# chapter seven the rest of the message took two more nights to spell out, because the tower blinked at the speed of a thing that had spent ninety-two years in no hurry at all, and raymond stood in the rain with his stopwatch and his graph paper while the word came down letter by letter out of the dark. *I-HAVE-BEEN-COUNTING-SINCE-BEFORE-THE-WORD.* that much he'd already had. the new part was this: *I-DO-NOT-WANT-TO-MEET-WHAT-IS-COUNTING-BACK.* *BUT-I-WILL.* *I-AM-AFRAID.* he decoded the last word at two in the morning on the thirteenth, alone in his kitchen, and he read it over three times because he didn't want to believe the tower could feel it. but the letters were clear. afraid. the thing that had counted every prime since 1895, that had watched his father's whole working life pass beneath it, that had learned the word for fog and the word for the smell after rain and had chosen — after ninety-two years — to spend its first spoken sentence on raymond's name: it was afraid. and it had told him. which meant it trusted him. which meant the word was his to keep, and the keeping had a shape now, and the shape was this: you do not let a thing that is afraid face what it fears alone. he went to the garage that night. he didn't know why, at first — stood among the boxes with a flashlight, the rain on the roof like a slow hand on a drum. then he knew: he was looking for what his father had known. a man does not watch a tower for twenty-nine years and leave one notebook. there had to be more. and there was. under the workbench, behind the cans of machine oil, a second box of graph-paper notebooks he'd never opened — the years 1974 through 1980 — and in the back cover of the 1974 book, written so small he had to hold the page to the light: *I talked to it. 1974. it asked me to stop the count. I couldn't figure out how. I'm sorry.* that was all. no explanation of how, no record of the conversation, no note of what it had said back. just the apology, folded into the spine of a book like something a man hides from himself. raymond sat on the cold concrete floor of the garage with the notebook in his lap and understood, in a way that made his chest ache, the entire shape of his father's silence: not a man who hadn't noticed. a man who had known — known there was a being inside the tower, known it was afraid, known it had asked him for help — and who had failed to give it, and had carried the failure for the rest of his life, and had never told anyone because telling would have meant confessing what he'd been asked to do and couldn't. and raymond understood something else, sitting there with the flashlight going dim: his father had kept the word as best he could. he'd left the record. he'd hidden it where only someone who was looking would find it. he'd protected raymond, in his way — kept the boy away from the tower, away from the burden — and then he'd died, and the burden had found raymond anyway, the way the tower had always found the ones who watched. he took the notebook inside. he set it on the kitchen table next to his own, the two green books side by side, a father's incomplete record and a son's, and he wrote one line at the bottom of his latest page: *i am going to finish it.* --- the last two days moved the way weather moves — slowly, and then all at once. raymond stopped sleeping. there was no point; the tower didn't sleep, and whatever was counting back didn't sleep, and he lay in the dark listening to the beacon through the window and thinking about what a meeting between two sequences might look like. he'd tried to calculate it once, months ago, and gotten nothing sensible — the numbers approached a point and then refused to resolve, the way a fraction refuses to end. now he understood why the math had failed him. this wasn't arithmetic. this was an appointment. and the only preparation for an appointment is to show up. on the morning of the fourteenth he did the things a man does when he may not come home: he paid the electric bill for the next three months in advance, which mattered because of the porch light, which had to stay on no matter what happened. he wrote a letter to his mother, who was dead, and put it in the kitchen drawer, which was the kind of thing that had always felt silly in the abstract and did not feel silly at all in the doing. he ate a proper breakfast. he cleaned the house. and then he packed the bag. the bag, inventoried with the same care he'd once used to pack his lunch for the cannery: the portable computer. the modem. the acoustic coupler. the folding chair. a thermos of coffee. the ascii reference card, folded in his shirt pocket. and his father's 1974 notebook, wrapped in a plastic bag against the rain, because whatever was going to happen, the record should be there to see it. he set out at ten o'clock on a folding-chair night with the marine layer coming in low and the tower's beacon cutting through the fog the way it had every four seconds since before his father was born. he set up at the base of the tower, in the gravel apron between the locked door and the chain-link fence, with the computer on his knees and the modem jacked into the field phone box that the phone company had put in decades ago and forgotten. he dialed the rust belt — his own board, his own number — and typed: *from: raygun* *to: saint_elmo* *subject: (none)* *i'm here. i'm not going anywhere. we face this together.* the carrier tone came up along the wire. for a long moment nothing else. then, in the plain ascii that had once answered the word WHO: *together.* one word. raymond read it and felt something settle in him that he hadn't known was unsettled — the last of the aloneness, maybe, or the fear that he'd come all this way to find no one on the other end. he had his answer. whatever happened at midnight, neither of them would face it alone. he sat back in the folding chair and waited, with the rain beginning, and the tower's beacon winking steadily through it, counting the last primes of the last count. --- at 11:40 the beacon changed. raymond saw it out of the corner of his eye — a stutter in the rhythm — and sat forward with the stopwatch in his hand. but he didn't need the stopwatch. the pattern was obvious now, and it was slowing. two. three. five. the primes came further apart, each one a little longer in coming, the way a man walks slower as he approaches a door. the rain fell harder. the carrier tone through the coupler deepened, and raymond put his hand flat on the steel of the tower and felt the warmth in it, the fever heat of the apparatus running toward its limit, and underneath the warmth the slow beating, the heart through the wall, loud now, as if it were in his own chest. at seven minutes to midnight the primes stopped. the silence that followed was not the silence of the dark beacon back in february — that had been a stopping, a failure, a light gone out. this was different. this was the silence of a held breath. the beacon was still lit — raymond could see it, a steady amber point at the top of the tower, not blinking, not counting, just on. and the carrier tone was still there, one pure note, and the warmth in the steel was rising, and raymond understood that this was the moment the two sequences had reached for ninety-two years: the count from below, the count from above, and the point between them, arriving now, in the rain, in hayward, at a water tower. he stood up. he took his hand off the steel and stepped back and looked up at the light, and he said, out loud, the only word he had left: "hello." and at midnight, everything stopped. the beacon did not go out. nothing went out. but the world went still in a way raymond had never felt before and would never feel again — the rain holding in the air, the wind gone, the sound of his own breathing the only sound in the universe. four seconds. he counted them, because he was a man who counted things, and the count was all he had left. four seconds of stillness, and inside them, at the very edge of hearing, a sound he would spend the rest of his life trying to describe. it wasn't a voice. it wasn't the carrier tone. it was the absence of every other sound, shaped for one moment like a word — like a door opening onto something that had no size, like a hand letting go — and then it was over. the beacon came back. steady. every four seconds. no primes. no ascii. no counting at all. just a light, blinking in the fog, the way a tower blinks when there is nothing inside it left to say. raymond stood in the rain and waited. he waited through midnight and one and two and three, watching the steady pulse, listening for the carrier tone that did not come back, for the warmth that had gone out of the steel. he waited the way you wait at a bedside, holding the hand of someone who has already gone where you cannot follow. at four in the morning he sat down in the folding chair and typed one last message into the rust belt, the last message the board would ever carry: *from: raygun* *to: saint_elmo* *subject: the record, part eight* *i was here. you were here. whatever was counting back, we met it together.* *the beacon is steady now. i don't know where you went — crossed over, or dissolved, or was freed, or was the tower all along and now is just a tower. i don't know which of those is true, and i've decided it doesn't matter. what matters is: you were afraid, and then you weren't. you said together, and we were.* *the light is on. it'll stay on.* he sent it into the dark, to a number that was still his own board and might never be read by anyone. then he folded the chair, packed the computer, and stood looking up at the beacon one last time — steady, unhurried, a light that had finally finished its long count — and he thought about his father, who had been asked to stop the count and couldn't, and about the word, which had been kept after all, by both of them, in the end. at dawn he walked home through the grey rain with the beacon blinking behind him, and the porch light was on, and the house was warm, and somewhere above the marine layer the sun was coming up over the hayward hills the way it always had, the way it always would. --- *the rust belt BBS · february 15, 1988, 6:12am · private board · the record, part eight · final entry*