Anyway, the CB idea had been a good one, even if the brain that had produced it was icelocked (except when it came to Joe). It would be the easiest way to locate other groups, Nadine had said, and to agree upon a rendezvous.
This had led to some puzzled discussion in their group, which at that time had numbered half a dozen with the addition of Mark Zellman, who had been a welder in upstate New York, and Laurie Constable, a twenty-six-year-old nurse. And the puzzled discussion had led to yet another upsetting argument about the dreams.
Laurie had begun by protesting that they knew exactly where they were going. They were following the resourceful Harold Lauder and his party to Nebraska. Of course they were, and for the same reason. The force of the dreams was simply too powerful to be denied.
After some back and forth on this, Nadine had gotten hysterical. She had had no dreams - repeat: no goddam dreams. If the others wanted to practice autohypnosis on each other, fine. As long as there was some rational basis for pushing on to Nebraska, such as the sign at the Stovington installation, fine. But she wanted it understood that she wasn't going along on the basis of a lot of metaphysical bullshit. If it was all the same to them, she would place her faith in radios, not visions.
Mark had turned a friendly, gapped grin on Nadine's strained countenance and said, "If you ain't had no dreams, how come you woke me up last night talkin in your sleep?"
Nadine had gone paper white. "Are you calling me a liar?" she nearly screamed. "Because if you are, one of us had better leave right now!" Joe shrank close to her, whimpering.
Larry had smoothed it over, agreeing with the CB idea. And in the last week or so, they had begun to pick up broadcasts, not from Nebraska (which had been abandoned even before they got there - the dreams had told them that, but even then the dreams had been fading, losing their urgency), but from Boulder, Colorado, six hundred miles farther west - signals boosted by Ralph's powerful transmitter.
Lucy could still remember the joyous, almost ecstatic faces of the others as Ralph Brentner's drawling, Oklahoma accent had cut nasally through the static: "This is Ralph Brentner, Boulder Free Zone. If you hear me, reply on Channel 14. Repeat, Channel 14."
They could hear Ralph, but had no transmitter powerful enough to acknowledge, not then. But they had drawn closer, and since that first transmission they had found out that the old woman, Abagail Freemantle by name (but Lucy herself would always think of her as Mother Abagail), and her party had been the first to arrive, but since then people had been straggling in by twos and threes and in groups as large as thirty. There had been two hundred people in Boulder when Brentner first got in contact with them; this evening, as they chattered back and forth - their own CB now in easy reaching distance - there were over three hundred and fifty. Their own group would send that number well on the way to four hundred.
"Penny for your thoughts," Lucy said to Larry, and put her hand on his arm.
"I was thinking about that watch and the death of capitalism," he said, pointing at her Pulsar. "It used to be root, hog, or die - and the hog who rooted the hardest ended up with the red, white, and blue Cadillac and the Pulsar watch. Now, true democracy. Any lady in America can have a Pulsar digital and a blue haze mink." He laughed.
"Maybe," she said. "But I'll tell you something, Larry. I may not know much about capitalism, but I know something about this thousand-dollar watch. I know it's no damned good."
"No?" He looked at her, surprised and smiling. It was just a little one, but it was genuine. She was glad to see his smile - a smile that was for her. "Why not?"
"Because no one knows what time it is," Lucy said pertly. "Four or five days ago I asked Mr. Jackson, and Mark, and you, one right after another. And you all gave me different times and you all said that your watches had stopped at least once... remember that place where they kept the world's time? I read an article about it in a magazine one time when I was in the doctor's office. It was tremendous. They had it right down to the micro-micro-second. They had pendulums and solar clocks and everything. Now I think about that place sometimes and it just makes me mad. All the clocks there must be stopped and I have a thousand-dollar Pulsar watch that I hawked from a jewelry store and it can't keep time down to the solar second like it's supposed to. Because of the flu. The goddamned flu."
She fell silent and they sat together awhile without talking. Then Larry pointed at the sky. "See there!"
"What? Where?"
"Three o'clock high. Two, now."
She looked but didn't see what he had pointed at until he pressed his warm hands to the sides of her face and tilted it toward the right quadrant of the sky. Then she did see and her breath caught in her throat. A bright light, starbright, but hard and unwinking. It fled rapidly across the sky on an east-to-west course.
"My God," she cried, "it's a plane, isn't it, Larry? A plane?"