The Tommyknockers, Page 77

  A large hand suddenly reached into Dick Allison's head and squeezed the meat of his brain. His hands flew up to his temples, the fingers splayed into stiff, galvanic spider shapes. He tried to scream but was unable. Below him, in the clearing, he was vaguely aware that people were falling to their knees in ranks, like pilgrims witnessing a miracle or a divine visitation.

  The ship had begun to vibrate--the sound filled the air with a thick, subaural hum.

  Dick was aware of this ... and then, as his eyes blew out of his head like half-congealed chunks of moldy jelly, he knew no more. Then, or ever.

  43

  Little help, God, we got a deal?

  He sat in the middle of the canted hexagonal room, his twisted, broken leg stuck out in front of him (croggled, that word wouldn't go away, his leg had been croggled), near where the thick master cable came out of the gasket in the floor.

  Little help for the kid. I know I'm not much, shot my wife, good fucking deal, shot my best friend, another good fucking deal, a New and Improved Good Fucking Deal, you might say, but please, God, I need an assist right now.

  That was no exaggeration, either. He needed more than just a little. The thick cable split off into eight thinner ones, each ending not in an earplug but in a set of headphones. If he had been playing Russian roulette back in Bobbi's shed, this was like sticking his head into a cannon and asking someone to pull the lanyard.

  But it had to be done.

  He picked up one set of phones, noticing again how the centers bulged inward, and then looked toward the tangle of brown, sere bodies in the far corner of the room.

  Tommyknockers? Hey-nonny-nonny nonsense name or not, it was still too good for them. Cavemen from space, that was all they had been. Long claws operating machinery they made but didn't even try to understand. Toes like the spurs on fighting cocks. This thing was a malignant tumor that needed quick removal.

  Please, God, let my little idea be right.

  Could he tap all of them? That was really the $64,000 question, wasn't it? If the "becoming" was a closed system--something on the skin of the ship simply bio-degrading into the atmosphere--the answer was probably no. But Gardener had come to think--or perhaps only to hope--that it was more, that it was an open system where the ship fed the humans, causing them to "become," and the humans fed the ship so it could ... what? Come again, of course. Could one use the word "resurrection"? Sorry, no. Too noble. If he was right, this was a kind of freak-show parthenogenesis whose proper place was under tawdry carnival lights and in cheap tabloids, not in undying myths or religious creeds. An open system ... a slave system ... quite literally a go-fuck-yourself system.

  Please, God. Little help right now.

  Gardener donned the headphones.

  It happened instantaneously. No sensation of pain this time, only a great white radiance. The lights in the control room flashed up to full bright. One of the walls turned into a window again, showing the smoky sky and the fringe of trees. And then another of the room's eight walls went transparent ... another ... another. In a space of seconds Gard seemed to be sitting in an open space with the sky above him and the trench with its silvery netting on either side. The ship seemed to have disappeared. He had a 360-degree view.

  Motors kicked in one by one and cycled up to full running pitch.

  A bell was ringing somewhere. Huge thudding relays kicked over one by one, making the metal deck shiver under him.

  The feeling of power was incredible; he felt as though the Mississippi was running through his head at flood level. He sensed it was killing him, but that was okay.

  I've tapped them all, Gardener thought faintly. Oh God, thank you God I've tapped them all! It worked!

  The ship began to tremble. To vibrate. The vibration became spasms of racking shudders. The time had come.

  Baring the last few of his teeth, Gardener prepared to reach down and grasp his own bootstraps.

  44

  He had tapped all of them, but it was Dick Allison, because of his greater evolution, and Hazel's forty or so border-watchers back in town who bore the brunt of the ship's powering-up process--these latter were all tied together neatly in one unified web, and the ship simply reached out for it.

  They slumped over, blood trickling from their eyes and noses, and died as the ship sucked their brains up.

  The ship drew from the Tommyknockers in the woods as well, and several of the older ones died; most, however, felt only an excruciating pain in their heads as they either knelt or lay, half-fainting, around the perimeter of the clearing. A few understood that the fire was very close now. As the wind freshened, that burning lady's fan spread ... and spread. Smoke ran across the clearing in thick grayish-white clouds. The fire crackled and thundered.

  45

  Now, Gardener thought.

  He felt something in his mind slip, catch, slip ... and catch firmly. It was like a gearshift. There was pain, but it was bearable.

  THEY'RE feeling most of the pain, he thought faintly.

  The sides of the trench appeared to move. At first just a little. Then a little more. There was a grinding, squealing sound.

  Gardener bore down, his brow locked in a tremendous frown, his eyes squeezed into slits.

  The silvery mesh began to slip past, slowly but steadily. Not that it was moving at all, of course; it was the ship that was moving; that grinding noise was the sound of it pulling itself free of the bedrock which had held it so long.

  Going up, he thought incoherently. Ladies' lingerie, hosiery, notions, and be sure to visit our pet department--

  It was gaining speed, the trench walls passing more quickly to either side. The sky widened out ahead--it was a dull gunmetal color. Sparks twisted by like formations of tiny burning birds.

  He brimmed with exaltation.

  Gardener thought of looking out of a subway window as the train left the station, slowly at first, then beginning to speed up--how the tile walls seemed to unroll backward like the strip of paper in a player piano, how you could read the ads as they passed from left to right--Annie, A Chorus Line, These Times Demand the Times, Touch the Velvet. Then into the darkness where there was only movement and a vague sensation of black walls rushing past.

  A Klaxon went off three times, nearly deafening him, making him shriek; fresh blood spattered into his lap. The ship shuddered and rumbled and squealed and dragged itself out of the earth's crypt; it rose into thickening bands of smoke and hazy sunlight, its polished flank coming out of the trench, out and out and up and up, a moving metal wall. One standing right next to this insane sight might have been tempted to believe that the earth was creating a stainless-steel mountain or injecting a titanium wall into the air.

  As the arc of the edge grew broader and broader, it reached the edges of the trench Bobbi and Gardener had dug steadily wider--ripping at the earth with their smart-stupid tools like half-wits trying to perform a cesarean section.

  Up and out and out and up. Rocks squealed. The earth moaned. Dust and the smoke of friction fumed from the trench. Up close the illusion of an emerging mountain or wall held, but even from such a short distance away as the edge of the clearing, the thing's circular shape was revealed--the titanic shape of the saucer, now emerging from the earth like a great engine. It was silent, but the clearing was filled with the coarse thunder of breaking rock. Up and out it came, cutting the trench wider and wider, its shadow gradually covering the whole clearing and burning woods.

  Its leading edge--the one Bobbi had stumbled over--sheared off the top of the tallest spruce in the forest and sent it tumbling and crashing to the ground. And still the ship birthed itself from the womb which had held it so long; continued until it covered the whole sky and was reborn.

  Then it stopped cutting the trench wider; a moment later there was actually a gap between the edges of the trench and the edge of the emerging ship. Its center had at last been reached and passed.

  The ship rumbled out of the smoky trench, emerging into the smoky sunsh
ine, and at last the squealing, rumbling sounds ceased, and there was daylight between the ground and the ship.

  It was out.

  It rose on a slanted, canted angle and then came to the horizontal, crushing trees with its unknown, unknowable weight, bursting their trunks open. Sap sprayed the air with thin amber veils.

  It moved with slow, ponderous elegance through the burning day, cutting a swath along the tops of the trees like a clipper trimming a hedge. Then it hovered, as if waiting for something.

  46

  Now the floor below Gardener was also transparent; he seemed to be sitting in thin air, looking down at the billowing reefs of smoke coming from the edge of the woods and filling the air.

  The ship was fully alive now--but he was fading fast.

  His hands crept up to the earphones.

  Scotty, he thought, gimme warp-speed. We're blowing this disco.

  He bore down hard inside his mind, and this time the pain was thick and fibrous and sickening.

  Meltdown, he thought dimly, this is what meltdown feels like.

  There was a sensation of tremendous speed. A hand knocked him sprawling to the deck, although there was no sensation of multi-g force; the Tommyknockers had apparently found a way to beat that.

  The ship didn't tilt; it simply rose straight up into the air.

  Instead of blotting out the whole sky, it blotted out only three-quarters, then half. It grew indistinct in the smoke, its hard-edged metal-alloy reality growing fuzzy, and thus dreamy.

  Then it was gone in the smoke, leaving only the dazed, drained Tommyknockers to try to find their feet before the fire could overtake them. It left the Tommyknockers, and the clearing, the lean-to ... and the trench, like a black socket from which some poisonous fang had been drawn.

  47

  Gard lay on the floor of the control room, staring up. As he watched, the smoky, chromed look of the sky disappeared. It became blue again--the brightest, clearest blue he had ever seen.

  Gorgeous, he tried to say, but no word came out--not even a croak. He swallowed blood and coughed, his eyes never leaving that brilliant sky.

  Its blue deepened to indigo ... then to purple. Please don't let it stop now, please--

  Purple to black.

  And now in that blackness he saw the first hard chips of stars.

  The Klaxon blared again. He felt fresh pain as the ship drew from him, and there was a sensation of increasing speed as it slipped into a higher gear.

  Where are we going? Gardener thought incoherently, and then the blackness overtook him as the ship fled up and out, escaping the envelope of the earth's atmosphere as easily as it had escaped the ground which had held it for so long. Where are we--?

  Up and up, out and out--the ship rose, and Jim Gardener, born in Portland, Maine, went with it.

  He drifted down through black levels of unconsciousness, and shortly before the final vomiting began--a vomiting of which he was never even aware--he had a dream. A dream so real that he smiled as he lay in the middle of blackness, surrounded by space and with the earth below him like a giant blue-gray croaker marble.

  He had gotten through it--somehow gotten through it. Patricia McCardle had tried to break him, but she had never quite been able to do it. Now he was back in Haven, and there was Bobbi coming down the porch steps and across the dooryard to meet him, and Peter was barking and wagging his tail, and Gard grabbed Bobbi and hugged her, because it was good to be with your friends, good to be where you belonged ... good to have some safe haven to come to.

  Lying on the transparent floor of the control room, already better than seventy thousand miles out in space, Jim Gardener lay in a widening pool of his own blood ... and smiled.

  Epilogue

  Curl up, baby! Curl up tight!

  Curl up, baby! Keep it all outta sight!

  Undercover

  Keep it all outta sight,

  Under cover of the night.

  --THE ROLLING STONES, "Undercover"

  O every night and every day

  A little piece of you is falling away ...

  Toe your line and play their game

  Let the anaesthetic cover it all

  Till one day they call your name:

  You're only waiting for the hammer to fall.

  --QUEEN, "Hammer to Fall"

  1

  Most of them died in the fire.

  Not all; a hundred or more never reached the clearing at all before the ship pulled itself out of the ground and disappeared into the sky. Some, like Elt Barker, who had gone flying off his motorcycle, did not reach it because they had been wounded or killed on the way ... fortunes of war. Others, like Ashley Ruvall and old Miss Timms, who was the town librarian on Tuesdays and Thursdays, were simply too late or too slow.

  Nor were all of those who did reach the clearing killed. The ship had gone into the sky and the awful, draining power which had seized them dwindled away to nothing before the fire reached the clearing (although by then sparks were drifting down and many of the smaller trees at the eastern edge were blazing). Some of them managed to stumble and limp further into the woods ahead of that spreading fiery fan. Of course, going straight west was no good to these few (Rosalie Skehan was among them, as were Frank Spruce and Rudy Barfield, brother of the late and mostly unlamented Pits), because eventually they would run out of breathable air, in spite of the prevailing winds. So it was necessary to first go west, and then turn either south or north in an effort to buttonhook around the fire-front ... a desperation play where the penalty for failure was not losing the ball but being roasted to cinders in Big Injun Woods. A few--not all, but a few--actually did make it.

  Most, however, died in the clearing where Bobbi Anderson and Jim Gardener had worked so long and hard--died within feet of that empty socket where something had been buried and then pulled.

  They had been used roughly by a power which was much greater than the early, tentative state of their "becoming" could cope with. The ship had reached out to the net of their minds, seized it, and used it to obey the Controller's weak but unmistakable command, which had been expressed as WARP SPEED to the ship's organiccybernetic circuits. The words WARP SPEED were not in the ship's vocabulary, but the concept was clear.

  The living lay on the ground, most unconscious, some deeply dazed. A few sat up, holding their heads and moaning, oblivious of the sparks drifting down around them. Some, mindful of the danger coming from the east, tried to get up and fell back.

  One of those who did not fall back was Chip McCausland, who lived on Dugout Road with his common-law wife and about ten kids; two months and a million years ago, Bobbi Anderson had gone to Chip for more egg cartons to hold her expanding collection of batteries. Chip shambled halfway across the clearing like an old drunk and fell into the empty trench. He tumbled, shrieking, all the way to the bottom, where he died of a broken neck and a shattered skull.

  Others who understood the danger of the fire and who could possibly have gotten away elected not to do so. The "becoming" was at an end. It had ended with the departure of the ship. The purpose of their lives had been canceled. So they only sat and waited for the fire to take care of what remained of them.

  2

  By nightfall, there were less than two hundred people left alive in Haven. Most of the township's heavily wooded western half had burned or was burning flat. The wind grew stronger yet. The air began to change, and the remaining Tommyknockers, gasping and whey-faced, gathered in Hazel McCready's yard. Phil Golden and Bryant Brown got the big air-exchanger going. The survivors gathered around it as homesteaders might once have gathered around a stove on a bitter night. Their tortured breathing gradually eased.

  Bryant looked over at Phil.

  Weather for tomorrow?

  Clear skies, diminishing winds.

  Marie was standing nearby, and Bryant saw her relax.

  Good that's good.

  And so it was ... for the time being. But the winds were not going to remain calm for th
e rest of their lives. And with the ship gone, there was only this gadget and twenty-four truck batteries between them and eventual strangulation.

  How long? Bryant asked, and no one answered. There was only the flat shine of their frightened, inhuman eyes in the fireshot night.

  3

  The following morning there were twenty less. During the night John Leandro's story had broken worldwide, with all the force of a hammerfall. State and Defense departments denied everything, but dozens of people had taken photographs as the ship rose. These photographs were persuasive ... and no one could stop the flood of leaks from such "informed sources" as frightened residents of the surrounding towns and the first arriving National Guardsmen.

  The Haven border-barriers held, at least for the time being. The fire-front had advanced into Newport, where the flames were finally being brought under control.

  Several Tommyknockers blew their brains out in the night.

  Poley Andrews swallowed Dran-O.

  Phil Golden awoke to discover that Queenie, his wife of twenty years, had jumped into Hazel McCready's dry well.

  That day there were only four suicides, but the nights ... the nights were worse.

  By the time the Army finally broke into Haven, like inept burglars into a strong safe, later that week, there were less than eighty Tommyknockers left.

  Justin Hurd shot a fat Army sergeant with a kid's Daisy air rifle that squirted green fire. The fat sergeant exploded. A scared E-4 in the APC just then roaring past Cooder's market turned the .50-caliber he was sitting behind on Justin Hurd, who was standing in front of the hardware store, wearing only a yellowing pair of Hanes underpants and his orange work-shoes.

  "Fixed them woodchucks!" Justin was screaming. "Fixed them all, you're fucking-A, you're--

  Then he was hit by some twenty .50-caliber slugs. Justin nearly exploded, too.