On his way home, thinking about what Rachel had said, he stopped at the City Hall Turnaround.
The center of this traffic circle had been developed as a park, planted with grass and equipped with a water fountain and a plaque commemorating the town’s incorporation. Much of Willy’s IWW battle had been fought on this circle of alkaline soil.
The Helper stood here. It had floated into town along the coast highway, made a right turn where the highway crossed Marine, glided past Mart’s office in the Marshall Building and across the railway overpass, and stationed itself on the Turnaround green.
Matt walked toward it through the rain. The rain was cold; he shivered under the wet bulk of his overcoat.
He stopped a short but wary distance from the Helper. He was intimidated by its size—it stood at least seven feet tall—and by its glossless black surface, somehow untouched by the rain.
They called it a Helper. The name, he thought, was grotesque but appropriate. It suggested a blunt, totalitarian benevolence—a meaningless gesture from a humorless tyrant.
Talk to it?
Not possible.
He stood in the park a while longer, listening to the rain as it fell on the grass and watching the clouds roll down from the slope of Mt. Buchanan. Then he turned and walked back to the car.
Hard times coming. Rachel repeated the warning a few days later. “The Travellers are doing things to the planet,” she said, and Matt experienced a tremor of fear that stitched into the deepest part of him. It wasn’t what she said—though that was frightening enough—but how she said it: blandly, if not happily.
They were sitting in the living room looking past the blank TV set, through the window to a faraway ridge of wet Douglas firs in their dark-green winter coats. It was another rainy December morning.
Matt cleared his throat and asked what “doing something to the planet” might entail.
“Fixing it,” Rachel said. “Restoring it. Reversing all the changes. What we did over the last century or so—what people did—was to set forces in motion we couldn’t control. Global warming, for instance. The Travellers are taking some of the C02 out of the atmosphere and trying to bind it into the ocean.” She turned to face him. “It was worse than we suspected. If the Travellers hadn’t come… it would have been awfully hard for all of us, next century, or the century after that.”
“They care what happens to the Earth?”
“They care because we care.”
“Even if you’re leaving?”
“It’s where we were born,” Rachel said. “It’s our planet. And it won’t be entirely empty.”
“Restoring the balance,” Matt said. “That doesn’t sound so bad.”
“No. But in the short term… Daddy, I can’t explain all the things they’re doing, but in the short term, it could mean some chaotic weather, at the very least. Storms. Bad storms.”
He nodded, grateful for this nugget of hard information. “When?”
“I don’t know… maybe soon. Late winter, early spring.”
“There’ll be some warning?”
“Of course. That’s what the Helpers are for… one of the things they’re for.” Her expression now was not bland at all; she regarded him with a desperate unhappiness. “Daddy, you must talk to the Helper.”
It had been agreed at the November Committee meeting that they would gather to celebrate Christmas Eve at Tom Kindle’s new house in Delmar Estates. Guests were welcome, even Contactees, especially family, and Matt asked Rachel to come along—but she declined.
He drove to the party through a chill, heavy rain that threatened to turn into hail, along streets grown ragged with winter potholes. He wondered whether he might be the only one lunatic enough to brave the weather. Some party. But there were other cars parked at the house; and Kindle welcomed him inside, took his coat, told him that, in fact, all ten members of the Committee had shown up, but nobody else: “Just us human beings. Which is probably just as well. Come on in, Matt. Everybody else got here early ’cause of the weather, I guess. Abby’s been here since two this afternoon, puttin’ up these goddamn Christmas decorations, plus that little plastic tree in the corner. Had me hangin’ bulbs and lights on it.”
“Looks good, Tom.”
“Looks like a fuckin’ department store, but there was no stopping her.”
Matt remembered the way Buchanan used to dress itself up for Christmas—tinsel across the avenues, pine boughs on the lamp standards.
“The punch is over there,” Kindle said, “but go easy for a while, we got a turkey in the oven and some radio calls coming in from the east—I don’t want anybody throwing up on the microphone.”
Dinner was festive. Even Paul Jacopetti seemed to have mellowed for the occasion. Matt sat between Chuck Makepeace, who was promoting the idea of a New Year’s reconnaissance trip to the waterworks and the power company, and Abby Cushman, who had taken most of the dinner chores on herself and was away from the table between courses.
Matt noted the way she fluttered over Tom Kindle, served him generously, asked his opinion of the gravy, the dressing, the plum pudding. (“Looks real good to me,” Kindle said. “Real good, Abby.”) She was married, Matt reminded himself, and had a couple of grandchildren living with her—but they were like Rachel, lost to Contact. It was no wonder she had adopted the Committee, and Tom Kindle in particular.
He gave a brief, sober thought to Annie Gates. He hadn’t spoken to her for months. He hadn’t wanted to say all the necessary things. All the things that amounted to: Goodbye, good luck, I loved you in my own fucked-up way but now you’re not human anymore. Surely silence was better than that.
Abby recruited Paul Jacopetti, Bob Ganish, and a reluctant Beth Porter to deal with the dinner dishes. Everybody else adjourned to the living room; Joey Commoner began warming up the transceiver, scouting for stray voices prior to the east-west hookup scheduled for 8:00 Pacific time.
Kindle took Matt aside. “That Abby… she’s a pain in the butt. She’s been over three times this week. Stops to chat. I don’t know how to chat. She brings food. Matthew, she bakes.”
“She seems nice enough,” Matt said.
“Hell, she is nice. If she wasn’t nice it wouldn’t be a problem. She talks about her family—she doesn’t see ’em much anymore. She’s having a hard time and she needs somebody she can latch onto. And, you know, I’m only human. It’s been a while since I had a woman around, barring some Saturday nights in town, and even that’s all finished since Contact. So I think yeah, okay, Abby’s nice… but it’s not fair to her.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’ll leave. The only advantage to getting old is that you learn this shit about yourself. I was married once—little Coast Salish girl up in Canada. Lasted about six months. She went back to the reserve, I came back across the border. And that was pretty much the endurance record for Tom Kindle. Maybe I won’t leave this month, maybe not next month, but I’ll leave. And Abby’s been left too much just now.”
“Maybe you should tell her that.”
“Good advice. Maybe I should just club her down with a stick—it’d be kinder.”
“Or don’t leave. That’s the other choice.”
“Uh-huh.”
“The thing is, you’re useful around here.”
“Right. About as useful as half a crutch. Speaking of which, I’m still limping. Is that normal?”
“You’ll limp a while longer. But don’t put down your own contribution. You’re like an anchor at the Committee meetings. The radio’s been a morale booster, too.”