Nick had taken three rooms on the basement level of the house, and nice rooms they were, furnished in knotty pine. No urging on Ralph's part had moved him to enlarge his living space - he felt like an interloper already, but he liked them... and until his trip from Shoyo to Hemingford Home he hadn't realized how much he had come to miss other faces. He hadn't gotten his fill yet.
And the place was the finest one he'd ever lived in, just as it was. He had his own entrance by the back door, and he kept his ten-speed parked under the door's low, overhanging eave, where it stood axle-deep in generations of fragrantly rotting aspen leaves. He had the beginnings of a book collection, something he had always wanted and never been able to have in his years of wandering. He had been a great reader in those days (during these new days, there rarely seemed to be time to sit and have a good long conversation with a book), and some of the books on the shelves - shelves which were still largely empty - were old friends, most of them originally borrowed from lending libraries at two cents a day; in the last few years he had never spent enough time in one town to get a regular library card. Others were books he hadn't yet read, books the lending library books had led him to look for. As he sat here with his felt-tip pens and paper, one of these books sat on the desk beside his right hand - Set This House on Fire, by William Styron. He had marked his place with a ten-dollar bill he had found on the street. There was a lot of money in the streets, blowing along the gutters in the wind, and he was still surprised and amused at how many people - himself among them - still stopped to pick them up. And why? The books were free now. The ideas were free. Sometimes that thought exhilarated him. Sometimes it frightened him.
The paper he was writing on came from a ring binder in which he kept all his thoughts - the contents of the binder were half diary, half shopping list. He had discovered a deep fondness in himself for making lists; he thought one of his forebears must have been an accountant. When your mind was troubled, he had discovered that making a list often set it at ease again.
He went back to the fresh page before him, doodling formlessly in the margin.
It seemed to him that all the things they wanted or needed from the old life were stored in the silent East Boulder power plant, like dusty treasure in a dark cupboard. An unpleasant feeling seemed to run through the people who had gathered in Boulder, a feeling just submerged below the surface - they were like a scared bunch of kids knocking around in the local haunted house after dark. In some ways, the place was like a rancid ghost town. There was a sense that being here was a strictly temporary thing. There was one man, a fellow named Impening, who had once lived in Boulder and worked on one of the custodial crews at the IBM plant out on the Boulder-Longmont Diagonal. Impening seemed determined to stir up unrest. He was going around telling people that in 1984 there had been an inch and a half of snow in Boulder by September 14, and that by November it would be cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey. That was the kind of talk Nick would like to put a quick stop to. Never mind that if Impening had been in the army he would have been cashiered for such talk; that was an empty logic, if it was logic at all. The important thing was that Impening's words would have no power if people could move into houses where the lights worked and where the furnaces blew hot air up through grates at the touch of a finger on a button. If that didn't happen by the time the first coldsnap arrived, Nick was afraid that people would begin simply to slip away, and all the meetings, representatives, and ratifications in the world wouldn't stop that.
According to Ralph, there wasn't that much wrong at the power plant, at least not that much visible. The crews who ran it had shut some of the machinery down; other machinery had shut itself down. Two or three of the big turbine engines had blown, perhaps as the result of some final power surge. Ralph said that some of the wiring would have to be replaced, but he thought that he and Brad Kitchner and a crew of a dozen warm bodies could do that. A much bigger work crew was needed to remove fused and blackened copper wire from the blown turbine generators and then install new copper wire by the yard. There was plenty of copper wire in the Denver supply houses for the taking; Ralph and Brad had gone one day last week to check for themselves. With the manpower, they thought they could have the lights on again by Labor Day.
"And then we'll throw the biggest f**king party this town ever saw," Brad said.