Dex Graham woke with the sun in his eyes and the weave of Evelyn Woodward’s bedroom carpet printed on the side of his face. He was cold and his body was stiff and knotted with aches.
He sat up, wondering what had caused him to spend the night on the floor. He hadn’t slept on a floor since college. The morning after some nightmarish frat party blowout, drunk on the floor of a dorm room and wondering what happened to the strawberry blond grad student who had offered him a ride in her Mustang. Vanished in the haze. Like so much else.
A breath of cool air made him shiver. The bay window was wide open. Had he done that? The curtains tossed fitfully and the sky was as blue as china glaze. It was a quiet morning; there was no sound louder than the honking of Canada geese in the shallow water under the docks.
He stood up, a slow operation, and looked at Evelyn. She was awkwardly asleep under a tangle of cotton sheets. One arm was flung out and Roadblock lay stretched at her feet.
Had he been drunk? Was that possible? He felt the way he remembered feeling after a drunk—the same sensation of bad news hovering just out of reach, the night’s ill omens about to unreel in his head.
And he turned to the window and thought: Ah, God, yes—the defense plant.
He remembered the beams of light stabbing the sky, the way the bedroom had begun to pinwheel around him.
Beyond the window, Lake Merced was calm. The docks shimmered under a gloss of hazy sunlight. The masts of pleasure boats bobbed randomly, listlessly. And due east—beyond the pines that crowded the far margin of the lake—a plume of smoke rose from the old Ojibway reservation.
He stared for a time, trying to sort out the implications. The memory of Chernobyl came again. Obviously, there had been an accident at the Two Rivers plant. He had no way of knowing what kind of accident. What he had seen had not looked like a nuclear explosion but might have been something just as catastrophic, a meltdown, say. He watched the smoke make a lazy spindle in the cool air. The breeze was brisk and from the west; if there was fallout it wouldn’t travel into town—at least not today.
But what happened last night had been more than an explosion. Something had rendered him unconscious for most of six or seven hours. And he wasn’t the only one. Look at Beacon Road, empty except for a scatter of starlings. The docks and boat ramps were naked in the sunlight. No boaters or dawn fishermen had taken to Lake Merced.
He turned to the bed, suddenly frightened. “Evelyn? Ev, are you awake?”
To his enormous relief, she stirred and sighed. Her eyes opened and she winced at the light.
“Dex,” she said. “Oh-um.” She yawned. “Pull the drapes.”
“Time to get up, Evie.”
“Um?” She raised herself on an elbow and squinted at the alarm clock. “Oh my God! Breakfast!” She stood up, a little unsteady on her feet, and pulled on a housecoat. “I know I set that alarm! People must be starving!”
The alarm was an ancient windup model. Maybe she had set it, Dex thought. Maybe it went off smack at seven, and maybe it rang until it ran down.
He thought: We might already be dying of radiation poisoning. How would we know? Do we start to vomit? But he felt all right. He felt like he’d slept on the floor, not like he’d been poisoned.
Evelyn hurried into the en suite bathroom and came back looking puzzled. “The light’s out in there.”
He tried the wall switch. The bedroom light didn’t work, either.
“House fuse,” she pondered, “or it might be a power failure . . . Dex, why do you look so funny?” Her frown deepened. “You were at the window last night, weren’t you? I remember now. You let Roadblock in. . . .”
He nodded.
“And there was lightning. An electric storm? Maybe that’s why the power is out. Lightning could have hit the transformer over by City Hall. Last time that happened we were in the dark for six hours.”
By way of an answer he took her hand and led her to the window. She shaded her eyes and looked across the lake. “That smoke is the defense plant,” he said. “Something must have happened there last night. It wasn’t lightning, Ev. Some kind of explosion, I think.”
“Is that why there’s no electricity?” Now her voice took on a timorous note and he felt her grip tighten on his hand.
He said, “I don’t know. Maybe. The smoke is blowing away from us, anyway. I think that’s good.”
“I don’t hear any sirens. If there’s a fire, shouldn’t there be sirens?”
“Fire company may be there already.”
“I didn’t hear any sirens during the night. The fire hall’s just down on Armory. It always wakes me up when they run the sirens at night. Did you hear anything?”
He admitted he hadn’t.
“Dex, it’s way too quiet. It’s a little scary.”
He said, “Let’s do something about breakfast. Maybe we can run that little battery radio in the kitchen, find out what’s going on.”
It seemed as if she weighed the suggestion and found it weak but adequate. “Everybody needs to eat, I guess. All right. Let me finish dressing.”
It was the off-season, of course, and with Mrs. Friedel gone, Howard Poole was the sole remaining guest—and Howard hadn’t come down to breakfast.
The stove was electric. Evelyn rummaged in the warming refrigerator. “I think we’re reduced to cereal,” she said. “Until the milk spoils, anyway.”
Dex opened the utility cupboard and found Evelyn’s Panasonic radio. The batteries weren’t fresh, but they might still hold a charge. He put the radio on the kitchen table, pulled its antenna to full length, and switched it on.
There was a crackle of static where WQBX used to be. So the batteries were good, Dex thought, but there was no broadcast coming out of Coby, some fifty miles west, where the relay tower was. The nearest actual radio station was in Port Auburn, and neither Dex nor Evelyn cared for its round-the-clock country-and-western music. But it would do, he thought, and he turned the dial clockwise.
Nothing.
Evelyn said, “There must be something wrong with it.”
Maybe. It seemed unlikely to Dex, but what other explanation made sense? Ten years ago he might have guessed there’d been some kind of nuclear war, the doomsday scenario everybody used to dread, that it had wiped out everything beyond the horizon. But that possibility was slim. Even if some Russian had pushed some antiquated red button, it wouldn’t have destroyed the entire civilized world. Surely it wouldn’t have wiped out Port Auburn or even closed down the radio station there.
An explosion at the Two Rivers plant and a radio with a dead transistor. He wanted to make a logical connection between the two, but could not.
He was still turning the dial when Howard Poole came into the kitchen. Howard was wearing a white T-shirt, Saturday jeans with a rip starting at the left knee, and an expression of sleepy bewilderment. “Must have missed breakfast,” he said.
“Nope. Cold cereal,” Evelyn said briskly, “and we haven’t really started yet. The power’s off, you may have noticed.”
“Trouble at the defense plant,” Dex put in.
Howard’s attention perked up instantly. “What kind of trouble?”
“Some kind of explosion during the night, from what I could see upstairs. There’s smoke coming off it now. The town’s pretty much still asleep. And I can’t find anything on the radio.”
Howard sat down at the table. He seemed to have trouble absorbing the information. “Jesus,” he said. “Fire at the research facility?”
“I believe so.”
“Jesus.”
Now Dex caught something on the radio. It was a voice, a masculine rumble distorted by static, too faint to decipher. He turned up the volume but the intelligibility didn’t improve.
“Put the radio on top of the refrigerator,” Evelyn said. “It always works better up there.”
He did so. The reception was marginally better, but the station faded in and out. Nevertheless, the three of them strained to hear what they could.
And for a time, the broadcast was quite clear.
Moments later it faded altogether. Dex took the radio down and switched it off.
Evelyn said, “Did anyone understand any of that?”
“It sounded like a newscast,” Howard said cautiously.
“Or a radio play,” Evelyn said. “That’s what I thought of.”
Dex shook his head. “There hasn’t been a radio play on the air since 1950. Howard’s right. It was a news broadcast.”
“But I thought—” Evelyn gave a small, puzzled laugh. “I thought the announcer said something about ‘the Spaniards.’ A war with the Spaniards.”
“He did,” Dex said.
For a few moments, the announcer’s bored voice had risen from the rattle of noise and distance into rough intelligibility. Issued was the first word Dex had understood.
. . . issued reports of great successes along the Jalisco front in the war with the Spaniards. Casualties were light and the cities of Colima and Manzanillo are under Allied control. In the Bahia, amphibian landings—
Then the swell of electronic noise buried the voice.
“Pardon me,” Howard said, “but what the hell kind of accent was that? Guy sounds like a Norwegian funeral director on Quaaludes. And excuse me, but Spaniards? It’s like the news from 1898. It has to be a joke. Or, Evelyn’s right, some kind of radio drama.”
“Like last Halloween,” Evelyn put in, “when they played a tape of the old Orson Welles War of the Worlds.”
“It’s not Halloween,” Dex said.
She gave him an angry glare. “So what are you saying, that it’s legitimate? We’re suddenly at war with Spain?”
“I don’t know. I don’t understand it. I don’t know what the hell it’s about, Evie. But let’s not make up an explanation when we don’t have one.”
“Is that what you think I’m doing?” She raised her voice, and it might have become an argument—not a real argument, Dex thought, but one of those peevish debates with more of fear than hostility in it—but she was interrupted by the keening of the Two Rivers Volunteer Fire Department, both trucks rolling out of the Armory Street fire hall and speeding past on Beacon Road.
“Well, thank God,” she said. “Somebody’s doing something at last.”
“Wait a minute,” Howard said, and there was an expression of sick foreboding on his face.
“It’s the fire department,” Evelyn told him. “They must be headed for the Indian reserve.”
“God, no,” Howard said. And Dex watched in perplexity as the younger man stood and ran for the door.
Dick Haldane struggled out of a confused sleep at eight A.M., and from the front window of his house, with the view overlooking the brickworks and the west end of Lake Merced, he saw smoke rising from the old Ojibway reserve.
Haldane had the misfortune of being the acting chief of the Two Rivers Volunteer Fire Department. The chief and most of the Fire Board trustees were in Detroit until Monday for a conference on ISO grading policy. And it looked as if an emergency had fallen into his lap in the meantime: the electricity didn’t work and neither did the phones. Perhaps worse, there was no water pressure in the bathroom—the toilet gave a sad last gasp when he flushed it. Two Rivers took its water pressure from a reservoir in the highlands north of the Bayard County line, so this might be a local problem . . . but it might not, and the idea of a major fire without the means to fight it was one of Haldane’s personal bad dreams. Lacking alternatives, he hopped into his aging Pontiac LeMans and drove like hell to the Beacon Road fire hall.
The Two Rivers Physical Research Laboratory—obvious source of the smoke—was supposed to have its own fire control team, and certainly no one had told Haldane the facility was inside his response area. Quite the opposite. The Department of Defense had had a long talk with the Municipal Fire Service. They didn’t want volunteer brigades on the property unless they were specifically called for, and according to the DOD’s Man in a Suit, that was about as likely as a 911 call from God Almighty.
Still that smoke kept on curling into a lazy sky.
Haldane kept the night shift on duty and waited for the morning crew to arrive. A couple of Honda generators in the basement provided AC for the dispatcher’s radio, but there was nobody talking back. He made a couple of attempts to reach City Hall and the mayor at home, but it was no go. This whole mess was squarely on his back.
There had been a fire in the National Forest land north of town in 1962, when Haldane was twenty years old, and he had been among the men cutting the firebreak. He had witnessed many fires since, but none as terrifying. He imagined the Ojibway reserve as it had been before the feds moved in: weedy meadowland and tall wild pine, a few shacks where the traditionals still persisted in their old ways. Those shacks had been razed and a perimeter drawn on the county maps: DOD, Enter at Your Own Risk, Here There Be Tygers. But a fire, as Haldane told his troops, observes no limits. A fire goes where it feels like.
This fire didn’t look all that serious, at least not yet, not from here, but still—he didn’t want anybody saying a forest burned down because Dick Haldane was waiting on a telephone call.
He kept the engine company at home but dispatched a ladder company to survey the scene. He followed behind in the chief’s car, a red station wagon with a roof light.
The siren cut the Saturday quiet like a hot, sharp knife. Not that there was much traffic to get in the way. Two Rivers was slow to wake this peculiar morning. He saw a few people on their porches out to stare at the ladder truck, a few kids in their PJs. No doubt they were wondering whether the TV would begin to work pretty soon—or the telephones. Haldane was troubled by the same question. There was no sign of an emergency except that smoke from the federal project, but how could a fire out there, even a bad fire, shut down so much of Two Rivers? Some kind of power surge, he supposed, or maybe a dead short across those kilovolt lines that had gone in last year. But he had never seen anything like it in his career, that was for sure.
They were quickly out of the crowded part of town, three miles down the highway and then east along the wide dirt road. All the federal money pouring in, couldn’t they have paved the access? Haldane’s kidneys protested this rattling. The woods were dense here, and although he saw the plume of smoke now and again, there was no clear line of sight to the plant itself until the road crossed a ridgeline overlooking the site.
He topped the rise and stood on the brake too hard. Even so, he only just managed to avoid ramming the rear end of the ladder unit. Who was driving? Tom Stubbs, as he recalled. Stubbs, too, was probably transfixed by what he was suddenly able to see.
The Two Rivers Physical Research Laboratory was a nucleus of low concrete bunkers in an asphalt-paved flatland where the old social hall used to be. At the extreme north of this paved space stood a tall administration building; at the south, a residence that looked like a stucco apartment complex misplaced from some L.A. suburb.
Two of the bunkerlike buildings had been damaged in some kind of explosion. The walls were blackened and the roofs were in a state of partial collapse. From the most central and badly damaged structure, that pall of oily smoke curled into the sky. No open flame was visible.
But that wasn’t the astonishing thing. The astonishing thing, Chief Haldane thought, was the way all of this property was enclosed in a veil of diaphanous blue light.
A few years ago Haldane had taken his vacation time in northern Ontario, along with two guys from the fire hall and a Realtor from the west side of town. They went fly fishing in the lake country north of Superior, and for a solid week they had achieved a nearly ideal balance of sport, intoxication, and masculine bullshit. But what Haldane remembered best was a chilly, clear night when he looked up into a sky jammed with stars and saw the aurora borealis dancing on the horizon.
It was this same kind of light. Same elusive haze of color, now here, now there. He had never expected to see it in daylight. Certainly he had never expected to see it enfolding this collection of bunkers and brickwork like some kind of science fiction force field.
It was a smoky, uncertain light. Mostly you could see through it, but it obscured a detail here and there. And Haldane noticed another peculiarity: the longer you stared at something inside that glow, the less you seemed to see of it. He fixed his eyes on the burning building, perhaps a thousand yards down this hill and across the asphalt. It wavered in his sight. After ten seconds, he might have been staring at a blank scrim of color.
He shook his head to clear it.
The radio crackled. It was Stubbs, calling from the truck ahead. Haldane picked up the microphone and said, “You scared the piss out of me, I hope you’re aware of that.”
Stubbs’s voice came crackling out of a deep well of static. He sounded like he was miles away, not a couple of yards. “Chief, what the hell is that? What do we do, turn back?”
“I don’t see anybody fighting the fire.”
“Maybe we should wait for the state cops or somebody.”
“Grow some balls, Tom. Take your foot off the brake.”
The ladder company inched forward.
Clifford Stockton, twelve years old, spotted the smoke about the same time Chief Haldane did.
Clifford, who was still called “Cliffy” by his mother and a mob of aunts, saw the smoke from his bedroom window. He stood in his pajamas watching it for a while, not sure whether it was important. He wanted it to be some dire omen, as in the disaster movies he loved—like the flaky pressure gauge nobody notices in The Last Voyage, or the snowstorm that just won’t quit in the first Airport movie.
It was a great beginning for Clifford’s Saturday, cue for any number of Clifford-scripts. He began orchestrating the movie in his head. “Little did anyone suspect,” he said out loud. Little did anyone suspect . . . what? But he hadn’t figured that out yet.
His mother always slept late Saturday. Clifford pulled on yesterday’s jeans and the first T-shirt in his T-shirt drawer, cleaned his foggy glasses with a Kleenex, and went downstairs to watch TV. Whereupon he discovered the electricity didn’t work. Not just in the living room, either, but in the kitchen, the hallway, the bathroom. And for the first time Clifford paused and wondered if it was possible, not in the world of wouldn’t-it-be-cool-if but in the real dailiness of his life . . . if something really weird might actually be happening.
He remembered being awakened by lightning, a diffuse lightning without thunder; remembered drifting in and out of a confused sleep with light all around him.
He decided to check on his mother. He padded back to the dim upstairs of their rented house and eased open her bedroom door. Clifford’s mother was a thin and not very beautiful woman of thirty-seven years, but he had never looked at her critically and he didn’t do so now. She was only his mother, dangerous if awakened too soon from her Saturday morning sleep-in.
Saturday morning drill was that she was allowed to sleep till ten o’clock, and if Clifford was up early he could do whatever he wanted—get his own breakfast, watch TV, play outside the house if he left a note and was back by noon for lunch. Today was different, obviously, but he guessed the rules still applied. He wrote her a message—I have gone to ride my bike—and stuck it to the refrigerator with a strawberry-shaped magnet.
Then he hurried outside, locked the door, grabbed his bike and pedaled south toward the bridge over Powell Creek.
He was looking for clues. There was a fire on the old Ojibway reserve and the lights didn’t work. A mystery.
Two Rivers seemed too quiet to yield any answers. Then, as he crossed the creek and rolled toward downtown, Clifford wondered if the very quietness was itself a clue. No one was mowing his lawn or washing the car. Houses brooded with their drapes still drawn. The sun shimmered on an empty road.
He heard the sirens when the fire engines went screaming along Beacon and out of town.
It was, he thought, almost too much like a movie.
He stopped at Ryan’s, a corner grocery that had been taken over last year by a Korean family named Sung. Mrs. Sung was behind the counter—a small, round woman with her eyes buried in nets of wrinkles.
Clifford bought a candy bar and a comic book with the money from yesterday’s allowance. Mrs. Sung took his money and made change from a shoebox: “Machine not working,” she said, meaning the cash register.
“How come?” Clifford said. “Do you know?”
She only shrugged and frowned.
Clifford rode away. He stopped at the public park overlooking Powell Creek to eat the candy bar. Breakfast. He chose a sunny patch of grass where he could see the north end of town. The town was waking up, but in a slow, lazy way. A few more cars were prowling the streets. More shops had opened their doors. The distant plume of smoke continued to rise, but it was unhurried and unchanged.
Clifford crumpled the paper candy bar wrapper and stuffed it into his shirt pocket. He took the cardboard liner down to the creek and let it float away. It tumbled over a rock and capsized. It was the Titanic in A Night to Remember. The unsinkable ship.
He climbed the embankment and looked again at Two Rivers—the town where nothing much ever happened.
The unsinkable town.
He checked his watch. Twenty after eleven. He rode home, wondering whether his mother was up and had found the note; she might be worried, he thought. He dropped the bike in the driveway and hurried inside.
But she was only just awake, tangle-haired in her pink bathrobe and fumbling over the coffee maker.
“Damn thing doesn’t work,” she said. “Oh, hello, Cliffy.”
Between breakfast and lunch, Dex Graham formulated the same idea as Clifford Stockton: he would go out and survey the town.
He left Evelyn in the kitchen and promised he’d be back by noon.
He drove west on Beacon to his own apartment, one bedroom in a thirty-year-old building, sparsely furnished. He owned a sofa bed, a fourteen-inch TV set, and a desk where last week’s history papers waited to be graded. Yesterday’s breakfast dishes were stacked in the drainer. It was a collation of postponed chores, not a home. He checked to see whether his lights were working. They weren’t. So the problem wasn’t confined to Evelyn’s house or street—it wasn’t only local. Somehow, he had doubted that it would be.
He picked up the phone, thought about calling somebody from the school—but his phone was as dead as Evelyn’s had been.
Back to reconnaissance, he thought. He locked the door behind him.
He drove downtown. The streets were still too empty, the town sluggish for a Saturday morning, but at least a few people were moving around. He supposed the blackout had kept a lot of people home. The big stores were closed by the power outage, but some of the smaller businesses had managed to open—Tilson’s Grocery was open, illuminated by daylight through the broad glass front windows and a couple of battery-powered lanterns in the dim corner where the freezer was. Dex stopped to pick up some groceries. Evelyn had asked for canned goods, anything nonperishable, and he thought that was a good idea; there was no way to predict how long this crisis might last or what its nature might turn out to be.
He filled a handbasket with canned vegetables and was about to pick up a bottle of distilled water when a man shoved in front of him and took two jugs. “Hey,” Dex said.
The stranger was a big man in a hunting jacket and a John Deere cap. He gave Dex a blank look and took the bottled water to the checkout counter, where he added it to a formidable stack of canned goods—the same sort of thing Dex had come for, but more of it.
The girl behind the counter was Meg Tilson, who had graduated from Dex’s history class last year. She said, “Are you sure you want all this?”
The man was sweating and a little breathless. “All of it. How much?”
The register was down, of course, so Meg began to total everything on a pocket calculator. Dex lined up behind the man. “You seem to be in a hurry.” Another blank look. The man was dazed, Dex thought. He persisted: “So you know something we don’t know?”
The man in the John Deere cap turned away as if the question frightened him, but then seemed to relent: “Shit,” he said, “I’m sorry if I got in your way. I’m just . . .”
“Stocking up?”
“You bet.”
“Any particular reason?”
“A hundred seventy-six eighty,” Meg announced. “At least I think so.”
The man pulled two hundred-dollar bills out of his pocket while Meg, stunned, rummaged in a shoebox for change.
“I was supposed to drive to Detroit this morning,” the man said. “For my sister’s wedding. I wake up late, so I throw the tux in the back seat and I drive out Beacon and turn south on the highway, right? But I only get about a mile and a quarter past the city limits.”
“The road’s blocked?”
The man laughed. “The road’s not blocked. The road just ain’t there. It stops. It’s like somebody cut it with a knife. It ends in trees. I mean old growth. There’s not even a trail through there.” He looked at Dex. “How the hell could that happen?”
Dex shook his head.
Meg put the groceries in two boxes and gave the man his change. Her eyes were wide and frightened.
“I think we’re in for a long siege,” said the man in the John Deere cap. “I think that’s pretty fucking obvious.”
Meg toted up Dex’s bill, all the while casting nervous glances at the man as he loaded his boxes into the back of an old Chevy van. “Mr. Graham? Is what he said true?”
“I don’t know, Meg. It doesn’t seem likely.”
“But the electricity doesn’t work. Or the phones. So maybe—”
“Anything’s possible, but let’s not jump to conclusions.”
She looked at his collection of canned goods and bottled water, not too different from the previous order. “Should we all be—you know, stocking up?”
“I don’t honestly know. Is your father around?”
“Upstairs.”
“Maybe you should tell him what happened. If any of this is true, or even if rumors start flying, there might be a crowd in here by this afternoon.”
“I’ll do that,” Meg said. “Here’s your change, Mr. Graham.”
He put the groceries in the trunk of the car. It might have been wiser to go straight back to Evelyn’s, but he couldn’t let the matter rest. He drove past the house on Beacon, connected with the highway and turned south.
He passed a couple of cars headed in the opposite direction. Through traffic, Dex wondered? Or had they hit the mysterious barrier and turned back? He decided he didn’t believe the John Deere man’s story; it was simply too implausible . . . but something might have turned the man around, perhaps something connected with the power failure and the explosion on the old reserve.
The state highway wound through low pine punctuated with back roads where tar paper shacks and ancient cabins crumbled in the noon heat. He saw the city limits sign, LEAVING TWO RIVERS; a billboard ad for a Stuckey’s ahead where the state road met the interstate; LEAVING BAYARD COUNTY. Then he rounded a tight curve and almost rammed the back end of a Honda Civic parked with one wheel in the breakdown lane. He stomped the brake and steered hard left.
When the car came to a stop he let it idle a few minutes. Then, when it occurred to him to do so, he put it in park and switched off the muttering engine.
Everything the man had said was true.
Three vehicles had arrived here before him: the Civic, a blue Pinto with a roof rack, and a tall diesel cab without a trailer. All three were motionless. Their owners stood at the end of the road, huddled in confusion: a woman with a toddler, a man in a business suit, and the truck driver. They looked at Dex as he climbed out of his car.
Dex went to the place where the road ended. He wanted to make a careful observation; wanted to be able to describe this with scientific accuracy to Howard Poole, the graduate physics student back at Evelyn’s. It seemed important, in this senseless moment, to register every detail.
The highway simply stopped. It was as if someone had drawn a surveyor’s line across it. On this side, two-lane blacktop; on that side—old-growth forest.
The road seemed to have been cut by something much finer than a knife. Only a few particles of asphalt had crumbled. The graded road was lower than the forest floor on the other side. A hump of loamy soil rose above the road surface and had dropped crumbs of moss and composted pine needles onto it. The smell of the soil was rich and strong. Dex picked up a handful. It was moist and compacted easily in his fist. It had been here a long, long time.
An earthworm crawled across the white divider by his knee, sublimely indifferent.
The truck driver ground a cigarette under the heel of his boot and said, “It’s real, all right. Nobody’s driving south today.”
Beyond this line of demarcation there was no road and had never been any road. That much was obvious. The forest was deep and trackless. Not so much as a deer trail passed through here, Dex thought.
“It doesn’t seem possible,” said the woman from the Pinto. She was hugging herself and kept glancing at the forest, furtively, as if it might disappear between peeks. The toddler pressed at her thigh.
“It isn’t possible,” said the man in the business suit. “I mean, there it is. But it’s not, I mean, possible. I don’t think possible has anything to do with it.”
Still cataloging details, Dex went to the side of the road where a string of telephone poles followed the right-of-way. The phone lines had been sliced as neatly as the road. The wires dangled limply from the poles.
“That’s not all,” the truck driver said. “Even the trees don’t match. This side’s been burned off a couple of times, I think. Over there it’s all old growth. Go a little ways in that direction, there’s an old pine sliced right up the middle. All the heartwood exposed and the sap leakin’ out. The bugs aren’t at it yet, so it must have happened just recently. Like last night.”
Dex said, “You come from out of town?”
“Yeah, but I spent the night in Two Rivers. Had the alternator replaced. I sure as hell wish I could leave, but it’s the same at the other end of the highway, about three miles beyond the quarry. Dead end. I think we’re locked in, unless there’s some side road they missed.”
“They?”
“Whoever did this. Or whatever. You know what I mean. Maybe there’s still a way out of town, but I doubt it.”
The woman repeated, “How is that possible?” By the expression on the truck driver’s face, Dex guessed she had been saying it for a while now.
He couldn’t blame her. It was the right question, he thought. In a way, it was the only question. But he couldn’t answer it; and he felt his own great fear treading on the heels of the mystery.
Howard Poole chased the ladder company as far as the old Ojibway reserve. As he came over the rise where Chief Haldane and his crew had recently been, and as he saw the research installation in its veil of blue light, a memory came to him unbidden.
It was a memory of something Alan Stern had said to him one night—Stern the physicist, who might have perished in the trouble last night; Stern, his uncle.
Howard had been sixteen years old, a math prodigy with a keen interest in high-energy physics, about to be launched into an academic fast track that both excited and frightened him. Stern had come to visit for a week that summer. He was a celebrity: Alan Stern had appeared in Time magazine, “preeminent among a new generation of American scientists,” photographed against a line of radio telescopes somewhere out west. He had been interviewed on public television and had published journal articles so dense with mathematics that they looked like untranslated Greek papyruses. At sixteen, Howard had worshiped his uncle without reservation.
Stern had come to the house in Queens, bald and extravagantly bearded, infinitely patient with family gossip, courteous at the dinner table and modest about his career. Howard had learned to cultivate his own patience. Sooner or later, he knew, he would be left alone with his uncle; and the conversation would begin as it always began, Stern smiling his strange conspirator’s smile and asking, “So what have you learned about the world?”
They sat on the back porch watching fireflies, a Saturday night in August, and Stern dazed him with starry sweeps of science: the ideas of Hawking, Guth, Linde, himself. Howard liked the way such talk made him feel both small and large—dwarfed by the night sky and at the same time a part of it.
Then, when the talk had begun to lull, his uncle turned to him and said, “Do you ever wonder, Howard, about the questions we can’t ask?”
“No. Can’t ask.”
“I don’t understand.”
Stern leaned back in his deck chair and folded his hands over his gaunt, ascetic frame. His glasses were opaque in the porch light. The crickets seemed suddenly loud.
“Think about a dog,” he said. “Think about your dog—what’s his name?”
“Albert.”
“Yes. Think about Albert. He’s a healthy dog, is he not?”
“Yes.”
“Intelligent?”
“Sure.”
“He functions in every way normally, then, within the parameters of dogness. He’s an exemplar of his species. And he has the ability to learn, yes? He can do tricks? Learn from his experience? And he’s aware of his surroundings; he can distinguish between you and your mother, for instance? He’s not unconscious or impaired?”
“Right.”
“But despite all that, there’s a limit on his understanding. Obviously so. If we talk about gravitons or Fourier transforms, he can’t follow the conversation. We’re speaking a language he doesn’t know and cannot know. The concepts can’t be translated; his mental universe simply won’t contain them.”
“Granted,” Howard said. “Am I missing the point?”
“We’re sitting here,” Stern said, “asking spectacular questions, you and I. About the universe and how it began. About everything that exists. And if we can ask a question, probably, sooner or later, we can answer it. So we assume there’s no limit to knowledge. But maybe your dog makes the same mistake! He doesn’t know what lies beyond the neighborhood, but if he found himself in a strange place he would approach it with the tools of comprehension available to him, and soon he would understand it—dog-fashion, by sight and smell and so on. There are no limits to his comprehension, Howard, except the limits he does not and cannot ever experience. So how different are we? We’re mammals within the same broad compass of evolution, after all. Our forebrains are bigger, but the difference amounts to a few ounces. We can ask many, many more questions than your dog. And we can answer them. But if there are real limits on our comprehension, they would be as invisible to us as they are to Albert. So: Is there anything in the universe we simply cannot know? Is there a question we can’t ask? And would we ever encounter some hint of it, some intimation of the mystery? Or is it permanently beyond our grasp?”
His uncle stood and stretched, peered over the porch railing at the dark street and yawned. “It’s a question for philosophers, not physicists. But I confess, it interests me.”
It interested Howard, too. It haunted him all that night. He lay in bed pondering the limits of human knowledge, while the stars burned in his window and a slow breeze cooled his forehead.
He never forgot the conversation. Neither did his uncle. Stern mentioned it when he invited Howard to join him at the Two Rivers research facility.
“It’s nepotism,” Howard said. “Besides—do I want this job? Everyone talks about you, you know. Alan Stern, disappeared into some government program, what a waste.”
“You want this job,” his uncle told him. “Howard, you remember a conversation we once had?”
And he had recalled it, almost word for word.
Howard gave his uncle a long look. “You mean to say you’re pursuing this question?”
“More. We’ve touched it. The Mystery.” Stern was grinning—a little wildly, Howard thought. “We’ve put our hands on it. That’s all I can say for now. Think about it. Call me if you’re interested.”
Fascinated despite himself—and lacking a better offer—Howard had called.
He had been investigated, approved, entered onto the DOD payroll; he had shown up three days ago and toured a part of the facility . . . but no one had explained its essential purpose, the fundamental reason for these endless rooms, computers, concrete bunkers and steel doors. Even his uncle had remained aloof, had smiled distantly: it will all be clear in time.
He came over the rise and saw the buildings gilded with blue light; saw the smoke rising from the central bunker. Worse, he saw a fire department ladder truck and chase car inching down the access road, the image fluid and indistinct.
He could not imagine what this veil of light might mean. He knew only that it represented some disaster, some tragedy of a bizarre and peculiar kind. No one was moving in the complex, at least no one out in the open. The facility had its own fire control team, but it wasn’t anywhere near the smoldering central bunker—at least, as far as Howard could tell. The blue light made his head swim.
Maybe they were all dead. Including his uncle, he thought. Alan Stern had been at the center of this project, that much had been obvious; Stern had been its lord, its shaman, its guiding presence. If the accident was lethal it would have taken Stern first of all. All this fluorescence suggested some kind of radiation, though nothing Howard could pin down—something powerful enough to kick photons out of the air. He knew there was radioactive material at the facility. He had seen the warning labels on the closed bunkers. They had given him a film badge as soon as he passed the gate.
That was why he’d chased the Two Rivers VFD all the way out here. He didn’t think small-town volunteer firemen were trained or equipped to fight radioactive fires. Most likely they weren’t even aware of the danger. They might blunder into an event more deadly than they could guess. So Howard had jumped into his car and rushed after, meaning to warn them—still meaning to.
But he saw the trucks hesitate and stop, then reverse, wobble, retreat.
He drove down the hillside to meet them.
Assistant Chief Haldane saw the civilian automobile come over the rise, but he was too dazed to worry about it. He had climbed out of his car, vomited once into the young weeds by the side of the road, then sat on a wedge of natural granite with his head in his hands and his stomach still churning.
He didn’t want to see anyone, didn’t want to speak to anyone. What mattered was that he was beyond the border of blue light, that he had found his way back into the world of sanity. His relief was immense. He took deep, cleansing gulps of air. Pretty soon he would be back in his sane house in the sane town of Two Rivers and this nightmare would be over. All these buildings could burn to the ground as far as he was concerned—the better if they did.
“Chief?”
He spat on the ground to clear the taste of puke from his mouth. Then he looked up. Standing before him in blue jeans and a pressed cotton shirt was a civilian, presumably the man from the automobile—more like a boy, though, Haldane thought, with his pink skin and his bug-eye glasses. Haldane didn’t speak, only waited for this apparition to justify its presence.
“I’m Howard Poole,” the civilian said. “I work at the facility. Or I was supposed to—I would be, if this hadn’t happened. I came because I thought, if you were fighting the fire, you might not know—there might be some radioactivity in there, some particulate matter in the smoke.”
Poole seemed exquisitely uneasy. “Particulate matter,” Haldane said. “Well, thank you, Mr. Poole, but I don’t believe particulate matter is our problem right now.”
“I saw you turn back.”
“Yessir,” Haldane said. “That we did.”
“May I ask why?”
Some of the firefighters had shaken off their queasiness and gathered behind Poole. Chris Shank was there, and Tom Stubbs, both looking demoralized and numb under their helmets and scuffed turnout coats. Haldane said, “You work here, you know more about it than me.”
Poole said, “No—I don’t understand any of this.”
“It’s like we crossed a line,” Chris Shank volunteered. Good old Chris, Haldane thought, never failed to open his mouth when he could just as well keep it shut. “We were heading down to size up the hazard, and it was weird, you know, with all this light and everything, but then we crossed some kind of line and suddenly it was—I mean, you couldn’t tell where you were going or coming from.” He shook his head.
“There are things in there,” Tom Stubbs added.
Haldane frowned. That had been his own perception, true enough. Things in there. But he hadn’t wanted to come out and say it. From here, the space between himself and the defense plant looked empty. Odd, in some shimmery way, but clearly deserted. So he had seen . . . what? A hallucination?
But Chris Shank was nodding vigorously. “That’s it,” he said. “I saw . . .”
“Tell the man,” Haldane said. If they were going to talk about this, they might as well speak plainly.
Shank lowered his head. Awe and shame played over his face like light and shadow.
“Angels,” he said finally. “That’s what I saw in there. All kinds of angels.”
Haldane stared at him.
Tom Stubbs was shaking his head vigorously. “Not angels! Nossir! Mister, it was Jesus Christ Himself in there!”
Poole glanced between the two men without comprehension, and the Saturday silence seemed louder now. A crow screeched in the still air.
“You’re both fucked up,” Chief Haldane said.
He looked back into the no-man’s-land of the research facility, so thick with light that it seemed as if a piece of the sky had fallen onto it. He knew what he’d seen. It was quite clear in his mind, despite the nausea, the sense of no-direction that had overtaken him. He remembered it. He remembered it vividly. He would remember it forever.
He said, “There’s no angels in there, and there sure as hell ain’t Jesus Christ. The only thing in there is monsters.”
“Monsters?” Poole said.
Haldane spat into the dry earth a second time, weary of all this. “You heard me.”
What spread through the town that day was not panic but a deep, abiding unease. Rumors passed from backyard to main street to gatepost. By sunset, everyone had heard about the miraculous barricades of virgin forest north and south on the highway. Several had also heard about Chris Shank’s assertion that there were angels flying around the Two Rivers Physical Research Laboratory. Some few even gave credence to Tom Stubbs’s claim that it was the Second Coming; that Jesus Christ, two hundred fifty feet tall and dressed in Resurrection white, was about to come striding into town—a point of view condemned Sunday morning at nearly every church service in town. That Sunday, all the churches were full.
The weekend rolled on without electrical power, phone service, or adequate explanation. Most people stayed near their families and told each other it would all come clear soon, that the lights would flicker back on and the TV would make sense of things. Food stocks began to run low at the few grocery stores open for business. The big supermarket at the Riverview Mall remained closed, and without power for refrigeration, some said, it was just as well—after two days of warm spring weather it must stink like sin in there.
Saturday night, Dex Graham and Howard Poole exchanged accounts of what they had seen. They were careful at first not to strain each other’s credulity; less cautious when they realized they had each witnessed miracles. In the morning they set out to map the perimeters of the town. Dex drove while Howard sat in the passenger seat with a recent survey map, a pencil, and a pair of calipers. Howard marveled at the southern interruption of the highway, then marked it with careful precision on his chart. Similarly the northern limit. Then they followed private roads, logging roads, and the east–west axis of the farm roads. Each ended abruptly in humid pine forest. At the western margin of County Route 5, Howard creased the map with his pencil and said, “We might as well quit.”
“It does get a little monotonous.”
“More than that.” Howard held the map against the dashboard. He had marked every dead end and joined them together: a perfect circle, Dex observed, with the town of Two Rivers in the southeastern quadrant.
Howard used his calipers to mark the center of the circle, but Dex had already seen what it must be: the old Ojibway reserve, the Two Rivers Physical Research Laboratory, where Howard had seen veils of blue light, and where the fire chief had seen monsters.
Sunday, a charter pilot named Calvin Shepperd took off from the air docks at the western end of Lake Merced and flew southeast toward Detroit—or the place on the map where Detroit used to be.
From the air it was easy to see the circle Dex Graham and Howard Poole had mapped. It was as clear as a cartographer’s line. Two Rivers—much of Bayard County—had been transplanted (that was the word that occurred to him: like his wife’s droopy ficus, transplanted) into the kind of white pine forest that must have covered Michigan when Jolliet and La Salle first crossed it. Shepperd, a calm man, understood none of this but refused to be frightened by it; only observed, took note, and filed the information for later reference.
Another troubling piece of information was that his VOR receiver wasn’t registering a signal. Which was okay—Shepperd was old-fashioned enough to have calculated his course with a VFR chart and a yardstick, and his dead-reckoning skills were quite intact, thank you very much. He was not one of these modern pilots: RNAV junkies, lost without a computer. But it was peculiar, this radio silence.
He flew south by compass along the coast of the Lower Peninsula, coming within sight of Saginaw Bay. He should have passed Bay City and he adjusted his course to take him over Saginaw, but neither town seemed to exist. He did see a few settlements—farms, mineheads, and some obvious forestry. So there were people here. But not until he was within sight of the Detroit River did Shepperd encounter anything he would call a town.
Detroit was a town. Hell, it was a genuine city. But it was not Detroit as Shepperd had known it. It was like no city he had ever seen.
There was air traffic here, large but frail-looking planes he could not identify, mainly to the south; but no tower chatter or beacons he could pick up, only hiss in the headphones—which made his presence here a danger. He flew a broad circle low over the city’s outskirts, over long tin-roofed buildings like warehouses hugging the river’s edge. There were taller buildings of some dark stone, narrow streets crowded with traffic, vehicles he didn’t recognize, some of them horse-drawn. Afternoon sun stitched the city with shadows. From Shepperd’s vantage point it might have been a diorama, something in a museum case, not real. Surely to God, he thought, not real.
He had seen enough to make him nervous. He flew home with the sun at his wingtip, trying not to think about any of this; it seemed too fragile to bear the weight of thought. During the long trip back he fretted that he had made some error in his reckoning, or that Two Rivers might have vanished in his absence, that he would be forced to land in the wilderness.
But he knew this terrain, even without its man-made landmarks, as well as he knew his wife Sarah. The land was family. It didn’t betray him. He was back on the calm surface of Lake Merced before nightfall.
He told no one what he had seen; not even Sarah. She might have called him crazy, and that would have been unbearable. He thought about talking to someone in authority—the police chief? The mayor? But even if they believed him, what could they do with this kind of information? Nothing, he thought. Nothing at all.
He decided to repeat the journey, if only to convince himself that it had been real. Monday morning, he refueled at the dock pumps and took off. He charted the same course to the south. But Two Rivers was barely beyond the green line of the horizon when Shepperd turned back, his heart pumping madly and his shirt drenched with sweat.
Something out there had frightened him. Something in the combination of white pine wilderness and dark, angular city had scared him off. He didn’t want to see it again. He had seen too much already.
Monday afternoon, a formation of three strange aircraft flew over the town of Two Rivers. The noise drew people into the streets, where they shaded their eyes and stared up into the cloudless June sky. Superficially, the aircraft were conventional enough. Certainly they were old-fashioned: single-engine, propeller-driven, their quilted-metal bodies brilliant in the sunlight. The insignia on their wings were too distant to recognize, but most people assumed the planes were military craft of some kind.
Calvin Shepperd thought they looked like World War II–vintage P-51’s, and he wondered what had drawn them here. Maybe it was his fault. Maybe he showed up on some radar screen. No telling what alarm he might have triggered.
But he didn’t like that idea, and like most of his ideas since the accident last Saturday, Shepperd kept it to himself.
He watched the three strange aircraft circle once more and then wheel away to the south, pale dots on a pale horizon.
Evelyn Woodward had spent the last of her household money on groceries and a set of fresh batteries for her radio. The batteries were a dangerous luxury—money was scarce, and who knew when the bank might open again?—but she still believed in the radio. It was a lifeline. Once or twice in every long winter a snowstorm would send pine boughs plummeting onto the power lines, and the house would grow cold and dark while the linemen battled the weather. During those times, Evelyn would listen to her radio. The blackout would be announced on WGST; the affected counties would be named. The calm of the announcer was contagious. Listening, you knew the problem was temporary; that there were people out there working on it, mending things in the windy dark.
Despite what Dex and Howard Poole had said, despite the length of the crisis, so peculiar in this lovely June weather, Evelyn still nurtured her hope that the radio would revive. Perhaps WGST was unavailable, but there had been that other station, that curious fragment of it, surely not as sinister as Dex had made it seem.
She replaced the batteries and turned up the volume until the kitchen filled with the spit of static, but no voice came through.
No matter, she thought. Soon.
The radio was a private thing. She turned it off when anyone came into the kitchen, especially Dex or Howard. She was afraid of seeming stupid or naive. It was too easy to see herself as stupid or naive; she didn’t need anyone’s help. Anyway, time to herself wasn’t hard to find. Evenings, Dex and Howard got together in the front room, where Dex had put the old hurricane lamp, and they talked about the emergency—as if, by talking, they could make it sensible, as if they could bury it under the sheer weight of their words. Evelyn went to the kitchen and sat in the gathering dark with her radio: Sunday night, Monday night.
Monday was the day the planes had flown over, an event that had cheered her considerably. Dex, of course, put some paranoid interpretation on it. To Evelyn, the meaning of the planes was much simpler. The problem—whatever the problem was—had come to someone’s attention. It was being worked on; it was being fixed.
That was the evening the radio began to talk again. When Evelyn heard the voices, faint and laced with static, she smiled to herself. Dex was wrong. Normality was not far off.
She sat at the kitchen table with sunset fading outside her dusty window and the radio close to her ear. She listened to fifteen minutes of a radio play (there were radio plays on this station), about policemen who were religious, or priests who were policemen—she couldn’t tell. The actors all had thick accents. Their accents sounded sometimes French, sometimes English, sometimes just unfamiliar; they used curious words from time to time. It must be a European play, Evelyn thought. Something avant-garde. Then there was an ad for Mueller’s Stone-Pressed White Flour, “our purity is never questioned,” in a similar voice. Then a time check and the news.
According to the news, there had been a naval battle in the Yucatán Channel with tremendous losses on all sides. The Logos was damaged and limping back to Galveston, but the Spanish Narvaez had sunk with all hands. And the land campaign was meeting stiff resistance in the hills around Cuernavaca.
At home, the announcer went on, Ascension Day had been marked by fireworks and public celebrations from coast to coast. On an unhappy note, incendiary displays in New York Harbor had inadvertently set fire to a pitch and tar warehouse on the Jersey shore and caused the death of three night watchmen.
A pacifist demonstration in Montmagny had been broken up by police. Though it was claimed to be a student demonstration, Proctors said the majority of those arrested were either apostates, trade unionists, or Jews.
More news at the turn of the hour, but first: don’t mark another Ascension without a new hat! Millinery to order at Roberge Hats and Yardgoods, a hat for every budget!
Evelyn snapped off the radio, resisting by a hair her urge to throw it across the room.
In the absence of television, Clifford Stockton had spent much of the past three days in the company of his bicycle.
The bicycle was more than transportation. It was his key to the mystery. Clifford was as curious about the events that had overtaken Two Rivers as any adult—maybe more so, since there was no explanation he rejected out of hand. Aliens, monsters, miracles: all fair game as far as Clifford was concerned. He had no theory of his own. He had heard his mother laughing out loud (but nervously) at the idea that angels had been seen flying over the defense plant. Clifford wasn’t keen on the idea of angels himself: he wouldn’t know what to expect from an angel. But he didn’t rule it out. He had tried to get close to the research building on his bike; but the Two Rivers police had posted a car at the access road to turn away the curious, so he couldn’t confirm any of this personally.
He didn’t really care. The defense plant was a long ride by bike. There were mysteries closer to home.
For instance, the mystery of Coldwater Road. Coldwater Road ran for a couple of miles northeast past the cement factory. It had been zoned for housing, and water and power lines had been installed—there were fireplugs planted like tropical shrubs in the raw earth of empty lots. But no houses had been built. Hardly anyone went out Coldwater Road (except teenagers at night, he had heard), and that was fine with Clifford: he had few friends and quite a few enemies among the kids his age. Clifford was nearsighted and thin, a reader of books and watcher of television. He liked his own company. Out on Coldwater Road he could spend an afternoon in the scrubby fields and patches of woods without much fear of interruption, and that was good.
But since Saturday, Coldwater Road had changed. The grid of vacant lots had been cut in half by what looked to Clifford like an old, old forest. It was a mystery of enormous proportions.
The forest was deep and cool. Its floor was loamy and it smelled moist and pungent. It was both inviting and frightening. Clifford didn’t venture far into that dimness.
Instead, he was fascinated by its perimeter: a straight line bisecting the blank lots, maybe curving a little if you stood at the far end of the cleared land and sighted northeast along the treeline—but only maybe.
Not every tree was intact. Where the white pines crossed the border, they were neatly cut. The cut trees were eerie, Clifford thought. The heartwood was pale green and bled a sticky yellow sap. On one side: green branches thick with needles. On the other: nothing.
He tried to imagine some force that could have enclosed Two Rivers, could have drawn it up from the world like the dough in a cookie cutter and deposited it here, wherever here was: a wilderness.
He had heard the phrase pathless wilderness, and he guessed that was what this was—except, Clifford discovered, it was not entirely pathless.
If you turned left where Coldwater Road ended, if you followed the line of woods past the vacant lots, over scrubland and a small hill (from which he could see the cement factory and, far beyond it, the tangle of culs-de-sac that contained his own house), and if you left your bike behind and persisted through berry canes and wildflowers and high weeds, then you came to a trail.
A trail in the new forest, which approached Two Rivers but ended there, as all the town’s roads ended at the forest.
It was a wide trail where the trees had been cleared and the undergrowth trampled down as if by trucks. A logging road, Clifford would have called it, but maybe it was not that; he made no assumptions.
He walked a few yards down this path, listening to the sway of the pines around him and smelling the moist pungency of moss. It was like stepping into another world. He didn’t go far. He worried that the connection between this forest and Two Rivers might close behind him; that he would turn back and not be able to find his bike, his house, the town; only more trees and more of this primitive road, its source or destination.
Monday, riding home along Coldwater Road, he saw three airplanes pass overhead. Another clue, he thought. He didn’t know much about airplanes, but it was obvious to Clifford that these were old-fashioned. They circled, circled, circled, then veered away.
Somebody’s seen us, he thought. Somebody knows we’re here.
He spent a day at home with his mother, who was frightened but trying not to show it. They opened cans of Texas-style chili and heated them over wax candles. His mother played the portable radio that night, and for a while there was music, but not anything Clifford or his mother recognized: sad, trilling songs. Then a man’s voice that faded into static.
“I don’t know this station,” his mother said absently. “I don’t know where it’s from.”
In the morning Clifford cycled back to the forest road.
He was there when more planes passed over the town. Bigger planes this time, huge planes, wings bristling with engines. The planes dropped black dots into the June sky: bombs, Clifford thought breathlessly, but the dots grew billowing circles: parachutes, men dangling beneath, a rain of them.
And he heard a rumbling from the earth under his feet, and he ducked into the shadow of the trees and watched terrified from the margin of the road as a column of armored vehicles roared past in choking shrouds of dust and diesel smoke, the men at their helms in black uniform bearing rifles with bayonets, none of them aware of Clifford watching as they broke from the forest into scrub waste and daylight and rumbled over sunlit empty lots to the gray ribbon of Coldwater Road.