Chapter 16 Forty Feet of Lattice

They went up the goat trail in four trips between two in the afternoon and seven in the evening, and the whole of that day on the peak turned into the logistics of two hundred and ten pounds of aluminum. Juna rigged it herself, at the school, on the roof's remaining truss, because a forty-foot mast comes down in five pieces and a drowned building is a bad place to be patient. She took the vane and the tip sensor off the top first, both of them wrapped in a windbreak, and the tip sensor's cable came down with them, forty feet of it, and Halleck coiled it into a bucket and carried it up the trail like a man carrying a sleeping child. Omar stripped the rest of it in the same four hours with Delgado and the two men from Fourth Street, and what came off that roof was not only the mast. The school had a code-required lightning system on it, and the down conductors for that system were solid copper the thickness of a thumb, and there were two runs of them coming off the roof edge down the outside of the building into electrodes in the ground, one on each end, forty feet apart. Halleck took those off with a hacksaw and a crowbar while Delgado held the ladder and told him, four separate times, to take a smaller piece. Two forty-foot runs of copper became one hundred and sixty feet of the best conductor on the mountain, and Omar made a dipole out of it that evening, folded back on itself at the top, and cut the length to the band a ship's radio would be sitting on, and fed the middle of it with the booster and eleven feet of the school's tie wire. The solar panel and the battery box came off the roof as one piece, because the panel was bolted to a frame and the frame was bolted to the frame, and the batteries in it were eleven years old and would hold a charge for about a week and had been holding a charge since Tuesday morning with nothing hooked to them at all. And Hague gave Omar the bus. "There are two batteries under the hood," he said. "They have been sitting since Tuesday night with the radio running off them and the alternator off. I know what that is. You get forty minutes of keying, and you have nothing left for the ignition, and if you try to start her after that you will turn her over until the plates come off." "Forty minutes is more than I need," Omar said, in the voice of a man who had no idea what he needed. At the second hour of the third trip, a nine-year-old came up the trail past everyone carrying the vane in both arms like a man carrying a lantern, and did not put it down, and did not say a word about it, and did not stop at the peak until he had it up onto the gravel pad and set it down upright. Perrin. He had decided on Wednesday that the numbers were his job, and he had extended that by the end of the day to include the instruments. And on the fourth trip, Aughrim sent somebody down with a cardboard box. It came up the trail in Halleck's arms, because it was lighter than anything else he had carried and by then he was carrying everything. It was the school's lost property, packed with the emergency blankets when the gym was closed, and it had been sitting on the peak in the open since Tuesday behind the mailbox. Eleven umbrellas. A wristwatch. A lunchbox with a child's name scratched on the inside. Six novels with swollen covers. A shoe with no mate. And one pair of rubber deck boots, gray, enormous, size thirteen, from the school sailing team. They were four sizes too big for Niko. Aughrim cut two holes in the toe of each with a folding knife, lined the edges with a strip cut from a tarp, and laced them onto a child's foot with eleven feet of salvage cord. He stood on the granite in them, and walked four steps, and stopped, and looked down at his own feet with an expression on his face that three adults turned away from so they would not have to watch it. Then he walked out to the edge of the pad where the wind was coming over and stood in it on purpose, in the new boots, with the gusts going around him, and Niko's mother watched her son do that and did not say a word to anybody for a long time. They got the mast up at ten past seven with the light going. It took ninety minutes to bolt to the lookout frame, and the frame held, and Omar's face when the last stay came tight was the face of a man who had been personally betrayed by a building and had decided to allow it. The dipole went up at thirty-four feet, clamped to the mast, running off in two directions along the mast's own structure, and the booster sat on the catwalk's remains in a plastic tote with its battery box and the bus batteries underneath it, and the school tie wire went down the inside of the mast as the ground leg. The vane went on at the top with its tail cut off short, because the tail had six inches of play in it and Omar would not have a loose thing up there. The tip sensor came back to life the moment it was plugged into the booster, and Omar let it run for four minutes and read the average off its own little dial with an expression Juna had never seen on him before. "Twenty-six knots," he said. "Gust forty-one. That is what the antenna is standing in. It is going to be standing in that for hours." "Is that bad?" "It is what it is going to be." He keyed the box. Perrin read the wind off the dial out loud to anybody who wanted it for the rest of that evening, in a voice with no expression in it at all, the way a boy reads a temperature. "Twenty-seven," he would say. "Thirty in the gusts. Twenty-six." He never once looked away from the instrument while he said it. Nobody told him to stop. The first thing he sent was three beats, and then he stopped, and then he sent them again, because that was the convention the machine under Signal Rock had used, and there was nothing else on the frequency to confuse it. Then he said the count. "Tidefall Harbor. Ridge shelter. Thirty-one people, eight of them children, one four-year-old. No injuries except one shoulder and one arm. We have a beam at thirty-four feet and a hand key and forty minutes of battery." He read it out twice and then sat with his hand on the box. Nobody on the peak slept. They took turns at the receiver with the amp's squelch open, four people for two hours each, and the amp was so sensitive on that gain that they heard a gull at four in the morning, six miles away, and one of the old men told everybody about it, and Aughrim told him to be quiet and then went outside to listen for it herself. At two-twenty the pen on the drum, which Omar had brought up and set on the plank where the numbers went, moved a third of an inch. He was asleep and woke up and saw it, and sat and looked at it, and did not wake anybody, because a man who has been up since Tuesday morning is entitled to thirty seconds of a thing going wrong on his own. At six-forty, with the first gray coming up over the shoulder of the dome, Hollis Halleck came off watch with red eyes and put his ear against the tote and lifted his head very slowly. "Omar." "I am here." "Somebody is keying." ---