The Tommyknockers, Page 58

  God, he thought, horrified and bitterly amused, is that what happens when you turn into a Tommyknocker? You start looking like someone who got caught in a great big messy atomic meltdown?

  Bobbi, who had been bending over the tools and gathering them up in her arms, turned quickly to look at Gardener, her face wary.

  "What?"

  I said let's get moving, you lazy juggins, Gardener sent clearly, and that wary, puzzled expression became a reluctant smile.

  "Okay. Help me with these, then."

  No, of course victims of high-gamma radiation didn't turn transparent, like Claude Rains in The Invisible Man. They didn't start to lose inches as their bodies twisted and thickened. But, yes, they were apt to lose teeth, their hair was apt to fall out--in other words, there was a kind of physical "becoming" in both cases.

  He thought again: Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.

  Bobbi was looking narrowly at him again.

  I'm running out of maneuvering room, all right. And fast.

  "What did you say, Gard?"

  "I said, 'Let's go, boss.' "

  After a long moment, Bobbi nodded. "Yeah," she said. "Daylight's wasting."

  3

  They rode out to the dig on the Tomcat. It did not fly the way the little boy's bike had flown in E.T. ; Bobbi's tractor would never soar cinematically in front of the moon, hundreds of feet above the rooftops. But it did cruise silently and handily eighteen inches above the ground, large wheels spinning slowly like dying propellers. It smoothed the ride out a whole hell of a lot. Gard was driving, Bobbi standing behind him on the yoke.

  "Your sister left?" Gard said. There was no need to yell. The Tomcat's engine was a faint, distant purr.

  "That's right," Bobbi said. "She left."

  You still can't lie worth shit, Bobbi. And I think--I really do--that I heard her scream. Just before I hit the patch going into the woods, I think I heard her scream. How much would it take to make a high-stepping, pure-d, ball-cutting bitch like Sissy let out a howl? How bad would it have to be?

  The answer to that one was easy. Very bad.

  "She was never the type to exit gracefully," Bobbi said. "Or to let anyone be graceful, if she could help it. She came to bring me home, you know ... watch that stump, Gard, it's a high one."

  Gardener shoved the gear lever all the way up. The Tomcat rose another three inches, skimming over the top of the high stump. Once past, he relaxed his hand and the Tomcat sank back to its previous altitude, eighteen inches above the ground.

  "Yes, she just came up with her bit and her hackamore," Bobbi said, sounding faintly amazed. "There was a time when she might have taken me, too. As things are now, she never had a chance."

  Gardener felt cold. There were a lot of ways a person could interpret a remark like that, weren't there?

  "I'm still surprised that it took you only one evening to convince her," Gardener said. "I thought Patricia McCardle was bad, but your sister made ole Patty look like Annette Funicello."

  "I just wiped off some of this makeup. When she saw what was underneath, she screamed and left so fast you would have thought there were rockets in her heels. It was actually pretty funny."

  It was plausible. It was so plausible that the temptation to believe it was almost insuperable. Unless you ignored the simple fact that the lady under discussion couldn't have gone anywhere in a hurry without help. The lady could barely walk without help.

  No, Gardener thought. She never left. The only question is whether you killed her or if she's out in the goddam shed with Peter.

  "How long do the physical changes go on, Bobbi?" Gardener asked.

  "Not much longer," Bobbi said, and Gardener thought again that Bobbi had never been able to lie worth shit. "Here we are. Park it over by the lean-to."

  4

  The following evening they knocked off early--the heat was still holding, and neither of them felt capable of going on until the last light died. They returned to the house, pushed food around on their plates, even ate some of it. With the dishes washed, Gardener said he thought he would go for a walk.

  "Oh?" Bobbi was looking at him with that wary expression which had become one of her main stocks in trade. "I would have thought you'd gotten enough exercise today for anyone."

  "Sun's down now," Gard said easily. "It's cooler. No bugs. And ..." He looked clear-eyed at Bobbi. "If I go out on the porch, I'm going to take a bottle. If I take a bottle, I'm going to get drunk. If I go for a long walk and come back tired, maybe I can fall into bed sober for one night."

  All of this was true enough ... but there was another truth nested inside it, like one Chinese box inside another. Gardener looked at Bobbi and waited to see if she would go hunting for that inner box.

  She didn't.

  "All right," she said, "but you know I don't care how much you drink, Gard. I'm your friend, not your wife."

  No, you don't care how much I drink--you've made it very easy for me to drink all I want. Because it neutralizes me.

  He walked along Route 9 past Justin Hurd's place, and when he struck the Nista Road he turned left and moved along at a good pace, his arms swinging easily. The last month's labor had toughened him more than he would have believed--not so long ago even a two-mile walk such as this would have left him rubber-legged and winded.

  Still, it was eerie. No whippoorwills greeted the encroaching twilight; no dog barked at him. Most of the houses were dark. No TVs flickered inside the few lighted windows he passed.

  Who needs Barney Miller reruns when you can "become" instead? Gardener thought.

  By the time he reached the sign reading ROAD ENDS 200 YARDS, it was almost full dark, but the moon was rising and the night was very bright. At the end of the road he reached a heavy chain strung between two posts. A rusty, bullet-holed NO TRESPASSING sign hung from it. Gard stepped over the chain, kept walking, and was soon standing in an abandoned gravel pit. The moonlight on its weedy sides was white as bone. The silence made Gardener's scalp prickle.

  What had brought him here? His own "becoming," he supposed--something he had picked out of Bobbi's mind without even knowing he'd done it. It must have been that, because whatever had brought him out here had been a lot stronger than just a hunch.

  To the left there was a thick triangular scar against the whiteness of the undisturbed gravel. This stuff had been moved around. Gardener walked over, shoes crunching. He dug into the fresher gravel, found nothing, moved, dug another hole, found nothing, moved, dug a third, found nothing--

  Oh, hey, wait a minute.

  His fingers skimmed across something much too smooth to be a stone. He leaned over, heart thudding, but could see nothing. He wished he had brought a flashlight, but that probably would have made Bobbi even more suspicious. He dug wider, letting the dirt run and rattle down the inclined slope.

  He saw he had uncovered a car headlight.

  Gardener looked at it, filled with an eerie, skeletal amusement. THIS is what it's like to find something in the earth, he thought. To find some strange artifact. Only I didn't have to stumble over it, did I? I knew where to look.

  He dug faster, climbing the slope and throwing dirt back between his legs like a mutt digging for a bone, ignoring his pounding head, ignoring his hands, which first scraped, then chafed, then began to bleed.

  He was able to clear a level place on the Cutlass's hood just above the right-side headlights where he could stand, and then the work went faster. Bobbi and her buddies had done a casual burial job at best. Gardener pulled loose gravel down by the armload, then kicked it off the car. Pebbles shrieked and squealed on the metalwork. His mouth was dry. He was working his way up to the windshield, and he honestly didn't know which would be better--to see something, or nothing.

  His fingers brushed slick smoothness again. Without allowing himself to stop and think--the silent creepiness of the place might have gotten to him then; he might have just turned and run--he dug a clear place on the windshield and peered in, cupping
his hands to the glass to cut the glare from the moon.

  Nothing.

  Anne Anderson's rented Cutlass was empty.

  They could have put her in the trunk. The fact is, you still don't know anything for sure.

  He thought he did, however. Logic told him that Anne's body wasn't in the trunk. Why would they bother? Anyone who found a brand-new car buried out here in a deserted gravel pit was going to find it suspicious enough to investigate the trunk ... or to call the police, who would do it.

  No one in Haven would give a rip one way or another. They have concerns more pressing than cars buried in gravel pits right now. And if someone from town did happen to find it, calling the police is the last thing they'd do. That would mean outsiders, and we don't want any outsiders in Haven this summer, do we? Perish the thought!

  So she wasn't in the trunk. Simple logic. QED.

  Maybe the people who did this didn't have your sterling powers of logic, Gard.

  That was a crock of shit, too. If he could see a thing from three angles, the Haven Quiz Kids could see it from twenty-three. They didn't miss a trick.

  Gardener backed to the edge of the hood on his knees and jumped down. Now he was aware of his scraped, burning hands. He would have to take a couple of aspirin when he got back and try to conceal the damage from Bobbi in the morning--work--gloves were going to be the order of the day. All day.

  Anne wasn't in the car. Where was Anne? In the shed, of course; in the shed. Gardener suddenly understood why he had come out here--not just to confirm a thought he had plucked from Bobbi's head (if that was what he had done; his subconscious mind might simply have fixed on this as the handiest place to get rid of a big car quick), but because he had needed to make sure it was the shed. Needed to. Because he had a decision to make, and he knew now that not even seeing Bobbi change into something which was not human was enough to force him into that decision--so much of him still wanted to dig the ship out, dig it out and put it to use--so much, so very much.

  Before he could make the decision, he had to see what was in Bobbi's shed.

  5

  Halfway back he stopped in the cold, slippery moonlight, struck by a question--why had they bothered to hide the car? Because the rental people would report it missing and more police would turn up in Haven? No. The Hertz or Avis people might not even know it was missing for days, and it would be longer still before the cops traced Anne's family connection here. At least a week, more like two. And Gardener thought by then Haven would be done worrying about outside interference, one way or another, for good.

  So who had the car been hidden from?

  From you, Gard. They hid it from you. They still don't want you to know what they're capable of when it comes to protecting themselves. They hid it and Bobbi told you Anne went away.

  He went back with this dangerous secret turning in his mind like a jewel.

  3.

  THE HATCH

  1

  It happened two days later, as Haven lay sprawled and sunstruck under the August heat. Dog-days had come, except of course there were no dogs left in Haven--unless maybe there was one in Bobbi Anderson's shed.

  Gard and Bobbi were at the bottom of a cut which was now a hundred and seventy feet deep--the hull of the ship formed one side of this excavation, and the other side, behind the silvery mesh crisscrossing it, showed a cutaway view of thin soil, clay, schist, granite, and spongy aquifer. A geologist would have loved it. They were wearing jeans and sweatshirts. It was stiflingly hot on the surface, but down here it was chilly--Gardener felt like a bug crawling on the side of a water cooler. On his head he wore a hardhat with a flashlight attached to it by silver utility tape. Bobbi had cautioned him to use the light as sparingly as possible--batteries were in limited supply. Both of his ears were stuffed with cotton. He was using a pneumatic drill to shag up big chunks of rock. Bobbi was at the other end of the cut, doing the same thing.

  Gardener had asked her that morning why they had to drill. "I liked the radio-explosives better, Bobbi old kid," he said. "Less pain and strain on the American brain, know what I mean?"

  Bobbi didn't smile. Bobbi seemed to be losing her sense of humor along with her hair.

  "We're too close now," Bobbi said. "Using an explosive might damage something we don't want to damage."

  "The hatch?"

  "The hatch."

  Gardener's shoulders were aching, and the plate in his head was aching as well--that was probably mental, steel couldn't ache, but it always seemed to when he was down here--and he hoped Bobbi would signal soon that it was time for them to knock off for lunch.

  He let the drill chatter and bite its way toward the ship again, not bothering too much about grazing that dull silver surface. You had to be careful not to let the tip of the drill walk onto it too hard, he had discovered; it was apt to rebound and tear off your foot if you weren't careful. The ship itself was as invulnerable to the rough kiss of the drill as it had been to the explosives he and his parade of helpers had used. There was at least no danger of damaging the goods.

  The drill touched the ship's surface--and suddenly its steady machine-gun thunder turned to a high-pitched squeal. He thought he saw smoke squirt from the pulsing blur of the drill's tip. There was a snap. Something flew past his head. All this happened in less than a second. He shut the drill off and saw the drill-bit was almost entirely gone. All that remained was a jagged stub.

  Gardener turned around and saw the part that had gone winging past his face embedded in the rock of the cut. It had sheared a strand of the meshwork neatly in two. Delayed shock hit, making his knees want to come unlocked and spill him to the ground.

  Missed me by a whore's hair. No more, no less. Mother! He tried to pull it out of the rock, and thought at first it wasn't going to come. Then he began to wiggle it back and forth. Like pulling a tooth out of a gum, he thought, and a hysterical titter escaped him.

  The chunk of drill-bit came free. It was the size of a .45 slug, maybe a little bigger.

  Suddenly he was on the verge of passing out. He put an arm on the mesh-covered wall of the cut and rested his head on it. He closed his eyes and waited for the world to either go away or come back. He was dimly aware that Bobbi's drill had also cut out.

  The world began to come back ... and Bobbi was shaking him.

  "Gard? Gard, what's wrong?"

  There was real concern in her voice. Hearing it made Gardener feel absurdly like weeping. Of course, he was very tired.

  "I almost got shot in the head by a forty-five-caliber drill-bit," Gardener said. "On second thought, make that a .357 Magnum."

  "What are you talking about?"

  Gardener handed her the fragment he had worked out of the wall. Bobbi looked at it and whistled. "Jesus!"

  "I think He and I just missed connections. That's the second time I've almost gotten killed down in this shithole. The first was when your friend Enders almost forgot to send down the sling after I'd set one of those radio explosives."

  "He's no friend of mine," Bobbi said absently. "I think he's a dork.... Gard, what did you hit? What made it happen?"

  "What do you mean? A rock! What else is there down here to hit?"

  "Were you near the ship?" All of a sudden Bobbi looked excited. No; more than that. Nearly feverish.

  "Yes, but I've grazed the ship with the drill before. It just bounces b--"

  But Bobbi wasn't listening anymore. She was at the ship, down on her knees, digging into the rubble with her fingers.

  It looked like it was steaming, Gardener thought. It--It's here, Gard! Finally here!

  He had joined her before he realized that she hadn't spoken the conclusion of her thoughts aloud; Gardener had heard her in his head.

  2

  Something, all right, Gardener thought.

  Pulling aside the rock Gardener's drill had chunked up just before it exploded, Bobbi had revealed, finally, a line in the ship's surface--one single line in all of that huge featureless expanse. Lookin
g at it, Gardener understood Bobbi's excitement. He stretched out his hand to touch it.

  "Better not," she said sharply. "Remember what happened before."

  "Leave me alone," Gardener said. He pushed Bobbi's hand aside and touched that groove. There was music in his head, but it was muffled, and quickly faded. He thought he could feel his teeth vibrating rapidly in their sockets and suspected he would lose more of them tonight. Didn't matter. He wanted to touch it; he would touch it. This was the way in; this was the closest they had been to the Tommyknockers and their secrets, their first real sign that this ridiculous thing wasn't just solid through and through (the thought had occurred to him; what a cosmic joke that would have been). Touching it was like touching starlight made solid.

  "It's the hatch," Bobbi said. "I knew it was here!" Gardener grinned at her. "We did it, Bobbi."

  "Yeah, we did it. Thank God you came back, Gard!" Bobbi hugged him ... and when Gardener felt the jellylike movement of her breasts and torso, he felt sick revulsion rise in him. Starlight? Maybe the stars were touching him, right now.

  It was a thought he was quick to conceal, and he thought that he did conceal it, that Bobbi got none of it.

  That's one for me, he thought. "How big do you think it is?"

  "I'm not sure. I think we might be able to clear it today. It's best if we do. Time's gotten short, Gard."

  "How do you mean?"

  "The air over Haven has changed. This did it." Bobbi rapped her knuckles on the hull of the ship. There was a dim, bell-like note.

  "I know."

  "It makes people sick to come in. You saw the way Anne was."

  "Yes."

  "She was protected to some degree by her dental work. I know it sounds crazy, but it's true. Still, she left in a hell of a hurry."

  Oh? Did she?

  "If that was all--the air poisoning people who came into town--that would be bad enough. But we can't leave anymore, Gard."

  "Can't?"

  "No. I think you could. You might feel sickish for a few days, but you could leave. It would kill me, and very quickly. And something else: we've had a long siege of hot, still weather. If the weather changes--if the wind blows hard enough--it's going to blow our biosphere right out over the Atlantic Ocean. We'll be like a bunch of tropical fish just after someone pulled the plug on the tank and killed the rebreather. We'll die."