“They moved in the TV this morning. I said I didn’t want to pay for it. They said I didn’t have to. Nobody else using it. It’s been years since I watched TV much.” Kindle shook his head. “Now I get a chance and there’s nothing good on. Nothing but the news.”

“Last time I looked,” Matt said, “there wasn’t any news. Not the kind of news I’m used to. All the armies went home and nobody robbed the grocery store.”

“I think that is news,” Kindle said. “Seems like it’s a more peaceful world.”

“Shit on that. The graveyard is peaceful.” Kindle turned back to the TV screen. “Have you seen this?”

Matt looked at the picture. It was the octahedron in Central Park. There was a CNN logo in the lower-left corner of the screen.

“I’ve seen it before.” He remembered when the octahedrons came out of the sky last spring, all those dark and ominous shapes—how Rachel had watched the videotape replays almost obsessively. Everybody had been afraid of the octahedrons, which had functioned, as far as Matt knew, mainly as monuments, or at most as a diversion. The real war had been microscopic and brief. Why invade the Earth when you can invade the bloodstream? A question of scale.

“I’ve seen the fuckin’ thing a dozen times too,” Kindle said. “That’s not the point. Watch!”

And with a deep reluctance Matt took a second look at the TV screen. This was videotape, but recent.

Kindle said he’d been watching it all day, over and over again.

Matt stared without comprehension as the octahedron—that vast black shape featureless and tall as a ten-story building—somehow unwound itself.

The motion was difficult to focus on even in slow-motion playback. It reminded him of a spring uncoiling. It was that kind of action… but multidimensional and terrifyingly fast.

Nothing decent moved like that. It made him think of a trap sprung, a cannon fired, a rattlesnake striking, every fast and deadly thing.

He blinked at the screen with his mouth open.

Kindle laughed. “Amazing, isn’t it?”

No. It was frightening. He felt nauseated.

The octahedron unwound into countless smaller shapes. The CNN camera zoomed closer, and Matt was able to see that each shape was the same, a bulbous saucer mounted on a truncated cone. Perhaps about the size of a person, though it was difficult to judge. He couldn’t tell whether these devices touched the ground or hovered above it. “Thousands of ’em,” Kindle said. “More.”

They began to move, radiating away from their point of origin through the trees and along the bike paths like an obscenely strange mass of strolling tourists.

Like a nest of ants, Matt thought, swarming out of its hole. “One for every town and city in North America,” Kindle said. “How do you know that?”

“The guy on the newscast said so. Don’t ask me how he knows.”

“What are they?”

Kindle shrugged. “Helpers. So the TV says.”

“ ‘Helpers’?”

“That’s what CNN is calling them. Don’t blame me, Matthew—I don’t write the news.”

He looked at the screen. There was a Helper in close focus now. It was a featureless matte-black object, and it looked about as helpful as a mace, a claymore, or a ballistic missile.

“Sit down, Matthew,” Kindle said gently. “You don’t look too well.”

Later—when the shock wore off—Matt told Kindle some of the things Jim Bix had said, about “neocytes” and the possibility of physical changes in the body.

Kindle absorbed all this with a thoughtful expression. “Matthew,” he said, “did you ever hear of a nurse log?”

Matt said he hadn’t—did it have something to do with the floor nurse, Miss Jefferson?

“No, not that kind of nurse. Back in the eighties, I worked for a while in Canada. Logging on the west coast of Vancouver Island. I got to know some of the forest there, what they call climax forest, meaning a forest that hasn’t been burned for a long time. Centuries. They have some 800-year-old cedars over there. Amazing trees. And it rains nonstop half the year, so in places you get what they call a temperate rain forest. Very dense vegetation, very wet.

“Decay is one of the main things that happens in a place like that. Every time one of these huge hemlocks falls down, or a cedar, say, or an amabilis fir, it’s not just a dead tree. It’s food. It turns into what’s called a nurse log, because it’s nursing new trees, among other things. When it’s rotting, that log might contain more organisms than there are people on the surface of the Earth. It’s so full of life it actually heats up—as much as five or six degrees warmer than the air.”

“This is interesting,” Matt said, “but—”

“I’m almost finished. Shit, you doctors are impatient people! All I mean to say is that it strikes me maybe the Earth is like a nurse log. All that talk about pollution, global warming, and so on. People used to say, Are we killing the Earth? My theory is, we already killed it. It’s dead. Like a nurse log. So all these decay organisms just arrowed in on it. Maybe humanity was already the first stage of decay, like a fungus growing in the heartwood. Then the insects move in to eat the wood rot and the birds eat the insects…”

“That’s disgusting,” Matt said.

“A little. It’s how nature works, though. Why should it be different when we’re talking about the whole planet? This thing in space, the Artifact, the octahedrons, these Helpers—” Kindle shrugged. “They just smell a rotting log, that’s all.”

Matt wasn’t cheered by these speculations, and he left the room sour-minded and unhappy. It was almost six o’clock—he’d wasted an afternoon staring at the horrors on Tom Kindle’s TV set. Time to go home.

Dinner with Rachel. Another evening to endure.

He had come to dread this time of day.

Worse, Kindle’s forest analogy haunted him during the drive home. Maybe the Earth was a nurse log; maybe the old hermit was right.

But he thought about Jim Bix, his smile fixed in place, his blood the color of thirty-weight motor oil.

A worse thought: Maybe Jim was a nurse log.

Something new growing in the hollow shell of him.

Maybe Lillian was a nurse log.

Maybe they all were.

Chapter 14

B E

Beth Porter was accustomed to seeing the Artifact suspended in every clear night sky and seldom gave it much thought. It was something people talked about on TV, like war or the economy. About as insubstantial as that. There had never been a war in Buchanan; the economy just meant people getting laid off, or not, at the pulp mill; and the Artifact was a light in the sky, as alarming as a streetlamp.

Or so she had thought.

Now, Beth had to admit, things were changing. Now things were beginning to get… well, scary.

She spent Friday night at Joey Commoner’s before they decided to do the B E.

Joey lived with his father, who was divorced and worked part-time for a building contractor; but Joey’s father had taken off in July to spend a couple of months on a Seattle job and to shack up for a while with his girlfriend, a Canadian-born typesetter who used to secretary for a drywall firm in Buchanan. So Joey had had the house to himself for the summer.

Labor Day had come and gone, but Joey wasn’t sure when his father would be back. His old man had telephoned three times since Contact, but Joey wouldn’t talk about what he said. Joey, Beth knew, was also a little scared of what had been happening since that feverish Friday night.

So they sat in the basement, which was Joey’s private apartment, with its own bathroom and even a little kitchenette; and they watched a rental movie and smoked dope.