“You mean to help,” Matt said. “I appreciate that. But it would be better if you didn’t stay.”
“I know. Thank you for the examination.”
She stood up and seemed ready to leave, then frowned and tugged at his sleeve. “Dr. Wheeler…”
“Yes?”
“It’s about your daughter.…” He felt a deep interior chill. “Rachel? What about her?”
“You should talk to her. You haven’t really talked to her since Contact. She misses you.”
“How do you know that?”
It had become the great unanswerable question. Cindy just shrugged—sadly.
“Talk to Rachel, Dr. Wheeler.”
* * *
There wasn’t much more meeting. Chuck Makepeace said they should invest in a few copies of Robert’s Rules of Order and elect a chairman at the next meeting. Matt agreed. Tim Belanger volunteered to take minutes next time. Abby Cushman said they would need a name—“You can’t have us just be nameless.”—and were there any suggestions? Abby herself thought “Committee of the Last True Human Beings” would be good.
“Too confrontational,” Makepeace said. “That’s not what we’re about.”
Jacopetti raised his hand. “Committee of Cockeyed Optimists. Council of Lost Causes.”
Matt said he thought it could be the “Emergency Planning Committee” for the time being. Heads nodded, though Abby seemed disappointed.
It was past ten o’clock and people were eager to leave. Matt asked them to write their names, addresses, and phone numbers on a piece of paper, which he would photocopy and distribute to everyone on the list along with an announcement of the next get-together. Meeting adjourned. Beth and Joey Commoner were first out the door; Miriam Flett, last. Matt stood at the window watching cars pull out of the parking lot.
Tom Kindle wheeled himself to the door. “Care to push me as far as the elevator? Jeez, I hate this fuckin’ chair.”
“You’ll be walking before long.” Matt guided the chair down the semidarkened corridor. The walls were painted a shade of green that was supposed to be soothing but looked, under the ceiling fluorescents, unearthly. Kindle wouldn’t be alone in this cavernous building—there was still a skeleton night staff on duty—but in some other sense he would be very alone, and Matt felt sorry for him.
“So,” Kindle said, “are you going to take the girl’s advice?”
“You heard that?”
“A little. None of my business, of course. Didn’t know you had a daughter.”
“I used to.” He rang for the elevator and worked to keep the bitterness out of his voice. “I’m not sure I do anymore.”
Chapter 16
The Battle of U.S. 95
The problem, John Tyler thought, was that all the armies had gone home, all the factories had closed their doors, all the Congressional committees had adjourned forever—and where did that leave him?
Sidelined. Down, in other words. But not out.
Tyler lived alone in a two-story Georgian-style townhouse in Arlington, Virginia. He had equipped the spare bedroom with a formidable array of Nautilus exercise equipment, and in the days after his unproductive conversation with the Chief Executive he spent a great deal of time working out.
Tyler was a month away from his fifty-second birthday, and though he was in fairly good civilian trim, he wanted more: He wanted to be in fighting shape. At his age, it was a difficult proposition. Not that it couldn’t be done. But he was paying for the effort. The token of exchange in this bargain was pain. First the obvious pain of a hard workout, the pain he took to a certain brink and backed away from. Then the stealthy pain that crept up in the night—the aching tendons, the protesting spine, the humiliating discomforts that sent him to the drugstore in search of Ben-Gay, Tylenol, something to help him sleep, something to help him move his bowels.
But there came a time when he was able to look at himself in the full-length bedroom mirror without flinching. Taut chest, lean belly tapering into the waistband of his Jockey shorts, firm legs. Gray stubble hair on his head and a down of gray hair on chest and limbs. It seemed to Tyler that he had created something good here, a reflection he could take some pride in. Appearances had always mattered to Tyler a great deal.
But the important thing was that he was fit for duty.
If anyone could be fit for the kind of duty he had in mind.
* * *
On the second Monday in October he took his old Army jacket out of mothballs, decided he liked the way it looked over a crisp white shirt and dress pants, and climbed into his car and headed for the Marine base at Quantico.
The Virginia countryside was deep in a sweet-tempered autumn. The sky was blue and the full blush of color was on the woods. The highway was mainly empty—as most highways were these days.
Tyler had given a great deal of thought to the crisis facing the country, and he rehearsed his logic as he drove. The problem, he thought once again, was that all the armies had gone home, and how do you engage an enemy without an army?
Guerrilla warfare was the obvious response to an occupying power of superior strength… but you still needed an infantry, a militia, a power base. “The revolutionary moves among the people like a fish in the sea.” Mao Tse-tung. But “the people” had been coopted. The fish was beached. Tyler had seen videotape of African armies, Central American armies, Asian and European and even Israeli and American armies, rabble and trained troops alike, laying down their arms, bailing out of tanks, abandoning trenches and revetments like something from a hippie pipe dream of the sixties. It had happened from Ethiopia to Lebanon, from Turkestan to Latin America, and it had happened without exception.
But it seemed to Tyler that even this defeat could be used to his advantage. Weapons that were rusting in the field couldn’t be turned on an insurgency. He could move among this pacified population, not like a fish in the sea, more like-—say—a shark among the minnows or a whale among the kill.
But not by himself. One could be outnumbered. One ought not to be alone.
One in ten thousand, the President had told him.
Tyler didn’t know if that was a reliable statistic. It surely wasn’t an encouraging one. But the military had been a major employer prior to Contact, and even if the situation was as bleak as it seemed, he should be able to find one or two good men.
Maybe he’d waited too long. Maybe the plan he had devised wouldn’t work… but that remained to be seen.
* * *
Quantico was a disappointment.
Last month, the Marine Reservation had been a hive of activity. Local newscasts had shown an apparently endless relay of Hercules transport aircraft buzzing in and out, part of the post-Contact grain airlift to the famine zones of the world.
But that airlift was over now, and the huge USMC complex at Quantico appeared to be deserted. He drove among these brick buildings and overgrown parade fields honking his horn until he grew weary of the echoes rolling back.
He drove to the main gate, stopped his car, and opened the trunk. Sunlight warmed the skin of his neck and dappled the huge statue of the Iwo Jima flagraising. From the trunk, he unwound ten yards of bright orange rip-stop nylon on which he had painted, painstakingly, in letters of waterproof black acrylic, the words:
Any Member of the Aimed Forces Remaining on Duty
Call Colonel John Tyler (202)212-5555
or Report to 731 Portage Street Arlington ASAP
God Bless the USA
He had sewn nylon cords into the fabric at several points, and he attached these to the fenceposts so that the banner hung suspended across the road.
The nylon drooped in the still air, but the message was easy to read.
* * *
Over the course of a week and a half Tyler constructed similar banners and left them at smaller military installations from Baltimore down to Richmond. Every evening, he checked his answering machine for messages. To date: None.
On his trips, Tyler was able to m
onitor the evolution of the new world. Superficially, not much had changed. Traffic was substantially lighter, especially on the interstates. Tyler saw more people out walking than there used to be, and fewer at work. A lot of small businesses (muffler shops, hairstylists, bookstores) were closed or unattended. People were still running the food stores and shopping at the malls, but he wondered how much longer that would last. Come to that, he wondered how several hundred thousand military and government employees were surviving without paychecks.
The thought was intriguing enough that Tyler tried an experiment. He went into a suburban Arlington grocery store—not in his neighborhood—and filled a cart with canned goods and bottled water. When he came to the checkout he told the clerk, “I don’t have any money. I used to work for HUD.”
He expected security guards. Instead, the clerk—a chubby young redhead wearing a nametag that said “Sally”—smiled and waved him through.
So why was anybody paying? Tyler lingered by the door and took an eyeball survey of the tills. According to his count, it was roughly half and half—half paid, half didn’t. Those who did seemed to be operating mainly by force of habit. Tyler guessed that paying for what you take was a reflex deeply entrenched in the American psyche—not an easy habit to break. It continued regardless, like the Major League playoffs. But he guessed the country was already well on the way to a moneyless economy.
Perfect communism, he thought, as practiced by perfect robots.
Tyler heard a voice inside him say, You’re surrounded by monsters.
It was Sissy’s voice. Sissy was an old, sad ghost. Tyler squared his shoulders and paid no attention. Sissy had been telling him he was surrounded by monsters since the day he was born.
* * *
Over the years, all his memories of Sissy had condensed into a single image. Here was Sissy as she appeared in his dreams: A middle-aged woman in a swaddling of canvas and polyester skirts, two sweaters buttoned over her pillowing breasts, gypsy-bright and red-faced, pushing a wire buggy full of old newspapers on a too-bright city sidewalk.
A bag lady, as they would say nowadays. She was his mother.
His father had been a salesman for a company that sold plastic novelty cups on which the name of a business could be printed in gold flash. The cup Tyler drank from for the first seven years of his life was inscribed with the legend Fletcher’s taxidermy, 33 east fith st, Cincinnati. When Tyler learned to read—he taught himself to read at the age of four years—he discovered the word FIFTH had been misspelled. Which made him cry, for no good reason he could think of. By then, his father was long gone.
His mother (she demanded he call her Sissy) lived in an ancient three-story row house on a hilly street in an urban neighborhood declining toward slum status. She owned the house. Sometime in her younger days, Sissy had inherited money from an aunt in Pittsburgh. Sissy had been young and childless and perhaps, Tyler thought, aware of her own impending dementia. She had bought the row house outright and put the remainder of the money in a trust, which issued her a monthly check.
Tyler’s father had come and gone without gaining access to any of this money. Sissy, a cautious woman by nature, had remained tightfisted even as the world began to slip past comprehension.
Tyler wasn’t sure when he figured out that Sissy was crazy. Probably some other child had been kind enough to let him know. Hey, Tyler, your mothers dressed like Freddy the Freeloader! Hey, Tyler, your house smells like shit!
He learned early on that the best response was a firm and uncompromising Fuck you. It got him beat up a lot. But in the long run, it also got him left alone. And it taught him a valuable lesson about people. You could be afraid of them or you could hate them; those were your choices. Anything else was a trap… a temptation to punishment.
He hated and feared Sissy, but she was also the exception to the rule. Although she was insane, Sissy was still his mother. She fed him, sporadically; she clothed him, eccentrically. She was supposed to care about him, and she was capable of hurting him with her indifference.
He could tolerate the indifference of anyone but Sissy.
That was why, when he went to school for the first time in his life—five days late and in the company of a truant officer—he was driven to tears when everyone laughed at his torn pants, his food-stained shirt.
Not because he cared what they thought. It was Sissy who had wounded him, Sissy who had sent him off so badly dressed.
Sissy, why?
Didn’t she know any better?
Obviously, she didn’t. Sissy had moved into a land where reason and custom had given way to bright strokes of invisible lightning, fearsome revelations too private to share. Sissy, the adult Tyler recognized, had been schizophrenic. Sissy had been defending her home by stockpiling it with garbage and rags, and it was a miracle she had dressed him at all.
Sissy had been dead now for many years. But she visited Tyler regularly and she wasn’t shy about making her opinions known.
* * *
The phone call came while he was watching television. Tyler had installed a satellite dish on the roof and an illegal descrambler in his living room. The descrambler was a neat little sync regenerator based on a CMOS chip and a 3.58 MHz oscillator. He could decode anything, including C-SPAN, HBO, and military broadcasts—not that any of these were on the air anymore.
In fact, since mid-October, there had been only a couple of hours of national TV a day—skeleton CNN broadcasts, mostly coverage of the disarming of the world and the continuous slow unwinding of the octahedrons.
It was this last that interested Tyler. Today, another bright autumn morning, windows open and a breeze tangling the curtains, he sipped a diet soda and watched a videotape of a lone Helper, so-called, gliding along an empty highway near Atlanta.
He was fascinated by the look of it. Seven feet of matte-black formless menace. It was a “Helper” the way Stalin had been “Uncle Joe.”
These curious items had been unwinding steadily from their octahedral bases in New York and Los Angeles, spreading out, forming a network across the country—the world—for purposes unannounced. You can call them Helpers, Tyler thought, but he recognized an occupation force when he saw one.
What would you need to take out one of these dreadnoughts? Well, Tyler thought, let me see… And then, as if in answer, the telephone rang. He stood up from the chair with his heart battering his ribs. Christ! How long since he’d heard that sound?
He had just about given up waiting.
He thumbed the mute button on the remote TV control and snatched up the telephone handset. “Hello?”
It’ll be a wrong number, he thought. Some Contactee who dialed a 5 instead of a 6. Or did they still make such human errors?
“Colonel Tyler?” asked a male voice.
“Speaking,” he managed.
“Saw your sign, sir. Down at Quantico.” Pause. “One of the strings came loose, but I hooked it up again.”
“I thank you for that,” Tyler said. “Are you a Marine?”
Turned out he was, a fairly raw one: a weapons specialist, twenty-one years old. “Name’s A.W. Murdoch.”
“What’s the A for?”
“Alphonse, I’m sorry to say.”
“I’m sorry to hear it. I won’t ask about the W. Do I understand you managed to turn down the invitation to Life Eternal?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, then, we ought to get together.”
“We will. Uh, Colonel Tyler… I take it you’re thinking of offering some resistance here? Meaning no offense, I’m not in need of company for company’s sake. I thought, from your sign, you’d probably want to kick a little ass?”
Eager young buck, Tyler thought. Well, so am I. Eager, at least. “I think that’s a safe assumption. When can I see you?”
“You can see me right now if you step to the window, sir.”
Tyler did so. He peered down from his second-story bay window into the sunny street. Parked there…
&
nbsp; …parked on a quiet tree-lined Arlington avenue…
…was a camouflage-brown M998 Hummer, the one-and-three-quarter-ton vehicle that had replaced the Jeep of Tyler’s youth, a sturdy and versatile machine…
… on the roof of which was mounted an M-109 TOW launcher, a tank killer par excellence, looking a little like a ray gun from an old science fiction movie…
… or like an answer to a prayer, Tyler thought…
…and grinning up from the interior of this vehicle was a lanky blond youth whose regulation haircut had grown a little shaggy but whose uniform remained relatively clean, holding in his right hand what appeared to be a cellular phone.
Obviously a smart-ass, Tyler thought, but a smart-ass bearing gifts.
Murdoch saluted, squinting into the sunlight.
“It appears we have a lot to talk about,” Tyler said.
“I’ll be right up, sir.”
“No. I’ll be right down.”
* * *
Tyler had learned how to establish a certain tone in male conversation, a certain rank. In the military, the rules of conduct were explicit. In civilian conversation the matter was more subtle; thus it was important to take command and do so quickly. It was the inability to take command that had frustrated him during his interview with the President, which was still a sore memory. He’d been off balance, at a disadvantage; taking a pistol to the White House was an impulse he should never have obeyed in the first place. It was hasty.
Here, the situation favored Tyler.
A. W. Murdoch was an active Marine Sergeant. John Tyler was a retired Army officer, technically a civilian, a superior officer by courtesy only. But it started well, Tyler thought, when Murdoch addressed him as “sir.” Given that, Tyler thought, all else falls into place.