“It is strange, isn’t it, that everybody’s staying home, now of all times?” She crammed the box into a spare corner of the station wagon.
“How many people really understand what’s happening?” he asked.
“That’s a point.”
“The kids at school understand,” Marty said. “They know the world’s going to end.”
“Maybe,” Arthur said. Again, trying to reassure them hurt him. The world is going to end. You know it, and they know it.
“Maybe everybody wants to be together,” Francine said, returning to the kitchen. She brought out a box of canned and dried food. “They want to be someplace familiar.”
“We don’t need that, do we?” Marty asked, shoving aside a pile of unwanted metal and plastic robots and spacecraft.
“All we need is each other,” Arthur agreed.
In the office, he reached into the back of the closet’s upper shelf and took out the wooden box containing the spiders. It felt peculiarly light. He opened the box. It was empty. For a moment, he stood with the box in his hand, and for some reason he could not understand he smiled. They had more work to do. He glanced at his watch. Wednesday. Ten a.m.
Time to be on the road.
“All packed?” he asked.
Marty surveyed the pile of rejected toys and clutched a single White Owl cigar box filled with the chosen. The cigar box had come down from Arthur’s father, who had had it from his father. It was tattered and reinforced with tape and represented continuity. Marty treasured the box in and of itself.
“Ready,” the boy said, climbing into the back seat. “Are we going to sleep in a lot of motels?”
“You got it,” Arthur said.
“Can I buy some toys where we go?”
“I don’t see why not.”
“And some pretty rocks? If I find them, I mean.”
“Nothing over a ton,” Francine said.
“The boulder that broke the Buick’s back,” Arthur said, going into the house for a final check.
Good-bye, bedroom, good-bye, office, good-bye, kitchen. Refrigerator still full of food. Good-bye, knotty-pine paneling, elevated porch, backyard, and wild plum tree. Good-bye, smooth and singing river. He passed Gauge’s wicker bed in the service porch and felt a lump in his throat.
“Good-bye, books,” he whispered, looking at the shelves in the living room. He locked the front door, but did not turn the dead bolt.
52
Trevor Hicks, his work finished in Washington, D.C., had taken a train to Boston, single suitcase and computer in hand. At the station, he had been met by a middle-aged, brown-haired scattered-looking woman dressed in a black wool skirt and old flower-print blouse. She had taken him to her home in Quincy in a battered Toyota sedan.
There he had rested for two days, watched owlishly by the woman’s five-year-old son and seven-year-old daughter. The woman had been husbandless for three years, and the old wood-frame house was in severe disrepair — leaky pipes, decrepit wallboard, broken stairs. The children seemed surprised that he did not share her bedroom, which led him to believe she had not lacked for male company. None of this mattered much to Hicks, who had never been judgmental even before his possession. He spent much of his time sitting on the broken-down living room couch, thinking or interacting with the network, helping a dozen other people in the Northeast compile lists of people to be contacted, and/or prepared for removal from the Earth.
All of his life, Hicks had worked with high-powered personalities — bright, knowledgeable, contentious, and often cantankerous men and women. Most of the people he now communicated with in the network fit this description. To his surprise, whatever maintained and governed the network did not discourage high-powered behavior among the network’s members. There was considerable debate, even acrimony, as first the categories of contactees and “saved” were decided, then specific communities, and finally specific individuals.
The Bosses (or Overlords or Secret Masters, all titles applied at one time or another to the anonymous organizers) had apparently decided that humans, with broad supervision, knew best how to choose and plan for their own rescue. Hicks sometimes had Ms doubts.
Over a dinner of macaroni and cheese served on a bare oak table, as the children listened, Hicks asked his hostess about her role in the rescue.
“I’m not sure,” she said. “They got to me about six weeks ago. I took in three people about a week after that, and they stayed here for a few days and then left. Some more people after that, and now you. Maybe I’m a den mother.”
The daughter giggled.
They could have chosen more hospitable lodgings. But he kept that thought to himself.
“What about you?” she asked. “What are you doing?”
“Making up a list,” he said.
“Who’s going, who’s not?”
He hesitated, then nodded. “Actually, we’re concentrating more on a list of others to recruit. There’s a lot of work left to be done, and not nearly enough people to do it.”
“I don’t think my kids and I are going,” the woman said. She stared at the table, her face slack, then slowly lifted her eyebrows and stood. “Jenny,” she said, “let’s clear the table.”
“Where ain’t we going, Mama?” the boy asked.
“Hush up, Jason,” the daughter ordered.
“Mama?” Jason persisted.
“Nowhere, and you pay attention to your sister, what she says.”
They had to start somewhere, Hicks thought. She was one of the first. They didn’t know where to begin. The suspicion of her inadequacy — if that was the right word — of her inability to qualify for the migration, did not prevent her from seeing the good they were doing, or the necessity of their work.
If we have any free will at all now.
That question was still unanswerable. Hicks preferred to think they did have free will, which implied that this woman demonstrated a truly admirable human quality: selfless courage.
Two days later, she drove him to the airport, and he boarded an airliner for San Francisco. Only on board the aircraft did he realize that he had heard the names of the woman’s children, but not her own.
High above the Earth, over the deck of obscuring clouds, Hicks napped and typed notes into his computer and realized he was not, for the moment, on call. The network had released him for these few hours and he was not privy to the ordered flow of voices and information. He had time to think, and to ask questions. How did the spiders get through airport security? That seemed easy enough. They had departed his luggage in the scanners, crawled through the mechanisms, and reentered the luggage beyond the sensors’ range. Or they had means of altering their X-ray shadows. Human sensory apparatus had failed completely from the beginning; if the bogeys could land on Earth without being detected, what was so amazing about a spider passing through airport security?
He mused about these things behind his closed eyes, relishing the temporary privacy. Then, on impulse, he inserted a CD carrying the texts of his complete works into the computer and called up Starhome. Scrolling through page after page, he skimmed the long sections of characterization (reasonably adept and no more) and intrigue and politics and read in more detail the passages of speculations and extrapolations. It’s not a bad book, he thought. Even now, two years after I finished it, it engages my interest, at least.