They had driven through dozens of towns like it. These little towns seemed emptier as the days passed, Tyler thought. One seldom saw the populace; either they had gone elsewhere or were locked indoors. Only a few lights came on at night. It was disturbing. It was even, if you let yourself dwell on it, frightening; but at the same time it made travelling easier. They spent nights in deserted motels; they drove freely in the daylight.

They arrived in Loftus at noon. These buildings, the three-story hotel and restaurant, the barber shop bedecked with Wildroot Cream Oil stickers, had probably not changed in any important way since the Korean War. There was a Helper, of course. It stood on a traffic island where the highway passed between a hardware store and a yellow-brick Kresge’s. Murdoch fired the TOW and Tyler watched what he had come to think of as the customary fireworks: an explosion that shattered windows on all sides and left the road littered with glass and black dust.

Murdoch drove on through Loftus in moody silence. Murdoch had been moody since they left D.C., but hadn’t wanted to talk about it. Tyler mentioned that they would need to locate another source of missiles before too long: the munitions they had carried from Virginia were about to run out.

“If there’s any point to it,” Murdoch said. “We’re pissing in the ocean, if you ask me.”

Tyler gave him a hard look. Murdoch’s uniform was ragged, oil-spotted, and torn from working on the Hummer. He wore a jacket he had stolen from a retail shop in an empty mall. His hair was long and matted.

“There’s more of these Helpers than we can ever hope to shoot,” Murdoch added, “and I don’t see any evidence we’re doing any real harm—and shit, Colonel, maybe that’s as it should be.”

“I don’t understand,” Tyler said.

“Don’t you? Are you sure? After Contact, I figured everybody was turned into zombies, it was like a horror movie, Invasion of the Body Snatchers.… I just wanted to kick some ass. Show somebody the human race wasn’t that easy to knock over. You know what I mean?”

“Certainly.”

“But it isn’t like that. Fuck, I knew all along it wasn’t like that.” Murdoch kept one hand on the wheel and used the other to unscrew the lid from the coffee thermos. “Didn’t want to admit it.” He took a long swallow. “But maybe they aren’t getting such a bad shake—all those zombies. Life eternal. Not such a shitty deal.”

“Christ, Murdoch,” Tyler said. “After all our work, you can’t tell me you believe that.”

“Don’t you? I mean, down where it counts? When they came to you that night, didn’t some part of you want to go along? Even if you said no, some part of you thought, shit, I don’t want to live and die and never understand what it’s all about… Wasn’t it like that?”

“Stupid question.”

“Seriously.” He startled Tyler by stopping the vehicle, standing on the brake until they were poised motionless on the white line of this country road. “Cutting all the crap,” Murdoch said.

Tyler just stared.

“What do you think we’d find,” Murdoch pressed, “if we turned around and drove back into that little pissant town?”

“Some evidence of our ability to harass an enemy. Were you asleep when you fired that TOW?”

“So we knocked down one of their ducks. I’m sorry, Colonel, but big fucking deal. How long till they send another Helper? They can have another unit there in a couple of days. Probably hours. They’re that efficient. The more I think about this, the more pointless it seems. The only reason we get away with it is that they don’t care. We’re like fleas on an elephant. Too insignificant even to scratch.”

He jerked the Hummer into a U-turn. Tyler said, “You really mean to go back there?”

“We need supplies. We should have stopped before we fired that missile. Plus I’d like to see just how long it really does take to repair the kind of damage we’ve been doing. Think of it as target assessment.” He gave Tyler another long look. “If you don’t mind, Colonel.”

Tyler minded a great deal, but he didn’t say so. It might be dangerous to linger at the site of an attack, but it might be more dangerous still to override Murdoch when the younger man was in this hostile mood.

Everything since Contact had become a matter of balances, Tyler thought. One thing weighed against another. What was buoyant might suddenly sink; what fell might rise.

They parked the Hummer out of sight— Tyler’s precaution—in the service bay of an Exxon station. Because Murdoch intended to stay the night in this village, they located two adjoining rooms in the brick hotel overlooking the remains of the Helper. The hotel was empty. The afternoon sky was dark and the corridors rattled with the sound of distant thunder.

Murdoch left to scrounge for food. Tyler stayed in his room, dwelling on the problem of the younger man’s doubts.

Maybe he should have seen this coming. Murdoch had been a technician in his old life, more loyal to the weapons he maintained than to the abstractions they served—the country, the Corps, the national defense. It was a thin reed to cling to, and lately Murdoch had grown sullen. The decline had been gradual but marked.

Maybe it was predictable. All the standards had fallen, Tyler thought. There was no propriety anymore, no decency. The norms had become fluid.

It was a frightening thought. Tyler had spent a lifetime negotiating the borderline between sanity and compulsion, and he had learned what Sissy in her madness had forgotten: Appearances matter. In the question of sanity, you were allowed to pretend. You were supposed to pretend. Everyone pretended. We prove we’re sane by pretending to be sane. To fail at the pretense, or not to bother, was the definition of insanity.

But now… it was as if gravity had failed, as if every solid thing had come unhooked from the earth. In an empty world, who was to judge? Where were the boundaries to separate one thought from another? What impulse might surface unobserved? How to distinguish the daylight from the dark?

We’re naked in this place, Tyler thought, and God help us for that.

He dozed for a time on the hotel bedspread and woke with a skull-splitting headache.

Murdoch came in the door with bags of canned food and bottled water. He dumped these on the bureau and took a towel from the bathroom—he was wet, his hair streaming water; it had begun to rain.

“It’s funny,” Murdoch said. “Most of the towns we’ve been through, you see at least a couple of people. This place—I’d swear it’s deserted. Didn’t see a living soul out there. For a while I thought I heard music. But I couldn’t track it down—not in this weather.”

Murdoch toweled his hair vigorously. The window was open a notch, and the room smelled moist and cool.

Murdoch gave him an odd, cautious look. “By the way, Colonel, have you seen the Helper?”

Tyler came alert. “What about it?”

“Well, it’s doing something,” Murdoch said.

“We destroyed it—what could it be doing? ⁷’

“Well, sir, it’s more or less putting itself back together.”

A.W. Murdoch followed Tyler down to the lobby, where the Colonel stood rigidly at the shattered front window and stared across the road at the remains of the Helper… at all that black, sooty dust that had begun to move as if stirred by an imperceptible wind, to heap itself into a crude, wet mound where the Helper had been.

Murdoch hadn’t been too surprised to see the Helper putting itself together. All the Traveller technology seemed to use subordinate but independent parts—the octahedrons, which were part of the Artifact; the Helpers, which were smaller fractions of the octahedrons… and all this. impact dust, which was just the smaller constituents of the Helper, he guessed, mobile and smart enough to crawl back into the original order.