The Harvest

  Soo listened attentively but began to frown, and he hurried to change the subject: “Then came Contact, you know, and then I met Colonel Tyler and we started this little cross-country turkey shoot.”

  “ Turkey shoot?”

  “Well, you saw the Helper—what happened to it.”

  “Uh-huh. Big mess, frankly. Took out the window at the five-and-dime and the rain came in and mint the magazine rack. You guys do that a lot?”

  He wasn’t sure whether he ought to boast or confess. “Maybe twenty times, twenty different towns since October.”

  “Isn’t it dangerous?”

  “The Helpers don’t fight back.” They don’t have to, Murdoch thought. “I mean, dangerous for regular people. Like civilians.”

  “We haven’t killed anybody so far.”

  She nibbled her thumb. “I don’t want to hurt your feelings, A.W., but it seems kind of pointless. Like, the Helpers almost back together again.”

  “We only just found out they can do that. But is it sensible, you mean? Soo, I don’t know. Colonel Tyler thinks so.”

  The taste of her skin, her lips, was still in his mouth. Murdoch thought: We smell like each other.

  “Going to do it some more?”

  “The TOW shoots?” He shrugged. “Maybe I won’t. Colonel Tyler… I can’t speak for him. Sometimes I think…”

  “What?”

  “He’s maybe not the world’s most stable individual.”

  “You didn’t look that stable yourself, this morning.” Her smile was mischievous.

  He shook his head at the memory. “Well, Christ… skins!”

  “Come on… it’s not so terrible.”

  He looked at her sidelong. “You said those people, what, faded away?”

  “Kind of. You know, A.W., it was something they decided to do. It’s how they wanted it. Maybe in some other town more people stayed in their flesh. Around here—I guess it sounds stupid, but there isn’t that much to do. You remember Contact? Travellers said in time people might not want the flesh? Well, that’s all this is. Mrs. Corvallis, she used to run the hair salon, she rented me a basement room—I watched her go. We were friends. I sat with her a lot. Toward the end she was just—I don’t know how to describe it—very pale. You could tell she was going. She was like china. Like porcelain. Almost shiny, light as a bag of feathers. The Travellers were holding her together until the end. A.W., you know what they call neocytes?”

  He nodded. He’d heard the word from a medic at Quantico, shortly after Contact.

  “Well, the neocytes kept her together. Until she was living mainly on the other side, hardly here at all. Then one morning I knocked on her door and nobody answered and when I went in her skin was there, all empty. It wasn’t so bad. She was happy about it.”

  But Murdoch couldn’t suppress a shudder. “It was her choice—you honestly think so?”

  “I know it.”

  “Horrible,” Murdoch said.

  “A.W., what’s the alternative? When you die, you know, you leave your skin behind, too… and considerably more than that. It gets buried in the ground and rots. This was cleaner—and it wasn’t death.” She was still smiling, but gently, almost absently. “What was Contact like for you?”

  “Same as for everybody,” he murmured—softly, because a terrible suspicion had touched him and lingered a moment before he could dismiss it.

  “No,” she said, “for you. I really want to know.”

  “The Travellers came that night in August and they made an offer. What else is there to say?”

  “You turned them down.”

  “Obviously.”

  “Any particular reason?”

  “I think—no, it’s stupid.”

  She focused her large eyes on him. “Tell me, A.W.”

  “When we moved from L. A. up to Mendocino County, I used to follow my father around those woods. Big Pacific woods. I was nine or ten years old and it scared the shit out of me—redwoods, helicopters, but not just that: it was the bigness of everything. I got lost once. Only for maybe half an hour. I sat under a tree until my old man found me. But I couldn’t help thinking about the woods rolling on for miles all the way to the sea, the sea big enough to cover up every place I’d ever lived and everyone I knew, and a sky big enough to drown the sea—shit. Does this make any sense?”

  Soo nodded gravely.

  Murdoch was embarrassed, but he went on talking almost in spite of himself. “I don’t think I trusted anything after that unless I could hold it in my hand or take it apart. Contact sounded real good, you know, in its own way. I’m not ashamed to admit that. But it was like being out in those woods again. Everything was so—” There wasn’t a word for this feeling. “Big.”

  “So you said no.”

  Murdoch nodded.

  “A.W.—did you ever regret it?”

  “You mean, would I do it the same way over again? I don’t know.” He thought of the skins. “It still scares the shit out of me, frankly.”

  “Maybe if there was somebody with you.”

  He looked at Soo a long time in the dim light. “But that’s not possible.”

  “I think it might be.”

  “They said—the Travellers said—Soo, the neocytes aren’t inside me anymore.”

  “A.W., if you want a second chance, I think it could be arranged.”

  He backed away across the sheets. “How would you know that? I mean, how would you know?”

  She looked deeply worried. “Is it possible to fall in love with someone in less than a day? It wouldn’t surprise me. Because I think I did. Stupid me.” She sighed. “No, they aren’t inside you. But they can be if you want them. It would be as easy as a touch, A.W. A kiss. If you want them. It’s not too late.”

  Murdoch couldn’t think clearly. He grabbed his pants and pulled them on, backed against a wall and stared at her. He summoned words and the words spilled out: “I thought you were human!”

  “Oh, God. I am! I just wanted to stay this way a while longer. It’s a choice, A.W., it really is. I like my skin. There’s skin in the new life, too, I mean it’s not just angels floatin’ around heaven, but… I wanted to have my Earth skin and be in Loftus a while longer.” She hung her head. She looked weirdly penitent, like a little girl caught stealing cookies. “I should have told you!”

  He thought of what he’d seen this morning, dry parchment in the shape of an arm, a hand, fingertips. He looked at Soo. This skin he’d just touched. He imagined it empty and dropping like isinglass, perhaps blowing down the street in a strong wind.

  God help me, Murdoch thought, I held her in my arms! And all along…

  … all along, she had been one of them…

  … one of them, under her skin…

  “A.W.,” she said, “please don’t leave. Please! I’ll explain.”

  The monster wanted to explain.

  Murdoch shook his head and ran for the door. He left most of his uniform behind. He didn’t want his uniform. There were other clothes. He wanted this cold rain to wash him. He wanted it to wash him clean.

  * * *

  John Tyler placed his service revolver on the desk opposite the bed where he could see it. He was reassured by the sight of the weapon. It was substantial and weighty. It was like an investment, Tyler thought, something withheld until its value increased.

  He was thinking about loyalty.

  Loyalty was the fundamental thing, Tyler thought. Loyalty was normalcy reduced to its essentials. Loyalty allowed no room to maneuver. Loyalty was precise.

  He had begun to entertain doubts about Murdoch’s loyalty.

  Tyler was sitting at the rainswept window watching the dark main street of Loftus when Murdoch came stumbling back to the hotel.

  Murdoch was a ludicrous sight, naked above the waist and barefoot, mincing over patches of broken glass in the midnight rain.

  It might have been funny, except for its implications about what Murdoch had said and refrained from saying… implica
tions about this town and about Murdoch’s loyalty to Tyler.

  He listened through the wall as Murdoch let himself into the adjoining room. There wasn’t much to hear. The shower ran for a long time before the room grew quiet again.

  Tyler eased back into his chair.

  He had been without sleep for two days, and he hadn’t left this room since Murdoch took him down to see the Helper rebuilding itself. This was his madness come back again, Tyler recognized, but he had forgotten that madness was also clarity; madness was the ability to see things as they really were, to make decisions he might not otherwise be capable of making.

  He could even admit that this might be a form of Sissy’s madness, a madness he had inherited. Sissy had heard voices. Tonight Tyler heard a crowded confusion of voices hovering on the edge of intelligibility; and if he listened closely he thought the sound might resolve into words, the same words, perhaps, that had frightened and exalted his mother. But Tyler wasn’t interested in voices. They were what the doctors called an epiphenomenon, a secondary symptom, like the curious sterility of the yellow light radiating from the room’s electric bulbs, or the sour odor of stale tobacco smoke that had begun to seep from every surface. Perhaps Sissy could be deceived by such trivia; Tyler was different.

  What interested him was the clarity, the speed of his thoughts. He was able to see the threads of significance that bound one event to another in a complex web of meaning.

  It was both hideous and quite beautiful.

  Colonel Tyler examined it, turned it this way and that in his mind, this glittering web, as the hours marched toward daylight. The rain had been falling now for forty-eight hours.

  * * *

  Murdoch knocked on his door early the next morning.

  Tyler rose and walked to the door and opened it just as Murdoch was preparing to knock a second time.

  “Sir,” Murdoch said, “I’ve reconsidered, and I think you were right. I think we should pull out of this town.”

  Tyler surveyed the younger man. “You look shitty, Mr. Murdoch. You look like you haven’t slept.”

  Murdoch blinked. “No offense, sir, but you’re no bed of roses yourself.”

  “It’s still raining,” Tyler said, savoring this.

  “Sir, yes it is, but—”

  “You made a convincing case about navigating these mountain roads in the rain.”

  “Well, as you yourself said, sir, we shouldn’t be scared by a little rain. I think—”

  “No. You were eloquent on the subject. We have to be careful. We can’t phone 911 if we slide off a mountainside. It’s a new world, Mr. Murdoch.”

  “Yes, sir, ” Murdoch said miserably. “But—”

  “We can afford to stay another day.”

  Murdoch seemed to surrender; he bowed his head. “Yes, sir.”

  “Or longer.”

  “Sir?”

  “Depending on the weather.”

  * * *

  Tyler was buoyed by this small victory, and in the afternoon he felt well enough to brave the rain. He ducked across the street to a clothing store, found a yellow rain slicker, and wore it for protection as he explored the immediate neighborhood of the hotel.

  The town was small and might not contain what he was looking for… but then again, it might.

  He stalked the rain-washed streets of Loftus with his gaze aimed at each shingled roof he passed. He was scouting for an antenna.

  Some of these houses were equipped with ancient rooftop television antennas; some had satellite dishes mounted on their lawns like enormous mushrooms. Most, Tyler presumed, were wired for cable. But it wasn’t a TV antenna he was hunting for. Tyler walked on, a strange figure in his yellow raincoat, the only color and motion in these gray and empty streets.

  By five o’clock, the light had nearly failed. Tyler was preparing to turn back when he looked east on one of these narrow residential streets and saw a tower silhouetted against the blue-black sky—a radio tower with a beam antenna mounted on it.

  Smiling to himself, Tyler hurried down the block to the pertinent house and kicked open the front door. The lights blazed on at the touch of a switch. It was amazing, he thought, and maybe it was more than amazing, that the power hadn’t failed. In every one of these whistlestop towns they’d passed through, the wall plates continued to offer 120 volts of AC as reliably as ever—maybe more reliably. It was a mystery… but Tyler set it it aside for later pondering.

  Inside the house, he found two of the skins Murdoch had talked about. He regarded these relics with a faint distaste, probing them with his shoe. The skins were dry and snaky and he understood Murdoch’s alarm.

  But they were harmless dead things, too, and Tyler was able to ignore them.

  In the basement he found what he’d been looking for: a small room decorated with QSO cards and antique code keys, and on a knotty pine desk, a Kenwood radio transceiver of recent vintage.

  Tyler switched on the machine to make sure it worked. The faceplate lit up; static whispered from the speaker.

  Who might be out there? Out there even now, Tyler thought, voices buried in this whisper of noise.

  Maybe no one, Tyler thought. Or maybe a population of survivors. One in ten thousand Americans was still a large group of people. Such a population would know nothing about him. None of them would know about Stuttgart or any other of his long nights; none of them would know he had held a gun on the President. Among such people, he would have essentially no past. He could be a new thing; he could be what he looked like in a mirror.

  He tuned the radio with scrupulous care. He was disappointed by its silence, but he persisted for hours, until long after dark, until he heard the faint sound of Joey Commoner talking to Boston, Massachusetts.

  * * *

  When Tyler analyzed the events that followed, his verdict was: I shouldn’t have played with the pistol. It was the pistol that made things go bad.

  When he came back to the hotel he found Murdoch frying hamburgers on the hot plate. Tyler wasn’t hungry; his headache had gotten worse. After dinner, Murdoch hauled a case of beer into the room. Tyler matched him bottle for bottle. It was a stupid thing to do, under the circumstances. The alcohol affected his judgment.

  He talked long and volubly and perhaps not too coherently about the large things on his mind: about loyalty and sanity. “In the end,” he told Murdoch, “it comes down to obedience. Obedience and sanity are the same word—wouldn’t you agree, Mr. Murdoch?”

  Murdoch—who had been nervous to begin with and seemed no better for his massive intake of Coors—looked at Tyler wearily. “Tell the truth, sir, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “That’s a hell of an admission.”

  “Is it? What’s that supposed to mean?” Now Murdoch was angry. “It’s an insult, right? Jesus. I swear I don’t understand you. Half the time you come on like a good old Army boy, half the time you sound like some faggot college professor. I don’t even know why we do this military routine. Aye sir, Colonel sir. Just because you’re walking around like you have a ramrod up your ass. Salute me, I’m wonderful. Well, fuck it. It’s not just stupid, John, it’s not even sane.”

  Tyler was stung by the extremity of this.

  “Epictetus,” he said.

  Murdoch, exasperated: “What?”

  “The Discourses. ‘Why, then, do you walk as if you had swallowed a ramrod?’ Epictetus. He was a Stoic. An educated Roman slave. You shouldn’t insult me, Mr. Murdoch.”

  “All I meant—”

  But Tyler’s attention had strayed to the pistol on the side table. Spontaneously, in a motion that seemed to belong to his hands alone, he picked the weapon up.

  Murdoch’s eyes widened.

  It was an old-fashioned revolver. Tyler opened it to show Murdoch the chamber. “Empty,” he said. Then he took a single bullet from the tabletop, displayed it between his right thumb and forefinger, and placed it in the pistol.

  Or pretended to. In fact, he palmed the b
ullet… but Murdoch didn’t see.

  “One round,” Tyler said.

  He spun the chamber without looking at it.

  He raised the pistol to his own head. The act was familiar, but he had never performed it in the presence of another man. It made him feel strange, dizzy, not altogether connected to Murdoch or this room or the exterior world in general.

  He looked steadily at Murdoch as he pulled the trigger. Click!

  He spun the chamber again.

  “That’s the advantage I have over you, you lame little fuck. That I’m capable of this.”

  Perhaps Murdoch, the weapons specialist, was visualizing the internal working of the pistol, the firing pin as it came down on empty air—or not. Click!

  “I can do this without flinching. Now. Can you?”

  Murdoch huddled away from the barrel of the pistol. He looked pinned in his chair by an invisible wind. His Adam’s apple bobbed in his throat, a motion Tyler watched with fascination. It looked like there was something inside him trying to get out, something more substantial than a word.

  “Christ,” Murdoch said in a strangled voice, “please, Christ Jesus, don’t!”

  “This is why you call me sir. You understand?”

  “Yes! Yes, sir!”

  “I doubt it.” Click!

  “Christ, Christ, put the gun away, Jesus, don’t do this to me!” Murdoch was rigid with terror. His hands were clamped on the arms of the chair. In the sterile light of the hotel room, Murdoch’s wristwatch was clearly visible. Tyler watched the numerals blink. He counted thirty seconds, then he lowered the pistol.

  He looked at Murdoch and smiled. “We’ll leave in the morning,” he said.