Kurtz put it down again, swung his bare feet out on to the floor, and stood up. The first thing he became aware of was the wind, still howling like a woe-dog. The second was that the faraway mutter of voices in his head had disappeared entirely. The telepathy was gone and Kurtz was glad. It had offended him in an elemental, down-deep way, as certain sexual practices offended him. The idea that someone might be able to come into his very head, to be able to visit the upper levels of his mind… that had been horrible. The grayboys deserved to be wiped out for that alone, for bringing that disgustingly peculiar gift. Thank God it had proved ephemeral.
Kurtz shucked his gray workout shorts and stood naked in front of the mirror on the bedroom door, letting his eyes go up from his feet (where the first snarls of purple veins were beginning to show) to the crown of his head, where his graying hair stood up in a sleep-tousle. He was sixty, but not looking too bad; those busted veins on the sides of his feet were the worst of it. Had a bell of a good crank on him, too, although he had never made much use of it; women were, for the most part, vile creatures incapable of loyalty. They drained a man. In his secret unsane heart, where even his madness was starched and pressed and fundamentally not very interesting, Kurtz believed all sex was FUBAR. Even when it was done for procreation, the result was usually a brain-equipped tumor not much different from the shit-weasels.
From the crown of his head, Kurtz let his eyes descend again, slowly, looking for the least patch of red, the tiniest roseola blush. There was nothing. He turned around, looked at as much as he could see by craning back over his shoulder, and still saw nothing. He spread his buttocks, probed between them, slid a finger two knuckles deep into his anus, and felt nothing but flesh.
“I’m clean,” he said in a low voice as he washed his hands briskly in the Winnebago’s little bathroom. “Clean as a whistle.”
He stepped into his shorts again, then sat on his rack to slip into his socks. Clean, praise God, clean. A good word. Clean. The unpleasant feel of the telepathy-like sweaty skin pressed against sweaty skin-was gone. He wasn’t supporting a single strand of Ripley; he had even checked his tongue and gums.
So what had awakened him? Why were there alarm bells clanging in his head?
Because telepathy wasn’t the only form of extrasensory perception. Because long before the grayboys knew there was such a place as Earth tucked away in this dusty and seldom-visited carrel of the great interstellar library, there had been a little thing called instinct, the specialty of uniform-wearing Homo saps such as himself.
“The hunch,” Kurtz said. “The good old all-American hunchola.”
He put on his pants. Then, still bare-chested, he picked up the walkie which lay on the bedtable beside the pocket watch (four-sixteen now, and how the time seemed to be rushing, like a brakeless car plunging down a hill toward a busy intersection). The walkie was a special digital job, encrypted and supposedly unjammable… but one look at his supposedly impervious digital clock made him realize none of the gear was un-anything.
He clicked the SEND/SQUEAL button twice. Freddy Johnson came back quickly and not sounding too sleepy… oh, but now that crunch time was here, how Kurtz (who had been born Robert Coonts, name, name, what’s in a name) longed for Underhill. Owen, Owen, he thought, why did you have to skid just when I needed you the most, son?
“Boss?”
“I’m moving Imperial Valley up to six. That’s Imperial Valley at oh-six-hundred, come back and acknowledge me.”
He had to listen to why it was impossible, crap Owen would not have spouted in his weakest dream. He gave Freddy roughly forty seconds to vent before saying, “Close your clam, you son of a bitch.”
Shocked silence from Freddy’s end.
“We’ve got something brewing here. I don’t know what, but it woke me up out of a sound sleep with the alarm bells ringing. Now I put all you fellows and girls together for a reason, and if you expect to be still drawing breath come suppertime, you want to get them moving. Tell Gallagher she may wind up on point. Acknowledge me, Freddy.”
“Boss, I acknowledge. One thing you should know-we’ve had four suicides that I know of There may have been more. “Kurtz was neither surprised nor displeased. Under certain circumstances, suicide wasn’t just acceptable, but noble-the true gentleman’s final act.
“From the choppers?”
“Affirmative.”
“No Imperial Valleys.”
“No, boss, no Valleys.”
“All right. Floor it, buck. We got trouble. I don’t know what it is, but I know it’s coming. Big thunder.”
Kurtz tossed the walkie back on the table and continued dressing. He wanted another cigarette, but they were all gone.
A pretty good herd of milkers had once been stabled in Old Man Gosselin’s barn, and while the interior might not have passed USDA standards as it now stood, the building was still in okay shape. The soldiers had strung some high-wattage bulbs that cast a brilliant glare over the stalls, the milking stations in the parlor, and the upper and lower lofts. They had also put in a number of heaters, and the barn glowed with a pulsing, almost feverish warmth. Henry unzipped his coat as soon as he stepped in, but still felt the sweat break out on his face. He supposed Owen’s pills had something to do with that-he’d taken another outside the barn.
His first thought as he looked around was how similar the barn was to the various refugee camps he had seen: Bosnian Serbs in Macedonia, Haitian rebels after Uncle Sugar’s Marines had landed in Port-au-Prince, the African exiles who had left their home countries because of disease, famine, civil war, or a combination of all three. You got used to seeing such things on the TV news, but the pictures always came from far away; the horror with which one viewed them was almost clinical. But this wasn’t a place you needed a passport to visit. This was a cowbarn in New England. The people packed into it weren’t wearing rags and dirty dashikis but parkas from Bean’s, cargo pants (so perfect for those extra shotgun shells) from Banana Republic, underwear from Fruit of the Loom. The look was the same, though. The only difference he could discern was how surprised they all still seemed. This wasn’t supposed to be happening in the land of Sprint Nickel Nights.
The internees pretty well covered the main floor, where hay had been spread (jackets on top of that). They were sleeping in little clumps or family groups. There were more of them in the lofts, and three or four to each of the forty stalls. The room was full of snores and gurgles and the groans of people dreaming badly. Somewhere a child was weeping. And there was piped-in Muzak: to Henry, this was the final bizarre touch. Right now the dozing doomed in Old Man Gosselin’s barn were listening to the Fred Waring Orchestra float through a violin-heavy version of “Some Enchanted Evening”.
Hyped as he was, everything stood out with brilliant, exclamatory clarity. All the orange jackets and hats! he thought. Man! It’s Halloween in hell!
There was also a fair amount of the red-gold stuff. Henry saw patches growing on cheeks, in ears, between fingers; he also saw patches growing on beams and on the electrical cords of several dangling lights. The predominant smell in here was hay, but Henry had no trouble picking up the smell of sulfur-tinged ethyl alcohol under it. As well as the snores, there was a lot of farting going on-it sounded like six or seven seriously untalented musicians tootling away on tubas and saxophones. Under other circumstances it would have been funny… or perhaps even in these, to a person who hadn’t seen that weasel-thing wriggling and snarling on Jonesy’s bloody bed.