18

   Ev and Butch stood well back from the edge of what was now a ragged slash running better than three hundred yards from right to left and yawning sixty feet across at its widest point. Anderson's old mongrel of a truck stood off to one side, looking tired and used. Next to it was the souped-up payloader with its giant screwdriver snout. There were other tools in a lean-to of peeled logs. Ev saw a chainfall on one side, a chipper on the other. There was a big pile of sodden sawdust below the mouth of the chipper's exhaust-vent. There were cans of gasoline in the lean-to, and a black drum labeled DIESEL. When Ev had first heard those noises in the woods, he had thought New England Paper must be doing some logging, but this was no logging operation. This was an excavation.
   That dish. That monstrous dish glittering in the sun.
   The eye could not stay away; it was drawn back again and again. Gardener and Bobbi had removed a lot more hillside. Ninety feet of polished silver-gray metal now jutted out of the earth and into the green-gold sunlight. If they had looked into the slash, they would have seen another forty feet or better.
   Neither of them went close enough to look.
   'Holy Jesus,' Dugan said hoarsely. The gold cup bobbed on his face, and above its rim his blue eyes bulged wildly. 'Holy Jesus, it's a spaceship. Is it ours or is it Russian, do you think? Holy Jesus Christ, it's as big as the Queen Mary, that ain't Russian, that ain't … ain't . . .'
   He fell silent again. In spite of the oxygen, his headache was coming back.
   Ev raised the disc camera and clicked off seven shots as fast as his finger could push the camera's button. Then he moved twenty feet to the left and took another five, standing by the chipper.
   'Move to the right!' he said to Dugan.
   'Huh?'
   'Your right! I want you in these last three, for perspective.'
   'Forget it, Pop!' Even muffled by the cup, there was a shrill note of hysteria in Dugan's voice.
   'Four steps will do it.'
   Dugan moved four very small steps to the right. Ev raised the disc camera again -a Father's Day present from Bryant and Marie – and clicked off the final three shots. Dugan was a very big man, but that ship in the earth reduced him to the size of a pygmy.
   'Okay,' Ev said, and Dugan stepped quickly back to where he had been. He walked with mincing, tentative steps, looking at the great round object as he went.
   Ev wondered if the pictures would turn out. His hands had been shaking. And the ship – for it certainly was some sort of spaceship – might be putting out radiation that would fog the film.
   Even if it does come out, who's gonna believe it? Who, in a world where kids go off to the movies every damn Saturday and see things like Star Wars?
   'I want to get out of here,' Dugan said.
   Ev looked at the ship a moment longer, wondering if David was in there, imprisoned, wandering through unknowable corridors or passing through doorways cut for no human shape, starving in the darkness. No … if he was in there, he would have starved a long time ago. Starved, or died of thirst.
   Then he slipped the small camera in his pants pocket, walked back to Dugan, and picked up the flare gun. 'Ayuh, I guess – '
   He broke off, looking in the direction of the Cherokee. There was a line of men -and one woman – standing in the trees, some armed. Ev recognized all of them … and none of them.

19

   Bobbi started down the slope toward the two men. The others followed.
   'Hello, Ev,' Bobbi said pleasantly enough.
   Dugan raised the .45, wishing bitterly for the familiar feel of his service .357. 'Stop,' he said. He didn't like the way the gold cup muffled the word, robbed it of authority. He pulled the air mask down. 'All of you. Those of you with rifles, put them down. You're all under arrest.'
   'You're outgunned, Butch,' Newt Berringer said pleasantly.
   'Damned tooting!' Beach growled. Dick Allison frowned at him.
   'You better put y'mask on again, Butch,' Adley McKeen said with a lazy, mocking smile. 'I think you're losing it.'
   Butch had begun to feel woozy as soon as he pulled the mask off. Hearing the steady whisper of their thoughts made it worse. He pulled it up, wondering how much air could be left in the flat-pack.
   'Put it down,' Bobbi said. 'And you put down the flare-gun, Ev. No one wants to hurt you two.'
   'Where's David?' Ev asked roughly. 'I want him, you bitch.'
   'He's on Altair-4 with Robby the Robot and Dr Mobius,' Kyle Archinbourg said with a titter. 'He's picknicking amid the Krell memory-banks.'
   'Shut up,' Bobbi said. She suddenly felt confused, ashamed of herself, unsure. Bitch? Was that what the old man had called her? A bitch? She found herself wanting to tell him that he was confused – she wasn't the bitch. That was her sister Anne.
   A sudden, confused image came to her – the old man's distress, Gard's distress, even her own, all mingled. She was distracted. While she was, Ev Hillman raised the flare-pistol and fired. If Dugan had done it, they would have read his intention before he could have acted, but the old man was different.
   There was a hollow fuddd! and a whoosh. Beach Jernigan exploded into white flame and staggered backward, the .22 flying out of his hands. His eyes filmed, simmered, then burst as they filled with burning phosphorus. His cheeks began to run. He opened his mouth and began to claw at his chest as the superheated air he drew in expanded and ruptured his lungs. This all happened in a space of seconds.
   The line of men wavered and lost coherency as they stumbled backward, their faces blank with terror. They were hearing Beach Jernigan die inside their heads.
   'Come on!' Ev shrieked at Dugan, and ran for the Cherokee. Jud Tarkington moved sluggishly to stop him. Ev swept the hot barrel of the flare-gun across his face, branding his cheek and breaking his nose. Jud went flailing backward, stumbled over his own feet, went sprawling.
   Beach was burning on the muddy, churned ground. He clawed weakly at his throat with one twisted, tallowy hand, shuddered, and then stilled.
   Dugan got moving, running after the old man, who was clawing at the driver's-side door of the Cherokee.
   Bobbi heard Beach's thoughts fade away, wink out, and turned to see that the old man and the cop were on the verge of getting away.
   'Jesus Christ you guys stop them!'
   That broke their paralysis, but Bobbi moved first. She got to Ev and slammed the butt of the shotgun she was carrying into the nape of the old man's neck. Ev's face whacked the top of the Jeep's door. Blood sprayed from his nose and he dropped to his knees, dazed. Bobbi raised the shotgun butt to hit him again, when Dugan, standing on the other side of the Cherokee, fired the old man's .45 through the passenger window.
   Bobbi felt a large hot hammer suddenly slam into her lower right shoulder. Her arm was driven powerfully upward, and she lost her grip on the shotgun. The hammer numbed her flesh for a moment and then the heat was back, an expanding furnace glow that was baking her from the inside out.
   She was thrown backward, her left hand going for the place the hammer had hit her, expecting to find blood, finding none – at least, not yet – only a hole in her shirt and in the flesh beneath. The hole had hard edges that felt hot and throbby. Blood was running down her back, a lot of it, but shock had numbed her and she felt little pain yet. Her left hand had found the small entrance wound; the exit wound was as big as a kid's fist.
   She saw Dick Allison, his face white and slack with panic.
   This isn't going right Christ not right at all get him before he gets us oh you fucking snoop fucking snoop FUCKING SNOOP
   ‘Don't shoot him!' Bobbi screamed. Pain exploded through her. Blood flew from her mouth in a scrawny spray. The bullet had torn her right lung open.
   Allison hesitated. Before Dugan could raise the gun again, Newt and Joe Summerfield had stepped in. Dugan turned toward them, and Newt clubbed the barrel of his rifle down on the hand holding the .45 as he did. Dugan's second shot went into the dirt.
   'Hold it, Trooper, hold it or you're dead!' John Enders, the grammar-school principal, screamed. 'Four guns on you right now!'
   Dugan looked around. He saw four men with rifles. And Allison, still wall-eyed and only one small step from unglued, looked ready to shoot the moment a squirrel farted.
   They'll kill you anyway. Might as well go out like John Wayne. Shit, they're all crazy.
   'No,' Bobbi said. She was leaning against the Jeep's hood now. Blood trickled steadily from her mouth. The back of her shirt was soaking. 'We're not crazy. We're not going to kill you. Check me.'
   Dugan probed clumsily toward Bobbi Anderson's mind and saw that she meant it … but there was a catch somewhere, something he might have caught on to if he hadn't been so new at this eerie mind-reading trick. It was like the fine print in some slick car salesman's contract. He would think about it later. These guys were amateurs, and there might still be a chance to get away clean. If . . .
   Suddenly Adley McKeen ripped the gold mask off his face. Butch felt a wave of dizziness almost at once.
   'I like you better this way,' Adley said. 'You won't think s'much about excapin' with your goddam canned air turned off.'
   Butch fought the dizziness and looked back at Bobbi Anderson. I think she's going to die.
   think what you want
   He straightened and took a step backward as that unexpected thought filled his head. He looked at her more closely.
   'What about the old man?' he asked flatly.
   'Not – ' Bobbi coughed, spraying more blood. Bubbles formed on her nostrils. Kyle and Newt started toward her. Bobbi waved them back. 'Not your business. You and me are going to get in the front of the Jeep. You drive. There'll be three men with guns in the back, if you think of trying anything funny.'
   'I want to know what's going to happen to the old man,' Butch repeated.
   Bobbi raised her gun with a great effort. She brushed her sweaty hair away from her eyes with her left hand. Her right dangled uselessly by her side. It was as if she wanted Dugan to see her very clearly, to measure her. Butch did. The coldness he saw in her eyes was real.
   'I don't want to kill you,' she said softly. 'You know that. But if you say one more word, I'll have these men execute you right here. We'll bury you next to Beach and take our chances.'
   Ev Hillman was struggling to his feet. He looked dazed, not sure where he was. He armed blood off his forehead like sweat.
   Another wave of dizziness washed through Butch, and a thought of infinite comfort came to him: This is a dream. All just a dream.
   Bobbi smiled without humor. 'Think that if you want,' she said. 'Just get in the Jeep.'
   Butch got in and slid across behind the wheel. Bobbi started around to the passenger side. She began coughing again, spraying blood, and her knees buckled. Two of the others had to help her.
   Never mind the 'think.' I know she's going to die.
   Bobbi turned her head and looked at him. That clear mental voice
   (think what you want)
   filled his head again.
   Archinbourg, Summerfield, and McKeen crammed into the back seat of the Cherokee.
   'Drive,' Bobbi whispered. 'Slow.'
   Butch began to back up. He would see Everett Hillman once more but would not remember – later, most of Butch's mind would have been rubbed away like chalk from a blackboard. The old man stood there in the sunlight, that stupendous saucer-shape behind him. He was surrounded by big men, and five feet to his left there was something on the ground that looked like a charred log.
   You didn't do too bad, old man. In your day you must have been quite a high rider … and you sure as hell weren't crazy.
   Hillman looked up and shrugged, as if to say: Well, we tried.
   More dizziness. Butch's sight wavered.
   'I'm not sure I can drive,' he said, his voice seeming to boom into his ears
   from a great distance. 'That thing … it makes me sick.'
   'Is there any air left in his little kit, Adley?' Bobbi whispered. Her face was ashy pale. The blood on her lips seemed very red by comparison.
   'Face-mask's hissin' a little.'
   'Put it on him.'
   A moment after it was jammed firmly over Butch's mouth and nose again, he began to improve.
   'Enjoy it while you can,' Bobbi whispered, and then passed out.

20

   'Ashes to ashes … dust to dust. Thus we commit the body of our friend Ruth McCausland to the ground, and her soul to a loving God.'
   The mourners had moved on to the pretty little graveyard on the hill west of the village. They stood loosely gathered around an open grave. Ruth's casket was suspended over it on runners. There were far fewer mourners here than there had been in the church; many of the out-of-towners, either headachey and nauseated or glowing feverishly with strange new ideas, had taken the chance afforded by the intermission between the acts to slip away.
   The flowers at the head of the grave ruffled gently in a fresh summer breeze. As the Rev. Goohringer raised his head, he saw a bright yellow rose go twirling down the grassy hill. Beyond and below Homeland's weatherbeaten white fence, he could see the town-hall clock tower. It wavered slightly in the bright air, like something seen through a heat-haze. Still, Goohringer thought, it was a damned good illusion. These strangers in town had seen the best magic-lantern slide in history and didn't even know it.
   His eyes met Frank Spruce's for just an instant – he read relief clearly in Frank's eyes, and he supposed Frank could see it just as clearly in his own. Many of the outsiders would go back to wherever they came from and tell their friends that Ruth's death had rocked the little community to its foundations; they had hardly seemed to be there at all. What none of them knew, Goohringer reflected, was that they had been following the events near the ship with most of their attention. For a while things out there had gone very badly. Now they were under control again, but Bobbi Anderson might die if they couldn't get her back to the shed in time, and that was bad.
   Still, things were under control. The 'becoming' would continue. That was the only important consideration.
   Goohringer held his Bible open in one hand. Its pages fluttered a little in the wind. Now he raised the other hand in the air. The mourners standing around Ruth's grave lowered their heads.
   'May the Lord bless you and keep you; may the Lord lift up His face and make it shine upon you and give you peace. Amen.'
   The mourners raised their heads. Goohringer smiled. 'There'll be refreshments in the library, for those of you who'd care to stop by for a while and remember Ruth,' he said.
   Act II was over.

21

   Kyle reached gently into Bobbi's pants pocket and probed until he found her keyring. He worked it out, picked through the keys, and found the one that opened the padlock on the shed door. He inserted the key in the lock but didn't turn it.
   Adley and Joe Summerfield were covering Dugan, who was still behind the wheel of the Jeep. Butch was finding it harder and harder to pull air from the mask. The needle on the supply dial had been in the red for five minutes now. Kyle rejoined them.
   'Go check the drunk,' Kyle said to Joe Summerfield. 'Looks like he's still passed out, but I don't trust the fucker.'
   Joe crossed the side yard, climbed the porch, and examined Gardener carefully, wincing at his sour breath. This time there really was no sham; Gardener had gotten a fresh bottle of Scotch and had drunk himself into oblivion.
   As the two other men stood waiting for Joe to come back, Kyle said: 'Bobbi is most likely going to die. If she does, I'm going to get rid of that lush first thing.'
   Joe came back. 'He's out.'
   Kyle nodded and turned the key in the shed's padlock as Joe joined Adley in keeping the cop covered. Kyle pulled the lock free and opened the door partway. Brilliant green light poured out – it was so bright it seemed to dim the sunlight. There was an odd liquid churning sound. It was almost (but not quite) the sound of machinery.
   Kyle took an involuntary step backward, his face tightening momentarily into an expression of fright, revulsion and awe. The smell alone – thick and fetid and organic – was damn near enough to knock a man over. Kyle understood – they all did – that the two-hearted nature of the Tommyknockers was now growing together. The dance of deception was nearly done
   Liquid churning sounds, that smell … and then another sound. Something like the feeble, bubbly yap of a drowning dog.
   Kyle had been in the shed twice before, but remembered little about it. He knew, of course, that it was an important place, a fine place, and that it had speeded his own 'becoming.' But the human part of him was still almost superstitiously afraid of it.
   He came back to Adley and Joe.
   'We can't wait for the others. We've got to get Bobbi in there right now if there's going to be any chance of saving her at all.'
   The cop, he saw, had taken off the mask. It lay, used up, on the seat beside him. That was good. As Adley had said out in the woods, he would think less about escaping without his canned air.
   'Keep your gun on the cop,' Kyle said. 'Joe, help me with Bobbi.'
   'Help you take her into the shed?'
   'No, help me take her to the Rumford Zoo so she can see the fucking lion!' Kyle shouted. 'Of course, the shed!'
   'I don't … I don't think I want to go in there. Not just now.' Joe looked from that green light back to Kyle, a shamed, slightly sickened smile on his lips.
   'I'll help you,' Adley said softly. 'Bobbi's a good old sport. Be a shame if she croaked before we got to the end of it.'
   'All right,' Kyle said. 'Cover the cop,' he said to Joe. 'And if you screw up, I swear to God I'll kill you.'
   'I won't, Kyle,' Joe said. That shamed grin still hung on his mouth, but there was no mistaking the relief in his eyes. 'I sure won't. I'll watch him good.'
   'See that you do,' Bobbi said feebly. It startled them all.
   Kyle looked at her, then back at Joe. Joe flinched away from the naked contempt in Kyle's eyes … but he didn't look toward the shed, toward that light, those churning, squelching sounds.
   'Come on, Adley,' Kyle said at last. 'Let's get Bobbi in there. Soonest started, soonest done.'
   Adley McKeen, fiftyish, balding, and stocky, flagged for only a moment. 'Is it . . .' he licked his lips. 'Kyle, is it bad? In there?'
   'I don't really remember,' Kyle said. 'All I know is I felt wonderful when I came out. Like I knew more. Could do more.'
   'Oh,' Adley said in an almost nonexistent voice.
   'You'll be one of us, Adley,' Bobbi said in that same feeble voice.
   Adley's face, although still frightened, firmed up again.
   'All right,' he said.
   'Let's try not to hurt her,' Kyle said.
   They got Bobbi into the shed. Joe Summerfield turned his attention briefly away from Dugan to watch them disappear into that glow – and it seemed to him that they really did disappear rather than just step inside; it was like watching objects disappear into a dazzling corona.
   His lapse was brief, but it was all the old Butch Dugan would have needed. Even now he saw the opportunity; he was simply unable use it. No strength in his legs. Churning nausea in his stomach. His head thudded and pounded.
   I don't want to go in there.
   Nothing he could do about it if they decided to drag him in, though. He was as weak as a kitten.
   He drifted.
   After a while he heard voices and raised his head. It took an effort, because it seemed as if someone had poured cement into one of his ears until his head was full of it. The rest of the posse was pushing out of the tangle that was Bobbi Anderson's garden. They were shoving the old man roughly along. Hillman's feet tangled and he fell down. One of them – Tarkington – kicked him to his feet, and Butch got the run of Tarkington's thoughts clearly: he was outraged at what he thought of as the murder of Beach Jernigan.
   Hillman stumbled on toward the Cherokee. The shed door opened then. Kyle Archinbourg and Adley McKeen came out. McKeen no longer looked frightened -his eyes were glowing and a big toothless grin stretched his lips. But that wasn't all. Something else …
   Then Butch realized.
   In the few minutes the two men had been inside there, a large portion of Adley McKeen's hair appeared to have disappeared.
   'I'll go in anytime, Kyle,' he was saying. 'No problem.'
   There was more, but now everything wanted to drift away again. Butch let it.
   The world dimmed out until there was nothing left but those unpleasant churning sounds and the afterimage of green light on his eyelids.

22 Act III.

   They sat in the town library – the name would be changed to the Ruth McCausland Memorial Library, all agreed. They drank coffee, iced tea, Coca-Cola, ginger ale. They drank nothing that was alcoholic. Not at Ruth's wake. They ate tiny triangular tuna-fish sandwiches, they ate similar ones containing a paste of cream cheese and olives, they ate sandwiches containing a paste of cream cheese and pimento. They ate cold cuts and a Jell-O salad with shreds of carrot suspended in it like fossils in amber.
   They talked a great deal, but the room was mostly silent – if it had been bugged, the listeners would have been disappointed. The tension that had drawn many faces tight in the church as the situation in the woods teetered on the dangerous verge of careening out of control had now smoothed out. Bobbi was in the shed. That nosey-parker of an old man had also been taken in. Last of all, the nosey-parker policeman had been taken into the shed.
   The group mind lost track of these people as they went into the thick, corroded-brass glow of that green light.
   They ate and drank and listened and talked and no one said a word and that was all right; the last of the outsiders had left town following Goohringer's graveside benediction, and they had Haven to themselves again.
   (will it be all right now)
   (yes they'll understand about Dugan)
   (are you sure)
   (yes they will understand; they will think they understand)
   The tick of the Seth Thomas on the mantelpiece donated by the grammar school after last year's spring bottle-and-can drive was the loudest sound in the room. Occasionally there was the decorous clink of a china cup. Faintly, beyond the open, screened windows, the sound of a faraway airplane.
   No birdsong.
   It was not missed.
   They ate and drank, and when Dugan was escorted from Bobbi's shed around one-thirty that afternoon, they knew. People rose, and now talk, real talk, began all at once. Tupperware bowls were capped. Uneaten sandwiches were popped into Baggies. Claudette Ruvall, Ashley's mother, put a piece of aluminum foil over the remains of the casserole she had brought. They all went outside and headed toward their homes, smiling and chatting.
   Act III was over.

23

   Gardener came to around sundown with a hangover headache and a feeling that things had happened which he could not quite remember.
   Finally made it, Gard, he thought. Finally had yourself another blackout. Satisfied?
   He managed to get off the porch and to walk shakily around the corner of the house, out of view of the road, before throwing up. He saw blood in the vomit, and wasn't surprised. This wasn't the first time, although there was more blood this time than ever before.
   Dreams, Christ, he'd had some weird nightmares, blackout or no. People out here, coming and going, so many people that all they needed was a brass band and the Dallas
   (Police, the Dallas Police were out here this morning and you got drunk so you wouldn't see them you fucking coward)
   Cowgirls. Nightmares, that was all.
   He turned away from the puddle of puke between his feet. The world was wavering in and out of focus with every beat of his heart, and Gardener suddenly knew that he had edged very close to death. He was committing suicide after all … just doing it slowly. He put his arm against the side of the house and his forehead in his arm.
   'Mr Gardener, are you all right?'
   'Huh!' he cried, jerking upright. His heart slammed two violent beats, stopped for what seemed forever, and then began to beat so rapidly he could barely distinguish the individual pulses. His headache suddenly cranked up to overload. He whirled.
   Bobby Tremain stood there, looking surprised, even a little amused … but not really sorry for the scare he had given Gardener.
   'Gee, I didn't mean to creep up on you, Mr Gardener
   You fucking well did, and I fucking well know it.
   The Tremain kid blinked rapidly several times. He had caught some of that, Gardener saw. He found he didn't give a shit.
   'Where's Bobbi?' he asked.
   'I'M – ‘
   'I know who you are. I know where you are. Right in front of me. Where's Bobbi?'
   'Well, I'll tell you,' Bobby Tremain said. His face became very open, very wide-eyed, very honest, and Gardener was suddenly, forcibly reminded of his teaching days. This was how students who had spent a long winter weekend skiing, screwing, and drinking looked when they started to explain that they couldn't turn in their research papers today because their mothers had died on Saturday.
   'Sure, tell me,' Gardener said. He leaned against the clapboard side of the house, looking at the teenager in the reddish glow of the sunset. Over his shoulder he could see the shed, padlocked, its windows boarded up.
   The shed had been in the dream, he remembered.
   Dream? Or whatever it is you don't want to admit was real?
   For a moment the kid looked genuinely disconcerted by Gardener's cynical expression.
   'Miss Anderson had a sunstroke. Some of the men found her near the ship and took her to Derry Home Hospital. You were passed out.'
   Gardener straightened up quickly. 'Is she all right?'
   'I don't know. They're still with her. No one has called here. Not since three o'clock or so, anyway. That's when I got out here.'
   Gardener pushed away from the building and started around the house, head down, working against the hangover. He had believed the kid was going to lie, and perhaps he had lied about the nature of what had happened to Bobbi, but Gardener sensed a core of truth in what the kid said: Bobbi was sick, hurt, something. It explained those dreamlike comings and goings he remembered. He supposed Bobbi had called them with her mind. Sure. Called them with her mind, neatest trick of the week. Only in Haven, ladies and germs
   'Where are you going?' Tremain asked, his voice suddenly very sharp.
   'Derry.' Gardener had reached the head of the driveway. Bobbi's pickup was parked there. The Tremain kid's big yellow Dodge Challenger was pulled in next to it. Gardener turned back toward the kid. The sunset had painted harsh red highlights and black shadows on the boy's face, making him look like an Indian. Gardener took a closer look and realized he wasn't going anywhere. This kid with the fast car and the football-hero shoulders hadn't been put out here just to give Gard the bad news as soon as Gard managed to throw off enough of the booze to rejoin the living.
   Am I supposed to believe Bobbi was out there in the woods, excavating away like a madwoman, and she keeled over with a sunstroke while her sometime partner was lying back on the porch, drunk as a coot? That it? Well, that's a good trick, because she was supposed to be at the McCausland woman's funeral. She went into the village and I was out here alone and I started thinking about what I saw Sunday … I started thinking and then I started drinking, which is mostly the way it works with me. Of course Bobbi could have gone to the funeral, come back here, changed, gone out in the woods to work, and then had a sunstroke … except that isn't what happened. The kid's lying. It's written all over his face, and all of a sudden I'm very fucking glad he can't read my thoughts.
   'I think Miss Anderson would rather have you stay here and keep on with the work,' Bobby Tremain said evenly.
   'You think?'
   'That is, we all think.' The kid looked momentarily more disconcerted than ever -wary, a bit rocky on his feet. Didn't expect Bobbi's pet drunk to have any teeth or claws left, I guess. That kicked off another, much queerer thought, and he looked at the kid more closely in the light which was now fading into orange and ashy pink. Football-hero shoulders, a handsome, cleft-chinned face that might have been drawn by Alex Gordon or Berni Wrightson, deep chest, narrow waist. Bobby Tremain, All-American. No wonder the Colson girl was nuts over him. But that sunken, infirm-looking mouth went oddly with the rest, Gardener thought. They were the ones who kept losing teeth, not Gardener.
   Okay – what's he here for?
   To guard me. To make sure I stay put. No matter what.
   'Well, all right,' he said to Tremain in a softer, more conciliatory voice. 'If that's what you all think.'
   Tremain relaxed a little. 'It really is.'
   'Well, let's go in and put on the coffee. I could use some. My head aches. And we'll have to get going early in the morning . . .'He stopped and looked at Tremain. 'You are going to help out, aren't you? That's part of it, isn't it?'
   'Uh … yessir.'
   Gardener nodded. He looked at the shed for a moment, and in the fading light he could see brilliant green tattooed in the small spaces between the boards. For a moment his dream shimmered almost within his grasp – deadly shoemakers hammering away at unknown devices in that green glare. He had never seen the glow as bright as this before, and he noticed that when Tremain glanced in that direction, his eyes skittered away uneasily.
   The lyric of an old song floated, not quite randomly, into Gardener's mind and then out again:
   Don't know what they're doing, but they laugh a lot behind the green door … green door, what's that secret you're keepin'?
   And there was a sound. Faint … rhythmic … not at all identifiable … but somehow unpleasant.
   The two of them had faltered. Now Gardener moved on toward the house. Tremain followed him gratefully.
   'Good,' Gardener said, as if the conversation had never lagged. 'I can use some help. Bobbi figured we'd get down to some sort of hatchway in about two weeks … that we'd be able to get inside.'
   'Yes, I know,' Tremain said without hesitation.
   'But that was with two of us working.'
   'Oh, there'll always be someone else with you,' Tremain said, and smiled openly. A chill rippled up Gardener's back.
   'Oh?'
   'Yes! You bet!'
   'Until Bobbi comes back.'
   'Until then,' Tremain agreed.
   Except he doesn't think Bobbi's going to be back. Ever.
   'Come on,' he said. 'Coffee. Then maybe some chow.'
   'Sounds good to me.'
   They went inside, leaving the shed to churn and mutter to itself in the growing dark. As the sun disappeared, the stitching of green at the cracks grew brighter and brighter and brighter. A cricket hopped into the luminous pencil-mark one of these cracks printed onto the ground and fell dead.

Chapter 10. A Book of Days – The Town, Concluded

1

   Thursday, July 28th:
   Butch Dugan woke up in his own bed in Derry at exactly 3:05 A.M. He pushed back the covers and swung his feet out onto the floor. His eyes were wide and dazed, his face puffy with sleep. The clothes he had worn on his trip to Haven with the old man the day before were on the chair by his small desk. There was a pen in the breast pocket of the shirt. He wanted that pen. This seemed to be the only thought his mind would clearly admit.
   He got up, went to the chair, took the pen, tossed the shirt on the floor, sat down, and then just sat for several moments, looking out into the darkness, waiting for the next thought.
   Butch had gone into Anderson's shed, but very little of him had come out. He seemed shrunken, lessened. He had no clear memories of anything. He could not have told a questioner his own middle name, and he did not at all remember being driven to the Haven-Troy town line in the Cherokee Hillman had rented, or sliding behind the wheel after Adley McKeen got out and walked back to Kyle Archinbourg's Cadillac. He likewise did not remember driving back to Derry. Yet all these things had happened.
   He had parked the Cherokee in front of the old man's apartment building, locked it, then got into his own car. Two blocks away, he had stopped long enough to drop the Jeep keys into a sewer.
   He went directly to bed, and had slept until the alarm clock planted in his mind woke him up.
   Now some new switch clicked over. Butch blinked once or twice, opened a drawer, and drew out a pad of paper. He wrote:
   I told people Tues. night I couldn't go to her funeral because I was sick. That was true. But it was not my stomach. I was going to ask her to marry me but kept putting it off. Afraid she'd say no. If I hadn't been scared, she might be alive now. With her dead there doesn't seem to be anything to look forward to. I am sorry about this mess.
   He looked the note over for a moment and then signed his name at the bottom: Anthony F. Dugan.
   He laid the pen and note aside and went back to sitting bolt upright and looking out the window.
   At last another relay kicked over.
   The last relay.
   He got up and went to the closet. He ran the combination of the wall-safe at the back and removed his .357 Mag. He put the belt over his shoulder, went back to the desk, and sat down.
   He thought for a moment, frowning, then got up, turned off the light in the closet, shut the closet door, went back to the desk, sat down again, took the .357 from its holster, put the muzzle of the gun firmly against his left eyelid, and pulled the trigger. The chair toppled and hit the floor with a flat, undramatic wooden clap – the sound of a gallows trapdoor springing open.

2

   Front page, Bangor Daily News, Friday, July 29th:
   DERRY STATE POLICEMAN APPARENT SUICIDE
   Was in Charge of Trooper Disappearance Investigation
   by John Leandro
   Cpl. Anthony 'Butch' Dugan of the Derry state police barracks apparently shot himself with his service revolver early Thursday morning. His death hit the Derry barracks, which was rocked last week by the disappearance of two troopers, hard indeed …

3

   Saturday, July 30th:
   Gardener sat on a stump in the woods, his shirt off, eating a tuna-and-egg sandwich and drinking iced coffee laced with brandy. Across from him, sitting on another stump, was John Enders, the school principal. Enders was not built for hard work, and although it was only noon, he looked hot and tired and almost fagged out.
   Gardener nodded toward him. 'Not bad,' he said. 'Better than Tremain, anyway. Tremain'd burn water trying to boil it.'
   Enders smiled wanly. 'Thank you.'
   Gardener looked beyond him to the great circular shape jutting from the ground. The ditch kept widening, and they had to keep using more and more of that silvery netting which somehow kept it from caving in (he had no idea how they had made it, only knew that the large supply in the cellar had been almost depleted and then, yesterday, a couple of women from town had come out in a van with a fresh supply, neatly folded like freshly ironed curtains). They needed more because they kept taking away more and more of the hillside … and still the thing continued down. Bobbi's whole house could now have fit into its shadow.
   He looked at Enders again. Enders was looking at it with an expression of adoring, religious awe – as if he were a rube Druid and this was his first trip from the boonies to see Stonehenge.
   Gardener got up, staggering slightly. 'Come on,' he said. 'Let's do a little blasting.'
   He and Bobbi had reached a point weeks earlier where the ship was as tightly embedded in dour bedrock as a piece of steel in cement. The bedrock hadn't hurt the ship; hadn't put so much as a scratch on its pearl-gray hull, let alone dented or crushed it. But it was tightly plugged. The plug had to be blasted away. It would have been a job for a construction crew who understood how to use dynamite – a lot of dynamite – under other circumstances.
   But there was explosive available in Haven these days that made dynamite obsolete. Gardener still wasn't clear on what the explosion in Haven Village had been, and wasn't sure he ever wanted to be clear on it. It was a moot point anyway, because no one was talking. Whatever it had been, he was sure that some huge piece of brickwork had taken off like a rocket, and some of those New and Improved Explosives had been involved. There had been a time, he remembered, when he had actually wasted time speculating on whether or not the super brain-food Bobbi's artifact was putting into the air could produce weapons. That time now seemed incredibly distant, that Jim Gardener incredibly naive.
   'Can you make it, Johnny?' he asked the school principal.
   Enders got up, wincing, putting his hands in the small of his back. He looked desperately tired, but he managed a small smile just the same. Looking at the ship seemed to refresh him. Blood was trickling from the corner of one eye, however – a single red tear. Something in there had ruptured. It's being this close to the ship, Gard thought. On the first of the two days Bobby Tremain had spent 'helping' him, he had spit out his last few teeth like machinegun bullets almost as soon as they got here.
   He thought of telling Enders that something behind his right eye was leaking, then decided to let him discover it on his own. The guy would be all right. Probably. Even if he wasn't, Gardener wasn't sure he cared … this more than anything else shocked him.
   Why should it? Are you kidding yourself that these cats are human anymore? If you are, you better wise up, Gard ole Gard.
   He headed down the slope, stopping at the last stump before rocky soil gave way to chipped and runnelled bedrock. He picked up a cheap transistor radio made of yellow high-impact plastic. It looked like Snoopy. Attached to it was the board from a Sharp calculator. And, of course, batteries.
   Humming, Gardener made his way down to the edge of the trench. There the music dried up and he was quiet, only staring at the titanic gray flank of the ship. The view did not refresh him, but it did inspire a deep awe which had overtones of steadily darkening fear.
   But you still hope, too. You'd be a liar if you said you didn't. The key could still be here … somewhere.
   As the fear darkened, however, that hope did too. Soon he thought it would be gone.
   The hillside excavation now made the ship's flank too far away to touch – not that he wanted to; he didn't enjoy the sensation of having his head turning into a very large speaker. It hurt. He rarely bled now when he did touch it (and touching it was sometimes inevitable), but the blast of radio always came, and on occasion his nose or ears could still spray a hell of a lot more blood than he cared to look at. Gardener wondered briefly just how much borrowed time he was now living on, but that question was also moot. From the morning he had awakened on that New Hampshire breakwater, it had all been borrowed time. He was a sick man and he knew it, but not too sick to appreciate the irony of the situation in which he found himself: after busting his hump to dig this fucker up with a variety of tools which looked as if they might have come out of The Hugo Gernsback Whole Universe Catalogue, after doing what the rest of them probably couldn't have done without working themselves to death in a kind of hypnotic trance, he might not be able to go inside when and if they came to the hatch Bobbi believed was there. But he meant to try. You could bet your watch and chain on that.
   Now he set his boot into a rope stirrup, slid the knot tight, and put the Snoopy radio in his shirt. 'Let me down easy, Johnny.'
   Enders began to turn a windlass and Gardener began to slide downward. Beside him the smooth gray hull slid up and up and up.
   If they wanted to get rid of him, this would be as easy a way as any, he supposed. Just send a telepathic order to Enders: Let go of the wheel, John. We're through with him. And down he would plunge, forty feet to the solid bedrock at the bottom, slack rope trailing up behind him. Crunch.
   But of course he was at their mercy anyhow … and he supposed they recognized his usefulness, however reluctantly. The Tremain kid was young, strong as a bull, but he had fagged out in two days. Enders was going to last out today – maybe -but Gardener would have bet his watch and chain (what watch and chain, ha-ha?) that there would be somebody else out here tomorrow to keep tabs on him.
   Bobbi was okay.
   Bullshit she was – if you hadn't come back, she would've killed herself.
   But she hung in there better than Enders or the Tremain kid
   His mind returned inexorably: Bobbi went into the shed with the others. Tremain and Enders never did … at least, not that you ever saw. Maybe that's the difference.
   So what's in there? Ten thousand angels dancing on the head of a pin? The ghost of James Dean? The Shroud of Turin? What?
   He didn't know.
   His foot touched down at the bottom.
   'I'm down!' he yelled.
   Enders's face, looking very small, appeared at the edge of the cut. Beyond, Gardener could see a tiny wedge of blue sky. Too tiny. Claustrophobia whispered in his ear – a voice as rough as sandpaper.
   The space between the side of the ship and the wall covered with that silvery netting was very narrow down here. Gardener had to move with great care to avoid touching the ship's side and setting off one of those brainbursts.
   The bedrock was very dark. He squatted and ran his fingers over it. They came away wet. They had come away a little wetter each day for the last week.
   That morning he had cut a small square four inches on a side and a foot into the floor of the bedrock using a gadget that had once been a blow-dryer. Now he opened his toolkit, removed a flashlight, and shone the light into it.
   Water down there.
   He got to his feet and screamed: 'Send down the hose!'
   '. . . what? . . .' drifted down. Enders sounded apologetic. Gardener sighed, wondering just how much longer he himself could hold out against the steady drag of exhaustion. All this Hugo Gernsback Whole Universe equipment, and no one thought to rig an intercom between up there and down here. Instead, they were screaming their throats out.
   Oh, but none of their bright ideas run in that direction, and you know it Why would they think about intercoms when they can read thoughts? You ' re the horse-and-buggy human here, not them.
   'The hose!' he shrieked. 'Send down the motherfucking hose, tripehead!'
   '. . . oh … kay . . .'
   Gardener stood waiting for the hose to come down, wishing miserably that he was anywhere else in the world than here, wishing he could convince himself all of it was only a nightmare.
   It was no good. The ship was madly exotic, but this reality was also too prosy to be a dream: the acrid smell of John Enders's sweat, the slightly boozy smell of his own, the dig of the rope loop into his instep as he went down into the cut, the feel of rough, moist bedrock under his fingers.
   Where's Bobbi, Gard? Is she dead?
   No. He didn't think she was dead, but he had become convinced that she was desperately ill. Something had happened to her on Wednesday. Something had happened to all of them on Wednesday. Gardener could not quite bring his memories into focus, but he knew there had been no real blackout or DT nightmare. It would have been better for him if there had been. There had been some sort of cover-up last Wednesday – a frantic cut-and-paste. And in the course of it, he believed that Bobbi had been hurt … taken ill … something.
   But they're not talking about it.
   Bobby Tremain: Bobbi? Heck, Mr Gardener, nothing wrong with Bobbi just a li'l ole heatstroke. She'll be back in no time. She can use the rest! You know that better'n anyone, I guess!
   It sounded great. So great you'd almost think the Tremain kid believed it himself until you looked closely at his odd eyes.
   He could see himself going to those he was coming to think of as the Shed People, demanding to know what had happened to her.
   Newt Berringer: Next thing you know, he'll be trying to tell us that we're the Dallas Police.
   And oh boy, they'd sure all start to laugh then, wouldn't they? Them, the Dallas Police? Oh, that was pretty funny. In fact, that was a scream.
   Maybe, Gard thought, that's why I feel so much like doing it. Screaming, I mean.
   Now he stood deep in this man-made crack in the earth, a crack that contained a titanic, alien flying ship, waiting for the hose to come down. And suddenly the final, horrible passage of George Orwell's Animal Farm clanged in his head like a death-cry. It was strange, the things you discovered you'd gotten by heart. 'Clover's old eyes flitted from one face to another. And as the animals outside looked from pig to man, and man to pig, and pig to man again, it seemed that some strange thing was happening. It was impossible to say which was which.'
   Jesus, Gard, cut it out!
   Here came the hose at last, a seventy-footer from the volunteer fire department. It was of course meant to spray water, not suck it up, but a vacuum pump had neatly reversed its function.
   Enders paid it out jerkily. The end swung back and forth, sometimes striking the hull of the ship. Each time this happened there was a cludding sound that was dull yet curiously penetrating. Gardener didn't like it and quickly came to anticipate each clud.
   Christ, I wish he hadn't got that thing swinging.
   Clud … clud … clud. Why can't it just clink? Why does it have to keep making that other sound, like dirt being shoveled on top of a coffin?
   Clud … clud … clud.
   Christ, I should have jumped when I had the chance. Just stepped off that fucking breakwater at Arcadia Beach. July 4th, wasn't it? Shit, I could have been a Yankee Doodle Deader.
   Well, go on, then. When you go back to the house tonight, gobble all the Valium in the medicine cabinet. Kill yourself if you haven't got the guts to either see this thing through or put a stop to it. The good people of Haven will probably throw a party over your body. You think they want you here? If there wasn't some of the Old, Unimproved Bobbi still around, I think you'd be gone already. If she wasn't standing between you and them …
   Clud … clud … clud.
   Was Bobbi still standing between him and the rest of Haven? Yeah. But if she died, how long would it be before he himself was scrubbed from the equation?
   Not long, buddy. Not long at all. Like maybe fifteen minutes.
   Clud … clud … cl
   Wincing, teeth set against that dull dead sound, Gard leaped up and caught the brass nozzle of the hose before it could rap against the side of the ship again. He pulled it down, knelt over the hole, and craned his head up at Enders's small face.
   'Start the pump!' he yelled.
   '. . . what? . . .'
   Jesus wept, Gardener thought.
   'Start the motherfucking pump!' he shrieked, and this time he felt, actually felt his head fall apart in two ragged pieces. He closed his eyes.
   '. . . oh … kay . . .'
   When he looked up, Enders was gone.
   Gardener plunged the end of the hose into the glory-hole he had cut out from rock that morning. The water began to bubble slowly, almost contemplatively. It was frigid at first, but his hands quickly became numb. Although the trench he was in was only forty feet deep, they had removed a whole hillside in the process of cutting a base level, with the result that the place where Gardener now crouched had probably been, until late June, ninety feet under the earth. Measuring the freeboard surface of the ship would have given an exact figure, but Gardener didn't give a shit. The simple fact was that they seemed to have nearly reached the aquifer -spongy rock filled with water. Apparently the bottom half or two thirds of the ship was floating in a large underground lake.
   His hands were now so numb they had forgotten what they were.
   'Come on, asshole,' he muttered.
   As if in answer, the hose began to vibrate and wriggle. He couldn't hear the pump's motor from here, but he didn't have to. As the water-level in the glory-hole dropped, Gardener was able to see his reddened, dripping hands again. He watched as the water-level continued to drop.
   If we hit the aquifer, it's going to slow us down.
   Yeah. We might lose a whole day while they figure out some sort of superpump. There might be a delay, but nothing's going to stop them, Gard. Don't you know that?
   The hose began to emit the sound of a giant soda straw in a giant Coke glass. The glory-hole was empty.
   'Turn it off!' he shouted. Enders just went on looking down at him. Gardener sighed and yanked hard on the hose. Enders looked startled, then made a thumb-and-forefinger circle at Gardener. He disappeared. A few seconds later the hose stopped vibrating. Then it began to rise as Enders wound it up.
   Gardener made sure that the end of it was perfectly still and wouldn't pendulum before he let it go.
   He now took the radio out of his shirt and turned it on. There was a built-in ten-minute delay. He put the radio on the bottom of the glory-hole, then covered it with loose chunks of rock. A lot of the explosion's force would be channeled upward anyway, but this was powerful stuff, whatever it was – enough would be left to tear perhaps three vertical feet of bedrock into chunks which they could quickly load into a sling and power-winch up. And the ship would not be hurt. Apparently nothing could do that.
   Gardener slid his foot into the sling and shouted: 'Pull me up!'
   Nothing happened.
   ‘PULL ME UP, JOHNNY!' he screamed. Once again there was that feeling that his head was splitting along some rotted midseam.
   Still nothing.
   His wrist-deep plunge into the icy water had dropped Gardener's body temperature perhaps two whole degrees. Nonetheless, a damp and slickly unpleasant sweat suddenly sprang out on his forehead. He looked at his wristwatch. Two minutes had passed since he had turned on the Snoopy radio. From his watch, his eyes moved to the loose pile of chunked granite in the glory-hole. Plenty of time to yank the rocks out and turn off the radio.
   Except turning off the radio wouldn't stop whatever was going on inside the radio. He knew that somehow.
   He looked up for Enders and Enders wasn't there.
   This is how they're getting rid of you, Gard.
   A drop of sweat ran into his eye. He brushed it away with the back of his hand.
   ‘ENDERS! HEY, JOHNNY!'
   Shinny up the rope, Gard.
   Forty feet? Dream on. Maybe in college. Maybe not even then.
   He looked at his watch. Three minutes.
   Yeah, this is how. Poof. All gone. A sacrifice to the Great Ship. A little something to propitiate the Tommyknockers.
   ‘… start it going yet?'
   He looked up so quickly his neck popped, his growing fear turning immediately to rage.
   'I started it almost five minutes ago you fucking shit-for-brains! Get me out of here before it goes off and blows me sky-high!'
   Enders's mouth dropped into an 0 that was almost comical. He disappeared again and Gardener was left looking at his watch through what was becoming a blur of sweat.
   Then the loop around his foot jerked and a moment later he began to rise. Gardener closed his eyes and clung to the rope. Apparently he wasn't quite as ready to sniff the pipe as he thought he was. Maybe that wasn't such a bad thing to know, either.
   He reached the top of the cut, stepped out, loosened the loop around his foot, and walked over to where Enders stood.
   'Sorry,' Enders said, smiling fussily. 'I thought we'd agreed that you'd give me a shout before – '
   Gardener hit him. The thing was done and Enders was on the ground, his glasses hanging from one ear and his mouth bloody, before Gardener was even wholly aware of what he meant to do. And although he was not telepathic, he thought he could feel every head in Haven suddenly turn toward this place, alert and listening.
   'You left me down there with that thing going, asshole,' he said. 'If you – or anyone else in this town – ever does it again, you better just leave me down there. Do you hear me?'
   Rage dawned in Enders's eyes. He fixed his glasses back in place as well as he could and got to his feet. There was dirt on his bald head. 'I don't think you know who you're talking to.'
   'I know more than you think,' Gardener said. 'Listen, Johnny. And the rest of you, if you're hearing this, and I think you are, you listen, too. I want an intercom down there. I want some ordinary fucking consideration. I've played square with you; I'm the only one in this town that didn't have to have his brains scrambled to do it, either. I want some fucking consideration. Do you hear me?'
   Enders looked at him, but Gardener thought he was listening, too. Listening to other voices. Gardener waited for their decision. He was too angry to really care much.
   'All right,' Enders said softly, pressing the back of his hand against his bloody mouth. 'You may have a point. We'll put in an intercom, and we'll see that you have a bit more … what did you call it?' A contemptuous flick of smile touched his lips. It was a smile with which Gardener was extremely familiar. It was the way the Arbergs and McCardles of the world smiled. it was the way the guys who ran the nukes smiled when they talked about atomicpower facilities.
   'The word was consideration. You want to remember it. But smart guys can learn, yeah, Johnny? There's a dictionary back at the house. You need it, asshole?' He took a step toward Enders and had the distinct satisfaction of seeing the man fall back two steps, the contemptuous little smile disappearing. It was replaced with a look of nervy apprehension. 'Consideration, Johnny. You remember. All of you remember. If not for me, then for Bobbi.'
   They were standing by the equipment lean-to now, Enders's eyes small and nervous, Gardener's large and bloodshot and still angry.
   And if Bobbi dies, your idea of consideration may extend all the way to a quick and painless death. That's about the size of it, am I right? Would you say that just about describes the topography of this situation, you bald-headed little fuck?
   'I – we – appreciate your plain speaking,' Enders said. His lips, with no teeth to back them up, pooched in and out nervously.
   'I bet you do.'
   'Perhaps a little plain speaking of our own is in order.' He took off his glasses, began to wipe them on the sweaty front of his shirt (an action which Gardener thought would only leave them more smeared than before), and Gardener saw a dirty, furious gleam in his eyes. 'You don't want to … to strike out like that, Jim. I advise you – we all advise you – never to do it
   again. There are … uh … changes … yes, changes … going on in Haven – '
   'No shit.'
   'And some of these changes have made people … uh … short-tempered. So striking out like that could be … well, a bad mistake.'
   'Do sudden noises bother you?' Gardener inquired.
   Enders looked wary. 'I don't understand your p – '
   'Because if the timer in that radio is jake, you're about to hear one.'
   He stepped behind the lean-to, not quite running, but by no means lingering. Enders threw a startled glance toward the ship, and then ran after him. He tripped over a shovel and went sprawling in the dirt, grabbing at his shin and grimacing. A moment later a loud, crumping roar shook the earth. There was a series of those dull yet penetrating cludding sounds as chunks of rock flew against the ship's hull. Others sprayed into the air, then fell onto the edge of the cut or rattled back into it. Gardener saw one rebound from the ship's hull and bounce an amazing distance.
   'You small-minded, practical joking son of a bitch!' Enders shouted. He was still lying on the ground, still clutching his shin.
   'Small-minded, hell,' Gardener said. 'You left me down there.'
   Enders glared at him.
   Gardener stood where he was for a moment, then walked over to him and held out his hand. 'Come on, Johnny. Time to let bygones be bygones. If Stalin and Roosevelt could cooperate long enough to fight Hitler, I guess we ought to be able to cooperate long enough to unglue this sucker from the ground. What do you say?'
   Enders would say nothing, but after a moment he took Gardener's hand and got up. He brushed sullenly at his clothes, occasionally favoring Gardener with an almost catlike expression of dislike.
   'Want to go see if we brought in our well yet?' Gardener asked. He felt better than he had in days – months, actually, maybe even years. Blowing up at Enders had done him a world of good.
   'What do you mean?'
   'Never mind,' Gardener said, and went over to the cut alone. He peered down, looking for water, listening for gurgles and splashes. He saw nothing, heard nothing. It seemed they had lucked out again.
   It suddenly occurred to him that he was standing here with his hands planted on his upper thighs, bent over a forty-foot drop with a man somewhere behind him to whom he had just administered a punch in the mouth. If Enders wanted to, he could run up behind me and tumble me into this hole with one hard push, he thought, and heard Enders saying: Striking out like that could be a very bad mistake.
   But he didn't look around, and that sense of well-being, absurdly out of place or not, held. He was in a fix, and strapping a rearview mirror onto his head so he could see who was coming up behind him wasn't going to get him out of it.
   When he turned around at last, Enders was still standing by the lean-to, looking at him with that sulky kicked-cat expression. Gardener suspected he had been on the party-line again with his fellow mutations.
   'What do you say?' Gardener called over to him. There was an edged pleasantness in his voice. 'There's a lot of broken rock down there. Do we go back to work, or do we air a few more grievances?'
   Enders went into the shed, grabbed the levitation-pack they used to move the bigger rocks, and started toward Gardener with it. He held it out. Gardener shouldered the pack. He started back toward the sling, then looked back at Enders.
   'Don't forget to hoist me up when I yell.'
   'I won't.' Enders's eyes – or perhaps that was only the lenses of his spectacles
   were murky. Gardener discovered he didn't really care which. He put his foot into the rope sling and tightened it as Enders went back to the winch.
   'Remember, Johnny. Consideration. That's the word for today.'
   John Enders lowered him down without saying anything.

4

   Sunday, July 31st:
   Henry Buck, known to his friends as Hank, committed the last act of outright irrational craziness to take place in Haven at a quarter past eleven on that Sunday morning.
   People in Haven are short-tempered, Enders had told Gard. Ruth McCausland had seen evidences of this short temper during the search for David Brown: hot words, scuffles, a thrown punch or two. Ironically, it had always been Ruth herself -Ruth and the clear moral imperative she had always represented in these people's lives – who had prevented the search from turning into a free-for-all.
   Short-tempered? 'Crazy' was probably a better word.
   In the shock of the 'becoming,' the entire town had been like a gas-filled room, waiting only for someone to light a match … or to do something even more accidental but just as deadly, as an explosion in a gas-filled room may be set off by an innocent delivery-boy pushing a doorbell and creating a spark.
   That spark never came. Part of it was Ruth's doing. Part of it was Bobbi's doing. Then, after the visits to the shed, a group of half a dozen men and one woman began to work like the hippie LSD-trip-guides of the sixties, helping Haven through to the end of the first difficult stage of 'becoming.'
   It was well for the people of Haven that the big bang never did come, well for the people of Maine, New England, perhaps for the whole continent or the whole planet. I would not be the one to tell you there are no planets anywhere in the universe that are not large dead cinders floating in space because a war over who was or was not hogging too many dryers in the local Laundromat escalated into Doomsville. No one ever really knows where things will end – or if they will. And there had been a time in late June when the entire world might well have awakened to discover a terrible, world-ripping conflict was going on in an obscure Maine town – an exchange which had begun over something as deeply important as whose turn it had been to pick up the coffee-break check at the Haven Lunch.
   Of course we may blow up our world someday with no outside help at all, for reasons which look every bit as trivial from a standpoint of light-years; from where we rotate far out on one spoke of the Milky Way in the Lesser Magellanic Cloud, whether or not the Russians invade the Iranian oilfields or whether NATO decides to install American-made Cruise missiles in West Germany may seem every bit as important as whose turn it is to pick up the tab for five coffees and a like number of Danish. Maybe it all comes down to the same thing, when viewed from a galactic perspective.
   However that may be, the tense period in Haven really ended with the month of July – by this time, almost everyone in town had lost his teeth, and a number of other, stranger mutations had begun. Those seven people who had visited Bobbi's shed, communing with what waited in the green glow, had begun to experience these mutations some ten days earlier, but had kept them secret.
   Considering the nature of the changes, that was probably wise.
   Because Hank Buck's revenge on Albert 'Pits' Barfield was really the last act of outrageous craziness in Haven, and in that light it probably deserves a brief mention.
   Hank and Pits Barfield were part of the Thursday-night poker circle to which Joe Paulson had also belonged. By July 31st the poker games had ended, and not because that bitch 'Becka Paulson had gone crazy and roasted her husband. They had stopped because you can't bluff at poker when all the players are telepaths.
   Still, Hank held a grudge against Pits Barfield, and the more he thought about it, the more it grew in his mind. All these years, Pits had been bottom-dealing. Several of them suspected it – Hank could remember a night in the back room of Kyle Archinbourg's place, seven years ago it must have been, playing pool with Moss Harlingen, and Moss had said: 'He's bottom-dealing just as sure as you're born, Hank. Six-ball in the side.' Whack! The six-ball shot into the side pocket as if on a string. 'Thing is, bastid's good at it. If he was just a little slower, I could catch him at it.'
   'If that's what you think, y'ought to get out'n the game.'
   'Shit! Everyone else in that game is as honest as the day is long. And the truth is, I can outplay most of 'em. Nine-ball. Corner.' Whap! 'Suckardly little prick is fast, and he never overuses it – just does a little if he really starts to go in the hole. You notice how he comes out every Thursday night? 'Bout even?'
   Hank had. All the same, he had thought the whole thing was just a little buggyboo in Moss's head – Moss was a good poker player, and he resented anyone whose money he couldn't take. But others had voiced a similar suspicion over the intervening years, and more than a few of them – some of them damned nice fellows, too, fellows Hank had really enjoyed pulling a few beers and dealing a few hands with – had dropped out of the game. They did this quietly, with no fuss or bother, and the possibility that Pits Barfield might be responsible was never hinted at. It was that they had finally gotten into the Monday-night bowling league up to Bangor and their wives didn't want them out late two nights a week. It was that their work schedules had changed and they couldn't take that late night anymore. It was that winter was coming (even if it was only May) and they had to do a little work on their snowmobiles.
   So they dropped out, leaving the little core of three or four that had -been there all along, and somehow that made it worse, knowing those outsiders had either picked it up or smelled it as clearly as you could smell the jungle-juice aroma which arose from Barfield's unwashed body most of the time. They got it. Him and Kyle and Joe Paulson had been snookered. All these years they had been snookered.
   After the 'becoming' got rolling really well, Hank discovered the truth once and for all. Not only had Pits been doing a little basement dealing, he had also, from time to time, indulged in a little discreet card-marking. He had picked these skills up in the long, monotonous hours of duty at a Berlin repple-depple in the months after the end of World War II. Some of those hot, muggy July nights Hank would lie awake in bed, head aching, and imagine Pits sitting in a nice warm farmhouse, shirt and shoes off, stinking to high heaven and grinning a great big shit-eating grin as he practiced cheating and dreamed of the suckers he would fleece when he got back home.
   Hank endured these dreams and headaches for two weeks … and then, one night, the answer came. He would just send old Pits back to the repple-depple, that's what he would do. Some repple-depple, anyway. A repple-depple maybe fifty light-years away, or maybe five hundred, or five million. A repple-depple in the Phantom Zone. And Hank knew just how to do it. He sat bolt upright in bed, grinning a huge grin. His headache was gone at last.
   'Just what the hell is a repple-depple, anyway?' he muttered, and then decided that was the least of his problems. He got out of bed and set to work right then, at three in the morning.
   He caught up to Pits a week after the idea had struck him. Pits was sitting in front of Cooder's market, tipped back in a chair and looking at the pictures in a Gallery magazine. Looking at pictures of naked women, bottom-dealing, and stinking up repple-depples – these were the specialties of Pits Barfield, Hank decided.
   It was Sunday, overcast and hot. People saw Hank walking toward where Albert 'Pits' Barfield sat tipped back in his chair, workboots curled around the front rungs, checking out all those Girls Next Door; they felt-heard the one thought beating steadily
   (reppledepplereppledepplerepple depple)
   in Hank's mind, they saw the great big ghetto-blaster radio he was carrying
   by the handle, saw the pistol jammed into the front of his pants, and they stepped away quickly.
   Pits was deeply absorbed in the Gallery gatefold. It showed a great deal of a girl named Candi (whose hobbies, the magazine said, included 'sailing and men with hands both strong and gentle'), and he looked up far too late to do anything constructive on his own behalf. Considering the size of the pistol Hank was carrying, people opined (usually without even opening their mouths, except to shovel in more food) over supper that night, it had probably been too late for poor old Pits when he got up that Sunday morning.
   Pits's chair came down with a bang.
   'Hey, Hank! What -'
   Hank pulled the gun – it was a souvenir of his own Army service. He had done his time in Korea, and not in any repple-depple, either.
   'You just want to sit right there,' Hank said, 'or they're gonna be washing your guts off that store window, you cheating son of a bitch.'
   'Hank … Hank … what …
   Hank reached inside his shirt and brought out a small pair of Borg earphones. He jacked them into the big radio, turned it on, and tossed the phones toward Pits.
   'Put em on, Pits. Let's see you deal your way out of this one.'
   'Hank … please . . .'
   'I ain't going to treat with you on this, Pits,' Hank said with great sincerity. 'I'll give you a five-count to put on those earphones, and then I'm gonna give you a sinus operation.'
   'Christ, Hank, it was a fucking quarter-limit poker game!' Pits screamed. Sweat poured down his face, stained his khaki shirt. The smell of him was large, vinegary, and amazingly repugnant.
   'One … two . . .'
   Pits looked around wildly. There was no one there. The street had cleared magically. There wasn't so much as a car to be seen moving on Main Street, although there were plenty slant-parked in front of the market. Complete silence had fallen. In it, both he and Hank could hear the music coming from the earphones -Los Lobos wondering if the wolf would survive.
   'It was a lousy three-raise quarter-limit poker game and I hardly ever did it anyway!' Pits shrieked. 'Somebody for Chrissake put a halter over this guy!'
   '. . . three . . .'
   And with a final, ludicrous defiance, Pits screamed: 'And he's a sore fucking loser!'
   'Four,' Hank said, and raised his service pistol.
   Pits, his entire shirt now stained nearly black with sweat, his eyes rolling, smelling like a manure pile which had just been napalmed, gave in. 'Okay! Okay! Okay!' He screamed, and picked up the earphones. 'I'm doin' it, see? I'm doin' it!'
   He put the phones on. Still holding the pistol on him, Hank bent over the ghetto-blaster, which could play cassette tapes as well as receive AM and FM stations. The Play button below the cassette holder had been taped over. Written on the tape was this one rather ominous word: Send.
   Hank pushed it.
   Pits started to scream. Then the screams began to fade, as if someone inside were turning down his volume. At the same time someone seemed to be turning down his vividness, his physical coherence … his there-ness. Pits Barfield faded like a photograph. Now his mouth was moving soundlessly, his skin was milk.
   A little piece of reality – a piece of reality roughly the size of a Dutch door's lower half – seemed to open behind him. There was a feeling that reality – Haven reality -had rotated on some unknowable axis, like a trick bookcase in a haunted-house spoof. Behind Pits now was an eerie purple-black landscape.
   Hank's hair began to flutter about his ears; his collar stuttered with a sound like a silenced automatic weapon; the litter on the asphalt – candy wrappers, flattened cigarette packages, a couple of Humpty Dumpty potato chip bags – zoomed across the pavement and into that hole. They were drawn on the river of air which flowed into that nearly airless other place. Some of that litter went between Pits's legs. And some, Hank thought, seemed to pass right through them.
   Then, suddenly, as if he himself had become as light as the litter which had been on the market's paved apron, Pits was vacuumed into that hole. His Gallery magazine went after him, pages flapping like batwings. Good for you, fuckface, Hank thought, now you got something to read in the repple-depple. Pits's chair toppled over, scraped across the asphalt, and lodged half-in, half-out of that opening. A wind-tunnel of air was now rushing around Hank. He bent over his radio, finger coming to rest on the Stop button.
   Just before he pushed it, he heard a high, thin cry coming from that other place. He looked up, thinking: That ain't Pits.
   It came again.
   '. . . hilly . . .'
   Hank frowned. It was a kid's voice. A kid's voice, and there was something familiar about it. Something
   '. . . over yet? I want to come ho-oome .
   There was a bright, toneless jingle as the window in Cooder's market, which had blown inward in the town-hall explosion the previous Sunday, was now sucked outward. A glass-storm flew all around Hank, leaving him miraculously untouched.
   '. . . please, it's hard to breeeeeeathe .
   Now the B&M Beans on special which had been pyramided in the market's front window began to fly around Hank as they were sucked through the doorway in reality he had somehow opened. Five-pound bags of lawn food and ten-pound bags of charcoal slithered across the pavement with dry, papery sounds.
   Gotta shut the sucker up, Hank thought, and as if to confirm this judgement, a can of beans slammed into the back of his head, bounced high in the air, then zoomed into that purple-black bruise.
   'Hilleeeeee -'
   Hank hit the Stop button. The doorway disappeared at once. There was a woody crunch as the chair lodged in the opening was cut in two, on an almost perfect diagonal. Half of the chair lay on the asphalt. The other half was nowhere to be seen.
   Randy Kroger, the German who had owned Cooder's since the late fifties, grabbed Hank and turned him around. 'You're payin for that display window, Buck,' he said.
   'Sure, Randy, whatever you say,' Hank agreed, dazedly rubbing the lump that was rising on the back of his head.
   Kroger pointed at the strange, slanting half-chair lying on the asphalt. 'You're paying for the chair, too,' he announced, and strode back inside.
   That was how July ended.