The Harvest

by Robert Charles Wilson

  “I don’t know,” Matt said. “But I mean to do it.”

  * * *

  Kindle’s estimate had been pessimistic, but not by much. At fifteen minutes after the hour, eight people had shown up—six from Buchanan, two from outlying farms.

  One in ten thousand? Was that really possible?

  Matt supposed it might be. He was reminded that one in ten thousand was roughly the number of ALS cases in the general population—what people commonly called Lou Gehrig’s Disease. He had heard of two such cases in all of Morgan County, which included Buchanan and three smaller towns.

  If the numbers were correct, this turnout was a testimony to the effort Matt had expended, placing ads in the Observer, posting leaflets, even cadging a few minutes on the local radio news. The radio session had been especially difficult, since no one seemed to know a polite word to differentiate the humans in the audience from the recently immortal. “Shoot, Dr. Wheeler, we’re all human,” the station manager had insisted. Well, perhaps. Anyway, no one had made much mention of Contact even in the local news;

  it was still too novel, too profound in its implications—or maybe they understood it collectively: ESP, as Kindle had said.

  The radio news department settled on what Matt considered a cumbersome circumlocution: “Those unconvinced by the experience so many of us shared on the last Friday in August are invited to a meeting to be held in Room 106 at Buchanan Regional Hospital, the evening of September the 28th. For details, contact Dr. Matthew Wheeler,” and his home and office phone numbers, followed by six seconds of dead air and a weather report.

  He was grateful for the announcement, but the experience seemed to foreshadow a whole world of negotiations and misunderstandings—precisely what he hoped to anticipate and even forestall.

  For the sake of Buchanan. For the sake, he supposed, of himself and Tom Kindle and these eight doubtful-looking souls waiting for him to speak.

  * * *

  He cleared his throat and introduced himself. He felt more than a little misplaced up here. He had attended how many meetings in his life—how many graduation exercises, board meetings, staff briefings? Too many. He had never liked any of them. Meetings, in Mart’s opinion, were an excuse to drink coffee, accumulate career karma, and avoid the threat of real work. But here he was. He had even wheeled in the big silver coffee urn from the cafeteria, from which Tom Kindle was tapping a cup. Kindle glanced at him with an air of patient amusement—tilt on, Don Quixote.

  He thanked everyone for coming.

  “We’re here to talk about the future,” he said. “I think we share some common interests, and I think we’re facing some common problems. Maybe if we get together now we can do something about that. But since there’s not many of us present, maybe we should begin with introductions. Let’s start with the front row. Thank you.”

  Matt jotted each name in his notebook as it was spoken:

  Miriam Flett. Front row left. In her mid-sixties, Matt guessed, not infirm, but thin as a straw. She wore a silver stickpin in the shape of a cross, and she announced her name as if she expected an argument. She sat down immediately and without comment and folded her arms.

  Bob Ganish. Two seats away from Miriam. A salesman, he said, at Highway Five Ford. A round man of middle age dressed as if he had just left a golf game. Were people still golfing, Matt wondered, or was it just that nobody cared anymore if you walked around in polyester slacks and a scuffed pair of putting shoes? “I agree we have a lot of problems, Dr. Wheeler, but I don’t know what we can do about it. But it’s nice to know there are people left who still think the old way.” Ganish sat down.

  “I’m Beth Porter and this is Joey Commoner.” No need to jot these names. Beth had dressed up tonight—wore a long-sleeved shirt to cover her tattoo. But Joey, who had also been Mart’s patient more than once in the last fifteen years—who had been buying antibiotics on Mart’s prescription since Beth dragged him into the office—sat with a grim expression, arms clasped together over a black T-shirt, sullen.

  Clockwise from Beth and Joey: Chuck Makepeace, a sitting member of the City Council. That might be useful, Matt thought. Mid-thirties, three-piece suit, receding hairline, natty little wire-rimmed glasses. “If we do this again, Dr. Wheeler, we should elect a chairman and follow some rules of order—but maybe I’m getting ahead of myself.”

  “Excellent suggestion,” Matt said. “But let’s get to know each other first.”

  Tim Belanger, about Joey’s age; blond, puppyish and eager to cooperate. “I work at City Hall, too. I’m a records clerk for Water and Power. Or I used to be. Hardly anybody shows up at the office anymore.”

  Abigail Cushman, who had driven in from her husband’s farm out in Surrey Heights, “an hour in that old truck, but Buddy said take it. He doesn’t give a damn, pardon me, what I do anymore.” She wore a discount-house dress and sweater and thick glasses with masculine rims taped at one joint. Matt guessed she might be fifty years old, maybe older. “Buddy’s looking after the kids. Our grandchildren, actually. Our daughter and son-in-law died last year, so we took the two boys. They’re at home. They didn’t want to come. I’m the only one who… I mean, they’re not…” The words ran out. She paused and blinked at the room as if she’d forgotten what she was doing here. Bob Ganish coughed into his hand. “Anyway,” she said. “Call me Abby.” Abby sat down.

  Paul Jacopetti, big, barrel-chested, sunburned, sixty-five, retired manager of a tool-and-die company in Corvallis, owned a hobby farm out along the Lake Roads. “Not sure if there’s any point in being here,” he said. “We can talk all we want, but it looks to me like the horse left the barn some time ago.”

  Tom Kindle introduced himself from his wheelchair, then turned to face the podium. “Mr. Jacopetti’s got a point, Matthew. It’s nice we’re all here and everything, but what’s the purpose? Therapy or strategy?”

  “Strategy,” Matt said. “Though a little therapy might be welcome.” There were a few nervous smiles. He turned a page in his notebook. “The big problem ahead, it seems to me, is that you can’t run a national economy when nobody’s going to work. Everything seems all right so far. The grocery stores are open, the trucks are bringing in food, the water runs, and the lights are on. Good. But you’ve all noticed the changes. Mr. Belanger mentioned that people aren’t showing up for work at City Hall. I guess nobody minds if the tax bills don’t get out.” Smiles—but only a few. Some of these people, like Mrs. Cushman, obviously hadn’t thought this far ahead.

  “But there are such things as essential services, and if those people stop working we could be in trouble. The hospital, for instance. There hasn’t been much call for our work, admittedly, but even so, I can’t maintain a twenty-four-hour emergency room all by myself. I’m not the only physician on call, but there are fewer every day. The administration tells me the hospital won’t close entirely… at least not yet. It’s the ‘not yet’ that worries me. I hear it a lot. People are vague about the future—maybe you’ve noticed. I don’t think they know what’s going to happen much better than we do. But they seem to expect something. Some kind of massive, sweeping change.”

  “Doesn’t take a genius to figure that out,” Jacopetti put in. “It’s like I said—we know the barn’s on fire.”

  “Not exactly,” Abby Cushman said. “Could be a fire. Could be a flood or an earthquake. We don’t know what the problem is… isn’t that what you mean, Dr. Wheeler?”

  “That’s right. The best we can do is make some general plans. We’re going to want to maintain as much of the quality of life in Buchanan as we can, and I think we’ll have to be able to deal with a breakdown at the telephone company, say, or the interruption of food deliveries.”

  Makepeace, the City Hall functionary, was frowning. “How is that our responsibility? It doesn’t follow. If these… other people… can’t maintain basic services, won’t they suffer right along with us?”

  Tom Kindle raised his hand. “Use your imagination, Mr.—Makep
eace, is it? It’s not like everybody got converted to some new religion—though maybe they did that, too. Outside this room, people are physically different. They have things living inside them. Who knows what that means? Come next summer, they might all turn to stone, or live on air and sunshine, or move to Canada.”

  “And there are those things,” Miriam Flett added. (Her voice, Matt thought, was as steely and rosinous as a violin note—and it commanded the same kind of attention.) “Those things on television, the Helpers, so-called, though they look like some kind of death robot to me. Probably one of them is coming to Buchanan.”

  “Lord, don’t remind me,” Abby Cushman said. “It makes me shudder to think of it. I got a phone call from my cousin Clifford in New York State. He said he saw one down on 1-90, cruising toward Utica at about forty miles an hour. It stood a foot above the road, like an eight-foot-tall ace of spades, he said, and traffic parted like the Red Sea all around it.”

  “Tom’s right,” Matt said, trying to steer the conversation back on course. “Anything could happen, and I think we’re obliged to do the most general kind of emergency planning. These are a few of the areas I’m concerned about.”

  The boardroom was equipped with a green chalkboard along the front wall. Tom scrawled out four categories:

  Food

  Medical Care

  Water Utilities

  Communication

  Everyone stared at the board for a long moment. It was Abby Cushman who broke the silence: “Holy God, Dr. Wheeler, is all that up to us?”

  Jacopetti snorted. “That’s nuts. There’s ten of us in this room, Dr. Wheeler. Two of us, I would guess, over sixty. Three of us teenagers or not much older. None of us with much useful experience—though we do have a medical man. If all these things fail, I’d say it’s game over. We couldn’t truck food here from Portland—if there was food in Portland, which I don’t guess there would be—or run the electric company, or pump water from the reservoir.”

  Kindle looked interested. “The numbers could be an advantage, though. Ten people can’t run a town, but they can sure as hell run themselves. It’s a survival problem, seems to me. If there’s no electricity, we can operate generators, as long as the gasoline holds out—which would be a hell of a long time if we had free access to every gas station between here and Portland. Similarly water. We don’t need every faucet in town running, only one or two.”

  “There might not even be ten of us,” Bob Ganish said. “I’ve got family in Seattle. I guess they might be… you know, changed. But I still might try to get up there and see ’em. In the kind of emergency you’re talking about, why stick around?”

  “Why leave?” This was Tim Belanger, the City Hall clerk, frowning massively. “Things would be bad all over, wouldn’t they?”

  “We can assume that,” Matt said. “But there’s another point. We may be the only human beings in Buchanan, but there’s the whole northwest to think about. If we have a plan in place, we might attract refugees from Portland or Astoria or even farther away. A small town is easier to manage than a city. We could turn Buchanan into a kind of safe haven.”

  “No room,” Jacopetti said.

  “Not if the original population is still here. But they might not be. That’s one possibility, anyhow.”

  “Communications,” Kindle said. “If we’re a refugee camp, people have to know about us.”

  “No telephone,” Makepeace mused, “no mail, no newspapers… this is hard to imagine. There’s the local radio station, but I don’t think we could run it by ourselves.”

  “Ham radio,” Kindle said. “Shit—excuse me—any radio ham who didn’t go over to the enemy must be laying eggs and hatching kittens. They love this emergency shit. Only there’s nobody to talk to.”

  “We should look into that as soon as possible,” Matt agreed. “Any hams present?”

  No one spoke.

  “Okay. I know we haven’t elected a chairman, but does anybody object if I appoint Tom Kindle as our radio committee?” No objection. “Tom, you ought to be mobile by the end of the month. I suggest you price a decent ham radio rig—there’s an electronics shop down by the marina, I recall. In the meantime, I can find you some books on the subject.”

  “Okay… but I’m not licensed, Matt.”

  “Do you suppose the FCC gives a damn right now?”

  Kindle grinned. “I spose not.”

  Miriam Flett put up her hand: “Dr. Wheeler… are we expected to pay for this radio nonsense?”

  “We should talk about funding. But I’m prepared to underwrite the Radio Committee for the time being.”

  Makepeace and Ganish both offered to chip in; Matt said he’d get back to them—no money was being spent until next week at the earliest.

  “There’s a fifth category,” Jacopetti said. “One you neglected to write down.”

  Matt glanced at the chalkboard. “What would that be, Mr. Jacopetti?”

  “Defense.”

  A chill seemed to settle in the room. Joey Commoner uttered a small, scornful laugh.

  Kindle said, “We get the point, Mr. Jacopetti, but as you yourself said, we’re kinda outnumbered. If this is the Alamo, we might as well pack it in.” Jacopetti folded his hands on his belly. “I agree. And I think it’s the likeliest prospect. We don’t fit into this new world of theirs. They’ll get tired of us, and then they’ll dispose of us.”

  “Not my kids,” Abby Cushman said faintly. “They wouldn’t do that to me… not my grandchildren.”

  Jacopetti gave her a stony look. “I wouldn’t count on that. We have to be prepared—isn’t that why we’re here, Dr. Wheeler?”

  “I don’t think that’s something we can prepare for, Mr. Jacopetti. And I don’t think it’s as likely as all that. No one’s threatened us yet.”

  “And no one will.”

  * * *

  A new voice. Heads turned toward the doorway. A small presence there. It was Cindy Rhee.

  Matt had the involuntary thought She ought to be dead by now.

  He was visited by the memory of Ellen Rhee wiping drool from her daughter’s chin as Cindy’s eyes roamed aimlessly and without focus.

  That was before the intervention of the neocytes, this miracle cure. Now Cindy Rhee was walking—albeit stiffly—and talking, although her words were solemn and curiously deliberate.

  “She’s one of them,” Miriam Flett announced. “She shouldn’t be here.”

  The twelve-year-old focused her eyes on Miriam before Matt could frame an answer. “I won’t stay if you don’t want me to, Miss Flett. I came so that someone could speak for us.” The collective, the inclusive, the universal us. She turned to Matt. “Dr. Wheeler, it’s probably sensible, what you’re doing here. But Mr. Jacopetti is wrong. We’re not a threat to you.”

  “Cindy,” Matt said, “are you speaking for everyone? All the Contactees?”

  She remained in the doorway, a small silhouette. “Yes.”

  “How is that possible?”

  She shrugged.

  “Cindy, if you really know what’s going to happen—next month, next year—I wish you’d tell us.”

  “I can’t. It hasn’t been decided yet, Dr. Wheeler.”

  Paul Jacopetti had turned a shade of-brick red that caused Matt to speculate about hypertension. “Who is this kid? And how does she know my name?” To Cindy: “What were you doing, listening through the door?”

  “She’s a patient of mine,” Matt said. “She—”

  “They know everything” Miriam interrupted. “Haven’t you figured that out? We don’t have any secrets from them.”

  Jacopetti stood up. “I vote to have her removed. She’s a spy, obviously.”

  “I’ll go,” Cindy Rhee said.

  “No,” Matt said. Lacking a gavel, he slapped shut his notebook. “I was about to declare a coffee break. Cindy, please stay until we reconvene. Twenty minutes.”

  * * *

  He asked Cindy to sit in one of the boardroom c
hairs and pulled up a second chair in front of her. He felt he should take the opportunity to examine the child, though he couldn’t say what moved him—sympathy, curiosity, dread. He took a penlight from his shirt pocket and shone it into her eyes.

  The others had crowded around the coffee urn, talking in low voices and sparing an occasional glance at Matt and Cindy. He hoped he hadn’t jeopardized his credibility by talking to the girl.

  Tom Kindle sat apart, thoughtful in his wheelchair.

  Cindy’s pupils still seemed slow to contract, but their reaction was equivalent and otherwise normal. She tracked the penlight adequately when he moved it right to left, up and down.

  He touched her forehead; the skin was cool.

  “Thank you for being worried about me, Dr. Wheeler. I’m all right.”

  “I’m glad, Cindy. It’s good to see you walking.”

  “But you think it’s strange.”

  “I’m happy about it. But yes, it seems strange to me.”

  More than that. He wondered what kind of miracle it really was. He wondered what was inside her skull right now. Normal brain tissue, somehow regenerated? Or something else? Something fed by blood like dark molasses?

  She seemed to sense the thought. “They had to work on me before Contact, Dr. Wheeler, because I was so sick. So I’m a little farther on than most people.”

  “That’s why you came here?”

  “Partly. Partly because even Mr. Jacopetti can’t be too scared of a twelve-year-old.” She suppressed a smile. The smile looked authentic. It was the way she had smiled last year, before the neuroblastoma put an end to all her smiling. “We aren’t dangerous to you. It’s important to understand that. You’re right about the future. It might be difficult. But we’re not the danger.”

  She was still woefully thin.