A glow was paling the windows by the time Michael finished. He doused the lantern and rose from his chair as Morning Bell began to peal-three solid rings followed by a pause of identical duration, then three more in case you didn’t get the message the first time (it’s morning; you’re alive)-and crossed the mazelike clutter of the narrow room with its plastic bins of parts and scattered tools and dirty dishes in teetering piles (why Elton couldn’t just eat in the barracks Michael had no idea; the man was just flat-out disgusting), stepped to the breaker panel, and powered down the lights. A wave of weary satisfaction washed through him, as it always did at Morning Bell: one more night’s work accomplished, all souls safe and sound to face another day. Let’s see Alicia and her blades do that. (And wasn’t it true that when he’d lifted his face to see the logbook, it had been the image of Alicia in his mind that had distracted him? As it sometimes-often-did? And not just Alicia but the specific picture of sunlight flaring her hair as she had stepped from the Armory that very evening, Michael moving down the path toward her, unseen? An image that was, as he considered it again, quite striking? All this despite the fact that Alicia Donadio was, in point of fact, the single most annoying woman on earth, not that there was such a vast field of competitors?) He returned to the panel and moved through the steps, flipping the cells to charge, turning on the fans and opening the vents; the meters, which stood at 28 percent across the board, began to flicker and rise.
He swiveled to look at Elton, who appeared to be dozing in his chair, though it was sometimes hard to tell. Waking and sleeping, Elton’s eyes were always the same, two thin strips of yellow jelly, peeking through slitted eyelids of perpetually tearing dampness that never quite managed to close. His pale hands were folded over the curve of his belly, the earphones, as always, clamped to the sides of his scaly head, pumping out the music he listened to all night. The Beatles. Boyz-B-Ware. Art Lundgren and his All-Girl Polka-Party Orchestra (the only one that Michael sort of liked).
“Elton?” No answer. Michael turned his voice up a notch. “Elton?”
The old man-Elton was fifty at least-startled to life. “Flyers, Michael. What time is it?”
“Relax. It’s morning. We’re down for the night.”
Elton screwed himself up in his chair, setting the hinges creaking, and drew the earphones down into the folds of his neck. “Then what you wake me up for? I was just getting to the good part.”
Next to the CDs, Elton’s nightly forays into imagined sexual adventure constituted his major pastime-dreams of women, conveniently long dead, which he would recount to Michael in excruciating detail, claiming that these were actually memories of things that had happened to him in his younger days. It was all bullshit, Michael figured, since Elton hardly ever set foot outside the Lighthouse, and to look at him now, with his dandruffy head and tangled beard and gray teeth clotted with the remains of a meal he had probably eaten two days ago, Michael didn’t see how any of it was even remotely possible.
“Don’t you want to hear about it?” The old man gave his eyebrows a suggestive wag. “It was the hay dream. I know you like that one.”
“Not now, Elton. I… found something. A book.”
“You woke me up because you found a book?”
Michael scooted his chair down the length of the panel and placed the log in the old man’s lap. Elton ran his fingers over the cover, his sightless eyes turned upward, then drew it to his nose and gave a long sniff.
“Now, I’d say that would be your great-grandfather’s logbook. Thing’s been floating around here for years.” He passed it back to Michael. “Can’t say I’ve read it myself. Find anything good in there?”
“Elton, what do you know about this?”
“Couldn’t say. Things do have a way of popping up right when you need them, though.”
Which was when Michael realized why he hadn’t seen the book before. He hadn’t seen it before because it wasn’t there.
“You put it on the shelf, didn’t you?”
“Now, Michael. Radio’s forbidden. You know that.”
“Elton, did you talk to Theo?”
“Theo who?”
Michael felt his irritation mount. Why couldn’t the man just answer a question? “Elton-”
The old man cut him off with a raised hand. “Okay, don’t get your gaps in a twist. No, I didn’t talk to Theo. Though I’m guessing you did. I didn’t talk to anyone, except for you.” He paused. “You know, you’re more like your old man than you think, Michael. He wasn’t a very good liar, either.”
Somehow, Michael wasn’t surprised. He slumped down into his chair. Part of him was glad.
“So how bad are they?” Elton asked.
“Not good.” He shrugged; for some reason, he was looking at his hands. “Number five is the worst, two and three a little better than the others. We’ve got irregular charge on one and four. Twenty-eight this morning across the board, never over fifty-five by First Bell.”
Elton nodded. “So, brownouts within the next six months, total failure within thirty. More or less like your father figured.”
“He knew?”
“Your old man could read those batteries like a book, Michael. He could see this coming a long time ago.”
So there it was. His father had known, and probably his mother too. A familiar panic rose within him. He didn’t want to think about this, he didn’t.
“Michael?”
He took a deep breath to calm himself. One more secret for him to carry. But he would do what he always did, pushing the information down inside himself as far as it could go.
“So,” said Michael, “how exactly do you build a radio?”
Radio wasn’t the problem, Elton explained; it was the mountain that was the problem.
The original beacon had run off an antenna that stood at the peak of the mountain; an insulated cable, five kilometers long, had run the length of the power trunk to connect it to the transmitter in the Lighthouse. All taken down and destroyed by the One Law. Without the antenna, they were hopelessly blocked to the east, and any signal they might have picked up would be overwhelmed by electromagnetic interference from the battery stack.
That left two choices: go to the Household and ask for permission to run an antenna up the mountain; or say nothing and try to boost the signal somehow.
It was, in the end, no contest. Michael couldn’t ask for permission without explaining the reason, which meant telling the Household about the batteries; and to tell them about the batteries was simply out of the question, because then everyone would know, and once that happened, the rest wouldn’t matter. It wasn’t just the batteries that Michael was in charge of; it was the glue of hope that held the place together. You couldn’t just tell people they had no chance. The only thing to do was find somebody still alive out there-find them with a radio, which would mean they had power and therefore light-before he said another word to anyone. And if he found nothing, if the world really was empty, then what would happen would happen anyway; it was better if nobody knew.
He got to work that morning. In the shed, piled among the old CRTs and CPUs and plasmas and bins of cell phones and Blu-rays, was an old stereo receiver-just AM and FM bands, but he could open that up-and an oscilloscope. A copper wire up the chimney served as their antenna; Michael refitted the guts of the receiver into a plain CPU chassis, to camouflage it-the only person who might have noticed an extra CPU sitting on the counter would be Gabe, and from what Sara had told him, the poor guy wasn’t ever coming back-and jacked the receiver into the panel, using the audio port. The battery control system had a simple media program, and with a little work he was able to configure the equalizer to filter out the battery noise. They wouldn’t be able to broadcast; he had no transmitter and would have to figure out how to build one from the bottom up. But for the time being, with a little patience, he’d be able to scoop out any decent signal from the west.