Cell

going to have guns. I mean, you know that.'

'Yes,' Tom said. He ran his hands through his neatly trimmed hair, giving it a comic ruffle. 'And I know that Arnie and Beth are probably not home. They were gadget-nuts as well as gun-nuts. He was always gabbing on his cell phone when he went by in that big Dodge Ram Detroit phallus of his.'

'See? There you go.'

Tom sighed. 'All right. Depending on how things look in the morning. Okay?'

'Okay.' Clay picked up his sandwich again. He felt a little more like eating now.

'Where did they go?' Tom asked. 'The ones you call the phone-crazies. Where did they go?'

'I don't know.'

'I'll tell you what I think,' Tom said. 'I think they crawled into the houses and the buildings around sundown and died.'

Clay looked at him doubtfully.

'Look at it reasonably and you'll see I'm right,' Tom said. 'This was almost certainly some sort of terrorist act, would you agree?'

'That seems the most likely explanation, although I'll be damned if I know how any signal, no matter how subversive, could have been programmed to do what this one did.'

'Are you a scientist?'

'You know I'm not. I'm an artist.'

'So when the government tells you they can guide computerized smart-bombs through bunker doors in the floor of the desert from aircraft carriers that are maybe two thousand miles away, all you can do is look at the photos and accept that the technology exists.'

'Would Tom Clancy lie to me?' Clay asked, unsmiling.

'And if that technology exists, why not accept this one, at least on a provisional basis?'

'Okay, spell it out. Small words, please.'

'At about three o'clock this afternoon, a terrorist organization, maybe even a tinpot government, generated some sort of signal or pulse. For now we have to assume that this signal was carried by every cell phone operating in the entire world. We'll hope that wasn't the case, but for now I think we have to assume the worst.'

'Is it over?'

'I don't know,' Tom said. 'Do you want to pick up a cell phone and find out?'

'Touchy,' Clay said. 'That's how my little boy says touchй.' And please,God, how he's still saying it.

'But if this group could transmit a signal that would send everyone hearing it insane,' Tom said, 'isn't it possible that the signal could also contain a directive for those receiving it to kill themselves five hours later? Or perhaps to simply go to sleep and stop breathing?'

'I would say that's impossible.'

'I would have said a madman coming at me with a knife across from the Four Seasons Hotel was impossible,' Tom said. 'Or Boston burning flat while the city's entire population—that part of it lucky enough not to have cell phones, that is—left by the Mystic and the Zakim.'

He leaned forward, looking at Clay intently. He wants to believe this, Clay thought. Don't waste a lot of time trying to talk him out of it, because he really, really wants to.

'In a way, this is no different from the bioterrorism the government was so afraid of after nine-eleven,' he said. 'By using cell phones, which have become the dominant form of communication in our daily lives, you simultaneously turn the populace into your own conscript army—an army that's literally afraid of nothing, because it's insane—and you break down the infrastructure. Where's the National Guard tonight?'

'Iraq?' Clay ventured. 'Louisiana?'

It wasn't much of a joke and Tom didn't smile. 'It's nowhere. How do you use a homeland force that now depends almost entirely on the cellular network to even mobilize? As for airplanes, the last one I've seen flying was the little one that crashed on the corner of Charles and Beacon.' He paused, then went on, looking straight across the table into Clay's eyes. 'All this they did . . . whoever they is. They looked at us from wherever it is they live and worship their gods, and what did they see?'

Clay shook his head, fascinated by Tom's eyes, shining behind his spectacles. They were almost the eyes of a visionary.

'They saw we had built the Tower of Babel all over again . . . and on nothing but electronic cobwebs. And in a space of seconds, they brushed those cobwebs aside and our Tower fell. All this they did, and we three are like bugs that happened, by dumb dim luck alone, to have avoided the fall of a giant's foot. All this they did, and you think they could not have encoded a signal telling the affected ones to simply fall asleep and stop breathing five hours later? What's that trick, compared to the first one? Not much, I'd say.'

Clay said, 'I'd say it's time we got some sleep.'

For a moment Tom remained as he was, hunched across the table a little, looking at Clay as if unable to understand what Clay had said. Then he laughed. 'Yeah,' he said. 'Yeah, you've got a point. I get wound up. Sorry.'

'Not at all,' Clay said. 'I hope you're right about the crazies being dead.' He paused, then said: 'I mean . . . unless my boy . . . Johnny-Gee . . .' He couldn't finish. Partly or maybe mostly because if Johnny had tried to use his phone this afternoon and had gotten the same call as Pixie Light and Power Suit Woman, Clay wasn't sure he wanted his son to still be alive.

Tom reached across the table to him and Clay took the other man's delicate, long-fingered hand in both of his. He saw this happening as if he were outside his body, and when he spoke, he didn't seem to be the one speaking, although he could feel his mouth moving and the tears that had begun to fall from his eyes.

'I'm so scared for him,' his mouth was saying. 'I'm scared for both of them, but mostly for my kid.'

'It'll be all right,' Tom said, and Clay knew he meant well, but the words struck terror into his heart just the same, because it was just one of those things you said when there was really nothing else. Like You'll get over it or He's in a better place.

11

Alice's shrieks woke clay from a confused but not unpleasant dream of being in the Bingo Tent at the Akron State Fair. In the dream he was six again—maybe even younger but surely no older—and crouched beneath the long table where his mother was seated, looking at a forest of lady-legs and smelling sweet sawdust while the caller intoned, 'B-12, players, B-12! It's the sunshine vitamin!'

There was one moment when his subconscious mind tried to integrate the girl's cries into the dream by insisting he was hearing the Saturday noon whistle, but only a moment. Clay had let himself go to sleep on Tom's porch after an hour of watching because he was convinced that nothing was going to happen out there, at least not tonight. But he must have been equally convinced that Alice wouldn't sleep through, because there was no real confusion once his mind identified her shrieks for what they were, no groping for where he was or what was going on. At one moment he was a small boy crouching under a bingo table in Ohio; at the next he was rolling off the comfortably long couch on Tom McCourt's enclosed front porch with the comforter still wrapped around his lower legs. And somewhere in the house, Alice Maxwell, howling in a register almost high enough to burst crystal, articulated all the horror of the day just past, insisting with one scream after another that such things surely could not have happened and must be denied.

Clay tried to rid his lower legs of the comforter and at first it wouldn't let go. He found himself hopping toward the inside door and pulling at it in a kind of panic while he looked out at Salem Street, sure that lights would start going on up and down the block even though he knew the power was out, sure that someone—maybe the gun-owning, gadget-loving Mr. Nickerson from up the street—would come out on his lawn and yell for someone to for chrissake shut that kid up. Don't make me come down there! Arnie Nickerson would yell. Don't make me come down there and shoot her!

Or her screams would draw the phone-crazies like moths to a bug light. Tom might think they were dead, but Clay believed it no more than he believed in Santa's workshop at the North Pole.