The Tommyknockers, Page 63

  "She couldn't have driven you?"

  "God bless you, John, Vera's had muscular dystrophy for years. She wears great big metal braces on her legs--cruel-looking things, they are, like something you'd expect to see in a torture chamber. It just about makes me cry sometimes to see her."

  5

  At a quarter to ten on the morning of August 15th, Leandro crossed into the town of Troy. His stomach was tight with anticipation and--let's face it, folks--a tingle of fear. His skin felt cold.

  I may get sick. I may get sick, and if I do, I'm going to leave about ninety feet of rubber reversing out of the area. Got that?

  I got it, boss, he answered himself. I got it, I got it.

  You may lose some teeth too, he cautioned himself, but the loss of a few teeth seemed a small price to pay for a story which might win him a Pulitzer Prize ... and, just as important, one which would surely turn David Bright green with envy.

  He passed through Troy Village, where everything seemed fine ... if a little slower than usual. The first jag in the normal run of things came about a mile further south, and from a direction he wouldn't have expected. He had been listening to WZON out of Bangor. Now the normally strong AM signal began to waver and flutter. Leandro could hear one ... no, two ... no, three ... other stations mixed in with its signal. He frowned. That sometimes happened at night, when radiant cooling thinned the atmosphere and allowed radio signals to travel further, but he had never heard of it happening on an AM bank in the morning, not even during those periods of optimum radio-transmission conditions which ham operators call "the skip."

  He ran the tuner on the Dodge's radio, and was amazed as a flood of conflicting transmissions poured out of the speakers--rock-and-roll, country-and-western, and classical music stepped all over each other. Somewhere in the background he could hear Paul Harvey extolling Amway. He turned the dial further and caught a clear transmission so surprising he pulled over. He sat staring at the radio with big eyes.

  It was speaking in Japanese.

  He sat and waited for the inevitable clarification--"This lesson in Beginners' Japanese has been brought to you by your local Kyanize Paint dealer," something like that. The announcer finished. Then came the Beach Boys' "Be True to Your School." In Japanese.

  Leandro continued to tune down the kHz band with a hand that shook. It was much the same all the way. As it did at night, the tangle of voices and music got worse as he tuned toward the higher frequencies. At last the tangle grew so severe it began to frighten him--it was the auditory equivalent of a squirming mass of snakes. He turned the radio off and sat behind the wheel, eyes wide, body thrumming slightly, like a man on low-grade speed.

  What is this?

  Foolish to speculate when the answer lay no more than six miles up ahead ... always assuming he could uncover it, of course.

  Oh, I think you'll uncover it. You may not like it when you do, but yeah, I think you'll uncover it with no trouble at all.

  Leandro looked around. The hay in the field on his right was long and shaggy. Too long and shaggy for August. There hadn't been any first cutting in early July. Somehow he didn't think there was going to be any August cutting, either. He looked left and saw a tumble-down barn surrounded by rusty auto parts. The corpse of a '57 Studebaker was decaying in the barn's maw. The windows seemed to stare at Leandro. There were no people to stare, at least not that he could see.

  A very quiet, very polite little voice spoke up inside him, the voice of a child at a tea party that has become decidedly scary:

  I would like to go home, please.

  Yes. Home to Mother. Home in time to watch the afternoon soaps with her. She would be glad to see him back with his scoop, maybe even more glad to see him back without it. They'd sit and eat cookies and drink coffee. They would talk. She would talk, rather, and he would listen. That was how it always was, and it really wasn't that bad. She could be an irritating thing sometimes, but she was ...

  Safe.

  Safe, yeah. That was it. Safe. And whatever was going on south of Troy on this dozy summer afternoon, it wasn't at all safe.

  I would like to go home, please.

  Right. There had probably been times when Woodward and Bernstein felt that way when Nixon's boys were really putting the squeeze on. Bernard Fall had probably felt that way when he got off the plane in Saigon for the last time. When you saw the TV news correspondents in trouble spots like Lebanon and Tehran, they only looked cool, calm, and collected. Viewers never had a chance to inspect their shorts.

  The story is out there, and I'm going to get it, and when I collect my Pulitzer Prize, I can say I owe it all to David Bright ... and my secret Superman wristwatch.

  He put the Dodge in gear again and drove on toward Haven.

  6

  He hadn't gone a mile before he began to feel ill. He thought this must be a physical symptom of his fear and ignored it. Then, when he began to feel worse, he asked himself (as one is apt to do when he realizes that the nausea sitting in his stomach like a small dark cloud is not going away) what he had eaten. There was no blame to be laid in that direction. He hadn't been afraid when he got up that morning, but he had been feeling a lot of anticipation and high-spirited tension; as a result he had refused the usual bacon and scrambled eggs and settled for tea and dry toast. That was all.

  I would like to go home! The voice was now more shrill.

  Leandro pushed on, teeth clamped grimly together. The scoop was in Haven. If he couldn't get into Haven, there would be no scoop. You couldn't hit 'em if you couldn't see 'em. QED.

  Less than a mile from the town line--the day was eerily, utterly dead--a series of beeping, booping, and buzzing noises began to come from the back seat, startling him so badly that he cried out and pulled over to the side of the road again.

  He looked in back and at first was unable to credit what he was seeing. It had to be, he thought, a hallucination brought on by his increasing nausea.

  When he and his mother had been in Halifax this past weekend, he had taken his nephew Tony out for a Dairy Queen. Tony (whom Leandro privately thought was an ill-mannered little snot) had sat in the back playing with a plastic toy that looked a bit like the handset of a Princess phone. This toy was called Merlin, and it ran on a computer chip. It played four or five simple games which called for simple feats of memory or the ability to identify a simple mathematical series. Leandro remembered it had also played tic-tac-toe.

  Anyway, Tony must have forgotten it, and now it was going crazy in the back seat, its red lights flashing on and off in random patterns (but were they? or just a little too fast for him to catch?), making its simple series of sounds again and again and again. It was running by itself.

  No ... no. I hit a pothole or something. That's all. Jogged its switch. Got it going.

  But he could see the small black switch on the side. It was pushed to Off. But Merlin went on booping and beeping and buzzing. It reminded him of a Vegas slot-machine paying off a big jackpot.

  The thing's plastic case began to smoke. The plastic itself was sinking ... drooling ... running like tallow. The lights flashed faster ... faster. Suddenly they all went on at once, bright red, and the gadget emitted a strangled buzzing sound. The case cracked open. There was a brittle shower of plastic shards. The seat-cover started to smolder underneath it.

  Ignoring his stomach, Leandro got up on his knees and knocked it onto the floor. There was a charred spot on the seat where Merlin had lain.

  What is this?

  The answer, irrelevant, nearly a scream:

  I WOULD LIKE TO GO HOME NOW PLEASE!

  "The ability to isolate a simple mathematical series." Did I think that? The John Leandro that flunked general math in high school? Do you mean it?

  Never mind that, just bug OUT!

  No.

  He put the Dodge in gear and drove on again. He had gone less than twenty yards when he thought suddenly, with crazy exhilaration:

  The ability to isolate a simple mathemat
ical series indicates the existence of a general case, doesn't it? You could express it this way, come to think of it: ax[2] + bxy = cy[2] + dx + ey + f-0.

  Yup. It'll work as long as a, b, c, d, and f are constants. I think. Yeah. You bet. But you couldn't let a, b, or c be 0--that'd fuck it for sure! Let f take care of itself! Ha!

  Leandro felt like puking, but he still uttered a shrill, triumphant laugh. All at once he felt as if his brain had lifted off, right through the top of his skull. Although he didn't know it (having pretty much dozed through that part of Nerd Math), he had reinvented the general quadratic equation in two variables, which can indeed be used to isolate components in a simple mathematical series. It blew his mind.

  A moment later, blood burst from his nose in an amazing flood.

  That was the end of John Leandro's first effort to get into Haven. He threw the gearshift into reverse and backed unsteadily up the road, weaving from side to side, right arm hooked over the front seat, blood pouring onto the shoulder of his shirt as he stared out through the back window with watering eyes.

  He backed up for almost a mile, then turned around in a driveway. He looked down at himself. His shirt was drenched with blood. But he felt better. A little better, he amended. Still, he didn't linger; he drove back to Troy Village and parked in front of the general store.

  He walked in, expecting the usual gathering of old men to stare at his bloody shirt with silent Yankee surprise. But only the shopkeeper was there, and he didn't look surprised at all--not at the blood, not at Leandro's question about any shirts he might have in stock.

  "Look like your nose might've bled a tetch," the storekeeper said mildly, and showed Leandro a selection of T-shirts. An inordinately large selection for such a small store as this, Leandro thought--he was slowly getting hold of himself, although his head still ached and his stomach still felt sour and unsteady. The flow of blood from his nose had scared him very badly.

  "You could say that," Leandro said. He allowed the old man to thumb through the shirts for him, because there was tacky blood still drying on his own hands. They were sized S, M, L, and XL. WHERE TH' HELL IS TROY, MAINE? some said. On others there was a lobster and the slogan I GOT THE BEST PIECE OF TAIL I EVER HAD IN TROY, MAINE. On others there was a large blackfly which looked like a monster from outer space. THE MAINE STATE BIRD, these proclaimed.

  "You sure do have lots of shirts," Leandro said, pointing to a WHERE TH' HELL in an M size. He thought the lobster shirt was amusing, but thought his mother would be less than wild about the innuendo.

  "Ayuh," the storekeeper said. "Have to have a lot. Sell a lot."

  "Tourists?" Leandro's mind was already racing ahead, trying to figure out what came next. He had thought he was onto something big; now he believed it was one hell of a lot bigger than even he had believed.

  "Some," the storekeeper said, "but there ain't been many down this way this summer. Mostly I sell em to folks like you."

  "Like me?"

  "Ayuh. Folks with bloody noses."

  Leandro gaped at the storekeeper.

  "Their noses bleed, they wreck their shirts," the storekeeper said. "Same way you wrecked yours. They want a new one, and if they're just locals--like I 'spect you are--they ain't got no luggitch and no changes. So they stop first place they come to and buy a new one. I don't blame em. Drivin' around in a shirt all over blood like yours'd make me puke. Why, I've had ladies in here this summer--nice-looking ladies, too, dressed to the nines--who smelled like guts in a hogshead."

  The storekeeper cackled, showing a mouth that was perfectly toothless.

  Leandro said slowly: "Let me get this straight. Other people come back from Haven with bloody noses? It's not just me?"

  "Just you? Hell, no! Shittagoddam! The day they buried Ruth McCausland, I sold fifteen shirts! That one day! I was thinkin about retirin on the proceeds and movin to Florida."

  The storekeeper cackled again.

  "They was all out-of-towners." He said this as if it explained everything--and perhaps in his mind, it did. "Couple of em was still spoutin when they come in here. Noses like fountains! Ears too, sometimes. Shittagoddam!"

  "And nobody knows about this?"

  The old man looked at Leandro from wise eyes.

  "You do, sonny," he said.

  6.

  INSIDE THE SHIP

  1

  "You ready, Gard?"

  Gardener was sitting on the front porch, looking out at Route 9. The voice came from behind him, and it was easy--too easy--for him not to flash on a hundred sleazy prison movies, where the warden arrives to escort the condemned man along the Last Mile. Such scenes always beginning, of course, with the warden growling, Are you ready, Rocky?

  Ready for this? You got to be kidding.

  He got up, turned around, saw the equipment in Bobbi's arms, then the little smile on Bobbi's face. There was something knowing in that smile that he didn't like.

  "See something funny?" he asked.

  "Heard it. Heard you, Gard. You were thinking about old prison movies," Bobbi said. "And then you thought, 'Ready for this? You got to be kidding.' I caught all of that one, and that's very rare ... unless you're deliberately sending. That's why I was smiling."

  "You were peeking."

  "Yes. And it's getting easier to do," Bobbi said, still smiling.

  From behind his decaying mental shield, Gardener thought: I have a gun now, Bobbi. It's under my bed. I got it in the First Reformed Church of the Tommyknockers. It was dangerous ... but it would be more dangerous not to know just how deep Bobbi's ability to "peek" now went.

  Bobbi's smile faltered a little. "What was that one?" she asked.

  "You tell me," he said, and when her smile began to change to a look of narrow suspicion he added easily, "Come on, Bobbi, I was just pulling your string a little. I was only wondering what you got there."

  Bobbi brought the equipment over. There were two rubber snorkel mouthpieces attached to tanks and homemade regulators.

  "We wear these," she said. "When we go inside." Inside.

  Just the word lit a hot spark in his belly and triggered all sorts of conflicting emotions--awe, terror, anticipation, curiosity, tension. Part of him felt like a superstitious native preparing to walk on taboo ground; the rest felt like a kid on Christmas morning.

  "The air inside is different, then," Gardener said.

  "Not so different." Bobbi had put her makeup on indifferently this morning, perhaps having decided there was no longer any need to hide the accelerating physical changes from Gardener. Gard realized he could see Bobbi's tongue moving inside her head as she spoke ... only it didn't look precisely like a tongue anymore. And the pupils of Bobbi's eyes looked bigger, but somehow uneven and wavering, as if they were peering up at him from underwater. Water with a slight greenish tinge. He felt his stomach turn over.

  "Not so different," she said. "Just ... rotten."

  "Rotten?"

  "The ship's been sealed for over twenty-five thousand centuries," Bobbi said patiently. "Totally sealed. We'd be killed by the outrush of bad air as soon as we opened the hatch. So we wear these."

  "What's in them?"

  "Nothing but good old Haven air. The tanks are small--forty, maybe fifty minutes of air. You clip it to your belt like this, see?"

  "Yes."

  Bobbi offered him one of the rigs. Gard attached the tank to his belt. He had to raise his T-shirt to do it, and he was very glad he'd decided to leave the .45 under the bed for now.

  "Start using the canned air just before I open it up," Bobbi said. "Almost forgot. Here. Just in case you forget." She handed Gardener a pair of noseplugs. Gard stuffed them into a jeans pocket.

  "Well!" Bobbi said briskly. "Are you ready, then?"

  "We're really going in there?"

  "We really are," Bobbi said almost tenderly.

  Gardener laughed shakily. His hands and feet were cold. "I'm pretty fucking excited," he said.

  Bobbi smiled. "I am too."
<
br />   "Also, I'm scared."

  In that same tender voice Bobbi said, "No need to be, Gard. Everything will be all right."

  Something in that tone made Gardener feel more scared than ever.

  2

  They took the Tomcat and cruised silently through the dead woods, the only sound the minute hum of batteries. Neither of them talked.

  Bobbi parked the Tomcat by the lean-to and they stood for a moment looking at the silver dish rising out of the trench. The morning sun shone on it in a pure, widening wedge of light.

  Inside, Gardener thought again.

  "Are you ready?" Bobbi asked again. Come on, Rocky--just one big jolt, you'll never feel a thing.

  "Yeah, fine," Gardener said. His voice was a trifle hoarse.

  Bobbi was looking at him inscrutably with her changing eyes--those floating, widening pupils. Gardener seemed to feel mental fingers fluttering over his thoughts, trying to pull them open.

  "Going in there could kill you, you know," Bobbi said at last. "Not the air--we've got that licked." She smiled. "It's funny, you know. Five minutes on one of those mouthpieces would knock someone from the outside unconscious, and half an hour of it would kill him. But it'll keep us alive. Does that tickle you, Gard?"

  "Yes," Gard said, looking at the ship and wondering the things he always wondered: Where did you come from? And how long did you have to cruise the night to get here? "It tickles me."

  "I think you'll be okay, but you know--" Bobbi shrugged. "Your head ... that steel plate interacts somehow with the--"

  "I know the risk."

  "As long as you do."

  Bobbi turned and walked toward the trench. Gardener stood where he was for a moment, watching her go.

  I know the risk from the plate. What I'm less clear on is the risk from you, Bobbi. Is it Haven air I'm going to get when I have to use that mask, or something like Raid?

  But it didn't matter, did it? He had thrown the dice. And nothing was going to keep him from seeing inside that ship, if he could--not David Brown, not the whole world.

  Bobbi reached the trench. She turned and looked back, her made-up face a dull mask in the morning light angling through the old pines and spruces which surrounded this place. "Coming?"