When the missile was well clear, a sustainer motor ignited; the missile unfolded four wings and accelerated to 900 feet per second.

Tyler’s eyes were on the Helper.

The TOW missile trailed two fine wires attached to the launcher. Tyler actually used the sight and a joystick to drive the missile, which never failed to astonish him, this video-game aspect of it. He steered the missile down a trajectory that seemed eternally long, but was not. He kept the cross hairs centered on the moving Helper. Picture-book launch.

The missile arrived in the vicinity of its target travelling at 200-plus miles per hour.

The warhead was fitted with a standoff probe that exploded fifteen inches from the target.

The main warhead detonated a fraction of a second later. Hell of an explosion, Tyler thought, his ears ringing. “Holy damn!” Murdoch whooped. The cows and crickets had fallen silent.

Tyler had once seen a movie called War of the Worlds, loosely based on the H. G. Wells novel.

Martians land in California and build monstrous killing machines.

Conventional weapons fail. At last, the Air Force drops a nuclear device.

Explosion. Mushroom cloud. Nervous observers wait for visibility to improve. The firestorm abates, the dust settles… The Martian machine is still there.

Tyler leaned against the hot mass of the TOW launcher, scrutinizing the spot on the highway where the missile had detonated.

The smoke swirled up and away in a lazy easterly breeze… And nothing at all was left behind.

Murdoch couldn’t resist driving to the spot, though Tyler’s instinct was to get away as quickly as possible.

He stopped and idled a few feet from the scorch marks.

Nothing remained of the Helper but a fine, sooty-black dust—a thick arc of it clean across the highway.

“Nice shot,” Murdoch said.

“Thank you.”

“Spose you’re right, though, Colonel. Spose we ought to scoot.”

“Commence scooting,” Tyler said.

It was a small beginning. But it was also, Tyler thought, the first human victory after a long humiliation. He closed his eyes as Murdoch raced the Hummer into the cool October air. It had been a genuinely lovely autumn, Tyler thought. A beautiful fall.

After a time, the crickets started up again.

Chapter 17

Two Eagles

Northwest autumn weather moved in from the ocean on the third of October and settled over coastal Oregon like a contented guest. The sky darkened, the rain came in mists and drizzles, dusk began at lunch and lingered till dinnertime.

Matt was afraid this would go on through the winter, that they wouldn’t see the sun again until April. He was happy to be proved wrong. Five days before Halloween, the clouds parted. One last bubble of warm air, drawn across the Pacific from Hawaii, paused above Buchanan. The dew dried on the pine needles and the grass wondered whether it ought to start growing again.

Over breakfast, Matt recalled what Cindy Rhee had told him.

Talk to your daughter.

The child was right, of course.

He had barely spoken to Rachel since Contact. He’d been busy—spending time at the hospital, trying to keep the ER functional, then organizing the Committee.

But even when he was alone with her in the long evenings, too silent, when the sun declined and the Artifact cast its bony light, or the rain talked to the roof… still, he couldn’t bring himself to speak.

Not to say the important things.

He was too much aware of the change in her, of the neocytes, so-called, at work inside her skull.

Changing her. Carrying her away.

To speak of it would be to invite the grief, which he could not allow, because there had been too much grief in his life already. He couldn’t afford more grief. He was tired of grief.

But maybe the time had come.

He found her sitting at the kitchen table eating a bowl of cereal and reading a library book. The book was propped against the cornflake box and braced with her left hand. It was Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, and it seemed to Matt she was turning the pages a trifle too quickly. Better not to dwell on that. Her hair was uncombed and she was wearing a blue nightgown. She looked at him as he entered the kitchen, a look both hopeful and wary.

He moved to the counter and started measuring out coffee. His hands were hardly shaking at all. “Busy today, Rache?”

“No,” she said.

“Feel like a drive? I thought maybe we could ride out to Old Quarry Park. Last nice day of the year, maybe.”

“We haven’t been up there for a long time,” Rachel said. “In the mood for it?” She nodded.

Rachel understood that her father wanted to talk, wanted to make sense of what had happened; and she knew how hard it was for him. She wanted to help but didn’t know how.

He drove the long way up toward Old Quarry Park. As the road rose along the flank of Mt. Buchanan, she could see the town sparkling in its bay, polished bright as a jewel by all that rain. There was no plume of smoke from the Dunsmuir pulp and paper mill down south. There’d been no smoke from the mill for a couple of weeks now.

The car turned down a side road past the reservoir, and Rachel realized where this detour was taking them: “The Old House!”

Her father nodded.

They always called it the Old House. It was the house where Daddy had grown up. Back in the old days, before her mother died, they would go on this drive every once in a while… maybe twice a year, when Daddy was in the mood. They would drive past the Old House, and Daddy would talk about what Buchanan had been like long ago; and Rachel would picture him as a child, as strange as that seemed, her father as a ten-year-old in jeans and a grubby T-shirt, trekking through the power company clearcuts on his way to school, or carrying peanut butter sandwiches out to the bluffs on warm Saturdays like this.

The street where he had grown up was called Floral Drive, a grand name for ten 1950s box houses on a cul-de-sac with backyard views of the distant bay. Rachel recognized the Old House at once as Daddy slowed the car. There was nothing special about it. It had a shake roof and aluminum siding painted brown. The number 612 was marked on a gatepost with ornate brass numerals. Daddy didn’t know who lived here now. Strangers. He hadn’t lived in the house himself for more than twenty years.

There was no traffic; he stopped the car and let it idle.

“My grandfather died here,” he said. He was looking at the house, not at Rachel. “I was ten. He lived with us for the last three weeks of his life. He died of a bone cancer just before Christmas. But he loved to talk, and he was fairly lucid those last three weeks. I sat in the bedroom with him so he’d have somebody to talk to. He was born one year before the century turned, if you can imagine such a thing. He was twenty during the labor troubles in 1919. He talked about that a lot. Seattle was the big IWW capital of the Northwest, but there was a lot of labor trouble in Buchanan, too. Buchanan was a logging town back then. Some bars, a hotel, City Hall, the harbor, loggers in on weekends to drink and carry on. The Wobblies were organizing at the Dunsmuir mill. In 1919 they called the big general strike up in Seattle. Buchanan had its own sympathy strike. Just like Seattle, the strike was put down with clubs and cops. Your great-grandfather—this was Willy, on the Hurst side of the family—he worked at Dunsmuir. He was part of the labor parade. Two hundred men marched into the City Hall Turnaround with red banners. The mayor in those days was Bill Gunderson, he was in the pocket of the Dunsmuir family—he called out a bunch of Army regulars and they advanced with fixed bayonets. Three people were killed before the fight was over. Everybody went home bloody. Willy said the big fight was over the IWW banner. Everybody was yelling, ‘Protect the flag!’ Two guys got hurt, one blinded, the banner went down, but Willy and another man grabbed it and carried it up the hill behind City Hall and planted it in the Civic Gardens—it stood there ten minutes before the troops fought through the crowd and pulled it down.”