The air outside was damp and cold. The pale sun at noon was just warm enough to melt the skin of the fallen snow and fill the gutters with frigid water. Clifford passed the time during the long walk to the food depot by trying to make perfect footprints in the crusty snow. When he stepped straight down his boots left cookie-cutter outlines behind him.
He carried an empty bag to fill up with food, and another bag—a plastic bag, into which he had placed the radio scanner in its box. He held the bag with the scanner close to his body and hoped no one would pay it any attention.
At the depot he collected the family-allowance of bread and cheese. Then he stood across the street under the awning of the Two Rivers Thrift Shop, watching the ration line grow as it hitched forward. The people in the line looked unhappy and too thin. Some of them were sick. The cold week had been hard on people, his mother had told him. He paid attention to the faces of the men in the line. Would he recognize the one he was looking for? He thought so. But it was hard to wait. His toes were numb inside his boots; the cold air made his nose run.
The line lengthened until it was twenty people long; then it began to shrink as the shadows grew. The soldiers dispensing food were tired. They punched notches into ration cards without really looking at them and paused to take off their gloves and blow into their cupped hands. Clifford was about to begin the walk home, disappointed, when he saw the man he was waiting for.
The man looked skinnier than Clifford remembered—and he had been a thin man to begin with—but it was definitely the same one. The man joined the line and waited with no particular expression on his thin face. When he reached the front he offered his ration card for clipping, then opened a dirty cloth bag for the bread and cheese. Then he turned and walked away with his head bent into the wind.
Clifford gathered his own food bag in one hand and the bag with the scanner in the other and followed the man west toward Commercial and River.
After a twisty walk among the slatboard houses of the west end of town, the man went into a shabby house. Clifford hesitated on the sidewalk. A shoal of cloud had hidden the low sun and meltwater was freezing in the gutters. There was a film of ice on the empty road.
He went to the door of the house and knocked.
Howard Poole opened the door and peered in obvious surprise from a dim hallway. The plume of his breath hung like a feather in the air.
Clifford, wanting to be sure, said, “You’re the man on the hill at the defense plant that day. You’re Howard,”
He nodded slowly. “And you’re Clifford. I remember.” He looked around the snowbound yard. “Did you follow me here?”
Clifford said yes.
“But you’re alone, right?”
“Yes.”
“You need something? You need some help?”
“No,” Clifford said. “I brought you something.”
“Well, come in.”
In the barely warm kitchen, Clifford took the radio scanner from its bag and set it on the table. He explained to Howard how it worked and how he was able to hear the soldiers talking on the marine band. He left out what had happened to the gas station. He didn’t want even Howard to know about that.
Howard accepted the gift gravely. He said it would probably be useful, though he wasn’t sure how. “Clifford, you want something to drink? There’s milk powder. Even a little chocolate. I could probably manage cocoa.”
It was tempting, but Clifford shook his head. “I have to get home. But there’s something else. You remember when I told you about Luke?”
“Luke—?”
“The soldier my mother sees.”
“Oh. Yes, I remember.”
“He talked about something they’re doing. He said the Proctors brought in a whole bunch of earth-movers from Fort LeDuc. Band saws, too, and stump cutters. They’re using them all around the town, following the line where, you know, where
Howard looked very solemn. His eyes were big behind those taped-up glasses. “Clifford, did Luke say
“He says he doesn’t know, and the Proctors won’t talk about it… but it looks like what they’re cutting is one big firebreak.”
The boy went out into a windy dusk. Howard wanted to pass on this information about the Proctors to Dex, but curfew was too close and a visit might be dangerous in any case. He closed the door. Maybe tomorrow.
The house was dark. After months of hiding here, Howard was still reluctant to use the lights. But a little light was good. For a week the Cantwell house had been cold and dark and even more lonely than it had seemed in the autumn: a strange shore to have washed up on. He still felt like an intruder here.
He climbed the stairs to Paul Cantwell’s study and loaded the last fifty pages of the Buchanan and Bayard counties white pages into the Hewlett-Packard PC. This work had been interrupted, maddeningly, by the week of darkness, and today by the need to pick up rations. He finished it now with more dread than excitement. The experiment for which he had risked so much—his life, his friend Dex’s life—might be exactly as ephemeral as Dex had predicted. He had built an ornate palace of conjecture, and that delicate structure might well collapse under the weight of reality.
The telephone number Stern gave him hadn’t appeared in the first hundred pages of the phone book—unless the optical reader had mistranslated it, or the program he was reading it into had some kind of flaw. But that was unlikely. More likely was that he simply hadn’t found the number yet… or that it was unlisted.
Howard finished loading the directory and told the computer to sort for the target number. The disk drive chattered into the silent room.
It didn’t take long. The machine announced success as prosaically as it had announced failure. The number simply appeared highlighted in blue; a name and address appeared at the left.
WINTERMEYER, R. 1230 HALTON ROAD, TWO RIVERS
Less than three blocks from here.
He spent a sleepless night thinking about Stern, his mind crowded with a hundred memories and a single image: Stern, so like his name, fiercely intelligent, eyes dark, lips pursed behind a curly beard. Generous but mysterious. Howard had been talking to Alan Stern for much of his life and every conversation had been a treasured event, but what had he learned about the man in back of the ideas? Only a few clues from his mother. Stern the enigmatic, Stern who was, his mother once said, “trying to secede from the human race.”
Howard walked to the Halton Road address in the morning in a dizzy mixture of anticipation and dread.
The house itself was nothing special: an old two-story row house faced with pink aluminum siding. The tiny lawn and the narrow pass-way at the side were obscured by snow; a tin trash can peeked out from a drift. A path snaked to the front door. There was a light in a downstairs window.
Howard pushed the doorbell and heard the buzzer ring inside.
A woman answered the door. She was in her fifties, Howard guessed; slim, small-boned, her gray hair long and loose. She looked at him warily, but that was how everyone looked at strangers nowadays.
He said, “Are you R. Wintermeyer?”
“Ruth. ‘R’ only to my tax form.” She narrowed her eyes. “You look a little familiar. But only a little.”
“I’m Howard Poole. I’m Alan Stern’s nephew.”
Her eyes widened and she took a step back. “Oh my God. I think you really
