John Barnes - Directive 51

“Harold,” Mrs. Cheiron said. “Their boys are right here.”

“Sorry. Daybreak jerks. Anyway, if you’re guilty, we don’t want you to get away, and if you’re innocent, the sheriff will be a lot more protection than your house was. Don’t bother telling me one way or the other. Once we hand you off to the sheriff, you’re all his problem. If they let you go, I guess I’ll owe you an apology.”

Teddy gasped and Tiff got the inhaler into his mouth again; before she pocketed it again, she wiped it with a Diapie-Wipe. Zach watched her dully, trying to pretend he didn’t understand; Harold Cheiron stared at them, face to face and back again, like a cougar deciding which sheep to jump on; probably he was just trying to remember everything he saw them do for the sheriff.

Back when Robert Cheranko was a kid who didn’t talk much because, really, words were kind of a nuisance, his classmates had nicknamed him Silent Bob, after some dumb movie that was already old then. Exactly one guy had ever asked him if he preferred Bob or something else, and he’d immediately said, “Robert,” which Karl Parsoni remembered from then on. As a result, Robert had never even thought about applying to be promoted and getting a truck of his own; he was an assistant lineman for high-tension wires, and he hadn’t done anything more about qualifying or promoting since—at Karl’s urging—he’d gotten his certificate for live-line operations.

Every day, he and Karl cruised back and forth, starting and finishing in the same office in Warsaw, in Kosciusko County, sometimes getting as far as the Ohio or Illinois state lines, now and then getting clear up to the lake or down to the river, just answering calls. Karl would do about ninety percent of the talking, which suited them both, because Robert thought Karl was the most interesting guy he’d ever listened to, and Karl agreed with him. Mostly, Karl, an amateur naturalist, talked about the birds he’d seen along a stream, or habitat for this kind of fish or that kind of shrew, or where the elderberries would be good this year; high-tension lines run through what Karl called “a fair-enough bit of rough-enough country,” which Karl liked to see on a regular basis.

Today, the orders had been “short and smart,” as Karl said, pointing at the paper as he peered at Robert over his reading glasses. In his red Bean chamois shirt, suspenders, and immense white beard, he looked like a slightly and harmlessly mad Santa Claus. “Robert, they haven’t said where, but they just want me to investigate some high-tension lines close to home. There are big increases in line resistance around here and they want us to see what we can find, leaving it up to us to decide where to find it. There’s some lines where if the truck dies it won’t be more than a mile and a half walk from my hunting cabin, but that’s a good fifteen miles out of town. Is there anything in the world that you’d hate to be without for a couple of weeks or so, say back at your apartment? We might be stuck out there that long if things really take a bad turn, but I’d rather be stuck someplace with wood heat and kerosene lamps.”

Robert considered. “Family pictures—my sister and folks are gone, I’d like to have those pictures around. And if I’m going to stay at a hunting cabin, I should get some more warm clothes. Plus I eat the same stuff over and over, and there’s plenty of it ’cause I buy in bulk, might as well bring the can and box stuff along.”

They grabbed the pictures, clothes, and food, and at Karl’s insistence, they brought along Robert’s banjo. “I’m not very good,” he pointed out.

“Yeah, there might be a lot of time to practice. If you’ve got extra strings, bring them too.”

Karl drove slowly down the narrow, cracked blacktop between the cornfields, chattering on, as always, about the way the crows were flocking, about the absence of other traffic, about the way the streams might change if there weren’t so many pumps around to keep pushing the water back onto the land.

Robert savored the hot coffee from the thermos; he knew it all came from overseas, and in case there wasn’t any for a long time, he wanted to make sure he appreciated it. They stopped at the cabin and unloaded the supplies from the truck, then followed the dirt road to where the power lines crossed.

Robert saw it first. “Look at those things hanging from the lines—the bright shiny things.”

With binoculars, they could see threads and strings hanging down from the power lines themselves, some of them as long as two or three feet.

Karl scratched thoughtfully under the huge beard. “Whatever those are, they’re made out of something, and my guess is it’s the power line; they’re stripping metal off it. Either it’s going to break, or they’ll reach the ground and short it out or maybe start a fire. We want to take a couple of those aluminum strings, in a sample bottle, back to look at, and call that good.”

“Sounds right to me,” Robert said. “We could put a jar on the end of a live-line pole and maybe shake one of the nearest ones in, from the tower, if you think it’d be safe.”

“Except the tower probably has some too, that would get on our boots and get loose in the truck.”

Robert scanned to the top of the tower; sure enough, bright strings of metal hung from it as well. “Well, they’re easy enough to reach,” he said. “And I don’t know how they got them up there but they aren’t on the lower parts of the towers, so my guess is they’re still working their way down. They said lye kills ’em?”

“Yeah, and I’ve got some industrial lye in the lockbox.”

“So I put on the spare gloves and apron and booties, go up to the strut below the first string we can see from the ground, and I use the live-line pole and jar to see if I can just take one off. When I do, I bring it down, cap it, and scrub the jar off with lye. We leave the spare gear here, take the jar back, and figure we’ve been about as safe as we can be.”

Forty feet above the ground, Robert spotted a small string he could reach and stopped to take stock for a moment. That was when he realized how quiet it was today; no noise from Indiana 25, though it was less than a mile away; no tractors out turning under the last of the corn and soybean fields; no cars moving, and just a few people walking, in the little crossroads town of Palestine off to the west. He could hear dogs barking, distant cattle, mobs of birds, and the wind. Nothing else.

The cabin had no landline, and their cell phones were dead, so they chanced a trip into Palestine and phoned from the pay phone at the gas station. Karl was on the phone for a long time; when he finished, he said, “Well, I’m supposed to put the jar in the mail to Indy, try turning my cell phone on once a day to check for messages, and if not, they’ll send us out notice by mail, to the hunting cabin. I want to take a little snip of the string for my own interest.”

He got another jar from the car, and working gingerly with tweezers, broke the aluminum string and dropped one end into the new jar. It took a while at the post office to buy a shipping box and send the sample through the mail—the clerk there thought it might qualify as hazardous material—but the truck still made it all the way from town to the cabin.

Karl went in to put the aluminum string under the microscope, and Robert said he wanted to look the truck over first. He washed off the tires, moved it to a dry spot, and decided to take a look underneath.

A good dozen metal threads hung from the undercarriage, anywhere where an aluminum surface was heated by the engine. Robert sat and thought for a time.