The Tommyknockers, Page 65

  Interstellar car crash, Gardener thought sickly. Is that all there is, Alfie?

  Bobbi did not go toward those brown husks piled in the lowest angle of this strange bare room. She only stared, her hands clenching and unclenching. Gardener tried to understand what she was thinking and feeling and could not. He turned and carefully lowered himself over the edge of the passageway. He joined her, walking carefully on the canted floor. Bobbi looked at him with her strange new eyes--What do I look like to her through those new eyes? Gard wondered--and then back toward the tangled remains in the corner. Her hands continued to open and snap closed.

  Gardener started toward them. Bobbi clutched at his arm. Gardener shook her grip off without even thinking. He had to look at them. He felt like a child drawn toward an open grave, full of fear but compelled to go on anyway. He had to see.

  Gardener, who had grown up in southern Maine, crossed what he believed to be--for all its starkness--the control room of an interstellar spacecraft. The floor under his feet looked as smooth as glass, but his sneakers held their grip easily. He heard no sound but his own harsh breathing, smelled only dusty Haven air. He walked down the slanted floor to the bodies and looked at them.

  These are the Tommyknockers, he thought. Bobbi and the others aren't going to look exactly like them when they're done "becoming, " maybe because of the environment or maybe because the original physiological makeup of the--whatwould you call it? target group?-results in a slightly different look each time this happens. But there's a kissin-cousin resemblance, all right. Maybe these aren't the originals ... but they're close enough. Ugly fuckers.

  He felt awe ... horror ... and a revulsion that ran blood-deep.

  Late last night and the night before, a wavering voice sang in his mind. Tommyknockers, Tommyknockers, knocking. at the door.

  At first he thought there were five, but there were only four--one was in two pieces. None of them looked as if he--she--it--had died easily or with any serenity. Their faces were ugly and long-snouted. Their eyes were filmed over to the whiteness of cataracts. Their lips were drawn back in uniform snarls.

  Their skins were scaly but transparent--he could see frozen muscles laid in crisscross patterns around jaws, temples, and necks.

  They had no teeth.

  8

  Bobbi joined him. Gard saw awe on her face--but no revulsion.

  These are her gods now, and one is rarely if ever revolted by one's own gods, Gardener thought. These are her gods now, and why not? They made her what she is today.

  He pointed to each one of them in turn, deliberately, like an instructor. They were naked, and their wounds were clear. Interstellar car-crash, yes. But he didn't believe there had been any mechanical failure. Those weird scaly bodies were slashed, scored with ragged cuts. One six-fingered hand was still wrapped around the haft of something that looked like a knife with a circular blade.

  Look at them, Bobbi, he thought, even though he knew Bobbi couldn't read him in here even if he opened up all the way. He pointed here, to a grinning mouth buried in another creature's throat; there, to a wide wound gaping in a thick, inhuman chest; there, to a knife still clutched in one hand.

  Look at them, Bobbi. You don't have to be Sherlock Holmes to see they were fighting. Having a good old knock-down-drag-out here in the old control room. None of this "Come-let-us-reason-together" shit for your gods. They were whipping some heavy numbers on each other. Maybe it started as an argument about whether or not to land here, or maybe it was about whether or not they should have hooked a left at Alpha Centauri. Anyway, the results are the same. Remember how we always assumed a technologically advanced race of beings would be, if one ever made contact with us? We thought they'd be smart like Mr. Wizard and wise like Robert Young on Father Knows Best. Well, here's the truth, Bobbi. The ship crashed because they were having a fight. And where are the blasters? The phasers? The transporter room? I see one knife. The rest they must have done with mirrors... or their bare hands ... or those big claws.

  Bobbi looked away, frowning strenuously--a pupil who didn't want to learn the lesson, a pupil who was in fact determined not to learn it. She started to move off. Gardener caught her by the arm and pulled her back. Pointed at the feet.

  If Bruce Lee had had a foot like that, he would have killed a thousand people a week, Bobbi.

  The Tommyknockers' legs were grotesquely long--they made Gardener think of those guys who don stilts and Uncle Sam suits and march in Fourth of July parades. The muscles below the semitransparent skins were long, ropy, gray. The feet were narrow, and not precisely toed. Instead, each foot sloped into that one thick, chitinous claw, like a bird's talon. Something like a giant vulture's.

  Gardener thought of the dips in the ladder rungs. He shuddered.

  Look, Bobbi. See how dark the claws are. That's blood, or whatever they had inside them. It's on the claws because they did most of the damage. This place sure as shit didn't look like the bridge of the starship Enterprise before it crashed. Just before it hit, it probably looked more like a free-for-all cockfight out behind some redneck's barn. This is progress, Bobbi? Next to these guys, Ted the Power Man looks like Gandhi.

  Frowning, Bobbi pulled away. Leave me alone, her eyes said.

  Bobbi, can't you see--

  Bobbi turned away. She wasn't into seeing.

  Gardener stood by the desiccated bodies, watching her climb the deck like a woman climbing a steep smooth hill. She didn't slip at all. She turned toward a far wall where there was another round opening and boosted herself in. For a moment Gardener could see her legs and the dirty soles of her tennis shoes, and then she was gone.

  Gard walked up the slope and stood for a moment near the center of the room, looking at the single thick cord coming out of the floor, at the earphones that split off from it. The similarity to the setup in Bobbi's shed was perfectly clear. Otherwise ...

  He looked around. Hexagonal room. Barren. No chairs. No pictures of Niagara Falls--or Cygnus-B Falls, for that matter. No astrogation charts, no Mad Labs equipment. All the big-time science-fiction producers and special-effects men would have been disgusted by this emptiness, Gardener thought. Nothing but some earphones lying tangled on the floor, and the bodies, perfectly preserved but probably as light as autumn leaves by now. Earphones and remains like husks piled in that far corner, where gravity had tossed them. Nothing very interesting about it. Nothing very smart. That fit. Because the Havenites were doing lots of stuff, but none of it was very smart, when you got right down to where the short hairs grew.

  It wasn't disappointment he felt so much as stupid correctness. Not rightness--God knew there was nothing right about this--but correctness, as if part of him had always known it would be this way when and if they got in. No Disneyland razzmatazz; only a dreary species of blankness. He found himself remembering W. H. Auden's poem about running away: sooner or later you always ended up in one room, under a naked light bulb, playing solitaire at three in the morning. Tomorrowland, it seemed, ended up being an empty place where people smart enough to capture the stars got mad and tore each other to shreds with the claws on their feet.

  So much for Robert Heinlein, Gard thought, and followed Bobbi.

  9

  He trekked uphill, realizing he had entirely lost track of what his position was in relation to the world outside. It was easier not to think about it. He used the ladder to help himself along as he went. He came to a rectangular porthole and looked through it into something that might have been an engine room--big metal blocks, square on one end, rounded on the other, marched off in a double row. Pipes, thick and dull silver in color, protruded from the square ends of these blocks and moved off at strange, crooked angles.

  Like straight-pipes coming out of a kid's jalopy, Gard thought. He became aware of liquid warmth on the skin above his mouth. It divided in two and ran down his chin. His nose was bleeding again ... slowly, but as if it meant to keep it up for a while.

  Is the light brighter in here now?<
br />
  He stopped and looked around.

  Yes. And could he hear a faint humming, or was that imagination?

  He cocked his head. No; not imagination. Machinery. Something had started up.

  It didn't just start, and you know it. We started it up. We're kicking it over.

  He bit down hard on the mouthpiece. He wanted out of here. Wanted to get Bobbi out. The ship was alive; in a weird way he supposed it was the Ultimate Tommyknocker. It was a howl. It was also the most horrible thing of all. Sentient creature ... What? Woke it up, of course. Gard wanted it asleep. All of a sudden he felt too much like Jack nosing around the castle while the giant slept. They had to get out. He began to crawl faster. Then a new thought struck him, stopping him dead.

  What if it won't let you out?

  He pushed the idea away and kept going.

  10

  The corridor branched into a Y, left arm continuing to angle up, the right turning steeply downward. He listened and heard Bobbi crawling to the left. He moved that way and came to another hatch. She was standing below it. She glanced briefly up at Gardener with eyes that were wide and frightened. Then she looked back again.

  He got one leg over the lip of the hatch and paused. No way he was going in there.

  The room was lozenge-shaped. It was full of hammocks suspended in metal frames--there were hundreds of them. All were canted drunkenly upward and to the left; the room looked like a snapshot of a sailing ship's bunkroom taken just as the ship rolled in the trough of a swell. All the hammocks were full, their occupants strapped in. Transparent skins; doglike snouts; milky, dead eyes.

  A cable ran from each scaled triangular head.

  Not just strapped, Gardener thought. CHAINED. They were the ship's drive, weren't they, Bobbi? If this is the future, it's time to eat the gun. These are dead galley slaves.

  They were snarling, but Gardener saw that some of the snarls were half-obliterated, because some of their heads seemed to have exploded--as if, when the ship crashed, there had been a gigantic backflow of energy that had literally blown their brains out.

  All dead. Strapped forever in their hammocks, heads lolling, snouts frozen in eternal snarls. All dead in this tilted room.

  Close by, another engine started up--chopping rustily at first, then smoothing out. A moment later fans whirred into life--he supposed the newly started engine was driving them. Air blew against his face--whether or not it was fresh was something he didn't intend to personally check on.

  Maybe opening the outer hatch started this stuff up, but I don't believe it. It was us. What starts up next, Bobbi?

  Suppose they started up next--the Tommyknockers themselves? Suppose their grayish-transparent six-fingered hands started to clench and unclench, as Bobbi's hands had been doing as she stared at the corpses in the barren control room? What if those taloned feet began to twitch? Or suppose those heads began to turn, and those milky eyes looked at them?

  I want out. The ghosts here are very lively and I want out.

  He touched Bobbi's shoulder. She jumped. Gardener glanced at his wrist, but there was no watch there--only a fading white shape on his otherwise tanned wrist. It had been a Timex, a tough old baby that had gone on a lot of toots with him and come out alive. But two days of working on the excavation had killed it. THERE'S one John Cameron Swayze never tried in those old TV ads, he thought.

  Bobbi took the point. She pointed at the air bottle clipped to her belt and raised her eyebrows at Gardener. How long has it been?

  Gardener didn't know and didn't care. He wanted out before the whole damned ship woke up and did God-knew-what.

  He pointed back down the passageway. Long enough. Let's bug out.

  A thick, oily chuckling noise began in the wall next to Gardener. He shrank from it. Drops of blood from his slowly bleeding nose splattered the wall. His heart was beating madly.

  Stop it, it's just some sort of pump--

  The oily noise began to smooth out ... and then something went wrong. There was a screech of grinding metal and a quick, thudding series of explosions. Gardener felt the wall vibrate, and for a moment the light seemed to flicker and dim.

  Could we find our way out of here in the dark if the lights went out? You make thee joke I theenk, senor.

  The pump tried to start again. There was a long metallic scream that set Gardener's teeth biting at the rubber plugs in his mouthpiece. It died away at last. There was a long loud rattle, like a straw in an empty glass. Then nothing.

  Not everything lasted all that time with no damage, Gardener thought, and found this idea actually relieving.

  Bobbi was pointing: Go, Gard.

  Before he did, he saw Bobbi pause and look back once at the ranks of hammocked dead. That frightened look was back on her face.

  Then Gard was crawling back the way he came, trying to keep an even, steady pace as the claustrophobia wrapped itself around him.

  11

  In the control room, one of the walls had turned into a gigantic picture window fifty feet long and twenty feet high.

  Gardener stood gape-jawed looking at the blue Maine sky and the fringe of pines and spruces and maples around the trench. In the lower-right-hand corner he could see the rooftree of their equipment lean-to. He stared at this for several seconds--long enough to see big white summer clouds drifting across the blue sky--before realizing it couldn't be a window. They were somewhere toward the middle of the ship, and deep in the ground as well. A window in that wall should show only more ship. Even if they had been near the hull, which they weren't, it would have given on a vista of mesh-covered rock wall, with maybe a squib of blue sky at the very top.

  It's a TV picture of some kind. Something like a TV picture, anyway.

  But there were no lines. The illusion was perfect.

  Forgetting, in this powerful new fascination, his claustrophobic need to get out, Gardener walked slowly toward the wall. The angle gave him a perverse sensation of flying--the effect was like slipping behind the controls of an airline trainer and pulling the mock controls up into a steep climb. The sky was so bright he had to squint. He kept looking for the wall, the way you might expect to see a movie screen through the picture as you got closer to it, but the wall just didn't seem to be there. The pines were a true, clear green; only the fact that he couldn't feel any breeze or smell the woods worked against the persuasive illusion.

  He walked closer, still looking for the wall.

  It's a camera, got to be--mountedon the outer rim of the ship, maybe even the part Bobbi stumbled over. The angle confirms that. But, Jesus! It's so fucking real! If the people at Kodak or Polaroid saw this, they'd go out of their gou--

  His arm was grabbed--grabbed hard--and terror leapt up in him. He turned, expecting to see one of them, a grinning thing with a dog's head, holding a cable with a plug tip in one hand: Just bend down, Mr. Gardener; this won't hurt a bit.

  It was Bobbi. She pointed to the wall. Held out her hands and arms and jittered them rapidly in some kind of charade. Then pointed at the window-wall again. After a moment, Gardener got it. In a grisly way it was almost funny. Bobbi had been miming electrocution, telling him that touching the window-wall would probably be a lot like touching the third rail of a subway.

  Gardener nodded, then pointed toward the wider companionway through which they had entered. Bobbi nodded back and led the way.

  As Gardener boosted himself up, he thought he heard a leaf-dry rattle and turned back, feeling a child's dreamy terror tug at his mind. He felt that it must be them, those corpses in the corner; them, rising slowly to their taloned feet like zombies.

  But they still lay in their tangled drift of strange arms and legs. The wide, clear view of the sky and the trees on the wall (or through the wall) was dimming, losing reality and definition.

  Gardener turned away and crawled after Bobbi as fast as he could.

  7.

  THE SCOOP, CONTINUED

  1

  You're crazy, you know, John Leand
ro told himself as he pulled into exactly the same parking slot Everett Hillman had used not three weeks ago. Leandro did not of course know this. That was probably just as well.

  You're crazy, he told himself again. You bled like a stuck pig, there's two teeth less in your head, and you're planning to go back there. You're crazy!

  Right, he thought, getting out of the old car. I'm twenty-four, unmarried, getting bulgy around the middle, and if I'm crazy it's because I found this, I did, me, I tripped over it. It's big, and it's mine. My story. No, use the other word. It's old-fashioned, but who gives a fuck--it's the right word. My scoop, I'm not going to let it kill me, but I am going to ride it until it bucks me off.

  Leandro stood in the parking lot at a quarter past one on what was rapidly becoming the longest day of his life (it would also be the last, despite all his mental avowals to the contrary) and thought: Good for you. Gonna ride it till it bucks you off. Probably Robert Capa, Ernie Pyle, thought the same thing from time to time.

  Sensible. Sarcastic, but sensible. That deeper part of his mind seemed to be beyond such sense, however. My story, it returned stubbornly. My scoop.

  John Leandro, now clad in a T-shirt reading WHERE THE HELL is TROY, MAINE? (David Bright would probably have laughed himself into a hemorrhage over that one), crossed the small parking lot of Maine Med Supplies ("Specializing in Respiration Supplies and Respiration Therapy Since 1946") and went inside.

  2

  "Thirty bucks is a stiff deposit for an air mask, don't you think?" Leandro asked the clerk, thumbing through his cash. He guessed he had the thirty, but it was going to leave him with about a buck and a half. "Wouldn't think they'd be a big black-market item."