“Last chance before winter,” Matt said.

“Last chance before something better. But even if you were moving from a log cabin into the Taj Mahal, you’d still want to look around the old place before you locked the door.” Her eyes were vague, unfocused. Her voiced seemed faint. “It’s the cradle of mankind. Not always easy, leaving the cradle.”

Curious, Matt thought, how a sunny day could feel so cold.

After dinner, she curled up in the easy chair with Dostoevsky in her lap. “How come you still need to read that?” Matt asked. “How come you can’t just remember it?”

“I’m not that good yet.”

“So the library’s not defunct.”

“Not yet.”

“But the time is coming.”

“Yes.” She looked up. He was wearing his jacket; the evening had turned cooler. “Are you going out?”

“Just for a drive.”

“Want company?”

“Thank you, Rache. No. Not this time.”

He drove down to the parking lot where the summer ferry took tourists over to Crab Pot Island, a dot of National Park greenery in the embrace of the bay. The parking lot was low to the water, and Matt parked facing west, where the sky was still gaudy with sunset, although the light had begun to fade.

He used to come here in the bad time after Celeste died. When you wanted privacy and you lived with a daughter, you found your own retreats. A parking lot was one place where you could sit by yourself in an automobile and be left in peace. People assumed you were waiting for someone. They didn’t look closely. A person could be alone with his grief… could even weep, if he did so discreetly, if he forestalled the kind of helpless sobbing that would attract a stranger’s attention.

He was past that now. But he wanted the solitude.

It was that time of evening when the streetlights flicker on and everything solid seems hollow and flat; when dark thoughts come easily and are harder to ignore.

He wondered what he was trying so hard to save.

What was he sorry to lose, in this new world they were making? War was finished, after all. Disease, apparently, was a thing of the past. Starvation was history. Lies were becoming impractical.

He had never loved war, disease, starvation, or deceit.

So what was it?

What had he loved so much that he turned down the offer of eternal life?

Something evanescent. Something fragile.

A family. Rachel’s childhood. Celeste. The possibility of a human future.

All these things were illusions. He thought of Willy’s IWW banner, an old rag invested with glory by his stubborn defiance. Or the eagles of Dos Aguilas, a beautiful lie.

The sky above the bay was empty.

But the eagles flew, Matt thought. They flew when we believed in them. Willy flew, those ten minutes on the hillside. I will save this town, Matt thought. See if I don’t.

And if I can’t save the town… if it comes to that… then, by God, I will save some part of it.

Someone.

Chapter 18

Annie and Bobby

On the Saturday Matt took his daughter to Old Quarry Park, Annie Gates drove south for an hour on the coast highway.

She had made this drive one weekend out of two—sometimes Saturday, sometimes Sunday—for ten years now.

She had never spoken of it, even to Matt.

She was going to visit Bobby.

Bobby lived in a room in the east wing of a long, low building in a pine grove near the sea. His window overlooked a broad green lawn and a portion of the lot where Annie parked her car. Of course, Bobby seldom looked out the window. But maybe that had changed. Maybe he was beginning to appreciate the view. Annie hoped so.

The sign at the front door of the building said:

Commonplace but very expensive. Since Bobby moved in, Annie had been paying Wellborne the equivalent of a Park Avenue monthly rental. She had cut a great many corners. The furniture in her apartment was fifteen years old. Her salad and tuna diet was not for cosmetic purposes. She rarely bought a hardcover book, which had been the most difficult economy of all.

Worth it, of course, to know that Bobby was decently looked after.

She checked in at the desk—Wellborne was still fully staffed, the effects of Contact slow to take hold among its patients—and walked down the east corridor to Bobby’s room, 114.

She’d noticed an improvement on her last visit. Usually Bobby retreated into a fetal curl when he saw her coming. Last time she visited, he had unbent and regarded her with a solemn expression on his face… an expression, however, that Annie could not decipher. Nor could Bobby explain it. He never spoke to her. He spoke to the staff sometimes, simple food and bathroom words. But never to Annie.

Today… her hopes were high.

She crossed her fingers and said a silent, wordless prayer before she knocked and opened the door.

“Annie!” he said.

Her heart did a startled double-beat. How long since she’d heard his voice?

Almost thirty years, she thought. She remembered quite distinctly, too distinctly, the last words Bobby had spoken to her. Annie, don’t.

He had been nine years old; she had been ten. Annie, he had said. Please don’t.

He looked good today. He was dressed in clean blue jeans and a white cotton T-shirt. The T-shirt said “I LOVE WELLBORNE,” except that “love” was a heart shape. He was still way too skinny. For the last couple of years, Bobby had been a problem eater. Just before Contact, he had bottomed out at 102 pounds. The staff doctor had called to discuss intravenous feeding as an option.

Now he was eating again, and although she could see the staves of his chest through the T-shirt, she could tell he was gaining weight.

His face was terribly thin. His smile was skeletal. But it was a smile, and that was miracle enough. His eyes, deep in their sockets, twinkled at her.

“Hi, Bobby,” she managed through the lump in her throat.

He climbed off the bed where he had been sitting cross-legged watching baseball on TV. “They said I could go out today. Annie! Go for a walk with me?”

“Sure, Bobby,” she said.

He looked painfully fragile as he hobbled down the front steps onto the lawn, but Annie supposed it really was all right for him to be outside. The medical staff at Wellborne knew what they were doing. And of course, since Contact, Bobby was immortal. Like everyone else. But it was hard to convince herself of that.

He walked like an old man. He was thirty-four years old. He talked like a nine-year-old, which was how old he had been when the accident happened.

Annie walked with him across the sunny lawn. She ventured a question: “Bobby, do you like it here?”

“It’s not bad,” he said. “The food is all right.”

“You want to stay?”

He shrugged. She recognized the gesture, a particular Bobby-shrug. The shrug meant: Don’t know. Don’t want to talk about it.

“Nice day,” she said, helplessly. After all these mute years! Discussing the weather!

Bobby just grinned.

She said, “What have you been doing?”

“Watching TV,” he said. “Remembering.”

“Remembering?”

“I remember a lot. Since they came.” He touched his head—the side of it that was not quite symmetrical—and pointed to the sky: the Travellers. “Annie… guess what I remember?”