  ‘That’s not a bad idea,’ said Connors. ‘Maybe we could work on that. What about the Crash and Rescue Team?’

  ‘They’ve been reassigned to Thule in Greenland. Flew out this morning. That still leaves another twenty or so up at Glasgow with some peripheral involvement – and that deputy who was up on Crow Ridge at the time of the crash. Volkert.’

  ‘I don’t think we need worry too much about him,’ said Connors.

  ‘You mean he’s too dumb to realize what’s going on?’

  ‘No, I wouldn’t call him dumb,’ said Connors, ‘but he’s certainly not about to rush out and discover gravity. What about those other guys from the county sheriffs office who were up on Crow Ridge the day after the crash?’

  ‘They’re covered.’

  ‘What about the local newspapers? If they’re like the ones back home, you only have to sneeze and they print your name and address and where you bought the Kleenex. If they pick it up, the wire services may – ’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Greg. ‘The Corporation is taking care of all that.’

  The outer office was secured by a captain from the base and Clayson’s two Air Force aides. The captain bore the look of someone who had expected to have the whole of the weekend off. One of Clayson’s aides took them on through.

  ‘Bob. Nice to see you.’ Clayson got up from behind the Base Commander’s desk. Wedderkind was sitting over on the sofa. ‘Arnold’s been telling me about the legal problem you ran into.’

  ‘We should have the all clear on that by midday Monday. Right now, we’ve got a bigger problem. Has Arnold told you about the cutoff zone round the crater?’

  ‘He’s told me he thinks it’s an alternating magnetic field, generated by whatever is buried down there.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘And that it has a neutralizing effect on electrical current.’

  ‘That’s it. As soon as any electrical system enters the field, a surge starts to build up in the current. This overloads the circuit to the point where – depending on the system – it burns out, blows a fuse, or trips the circuit breaker that automatically shuts off the power when the circuit becomes overloaded. Which is great, because all you have to do is reset the cutout to switch everything back on. But as fast as you do that, the surge builds up and the circuit cuts out again.’

  ‘We haven’t tested the field exhaustively,’ said Wedderkind. ‘But the preliminary experiments carried out along the access road indicate that the effect of the surge is weakest on the extreme edge of the field – about a quarter of a mile from the crater. As you move inward, there’s a rapid, and rather dramatic, buildup. The magnetometer we took with us wasn’t calibrated far enough. The reading went right off the dial.’

  ‘And we’re also screwed for transportation,’ said Connors. ‘If we want to move any heavy equipment into the cutout zone, we’ll have to use diesel-engine trucks. We’ll have to pull out the electric starters, and fit cartridge starters like the Air Force uses on their jet engines. That’s going to need some snappy conversion work. I don’t quite know what we’ll do for lighting.’

  ‘Acetylene lamps,’ said Greg. ‘Beyond that quarter-mile radius, of course, you should be able to use all the normal equipment.’

  ‘I hope you can.’ Clayson looked worried. ‘Communications are getting to be a big problem. The radar wavelengths are still jammed, the fade-out on the TV and radio wavelengths has got worse. And we’re starting to get some bad line interference too.’

  Connors looked at Wedderkind, then back at Clayson. ‘How’s the world taking that?’

  Clayson shrugged. ‘It’s hard to get the whole picture from Washington, but we seem to be building towards a global-sized jam in the telecommunications network. If we don’t get a break soon, the wires are going to burn out.’

  ‘We’re going to need some lines of communication ourselves,’ said Connors. ‘Can the Air Force get us hooked up to Washington?’

  ‘The Air Force has troubles of its own,’ said Clayson. ‘Hell, have you forgotten? We’ve lost contact with all our military navigation, and communications satellites as well. We’ve got a major operational crisis on our hands.’

  ‘You’ll be able to handle it,’ said Connors.

  ‘Yes… I’ll see what I can do.’

  ‘Give it top priority, Chuck. We could find ourselves in a s
ituation that needs a fast call to the White House. I want to be able to pick up a phone and get straight through.’

  ‘Right now, I can only guarantee one thing,’ said Clayson. ‘If it’s urgent, we’ll fly you there.’

  ‘Great,’ said Connors. ‘I’m going to end my life as a carrier pigeon.’

  ‘There’s one other thing worrying me. How is this solar radiation theory going to hold up? We’ve had over a week of intense fade-out and my people tell me that there’s no observable flare activity on the sun at the moment. Everyone with a telescope is going to know that too. Aren’t they going to start asking questions?’

  ‘They already are,’ said Wedderkind. ‘But the marvellous thing is they’re already coming up with answers. There’s nothing scientists like more than proving that their colleagues have got hold of the wrong end of the theoretical stick. Right now, the freak-solar-flare school is standing around with egg on their faces. The current theory is that the fade-out is caused by a prolonged burst of deep-space radiation.’

  ‘Where from?’ asked Clayson.

  ‘No one knows. All our radio telescopes are out. But there’s some talk that a quasar might have gone supernova.’

  Connors grinned. ‘That’s not a bad theory. Crusoe is the source of the interference and he is from deep space.’

  ‘Yes, but there’s one thing that worries me,’ said Wedderkind. ‘Fraser used the times that the radar stations broke down to prove that Crusoe wrapped a residual band of interference clear around the globe while he was in orbit. If he’s under Crow Ridge, and if he is the cause of the fade-out, then he must be doing it in a different way.’

  ‘Do I gather you no longer think Crusoe’s propulsion unit is the cause of the interference?’ asked Clayson.

  ‘That idea still holds, but only just. What’s beating me is how the interference is spread so evenly through the whole atmosphere. I would have expected some falloff the further you got from Montana.’

  ‘Maybe he’s beaming it right through the Earth and out the other side,’ said Greg.

  ‘I’ll go one better than that,’ said Connors. ‘Maybe there’s still a mother ship in orbit.’