5

   Monday, August 1st:
   John Leandro finished talking, knocked back the rest of his beer, and asked David Bright: 'So what do you think he'll say?'
   Bright thought for a moment. He and Leandro were in the Bounty Tavern, a wildly overdecorated Bangor pub with only two real marks in its favor – it was almost directly across the street from the editorial offices of the Bangor Daily News, and on Mondays you could get Heineken for a buck and a quarter a bottle.
   'I think he'll start by telling you to hurry over to Derry and finish getting the rest of the Community Calendar,' Bright said. 'Then I think he might ask you if you've thought about psychiatric help.'
   Leandro looked absurdly crushed. He was only twenty-four, and the last two stories he had covered – the disappearance (read: presumed murder) of the two state troopers, and the suicide of a third – had whetted his appetite for the high-voltage stuff. When stacked up against being in on a grim midnight hunt for the bodies of two state troopers, reporting on the Derry Amvets' covered-dish supper wasn't much. He didn't want the heavy stuff to end. Bright felt almost sorry for the little twerp – trouble was, that was what Leandro was. Being a twerp at twenty-four was acceptable. He was pretty sure, however, that Johnny Leandro was still going to be a twerp at forty-four … sixty-four … at eighty-four, if he lived that long.
   A twerp of eighty-four was a slightly awesome and wholly frightening idea. Bright decided to order another beer after all.
   'I was just joking,' Bright said.
   'Then you think he will let me follow it up?'
   'No.'
   'But you just said
   'I was joking about the psychiatric-help part,' Bright said patiently. 'That's what I was joking about.'
   'He' was Peter Reynault, the city editor. Bright had learned a good many years ago that city editors had one thing in common with God Himself, and he suspected that Johnny Leandro was about to learn it himself very soon now. Reporters might propose, but it was city editors like Peter Reynault who eventually disposed.
   'But – '
   'You have nothing to follow up,' Bright said.
   If Haven's inner circle – those who had made the trip into Bobbi Anderson's shed -could have heard what Leandro said next, his life expectancy might well have sunk to days … maybe mere hours.
   'I've got Haven to follow up,' was what he said, and quaffed the rest of his Heineken Dark in three long swallows. 'Everything starts there. The kid disappears in Haven, the woman dies in Haven, Rhodes and Gabbons are coming back from Haven. Dugan commits suicide. Why? Because he loved the McCausland woman, he says. The McCausland woman from Haven.'
   'Don't forget lovable old Gramps,' Bright said. 'He's running around saying his grandson's disappearance was a conspiracy. I kept expecting him to start whispering about Fu Manchu and white slavery.'
   'So what is it?' Leandro asked dramatically. 'What's going on in Haven?'
   'It is the insidious doctor,' Bright said. His beer arrived. He no longer wanted it. He only wanted to get out of here. Bringing up loveable old Gramps had been a mistake. Thinking about loveable old Gramps made him feel a trifle uneasy. Gramps was obviously off his rocker, but there had been something about his eyes …
   'What?'
   Dr Fu Manchu. If you see Nayland Smith hanging around, I think you've got the story of the century.' Bright leaned forward and whispered hoarsely: 'White slavery. Remember who you heard it from when you get the call from the New York Times.'
   ‘I don't think that's very funny, David.'
   An eighty-four-year-old twerp, Bright thought again. Imagine it.
   'Or, here's one,' Bright said. 'Little green men. The invasion of earth is already underway, see, only no one knows it. And – TA-DA! No One Will Believe This Heroic Young News-Hawk! Robert Redford Stars as John Leandro in This Nail-Biting Saga of – '
   The bartender wandered down and said, 'You want to turn it down?'
   Leandro got up, his face stiff. He dropped three dollar bills on the bar. 'Your sense of humor is adolescent, David.'
   'Or try this,' Bright said dreamily. 'It's both Fu Manchu and green men from space. An alliance formed in hell. And no one knows but you, Johnny. Klaatu barada nictu!'
   'Well, I don't care if Reynault lets me follow it up or not,' Leandro said, and Bright saw that he might have twanged Johnny's strings just a little too hard; the twerp was furious. 'My vacation starts next Friday. I may just go down to Haven. Follow it up on my own time.'
   'Sure,' Bright said, excited. He knew he should let up– pretty soon Leandro was probably going to try to punch him in the mouth – but the guy just kept giving him openings. 'Sure, that's gotta be part of it! Redford wouldn't take the part unless he could go it alone. The Lone Wolf! Klaatu barada nictu! Wow! Just remember to wear your special watch when you go down there.'
   'What watch?' Leandro asked, his face still angry. Oh, he was pissed, all right, but he kept leading with his chin just the same.
   'You know, the one that sends out an ultrasonic signal that only Superman can hear when you pull out the stem,' Bright said, demonstrating with his own watch (and spilling a fair amount of beer into his crotch). 'It goes zeeeeeeeee – '
   'I don't care what Peter Reynault thinks, and I don't care how many stupid jokes you make,' Leandro said. 'You both just might get a big surprise.'
   He started out, then turned back.
   'And for the record, I think you're a cynical shithead with no imagination.'
   Having delivered this valedictory, Johnny Leandro turned on his heel and stalked grandly out.
   Bright lifted his glass and tipped it toward the bartender. 'Let's drink to the cynical shitheads of the world,' he said. 'We have no imagination, but we're remarkably resistant to twerpism.'
   'Whatever you say,' the bartender said. He believed he had seen it all before … but then, he had never tended bar in Haven.

6

   Tuesday, August 2nd:
   There were six of them who met late that afternoon in Newt Berringer's office. It was going on five P.m., but the clock in the tower – a tower that looked real but which a bird could easily have flown through, if there had been any birds left in Haven Village – still read five past three. All six had spent some time in Bobbi's shed; Adley McKeen was the most recent addition to their number. The others included Newt, Dick Allison, Kyle, Hazel, and Frank Spruce.
   They discussed the few things they had to discuss without talking aloud.
   Frank Spruce asked how Bobbi was.
   Still alive, Newt responded; no one knew any more. She might come out of the shed again. More likely she would not. Either way, they would know when it happened.
   Discussion turned briefly to what Hank Buck had done the day before, and what Hank said he'd heard coming from that other world. None of them was much concerned with the late and not so great Pits Barfield. Perhaps the punishment had suited the crime; perhaps it had been a little too extreme. It didn't matter. It was over. Nothing had happened to Hank as a result of what he had done; he had given Randy Kroger a personal check for the broken display window and the goods that had been sucked through the hole Hank had spiked into reality. Kroger called Northern National in Bangor to verify the check. He found it was good, and that was all he cared about.
   There was little they could have done about Hank even if they'd had a mind to; the town's one jail cell was in the town hall's basement, a converted storeroom where Ruth had jugged a few weekend drunks, and it might hold Hank Buck for all of ten minutes. A strong fourteen-year-old could, have broken out of it. And they couldn't very well have sent Hank up to county jail. The charge would have looked pretty odd. The alternatives available to them were simple – let him alone or pack him off to Altair-4. Luckily, they were able to look closely into Hank's mind and motivations. They saw that his anger and confusion were subsiding, as they were all over town. He was not apt to do anything radical again, so they took away his converted radio, asked him not to make another, and moved on to what concerned them a bit more … the voice he claimed to have heard.
   It was David Brown, all right, Frank Spruce said now. Anybody doubt it?
   No one did.
   David Brown was on Altair-4.
   No one knew exactly where Altair-4 was, or what it was, and they didn't much care. The words themselves came from some old movie and meant no more than the name Tommyknockers, which came from some old rhyme. What mattered (and even this didn't, much) was that Altair-4 was a kind of cosmic warehouse, a place where all sorts of things were stored. Hank had sent Pits there, but first he had put the smelly old son of a bitch through some half-assed sort of disintegration process.
   This had apparently not been the case with David Brown.
   Hazel asked if they could get him back.
   Long, thoughtful silence.
   (yes probably yes)
   Ike
   This last was not ascribable to any one person; it was group-think, hive. and complete in itself.
   (but why why bother)
   They looked at each other with no emotion. They could feel emotion, but not over such a minor matter as this.
   Bring him back, Hazel said indifferently. It'll please Bryant and Marie. And Ruth. She would have wanted it. And we all did love her, you know. Her thought had the tone of a woman suggesting that a friend buy her son a soft drink as a treat for being good.
   No, Adley said, and they all looked toward him. It was the first time he had entered their conversation. He looked embarrassed but pushed on anyway. Every paper and TV station in the state'd be down here to get a story on the 'miracle return.' They think he must be dead, only four and gone over two weeks now. If he shows up, it'll make too much whoop-de-doo.
   They were nodding now.
   And what would he say? Newt put in. When they asked him where he'd been, what would he say?
   We could blank his memories, Hazel said. That would be no problem at all, and the press people would accept amnesia as perfectly natural. Under the circumstances.
   (yes but that's not the problem)
   It was the many voices again, as one voice. They came together in a strange combination of words and images. The problem was that things had now gone too far to allow anyone in town except for the most transient through-travelers … and even most of them could be discouraged with fake road construction and detour signs. The last people they wanted in Haven was a bunch of reporters and TV camera crews. And the clock tower wouldn't show up on film; it was a mind-slide, really no more than a hallucination. No, David Brown was best left alone, all things considered. He would be all right for yet a while. They knew little about Altair-4, but they did know that time ran at a different speed there – on Altair-4, less than a year had passed since earth had been flung out of the sun. So David Brown had in fact just gotten there. Of course he still might die; strange microbes might invade his system, some strange Altair-4 warehouse-rat might gobble him up, or he might die of simple shock. But he probably wouldn't, and if he did, it really wasn't very important.
   I've a feeling the boy might come in handy, Kyle said.
   (how)
   As a diversion.
   (what do you mean)
   Kyle didn't know exactly what he meant. It was only a feeling that if a spotlight were to be trained on Haven again – the way Ruth had tried to train one on the town with her damned exploding dolls, which had worked ever so much better than they were supposed to work – perhaps they could bring David Brown back and set him down somewhere else. If that was done in the right way, they might gain a little more time here. Time was always a problem. Time to 'become.'
   Kyle expressed these ideas in no coherent way, but the others nodded at the drift of his thoughts. It would be well to keep David Brown waiting in the wings, so to speak, a while longer.
   (don't let Marie know – she hasn't gone far enough in the 'becoming' – you must hide this from Marie yet a while)
   All six looked around, eyes widening. That voice, weak but clear, belonged to none of them. It had come from Bobbi Anderson.
   Bobbi! Hazel cried, half-rising from her seat. Bobbi, are you all right? How you doing?
   No answer.
   Bobbi was gone – there was not even a feel of her left in the air. They looked at each other cautiously, testing each other's impression of that
   thought, confirming that it had been Bobbi. Each knew that if he or she had been alone, with no confirmation available, he or she would have dismissed it as an incredibly powerful hallucination.
   How are we going to keep it from Marie? Dick Allison asked, almost angrily. We can't hide nothing from anybody else!
   Yes, Newt returned. We can. Not good enough yet, maybe, but we can dim out our thoughts a little. Make them hard to see. Because
   (because we've been)
   (been out there)
   (been in the shed)
   (Bobbi's shed)
   (we wore the headphones in Bobbi's shed)
   (and ate ate to 'become')
   (take ye eat do this in remembrance of me)
   A sigh ran gently through them.
   We'll have to go back, Adley McKeen said. Won't we?
   'Yes,' Kyle said. 'We will.' It was the only time anyone spoke aloud during the entire meeting, and it marked its end.

7

   Wednesday, August 3rd:
   Andy Bozeman, who had been Haven's only realtor up until three weeks ago, when he simply closed his office, had discovered that mind-reading was something a fellow got used to very quickly. He didn't realize how quickly, or how much he had come to depend on it, until it was his turn to go on out to Bobbi's place to help and to keep an eye on the drunk.
   Part of his problem – he knew it was going to be a problem after talking to Enders and the Tremain lad – was being this close to the ship. It was like standing next to the biggest power generator in the world; constant eddies and flows of its weird force ran over his skin like skirling sand-devils in the desert. Sometimes large ideas would float dreamily into his mind, making it impossible to concentrate on what he was doing. Sometimes the exact opposite would occur: thought would break up completely, like a microwave transmission interrupted by a burst of ultraviolet rays. But most of it was just the physical fact of the ship, looming there like something out of a dream. It was exhilarating, awe-inspiring, frightening, wonderful. Bozeman thought he now understood how the Israelites must have felt carrying the Ark of the Covenant through the desert. In one of his sermons, the Rev. Goohringer said that some fellow had ventured to stick his head in there, just to see what all the shouting was about, and he had dropped dead on the spot.
   Because it had been God in there.
   There might be a kind of God in that ship, too, Andy thought. And even if that God had fled, It had left some residue … some of Itself … and thinking about all that made it hard to keep your mind on the business at hand.
   Then there was Gardener's unsettling blankness. You kept running into it like a closed door that should have been open. You'd yell at him to hand you something, and he would go right on with what he was doing.
   Just … no response. Or you'd go to tune in on him – just sort of fall into the run of his thoughts, like picking up a telephone on a party-line to see who was talking, and there would be no one there. No one at all. Nothing but a dead line.
   There was a buzz from the intercom nailed to the inside wall of the lean-to. Its wire ran across the muddy, churned ground and into the trench from which the ship jutted.
   Bozeman flipped the toggle over to Talk. 'I'm here.'
   'The charge is set,' Gardener said. 'Haul me up.' He sounded very, very tired. He had thrown himself a pretty fair country drunk last night, Bozeman thought, judging by the sound of the puking he had heard from the back porch around midnight. And when he glanced into Gardener's room this morning, he had seen blood on his pillow.
   'Right away.' The episode with Enders had taught them all that when Gardener asked to be brought up, you didn't waste time.
   He went to the windlass and began to crank. It was a pain in the ass, having to do this by hand, but there was a temporary shortage of batteries again. Give them another week and everything out here would be running like clockwork … except Bozeman doubted if he would be here to see it. Being near the ship was exhausting. Being near Gardener was exhausting in a different way – it was like being near a loaded gun that had a hair trigger. The way he had sucker-punched poor John Enders, now – the only reason John hadn't known it was coming was because Gardener was such an infuriating blank. Every now and then a bubble of thought partial or complete – would rise to the surface of his mind, as readable as a newspaper headline, but that was all. Maybe Enders had it coming – Bozeman knew that he wouldn't be too nuts about being stuck at the bottom of a trench with one of those explosive radios. But that wasn't the point. The point was that Johnny hadn't been able to see it coming. Gardener could do anything, at any time, and no one could stop him, because no one could see it coming.
   Andy Bozeman almost wished Bobbi would die so they could get rid of him. It would be tougher with just Havenites working on the project, true, it would slow them down, but it would almost be worth it.
   The way he could come out of left field at you was so fucking unsettling.
   This morning, for instance. Coffee break. Bozeman sitting on a stump, eating some of those little peanut-butter-and-cracker sandwiches and drinking iced coffee from his Thermos. He had always preferred hot coffee to cold even in warm weather, but since he'd lost his teeth, really hot drinks seemed to bother him.
   Gardener had been sitting cross-legged like one of those Yoga masters on a dirty swatch of tarpaulin, eating an apple and drinking a beer. Bozeman didn't see how anyone could eat an apple and drink a beer at the same time, especially in the morning, but Gardener was doing it. From here, Bozeman could see the scar an inch or so above Gardener's left eyebrow. The steel plate would be under that scar. it
   Gardener had turned his head and caught Bozeman looking at him. Bozeman flushed, wondering if Gardener was going to start to yell and rant. If maybe he was going to come over here and try to sucker-punch him the way he had Johnny Enders. If he tries that, Bozeman thought, curling his hands into fists, he's going to find that I'm no sucker.
   Instead, Gardener had begun to speak in a clear, carrying voice – there was a small, cynical smile on his mouth as he did it. After a moment, Bozeman realized he wasn't just speaking, he was reciting. The man was sitting out here in the woods cross-legged on a dirty tarp, hungover out of his mind, the glittering body of the ship in the earth casting moving ripples of reflection on his cheek, and reciting like a schoolboy – the man was unfucking-stable, Bozeman would tell the world. He sincerely wanted Gardener dead.
   Tom gave up the brush with reluctance in his face, but alacrity in his heart,"' Gardener said, eyes half-closed, face turned up toward the warm morning sun. That little smile never left his lips.---Andwhile the late steamer Big Missouri worked and sweated in the sun, the retired artist sat on a barrel in the shade close by, dangled his legs, munched his apple, and planned the slaughter of more innocents.
   'What – ' Andy began, but Gardener, his smile now spreading into a genuine – if nonetheless cynical – grin, overrode him.
   There was no lack of material; boys happened along every little while; they came to jeer, but they remained to whitewash. By the time Ben was fagged out, Tom had traded the next chance to Billy Fisher for a kite, in good repair; and when he played out, Johnny Miller bought in for a dead rat, and a string to swing it with . . . "'
   Gardener drank the rest of his beer, belched, and stretched.
   'You never brought me a dead rat and a string to swing it with, but I got an intercom, Bozie, and I guess that's a start, huh?'
   'I don't know what you're talking about,' Andy Bozeman said slowly. He had only gotten two years of college, business admin, before having to drop out and go to work. His father had a heart condition and chronic high blood pressure. High-flown fellows like this made him nervous and angry. Lording it over ordinary folks, as if being able to quote from something written by someone who had died a long time ago made their shit smell sweeter than other people's.
   Gardener said, 'That's okay. It's from chapter two of Tom Sawyer. When Bobbi was a kid back in Utica, seventh grade, they had this thing called Junior Exhibition. It was a recitation competition. She didn't want to be in it, but her sister Anne decided she ought to be, that it would be good for her, or something, and when sister Anne decided something, brother, it was decided. Anne was a real tartar then, Bozie, and she's a real tartar now. At least I guess she is. I haven't seen her in a long time, and that's the way, oh-ho, uh-huh, I like it. But I think it's fair to say she's still the same. People like her very rarely change.'
   'Don't call me Bozie,' Andy said, hoping he sounded more dangerous than he felt. 'I don't like it.'
   'When I had Bobbi in freshman comp, she wrote once about how she froze trying to recite Tom Sawyer. I just about cracked up.' Gardener got to his feet and started walking toward Andy, a development the ex-realtor viewed with active alarm. 'I saw her after class the next day and asked her if she still remembered how "Whitewashing the Fence'' went. She did. I wasn't surprised. There are some things you never forget, like when your sister or your mother bulldozed you into some horror-show like Junior Ex. You may forget the piece when you're standing up there in front of all those people. Otherwise, you could recite it on your deathbed.'
   'Look,' Andy said, 'we ought to get back to work
   'I let her get about four sentences in, and then I joined her. Her jaw dropped almost down to her knees. Then she started grinning, and we went through it together, word for word. It wasn't so strange. We were both shy kids, Bobbi and I. Her sister was the dragon in front of her cave, my mother was the dragon in front of mine. People like that often get this very weird idea that the way to cure a shy kid is to put him into the sort of situation he dreads the most – something like Junior Ex. It wasn't even much of a coincidence that we'd both gotten that whitewashing thing by heart. The only one more popular for recitation is "The Tell-Tale Heart.
   Gardener drew in breath and screamed:
   'Stop, fiends! Dissemble no more! Tear up the floor-boards! Here! Here! 'Tis the beating of his hideous heart!'
   Andy had uttered a small shriek. He dropped his Thermos, and half a cup of cold coffee stained the crotch of his pants.
   'Uh-oh, Bozie,' Gardener said conversationally. 'Never get that out of those polyester slacks.
   'Only difference between the two of us was that I didn't freeze,' he went on. 'In fact, I won a second-prize ribbon. But it didn't cure my fear of talking in front of crowds . . . only made it worse. Whenever I stand up in front of a group to read poetry, I look at all those hungry eyes . . . I think of “Whitewashing the Fence” Also, I think about Bobbi. Sometimes that's enough to get me through. Anyway, it made us friends.'
   'I don't see what any of that has to do with getting this work done!' Andy cried in a hectoring voice utterly unlike him. But his heart had been beating too fast. For a moment there, when Gardener had shrieked, he really had believed the man had gone insane.
   'You don't see what this has to do with whitewashing the fence?' Gardener asked, and laughed. 'Then you must be blind, Bozie.'
   He pointed to the ship leaning skyward at its perfect forty-five-degree angle, rising out of the wide trench.
   'We're digging it up instead of whitewashing it, but that doesn't change the principle a bit. I have fagged out Bobby Tremain and John Enders, and if you're back tomorrow I'll eat your Hush Puppies. Thing is, I never seem to get any prizes for it. You tell whoever comes out tomorrow I want a dead rat and a string to swing it by, Bozie … or a bully taw, at the very least.' Gardener had stopped halfway to the trench. He looked around at Andy. Andy's failure to read this big man with the sloping shoulders and the indistinct, oddly broken face had never made Bozeman more uncomfortable than it did then.
   'Better still, Bozie,' Gardener had said in a voice so soft Andy could hardly hear it, 'get Bobbi out here tomorrow. I'd like to find out if the New Improved Bobbi still remembers how to recite “Whitewashing the Fence” from Tom Sawyer.'
   Then, without another word, he had gone to the sling and waited for Andy to lower him down.
   If that whole thing hadn't been Ieft-field, Andy didn't know what was. And, he added to himself as he turned the winch, that had only been Gardener's first beer of the day. He'll put away another five or six at lunch and really get wild and crazy.
   Gardener now came swaying to the top of the trench, and Andy had an urge to let go of the windlass crank. Solve the problem himself.
   Except he couldn't – Gardener belonged to Bobbi Anderson, and until Bobbi either died or came out of the shed, things had to go on pretty much as they were.
   'Come on, Bozie. Some of those rocks fly a long way.' He started toward the lean-to. Andy fell in beside him, hurrying to keep up.
   'I told you I don't like you calling me Bozie,' he said.
   Gardener spared him a curiously flat glance. 'I know,' he said.
   They went around the lean-to. About three minutes later another of those loud, crumping roars shuddered out of the trench. A spray of rocks rose into the sky and came down, rattling off the hull of the ship with dull clangs and clongs.
   'Well, let's – 'Bozeman began.
   Gardener grabbed his arm. His head was tilted, his face alert, his eyes Clark and lively. 'Shhh!'
   Andy wrenched his arm away. 'What in the hell's wrong with you?'
   'Don't you hear it?'
   'I don't h – '
   Then he did. A hissing sound, like a giant tea-kettle, was coming from the trench. It was growing. A mad excitement suddenly seized Andy. There was more than a little terror in it.
   'It's them!' he whispered, and turned toward Gard. His eyes were the size of doorknobs, his lips, shiny with loose spittle, were trembling. 'They weren't dead, we woke them up … they're coming out!'
   'Jesus is coming and is He pissed,' Gardener remarked, unimpressed.
   The hissing grew louder. Now there was another crunching thud – this wasn't an explosion; it was the sound of something heavy collapsing. A moment later something else collapsed: Andy. The strength ran out of his legs and he fell to his knees.
   'It's them, it'– them, it's them!' he slobbered.
   Gardener hooked a hand into the man's armpit, wincing a little at the hot, jungly dampness there, and pulled him to his feet.
   'That's not the Tommyknockers,' he said. 'It's water.'
   'Huh?' Bozeman looked at him with dazed incomprehension.
   'Water!' Gardener cried, giving Bozeman a brisk little shake. 'We just brought in our swimming pool, Bozie!'
   'Wh – ‘
   The hiss suddenly exploded into a soft, steady roar. Water jetted out of the trench and into the sky in a widening sheet. This was no column of water; it was as if a giant child had just pressed his finger over a giant faucet to watch the water spray everywhere. At the bottom of the trench, water was driving up through a number of fissures in just that way.
   'Water?' Andy asked weakly. He couldn't get it right in his mind.
   Gardener didn't reply. Rainbows danced in the water; it ran down the sleek hull of the ship in rivulets, leaving beads behind . . . and as he watched, he saw those drops begin to skitter, the way water flicked into hot fat on a griddle will skitter and hop. Only this was not random. The drops were lining up in obedience to lines of force which ran down the hull of the ship like lines of longitude on a globe.
   I can see it, Gardener thought. I can see the force radiating from the ship's skin in those drops. My God
   There was another crunch. Gardener seemed to feel the earth actually drop a bit under his feet. At the bottom of the trench, water pressure was finishing the work the blasting had begun – widening fissures and holes, pulling the friable rock apart. More water began to escape, and more easily. The sheets of spray fell back. A last diffuse rainbow wavered in the air and disappeared.
   Gardener saw the ship shift as the rock weld which had prisoned it so long let go. It moved so slightly it might have been imagination, but it wasn't. In that brief movement he could see how it would look coming out of the ground – he could see its shadow rippling slowly over the ground as it came up and out, could hear the unearthly wailing of its hull scraping over the bones of bedrock, could sense everyone in Haven looking this way as it rose into the sky, hot and glittering, a monstrous silver coin slowly heeling over to the horizontal for the first time in millennia, floating soundlessly in the sky, floating free …
   He wanted that. God! Right or wrong, he wanted that so bad.
   Gardener gave his head a brisk shake, as if to clear it.
   'Come on,' he said. 'Let's take a look.'
   Without waiting, Gardener walked across to the trench and looked in. He could hear rushing water, but it was hard to see. He attached one of the big kleig lights they used for night-work to the stirrup of the sling and lowered it about ten feet. That was plenty; if he had lowered it another ten, it would have been underwater. It had been a lake they had broken into, all right; no joke. The trench was filling rapidly.
   After a moment, Andy joined him. His face was wretched. 'All that work!' he cried.
   'Did you bring your diving board, Bozie? Are we going to have Free Swim on Thursdays or Fr – '
   'Shut up!' Andy Bozeman screamed at him. 'Shut up, I hate you!'
   Wild hysteria washed over Gardener. He staggered away to a stump and sat down, wondering if the goddam thing had stayed watertight all these years, wondering what the fair market price was for a flying saucer with water damage. He began to laugh. Even when Andy Bozeman came over and hit him upside the face and knocked him onto the ground, Jim Gardener couldn't stop laughing.

8

   Thursday, August 4th:
   When it got to be quarter to nine and still no one had shown up, Gardener began to wonder if maybe they were quitting. He toyed with the idea as he sat in Bobbi's rocker on the porch, fingering the big, puffy bruise on the side of his face where Bozeman had clouted him.
   A bunch of them had been out in Archinbourg's Cadillac again, after midnight. Mostly the same bunch. Another Midnight Shed Party. Gardener had hiked himself up on one elbow and had watched them through the guestroom window, wondering who brought the chips and dip to these soirees. They were just shadows grouped around the long front end of the Coupe DeVille. They stood there for a moment, then went to the shed. When they opened the door, that viciously brilliant light poured out in a flood that lit the entire yard and the guestroom itself with a sick radium-dial glow. They went inside. The glow faded down to a thick vertical bar but didn't go out entirely. They had left the door ajar. The folks in this little jerkwater Maine town were now the brightest people on earth, but apparently not even they had been able to figure out how to padlock a door from the outside, and they hadn't thought to put one on the inside.
   Now, sitting on the porch and looking toward the village, Gardener thought: Maybe when they get inside there, they get too exalted to think of mundane things like padlocks.
   He shaded his eyes with one hand. A truck was coming. A big old pulp truck that was vaguely familiar. There was a tarpaulin over something in the back. It flapped casually in the wind. Gardener knew it was going to turn in. Of course they hadn't given up.
   Woke up last night in the guestroom bed, saw the folks going into the Tommyknockers' shed. Could have looked in, but I didn't quite dare; don't want to know what goes on in there.
   He didn't think, somehow, that the judges of the Yale Younger Poets competition would think much of it. But, Gardener thought, This Is Where Jim Gardener Is Now, as they say. Maybe later on they'll call it my Tommyknocker Phase. Or my Shed Period. Or
   The truck changed to a lower gear and came groaning into Bobbi's dooryard. The engine died with a wheeze. The man in the strap-style T-shirt who got out was the man who had given Gard his ride to the Haven town line on July 4th. He recognized the man at once. Coffee, he thought. You gave me coffee with a lot of sugar in it. Tasted good. He looked like an extra from the James Dickey novel about those city boys and their weekend canoeing trip down the Cahoola-wassee. Gardener didn't think the man was from Haven, though – hadn't he said Albion?
   Stuff's spreading, he thought. Well, why not? It's fallout, isn't it? And Albion's downwind.
   "Lo there,' the truck driver said. 'Guess you don't 'member me.' His tone added: Don't fuck with me, Fred.
   'Guess I do,' Gard said, and the name rose magically in his mind, even after all this – a single month that seemed more like ten years, with all these strange events. 'Freeman, Moss. Gave me a ride. I was coming to cheek on Bobbi. But I guess you know that.'
   Moss went to the back of the truck and began pulling slipknots and yanking rope. 'Want to give me a help with this?'
   Gardener started down the steps, then stopped, smiling a little. First Tremain, then Enders, then Bozeman with his somehow pitiful pale yellow polyester pants.
   'Sure,' he said. 'Just tell me one thing.'
   'Ayuh?' Moss left off pulling the ropes. He flipped back the tarpaulin, and Gardener saw about what he had expected: a weird conglomeration of equipment: tanks, hoses, three car batteries nailed to a board. A New and Improved Pump. 'Will if I can.'
   Gardener grinned without much humor. 'Did you bring me a dead rat and a string to swing it with?'

9

   Friday, August 5th:
   No air traffic had overflown Haven on a regular basis since the late 1960s when Dow Air Force Base in Bangor had closed down. If someone had uncovered the ship in the earth back in those days, there might have been trouble; there had been Air Force fighter planes zooming overhead four and five times a day, rattling windows and sometimes breaking them with sonic booms. The pilots weren't supposed to boom over the continental United States unless absolutely necessary, but the hotshots who flew the F-4s, most of them with adolescent acne still fading from their cheeks and foreheads, sometimes got a little exuberant. The jets made the Mustangs and Chargers these overgrown boys had been driving only a year before look mighty tame. When Dow closed there were still a few Air National Guard flights, but the patterns were shifted north, toward the Loring in Limestone.
   After some dithering, the base was turned into a commercial airfield, named Bangor International Airport. Some thought the name rather grand for an airport that serviced a few wheezy Northeast Airlines flights to Boston each day and a handful of puddle-jumper Pipers bound for Augusta and Portland. But the air traffic eventually grew, and by 1983 BIA had become a thriving air terminal. Besides serving two commercial airlines, it was also a refueling point for many international carriers, and so it finally earned its grand name.
   For a while, some commercial airliners did overfly Haven – this was in the early seventies. But pilots and navigators regularly reported radar problems in the area coded Quadrant G-3, a square which took in most of Haven, all of Albion, and the China Lakes region. This cloudy interference, known as ,popcorn,' 'echo-haze,' or, even more colorfully, as 'ghost-turds,' is also reported regularly over the Bermuda Triangle. Compasses went wacky. Sometimes there were funny cuckoo electrical glitches in the equipment.
   In 1973, a Delta jet southbound from BIA to Boston nearly collided with a TWA jet bound from London to Chicago. Drinks on both planes were spilled; a TWA stewardess was scalded by hot coffee. No one but the flightcrews knew how close it had been. The co-pilot on the Delta plane ran a hot special-delivery into his pants, laughed hysterically all the way to Boston, and quit flying forever two days later.
   In 1974 a Big Sky charter jet loaded with happy gamblers bound for Las Vegas from Bangor and the Canadian Maritimes lost power in one engine over Haven and had to return to Bangor. When the engine was restarted on the ground, it ran fine.
   There was another near-miss in 1975. By 1979, all commercial air traffic had been routed out of the area. If you had asked an FAA controller about it, he only would have shrugged and called it a dragon. It was a word they used. There were such places here and there; no one knew why. It was easier to route planes away and forget it.
   By 1982, private air traffic was also being routinely vectored away from G-3 by controllers in Augusta, Waterville, and Bangor. So no pilot had seen the great shiny object winking up from the exact center of map-square G-3 on FAA Map ECUS-2.
   Not until Peter Bailey saw it on the afternoon of August 5th.
   Bailey was a private pilot with two hundred hours on his own in the air. He flew a Cessna Hawk XP, and he would have been the first to tell you that it had cost him a few banana-skins. This was Peter Bailey's phrase for money. He found it hilarious. The Hawk cruised at a hundred and fifty miles an hour and had good sky capability; 17,000 feet without breathing hard. The Cessna nav-pack made it hard to get lost (the optional nav antenna had also cost a few banana-skins). In other words it was a good plane, one that could damn near fly itself – only it didn't have to with a good pilot like him driving.
   If Peter Bailey had a bitch, it was the goddam insurance. It was highway robbery, and he had bored his golfing partners to tears with the outrage the insurance companies had foisted on him.
   He had friends who flew, he assured them grimly, plenty of them. A lot with less hours on their licenses than he had were forking over fewer banana-skins to the insurance heathens than he was. Some were guys he wouldn't have flown with, he said, if they owned the last plane on earth and his wife was in Denver dying of a brain hemorrhage. And the amount wasn't the greatest humiliation of all. The greatest humiliation of all was that he, Peter Bailey, he, a respected neurosurgeon who made well over three hundred thousand banana-skins a year, had to accept pool coverage if he wanted to fly. Well, he told his captive audiences (who often wished fervently that they had only played the front nine, or, better, had stayed in the bar and soaked up a few Bloody Marys), pool coverage was assigned-risk coverage, the sort teenagers and convicted drunks had to carry on their cars. Shit! If that wasn't goddam discrimination he didn't know what was. If he wasn't such a busy man he'd slap the bastards with a class action suit and he'd win, too.
   Many of Bailey's golf companions were lawyers, and most knew it wouldn't wash. Risk coverage was made on the basis of actuarial tables, and the fact was, Peter Bailey wasn't just a neurosurgeon; he was a doctor, and doctors have the worst record as private pilots of any professional group in the world.
   After escaping one of these foursomes, one of the players remarked as Bailey headed toward the clubhouse, still fuming: 'I wouldn't even drive to Denver with the long-winded son of a bitch if my wife was dying of a brain hemorrhage.'
   Peter Bailey was exactly the sort of flier for whom the tables had been invented. There were undoubtedly doctors all over America who were exemplary pilots. Bailey wasn't one of them. Quick and decisive in the operating theater when a patient lay before him with a window of skull cut away to reveal the pinkish-gray brain tissue, as delicate as a dancer with scalpel and laser knife, he was a ham-fisted pilot who constantly violated assigned altitudes, FAA safety rules, and his own flight patterns. He was a bold pilot, but with only two hundred hours on his license, he could by no stretch of the imagination be called an old pilot. His status as an assigned risk only confirmed the old saw: a pilot may be one or the other, but no pilot is both.
   He was flying alone that day from Teeterboro outside New York to Bangor. At Bangor he would rent a car and drive to Derry Home Hospital. He had been asked to consult in the case of young Hillman Brown. Because the case was interesting and the price right (and because he had heard good things about the golf course in Orono), he had agreed.
   The weather had been clear the whole way, the air smooth. Bailey had enjoyed the trip tremendously. As usual, his logbook was botched, he had missed one VOR beacon entirely and had decided another must be on the blink (he had hit the frequency dial with his elbow), he had wandered from his assigned altitude of 11,000 feet as high as 15,000 and as low as 6,000, and had once again avoided killing anyone . . . a blessing he was unfortunately too stupid to count.
   He also wandered well off his flight-path, and so happened to overfly Haven, where a great blink of light suddenly flicked into his eye; it was as if someone had just flashed the lid of the world's biggest Crisco can up at him.
   'What in the Sam Hill – '
   He looked down and saw a tantalizing glimmer of that brightness. He might have dismissed it, might have gone on and survived to fight yet another day (or perhaps to collide with a fully loaded airliner), but he was early and intrigued. He banked the Hawk and went back.
   'Now where -'
   It flashed again, bright enough to dazzle a blue crescent of afterimage onto his eyes. Ripples of light ran across the top of the pilot's cabin.
   'Jee-zus!'
   There, below him in a clearing in the gray-green woods, was a huge silver object. He could tell little about it before it was gone again under the port wing.
   At 6,000 feet for the second time that day, Bailey banked back again. His head had begun to ache – he noticed this and dismissed it as excitement. His first thought had been that it was a water-tower, but no one would locate a water-tower that big in the woods.
   He overflew the object again, this time at 4,000. He had the Hawk throttled back as far as he dared (which was a good deal further than a more experienced pilot would have dared do, but the Hawk was a good plane and it forgave him).
   Artifact, he thought this time, almost sick with excitement. A great dishshaped artifact in the earth . . . or some government thing? But if it was government, how come it wasn't covered with a camouflage net? And the ground around it had been excavated – from up here, the trench cut into the earth was perfectly clear.
   Bailey determined to overfly it again – hell, he'd buzz it! – and then his eye fell on his gauges and his heart took an unsteady leap. His compass was winding itself around in big stupid circles, the tank indicators were flashing red. The altimeter suddenly ran up to 22,000 feet, stopped briefly, and then dropped back to dead zero.
   The Hawk's husky 195-horsepower motor gave a terrifying hitch. The nose dipped. Bailey's heart did the same. His head throbbed. In front of his bulging eyes needles were whirling, lights flashed from green to red like pygmy traffic signals, and the altitude warning beeper, which was supposed to tell a bemused pilot Wake up, dummy, you are about to run into a large immovable object
   called Mother Earth, began to sound, even though it wasn't supposed to go off until the plane passed through five hundred and Bailey's own eyes told him the Hawk was still at four thousand feet, perhaps a bit more. He looked at the digital thermometer which recorded the outside air temperature. It blinked from 47 to 58, then to 5. It paused there for a moment, then showed 999. The red numerals held there, pulsing distractedly, and then the thermometer shorted out.
   'What in Christ's name is going on here?' Bailey screamed, and was stupidly amazed to see one of his front teeth fly out of his mouth, bounce off his airspeed indicator and fall on the floor.
   The engine hitched again.
   'Fuck,' he whispered. He was now sick with fright. Blood from the socket where his tooth had been trickled down his chin. A drop splashed on his Lacoste shirt.
   The gleaming thing in the earth passed under his wings again.
   The Hawk's engine ran choppily and stalled. It began to lose altitude. Forgetting all his training, Bailey hauled up on the wheel as hard as he could, but the silent plane didn't, couldn't, answer. Bailey's head pounded and thudded. The Cessna dropped to 4,000 feet … 3,500 … 3,000. Bailey groped out with one hand like a blind man and thumbed the button marked EMERGENCY RESTART. Hi-test av-gas boomed hollowly in the Hawk's carbs. The propeller jerked, then stopped again. Now the Cessna had slid down to 2,500 feet. It passed over the Old Derry Road close enough for Bailey to be able to see the service board in front of the Methodist church.
   'Motherfuck,' he whispered. 'I'm gonna die.'
   He pulled the choke all the way out and hit the restart button again. The engine coughed, ran for a while, then began to stutter.
   'No!' Bailey screamed. One eye ruptured and filled up with blood. The blood sheeted thinly down his left cheek. In his panicky, terrorized state, he didn't even notice. He slammed the choke in again. 'No, don't you stall, you ratshit plane!'
   The engine roared; the propeller blurred into invisibility with a wedge of reflected sunshine in it. Bailey hauled up on the wheel. The overburdened Hawk began to lug again.
   'Ratshit plane! Ratshit plane! Ratshit plane!' he screamed. His left eye was now full of blood and he was on some level aware that the world seemed to have taken on a strange pinkish aspect, but if he'd had the time or inclination to think about this at all, he would have thought it no more than rage at this idiotic situation.
   He let off on the wheel; the Hawk, allowed to climb at an angle which was almost sane, began to buckle down to its job again. Haven Village passed beneath it, and Bailey was dimly aware of people looking up at him. He was low enough so someone could take his number if they thought of it.
   Go ahead! he thought grimly. Go ahead, take it, because when I finish with Cessna Corporation, every goddam stockholder they have is gonna be standing in his underwear! I'm going to sue those negligent sons of bitches for every banana-skin they've got!
   The Hawk was rising smoothly now, its engine smooth and sweet. Bailey's head was trying to tear itself right off his shoulders, but an idea suddenly came to him -an idea of such stupefying simplicity and such staggering ramifications that everything else was driven from his mind. He understood nothing less than the physiological basis of bicamerality in the human brain. This led to an instant understanding of race memory, not as a hazy Jungian concept but as a function of recombinant DNA and biological imprinting. And with this came an understanding of what the increased millierg generating capacity of the corpus callosum during periods of increased ductless gland activity, which had puzzled students of the human brain for thirty years, actually meant.
   Peter Bailey suddenly understood that time travel – actual time travel -was in his grasp.
   At the same instant, a large portion of his own brain exploded.
   White light flashed in his head – white light exactly like the huge reflection that had winked at him from that object in the woods.
   If he had collapsed forward, pushing the wheel in, the people of Haven would have had another mess on their hands. But instead he fell backward, head lolling on his neck, blood running from his ears. He stared up at the ceiling of the pilot's compartment with an expression of stupendous, terminal surprise printed on his face.
   If the Cessna's autopilot had been engaged, it would almost certainly have flown serenely on until it ran out of fuel. Weather conditions were optimum, and such things have happened before. As it was, it flew along almost dead level at 5,500 feet for five minutes anyway. The radio squawked at the dead neurosurgeon, telling him to get his ass up to his assigned altitude right now.
   Over Derry a wind current threw the plane into a gentle bank. It flew in a long, looping arc toward Newport. The bank grew steeper, turned into a spiral. The spiral became a spin. A kid fishing off a bridge on Route 7 looked up and saw a plane falling out of the sky, and whirling like a screw-auger as it did. He stared, open-mouthed, as it crashed in Ezra Dockery's north field and exploded in a pillar of flame.
   'Holy jeezum!' the kid yelled. He dropped his fishing-pole and ran for the Newport Mobil up the road to call the fire department. Shortly after he left, a bass snatched his worm and pulled his pole into the water. The kid never found the pole, but in the excitement of fighting the grassfire in Dockery's field and pulling the crispy pilot out of the remains of the Cessna, he barely noticed.

10

   Saturday, August 6th:
   Newt and Dick were sitting in the Haven Lunch. The newspaper was between them. The lead story was another outbreak of hostilities in the Mideast; the story that most concerned them that morning was below the fold. NEUROSURGEON KILLED IN LIGHT PLANE CRASH, the headline read. There was a photo of the plane. Nothing recognizable remained of the once beautiful Cessna Hawk except its tail.
   Their breakfasts were pushed to one side, mostly untouched. Molly Fenderson, Beach's niece, was cooking now that Beach was dead. Molly was a helluva nice girl, but her fried eggs looked like broiled assholes. Dick thought they tasted that way, too, although he'd never actually eaten an asshole, broiled or any other way.
   Might have, Newt said.
   Dick looked at him, eyebrows raised.
   They put damn near anything in hot dogs. Least, that's what I read once.
   Dick's gut rolled over. He told Newt to shut his fucking gob.
   Newt paused, then said: Must have been twenty, thirty people see that ijit come low acrost the village.
   All from town? Dick asked.
   Yes.
   Then we have no problem, do we?
   No, I don't think so, Newt replied, sipping coffee. At least, not unless it happens again.
   Dick shook his head. Shouldn't do. Paper says he was off-course.
   Yeah. So it said. You ready?
   Sure.
   They left without paying. Money had ceased to hold much interest to the residents of Haven. There were several large cardboard cartons of cash in Dick Allison's basement, carelessly tucked into the old coal-hold – twenties, tens, and ones, mostly. Haven was a small town. When someone needed cash for something, they came and got some. The house was unlocked. Besides telepathic typewriters and water heaters that ran on the power of collapsing molecules, Haven had discovered a nearly perfect form of collectivism.
   On the sidewalk in front of the Lunch, they stared toward the town hall. The brick clock tower was flickering uneasily. One moment it was there, as solid as the Taj Mahal, if not so beautiful. The next, there was only blue sky above the jagged ruin of the tower's base. Then it would come back. Its long morning shadow fluttered like the shadow of a window-shade blown by an intermittent wind. Newt found the fact that sometimes the shadow of the clock tower was there when the tower itself was not particularly disturbing.
   Christ! If I looked at that sucker too long, I'd go batshit, Dick said.
   Newt asked if someone was taking care of the deterioration.
   Tommy Jacklin and Hester Brookline have had to go up to Derry, Dick said. They're supposed to go to about five different service stations, plus both auto-parts stores. I sent damn near seven hundred bucks with them, told them to come back with as many as twenty car batteries, if they could. But they're supposed to spread the buy around. There's people in some of the towns around here that think folks have gone battery-crazy in Haven.
   Tommy Jacklin and Hester Brookline? Newt asked dubiously. Christ,
   they're just kids! Has Tommy got a driver's license, Dick? ‘
   No, Dick said reluctantly. But he's fifteen and he's got a permit and he drives real safe. Besides, he's big. Looks older than he really is. They'll be okay.
   Christ, it's so fucking risky!
   It is, but
   They communed in thoughts that were more images than words; this was happening more and more in Haven, as the people in town learned this strange new thought-language. For all of his misgivings, Newt understood the basic problem that had caused Dick to send a couple of underage kids to Derry in the Fannins' pickup truck. They needed batteries, needed them, but it was getting harder and harder for the people who lived in Haven to leave Haven. If a codger like Dave Rutledge or an old coot like John Harley tried it, they would be dead – and probably rotting – before they got to the Derry city line. It would take younger men like Newt and Dick a slightly longer time, but they would also go … and probably in agony, because of the physical changes that had begun in Bobbi's shed. It didn't surprise either man that Hilly Brown was in a coma, and he had left when things were just starting to really roll. Tommy Jacklin was fifteen, Hester Brookline a well-developed thirteen. They at least had youth on their side, and could hope to leave and come back alive without the equivalent of NASA spacesuits to protect them from what was now an alien and inimical atmosphere. Such equipment would have been out of the question even if they'd had it. They probably could have cobbled something together, but if a couple of folks showed up at the Napa auto-parts store in Derry wearing moonsuits, there might be a few questions. Or more than a few.
   I don't like it, Newt said at last.
   Hell, I don't either, Dick replied. I'm not going to have a minute's peace until they get back, and I've got ole Doc Warwick parked out by the HavenTroy line to take care of 'em just as soon as they do
   I they do.
   Ayuh … if. I think they will, but they'll be hurting.
   What kind of problems do you expect?
   Dick shook his head. He didn't know, and Doc Warwick refused to even guess … except to ask Dick in a cross mental voice what he, Dick, thought would happen to a salmon if it decided to ride a bike upstream to the spawning grounds instead of swimming.
   Well … Newt said doubtfully.
   Well, nothing, Dick returned. We can't leave that thing – he nodded toward the oscillating clock tower – the way it is.
   Newt returned: We're almost down to the hatchway now. I think we could leave it.
   Maybe. Maybe not. But we need batteries for other things, and you know it. And we need to keep being careful. You know that, too.
   Don't teach your grammy to suck eggs, Dick.
   (Fu)
   Fuck that, asshole, was what Newt had been about to say, but he squashed it, although he found more to dislike about Dick Allison with every passing day. The truth was, Haven ran on batteries now, just like a kid's toy car from FAO Schwarz. And they kept needing more, and bigger ones, and mail-order was not only too slow, it was the sort of thing that might send up a warning flag to someone somewhere. You could never tell.
   All in all, Newt Berringer was a troubled man. They had survived the plane crash; if something happened to Tommy and Hester, could they survive that?
   He didn't know. He only knew he wouldn't have much peace until the kids were back in Haven, where they belonged.

11

   Sunday, August 7th:
   Gardener was at the ship, looking at it, trying to decide again – if any good could be turned from this weird mess … and if not, if there was any way out of it. He had heard the light plane two days before, although he had been in the house and had come out a moment too late to see it on its third pass. Three passes was just about two too many; he had been pretty sure the pilot had spotted the ship and the excavation. The thought had afforded Gardener a strange, bitter relief. Then, yesterday, he had seen the story in the paper. You didn't have to be a college graduate to see the connection. Poor old Dr Bailey had wandered off-course, and that leftover from the space armada of Ming the Merciless had stripped his gears.
   Did that make him, Jim Gardener, an accessory to murder? It might, and, wifeshooter or not, Gard didn't care for the thought.
   Freeman Moss, the dour woodsman from Albion, hadn't shown up this morning -Gard supposed the ship had blown his fuses as it had those of the others before him. Gard was alone for the first time since Bobbi had disappeared. On the surface, that seemed to open things up some. But when you looked deeper, the same old conundrums remained.
   The story of the dead neurosurgeon and the crashed plane had been bad, but to Gard's mind, the story above the fold – the one Newt and Dick had ignored – was much worse. The Mideast was getting ready to explode again, and if there was shooting this time, some of it might be nuclear. The Union of Concerned Scientists, those happy folks who kept the Black Clock, had advanced the hands two minutes to nuclear midnight yesterday, the paper reported. Happy days were here again, all right. The ship could maybe pull the pin on all that … but was that what Freeman Moss and Kyle Archinbourg and old Bozie and all the rest of them wanted? Sometimes Gard felt a sickening surety that cooling out the powderkeg the planet was sitting on was the last thing which the New and Improved Haven was concerned with. And so?
   He didn't know. Sometimes being a telepathic zero was a pain in the ass.
   His eye moved to the pumping machinery squashed into the mud at the edge of the trench. Working at the ship had previously been a matter of dust and dirt and rocks and stumps that wouldn't come up until you were just about half-crazy with frustration. Now it was wet work – very wet work indeed. The last couple of nights he had gone home with wet clay in his hair, between his toes, and in the crack of his ass. Mud was bad, but clay was worse. Clay stuck.
   The pumping equipment was the strangest, ugliest conglomeration yet, but it worked. It also weighed tons, but the mostly silent Freeman Moss had transported it from Bobbi's dooryard all by himself … it had taken him most of Thursday and about five hundred batteries to do it, but he had done it, something which would have taken an ordinary construction crew a week or more to accomplish.
   Moss had used a gadget like a metal-detector to guide each component to its final resting-place – first off the truck, then through the garden, then out along the well-worn path to the dig. The components floated serenely through the warm summer air, their shadows pooled beneath them. Moss carried the thing which had once been a metal-detector in one hand, and something which looked like a walkie-talkie handset in the other. When he raised the curved stainless-steel antenna on the end of the walkie-talkie gadget and moved the dish at the end of the detector, the motor or pump would rise. When he moved them to the left, the piece of equipment went left. Gard, watching this with the bemusement of a veteran drunk (and surely no one sees as many strange things as one of those), thought that Moss looked like a scrofulous animal trainer leading mechanical elephants through the woods to the site of some unimaginable circus.
   Gardener had seen the laborious moving of enough heavy equipment to know that this device could revolutionize construction techniques. Such things were outside his practical knowledge, but he guessed that a single gadget such as the one Moss had used on Thursday with such absent ease could cut the cost of a project the size of the Aswan Dam by twenty-five per cent or more.
   In at least one respect, however, it was like the illusion being maintained at the town hall – it required a lot of juice.
   'Here,' Moss said, handing Gard a heavy packsack. 'Put this on.'
   Gard winced shouldering the straps. Moss saw it and smiled a little. 'It'll
   get lighter as the day goes along,' he said. 'Don't you worry about that.' He plugged the jack of a transistor earphone into the side of the radio-controller and pushed the phone into his ear.
   'What's in the pack?' Gardener asked.
   'Batt'ries. Let's go.'
   Moss had switched the gadget on, seemed to listen, nodded, then pointed the curved antenna at the first motor. It rose in the air an hung there. Holding the controller in one hand and the customized metal-detector in the other, Moss walked toward the motor. For every step he took, the motor retreated a similar distance. Gard brought up the rear.
   Moss walked the motor between the house and the shed, urging it around the Tomcat, and then ahead of him through Bobbi's garden. A wide path had been worn through this, but on both sides of it the plants continued to grow in rampant splendor. Some of the sunflowers were now twelve feet high. They reminded Gardener of a science-fiction novel called The Day of the Triffids he had read as a boy. One night about a week ago he had awakened from a terrible nightmare. In it, the sunflowers in the garden had uprooted themselves and begun to walk, eldritch light shining from their centers and onto the ground like the beams of flashlights with green lenses.
   There were summer squashes in the garden as big as U-boat torpedoes. Tomatoes the size of basketballs. Some of the corn was nearly as high as the sunflowers. Curious, Gardener had picked one of the ears; it was easily two feet long. A single ear, had it been good, would have fed two hungry men. But Gard had spat out the single mouthful of butter-and-sugar kernels he had bitten off, grimacing and wiping his mouth. The taste had been meaty and hideous. Bobbi was growing a garden full of huge plants, but the vegetables were inedible … perhaps even poisonous.
   The motor had cruised serenely ahead of them along the path, cornstalks rustling and bending on either side as it pushed its way through. Gardener saw smears and swatches of grease and engine oil on some of the militantly green, swordlike leaves. On the far side of the garden, the motor began to sag. Moss had lowered the antenna, and the motor settled to the earth with a gentle thump.
   'What's up?' Gardener had asked.
   Moss only grunted and produced a dime. He stuck it in the base of his controller, twisted it, and pulled six double-A Duracells out of the battery compartment. Tossed them indifferently on the ground. 'Gimme some more,' he said.
   Gardener unshouldered the knapsack, undid the straps, opened the flap, and saw what looked at first glance like a billion double-A's; it was as if someone had hit the Grand Jackpot at Atlantic City and the machine had paid off in batteries instead of bucks.
   'Jesus!'
   'I ain't Him,' Moss said. 'Gimme half a dozen of those suckers.'
   For once Gardener didn't seem to have a wisecrack left in him. He handed six batteries over and watched Moss fit them into the compartment. Then Moss replaced the battery hatch, turned it on, refitted the earplug in his ear, and said, 'Let's go.'
   Forty yards into the woods there was another battery change; sixty yards after that, another. Floating the motor sucked less juice when it was going downhill, but by the time Moss had finally settled the big motor-block on the edge of the trench, they had gone through forty-two batteries.
   Back and forth, back and forth; one by one they brought the pieces of pumping machinery from Freeman Moss's truck to the edge of the trench. The knapsack on Gardener's back grew steadily lighter.
   On the fourth trip, Gard had asked Moss if he could try it. A large industrial pump, whose raison d'etre before this odd little side-trip had probably been pumping sewage from clogged septic tanks, was sitting on a tilted angle about a hundred yards from the trench. Moss was once more changing batteries. Dead double-A's lay all along the path now, reminding Gard with odd poignance of the kid on the beach at Arcadia Beach. The kid with the firecrackers. The kid whose mother had given up drinking … and everything else. The kid who had known about the Tommyknockers.
   'Well, you can give her a try.' Moss handed over the gadget. 'I could use a smidge of help, and I don't mind sayin' so. Wears a man out, liftin' all that.' He saw Gardener's look and said: 'Oh, ayuh, I'm doin' part of it m'self; that's what the plug's for. You can try it, but I don't think you'll have much luck. You ain't like us.'
   'I noticed. I'm the one that isn't going to have to buy a set of teeth from Sears and Roebuck when all this is over.'
   Moss looked at him sourly and said nothing.
   Gard used his handkerchief to wipe off the brown coating of wax Moss had left on the earplug, then stuck it in his ear. He heard a distant sound like the one you heard when you held a conch shell to your ear. He pointed the antenna at the pump as he had seen Moss do, then cautiously flickered the antenna upward. The quality of the dim seashore rumble in his ear changed. The pump moved the tiniest bit – he was sure it wasn't just his imagination. But a instant later, two other things happened. He felt warm blood coursing down his face from his nose, and his head was filled with a blaring voice. I CARPET YOUR DEN OR YOUR WHOLE HOME FOR LESS!' screamed some radio announcer, who was suddenly sitting right in the middle of Gardener's head and apparently yelling into an electric bullhorn. 'AND YES WE DO HAVE A NEW SHIPMENT OF THROW-RUGS! THE LAST SHIPMENT SOLD OUT FAST, SO BE SURE -'
   'Oww, Jesus, shut up!' Gardener had cried. He dropped the handset and reached for his head. The earphone was dragged out of his ear, and the blaring announcer cut out. He had been left with a nosebleed and a head that was ringing like a bell.
   Freeman Moss, startled out of his taciturnity, stared at Gardener with wide eyes. 'What in Christ's name was that?' he asked.
   'That,' Gardener said weakly, 'was WZON, Where It's Only Rock and Roll
   Because That's the Way You Like lt. You mind if I sit down for a minute, Moss? Think I just pissed myself.'
   'Your nose is bleedin', too.'
   'No shit, Sherlock,' Gardener said.
   'Think maybe you better let me use the lifter after this.' Gard had been more than happy to abide by that. It took them the rest of the day to get all the equipment out to the trench, and Moss was so tired when the last piece arrived that Gardener had to practically carry the man back to his truck.
   'Feel like I just chopped two cord of wood and shit m'brains out while I was doin' it,' the older man gasped.
   After that, Gardener hadn't really expected the man to come back. But Moss had shown up promptly at seven the next day. He had been driving a beat-up split-grille Pontiac instead of his truck. He got out of the Pontiac banging a dinner bucket against his leg.
   'Come on. Let's get to it.'
   Gardener respected Moss more than the other three 'helpers' put together … in fact, he liked him.
   Moss glanced at him as they walked out to the ship with the morning dew of that Friday morning wetting down the cuffs of their pants. 'Caught that one,' he grunted. 'You're okay too, I guess.'
   That was about all Mr Freeman Moss had to say to him that day.
   They sunk a nest of hoses into the trench and rigged more hoses – outflow hoses, this time – to direct the water they pumped out downhill, on a slope that ran a bit southeast of Bobbi's place. These 'dumper hoses,' as Moss called them, were big, wide-bore rolls of canvas that Gardener supposed had been scavenged from the VFD.
   'Ayuh, got a few there, got a few other places,' Moss said, and would offer no more on that subject.
   Before starting the pumps, he had Gardener pound a number of U-shaped clamps over the dumper hoses. 'Else they'll go whippin' around, sprayin' water everywhere. If you've ever seen a fireman's hose outta control, you know someone c'n get hurt. And we ain't got enough men to stand around holdin' a bunch of pissin' hoses all day.'
   'Not that there'd be any volunteers standing in line. Right?'
   Freeman Moss had looked at him silently, saying nothing for a moment. Then he grunted: 'Pound those clamps in good. We'll still have to stop pretty often to pound 'em back in. They'll loosen up.'
   'Can't you control the outflow so you don't have to bother with all this clamping shit?' Gardener asked.
   Moss rolled his eyes impatiently at his ignorance. 'Sure,' he said, 'but there's one fuck of a lot of water down in that hole, and I'd like to get it out before doomsday, if it's all the same to you.'
   Gardener held out his hands, half-laughing. 'Hey, I was just asking,' he said. 'Peace.'
   The man had only grunted in his inimitable Freeman Moss style.
   By nine-thirty, water was pouring downhill and away from the ship at a great rate. It was cold and clear and as sweet as water can be – which is sweet indeed, as anyone with a good well could attest. By noon they had created a brand-new stream. It was six feet wide, shallow, but brawling right along, carrying pine needles, loamy black topsoil, and small shrubs away. There was not much for the men to do but to sit around and make sure none of the plump, straining dumper hoses came free and started to fly around, spraying water like bombed-out fire hydrants. Moss shut the pumps down regularly, in sequence, so that they could pound in loose clamps or switch them to a new place along the hose if the ground was getting loose where they had been.
   By three o'clock, the stream was rolling larger bushes downstream, and just before five o'clock, Gardener heard the rending rumble of a biggish tree going over. He got up and craned his neck, but it had happened too far down the new stream's course to see.
   'Sounded like a pine,' Moss said.
   It was Gardener's turn to look at Moss and say nothing.
   'Might have been a spruce,' Moss said, and although the man's face remained perfectly straight, Gardener believed Moss might just have made a joke. A very small one, but a joke, just the same.
   'Is this water reaching the road, do you think?'
   'Oh, ayuh, I sh'd suspect.'
   'It'll wash it out, won't it?'
   'Nope. Town crew's already putting in a new culve't. Large bore. S'pose they'll have to detour traffic for a couple of days while they tear up the tarvy, but there ain't's much traffic out this way as there used to be, anyway.'
   'I noticed,' Gardener said.
   'Damn good thing, if you ask me. Summer people're always a pain in the ass. Looka here, Gardener – I'm gonna cut the outflow on these pumps way down, but they'll still pump fifteen, maybe seventeen gallons a minute overnight. With four pumps workin', that's thirty-eight hundred gallons an hour, all night long. Not bad for runnin' on automatic. Come on, let's go. Yon ship's lovely, but it makes my blood pressure jumpy. I'll drink one of your beers before I head home to the missus, if you'll let it be so.'
   Moss had shown up again yesterday, Saturday, in his old Pontiac, and had promptly run the pumps up to capacity – thirty-five gallons per minute each, eighty-four hundred gallons an hour.
   This morning, no Freeman Moss. He had finally played out like the others, leaving Gardener to consider the same old options.
   First option: Business as usual.
   Second option: Run like hell. He had already come to the conclusion that if Bobbi died, he would suffer a fatal accident soon afterward. It might take as long as half an hour for him to have it. If he decided to run, would they know in advance? Gardener didn't think so. He and the rest of Haven still played poker the old-fashioned way: with all the cards dealt face down. Oh, and by the way, gang – how far would he have to run to get out of the reach of them and their Buck Rogers gadgetry?
   Actually, Gard didn't think it would be all that far. Derry, Bangor, even Augusta … all those might be too close. But Portland? Maybe. Probably. Because of what he thought of as the Cigarette Analogy.
   When a kid started to smoke, he was lucky if he could get through half a butt without puking his guts out or almost fainting. After six months' experience, he might be able to get through five or ten butts a day. Give a kid three years and you had yourself a two-and-a-half-pack-a-day candidate for lung cancer.
   Then turn it over. Tell a kid who has just finished his first butt and who is wandering around green-faced and gagging that he has to quit smoking, and he'll probably fall down and kiss your ass. Catch him when he's doing five or ten smokes a day and you've got a kid who probably doesn't care much one way or another … although a kid habituated even at that level may find himself eating too many sweets, and wishing for a smoke when he's bored or nervous.
   Ah, Gardener thought, but take your smoking vet. Tell him he's got to quit the coffin-nails and he clutches his chest like a man who's having a heart attack … only he's just protecting the smokes in the breast pocket of his shirt. Smoking, Gardener knew from his own mostly successful efforts to either quit the habit or at least damp it down to a less lethal vice, is a physical addiction. In the first week off cigarettes, smokers suffer from jitters, headaches, musclespasms. Doctors may prescribe B-12 to quiet the worst of these symptoms. They know, however, that there are no pills to combat the ex-smoker's feelings of loss and depression during the six months which begin the instant the smoker crushes out his last butt and starts his or her lonely voyage out of addiction.
   And Haven, Gardener thought now, running the pumps up to full power, is like a smoke-filled room. They were sick here at first … they were like a bunch of kids learning to smoke cornshucks out behind the barn. But now they like the air in the room, and why not? They're the ultimate chainsmokers. It's in the air they breathe, and God knows what kinds of physiological changes are going on in their brains and bodies. Lung sections show formation of oat cells in the lung tissue of people who have only been smoking for eighteen months. There's a high incidence of brain tumors in towns where there are high-pollution milling operations or, God save us, nuclear reactors. So what is this doing to them?
   He didn't know – he had seen no surface, observable changes except for the loss of teeth and the increased shortness of temper. But he didn't think they'd chase him very far if he split. They might begin by lighting out after him with the fervor of a posse in a Republic western, but he somehow thought they would lose interest very quickly . . . as soon as the withdrawal symptoms set in.
   He got all four pumps running at top speed, swelling the creek into a wide stream almost at once. Then he began the day's work of checking the U-clamps which held the hoses still.
   If he got away, his choices were two: keep his mouth shut or blow the whistle. He knew that, for a variety of reasons, he would probably keep quiet. Which meant simply dealing himself – writing off the last month of back-breaking labor, writing off any chance to change the suicidal course of world politics at a stroke, most of all writing off his good friend and erstwhile lover Bobbi Anderson, who had been in absentia for the best part of two weeks now.
   Third option: Get rid of it. Blow it up. Destroy it. Make it no more than another vague rumor, like the supposed aliens in Hangar 18.
   In spite of his dull fury at the insanity of nuclear power and the energyswilling technocratic pigs who had created it and underwritten it and refused to see its dangers even in the wake of Chernobyl, in spite of his depression at the AP wirephoto of the scientists advancing the Black Clock to two minutes before midnight, he fully recognized the possibility that destroying the ship might be the best thing he could possibly do. The oxidation of whatever had been impregnated in the surface of its hull (deliberately, he had no doubt) had created a cornucopia of mind-blowing gadgets out here; God alone knew what wonderful things might be waiting inside. But there was the other stuff, wasn't there? The neurosurgeon in the crashed plane, that old man and the big state cop, maybe the lady constable, Mrs McCausland, maybe the two other state cops who had disappeared, maybe even the Brown kid … how much of this could be laid at the door of this thing he was staring at, which was jutting out of the ground like the breeching snout of the greatest white whale ever dreamed of? Some? All? None of the above?
   Gardener was sure of one thing – it wasn't the last.
   That the ship in the earth was a font of creation was undeniable … but it was also the wrecked craft of an unknowable species from somewhere far out in the blackness – creatures whose minds might be as different from those of human beings as human minds were from the minds of spiders. It was a marvelous, improbable artifact shining in the hazy sunlight of this Sunday morning … but it was also a haunted house where demons might still walk between the walls and in the hollow places. There were times when he would look at it and feel his throat fill up with strangeness, as at the sight of flat eyes staring up at him from the earth.
   But get rid of it how? Blow it up how? Even supposing he wanted to, how would he do it? The packet charges they had used to chop up the bedrock holding the ship fast were more powerful than dynamite, but they didn't even scratch the hull of the thing. Was he supposed to trot off to Limestone Air Force Base, steal an A-bomb, moving with the silky, unbelievable smoothness of Dirk Pitt in a Clive Cussler novel? And wouldn't it be funny, wouldn't it really be the last laugh, if he actually did manage to get a nuke and set it off, only to discover that all he'd really managed to do was to set the ship, still uncannily unharmed and unscratched, free at a stroke?
   Those were his options, the third of which was not an option at all … and apparently his hands had known more than his brain, for while he went on turning them over in his mind for the umptieth time, he had gone calmly about the morning's work – driving the pumps up to full blast and making sure that the dumper hoses were solidly planted. Now he was back at the trench, checking the sucker hoses, and the level of the water. He was happy to find he needed a powerful flashlight to see the water – it was falling rapidly. He guessed that blasting and excavation could begin again by Wednesday, Thursday at the latest … and once they got going again, the work would go fast. The rock of an aquifer was spongy and large-pored. They wouldn't need to waste time digging glory-holes for explosives, because there would be enough natural spots for not just exploding radios but satchel charges. The next phase would be like moving from a dense, gluey batter to a freshly risen dough.
   Gard stood bent over the cut in the earth for some time, shining the big light into the black depths. Then he clicked it off, meaning to inspect the clamps again. Here it was, only eight-thirty in the morning, and already he wanted a drink.
   He turned around.
   Bobbi was standing there.
   Gardener's mouth dropped open. He closed it with a snap after a moment of gaping and started toward her, fully expecting this hallucination to grow transparent, then be gone. But Bobbi stayed solid, and Gard saw that she had lost a great deal of hair – her brow, a pale and shining white, extended back nearly to the middle of her skull, leaving the world's biggest widow's peak in the center. Nor were these newly exposed sections of skull the only pale things about her; she looked like someone who had been through a terrible debilitating illness. Her right arm was in a sling. And
   – and she's wearing makeup. Pan-Cake makeup. I'm pretty sure that's what it is she's laid it on heavy the way a lady does when she wants to cover up a bruise. But it's her … Bobbi . . . no dream …
   His eyes suddenly filled with tears. Bobbi doubled, then trebled. It wasn't until then – that moment – that he realized just how scared he had been. And how lonely.
   'Bobbi?' he asked hoarsely. 'Is it really you?'
   Bobbi smiled, that old sweet smile he loved so well, the one that had saved him from his own idiot self so often. It was Bobbi. It was Bobbi and he loved her.
   He went to her, put his arms around her, laid his tired face against her neck. He had done this before, too.
   'Hello, Gard,' she said, and began to cry.
   He was crying too. He kissed her. Kissed her. Kissed her.
   His hands were suddenly all over her; her free one was on him.
   No, he said, still kissing her. No, you can't
   Shh. I have to. It's my last chance, Gard. Our last chance.
   Kissed. They kissed. Oh they kissed and now her shirt was unbuttoned and this was not the body of a sex-goddess, it was white and sickish, the muscles flabby, the breasts saggy, but he loved it and he kissed her and kissed her and their tears were all over each other's faces.
   Gard my dear, my dear, always my
   shhhh
   Oh please I love you
   Bobbi I love
   love
   kiss me
   kiss
   yes
   Pine needles under them. Sweetness. Her tears. His tears. They kissed, kissed, kissed. And as he entered her, Gard realized two things at once: how much he had missed her, and that not a single bird was singing. The woods were dead.
   Kissed.

12

   Gard used his shirt, which wasn't very clean anyway, to wipe swatches of brown makeup from his naked body. Had she come out here expecting to make love to him? Something it might be just as well not to think about. Now, anyway.
   Although they both should have been Thanksgiving dinner for the mosquitoes and noseeums and moose-flies, spouting sweat as they had been doing, he hadn't a single bite. He didn't think Bobbi had any, either. It's not only an IQ booster, he thought, looking at the ship, it's got every insect repellent on the market beat hollow.
   He tossed his shirt aside and touched Bobbi's face, running a finger down her cheek, picking up a little more of the makeup. Most of it, however, had either been sweated off … or washed away by her tears.
   'I hurt you,' he said.
   You loved me, she answered.
   'What?'
   You hear me, Gard. I know you do.
   'Are you angry?' he asked, aware that the barriers were going up again, aware that he was acting again, aware that it was over, all the things they'd had were finally over. These were sorry things to be aware of. 'Is that why you won't talk to me?' He paused. 'I wouldn't blame you. You've put up with a lot of shit from me over the years, woman.'
   'I was talking to you,' she said, and, sorry as he was to be lying to her after loving her, he was glad to sense her doubt. 'With my mind.'
   'I didn't hear.'
   'You did before. You heard … and you answered. We talked, Gard.'
   We were closer to … that.' He flagged an arm at the ship.
   She smiled wanly up at him and put her cheek against his shoulder. With most of the makeup scrubbed away, her flesh had an unsettling translucence even her illness, whatever it had been, could not account for.
   'Did I? Hurt you?'
   'No. Yes. A little.' She smiled. It was that old Bobbi Anderson go-to-hell grin, but a final tear ran slowly down her cheek nonetheless. 'It was worth it. We saved the best for last, Gard.'
   He kissed her gently, but now her lips were different. The lips of the New and Improved Roberta Anderson.
   'First, last, or in the middle, I didn't have any business making love to you, and you don't have any business out here.'
   'I look tired, I know,' Bobbi said, 'and I'm wearing a lot of goop, as you already found out. You were right – I let myself get overtired and I had something like a complete physical breakdown.'
   Bullshit, Gardener thought, but he covered this thought with white noise so Bobbi couldn't read it – he did this with barely a conscious thought. Such hiding was becoming second nature to him now.
   'The treatment was … radical. It's resulted in some superficial skin problems and some hair loss. But it'll all grow back.'
   'Oh,' Gardener said, thinking: You still can't lie for shit, Bobbi. 'Well, I'm glad you're all right. But you maybe ought to take a couple of days off, put your feet up -'
   'No,' Bobbi said quietly. 'This is the time for the final push, Gard. We're almost there. We started this, you and me – '
   'No,' Gardener said. 'You started it, Bobbi. You literally stumbled over it. Back when Peter was alive. Remember?'
   Gard saw pain in Bobbi's eyes at the mention of Peter. Then it was gone. She shrugged Gardener's qualification off. 'You were here soon enough. You saved my life. I wouldn't be here without you. So let's do it together, Gard. I bet it's no more than another twenty-five feet down to that hatchway.'
   Gardener had a strong hunch she was right, but he suddenly didn't feel like admitting it. There was a spike turning and turning in his heart, and the pain was worse than any hangover headache he'd ever had.
   'If you think so, I'll take your word for it.'
   'What do you say, Gard? One more mile. You and me.'
   He sat thoughtfully, looking at Bobbi, noticing again how still, how almost malignant the woods seemed with no birdsong in them.
   This is how it would be – this is how it will be – if one of their asshole power plants ever does melt down. The people will have smarts enough to get out – if they're warned in time, that is, and if the power plant in question and the NRC have balls enough to tell them – but you can't tell an owl or woodpecker to clear the area. You can't tell a scarlet tanager not to look at the fireball. So their eyes will melt and they'll just go flapping around, blind as bats, running into trees and the sides of buildings until they starve to death or break their necks. Is this a spaceship, Bobbi? Or is it a great big containment housing that's already leaking? It has, hasn't it? That's why these woods are so quiet, and that's why the Polyester-Clad Neurologist Bird fell out of the sky on Friday, isn't it?
   'What do you say, Gard? One more mile?'
   So where's the good solution? Where's peace with honor? Do you run? Do you turn it over to the American Dallas Police so they can use it on the Soviet Dallas Police? What? Any new ideas, Gard?
   And suddenly he did have an idea … or the glimmer of one.
   But a glimmer was better than nothing.
   He hugged Bobbi with a lying arm. 'Okay. One more mile.'
   Bobbi's grin started to widen … and then it became a look of curious surprise. 'How much did he leave you, Gard?'
   'How much did who leave me?'
   'The Tooth Fairy,' Bobbi said. 'You finally lost one. Right there in the front.'
   Startled and a little afraid, Gard raised his hand to his mouth. Sure enough, there was a gap where one of his incisors had been yesterday.
   It had started, then. After a month working in the shadow of this thing., he had foolishly assumed immunity, but it wasn't so. It had started; he was on his way to becoming New and Improved.
   On his way to 'becoming.'
   He forced an answering smile. 'I hadn't noticed,' he said.
   'Do you feel any different?'
   'No,' Gard said truthfully. 'Not yet, anyway. What do you say, you want to do some work?'
   'I'll do what I can,' Bobbi said. 'With this arm
   'You can check the hoses and tell me if any of them are starting to come loose. And talk to me.' He looked at Bobbi with an awkward smile. 'None of those other guys knew how to talk, man. I mean, they were sincere, but . . .' He shrugged. 'You know?'
   Bobbi smiled back, and Gardener saw another brilliant, unalloyed flash of the old Bobbi, the woman he had loved. He remembered the safe dark harbor of her neck and that screw in his heart turned again. 'I think I do,' she said, 'and I'll talk your ear off, if that's what you want. I've been lonely, too.'
   They stood together, smiling at each other, and it was almost the old way, but the woods were silent with no birdsong to fill them up.
   The love's over, he thought. Now it's the same old poker game, except the Tooth Fairy came last night and I guess the bastard will be back tonight. Probably along with his cousin and his brother-in-law. And when they start seeing my cards, maybe exposing that glimmer of an idea like an ace in the hole, it'll be all over. In a way, it's funny. We always assumed the aliens would have to at least be alive to invade. Not even H. G. Wells expected an invasion of ghosts.
   'I want to have a look into the trench,' Bobbi said.
   'Okay. You'll like the way it's draining, I think.'
   Together they walked into the shadow cast by the ship.

13

   Monday, August 8th:
   The heat was back.
   The temperature outside of Newt Berringer's kitchen window was seventynine at a quarter past seven that Monday morning, but Newt wasn't in the kitchen to read it; he was standing in the bathroom in his pajama bottoms, inexpertly applying his late wife's makeup to his face and cursing the way the sweat made the Pan-Cake clump up. He had always thought makeup a lot of harmless ladies' foofraw, but now, trying to use it according to its original purpose – not to accent the good but to conceal the bad (or, at least, the startling) – he was discovering that putting on makeup was like giving someone a haircut. It was a fuck of a lot harder than it looked.
   He was trying to cover up the fact that, over the last week or so, the skin of his cheeks and forehead had begun to fade. He knew, of course, that it had something to do with the trips he and the others had made into Bobbi's shed – trips he could not remember afterwards; only that they had been frightening but even more exhilarating, and that he had come out all three times feeling ten feet tall and ready to have sex in the mud with a platoon of lady wrestlers. He knew enough to associate what was happening with the shed, but at first he had thought it was simply a matter of losing his usual summer tan. In the years before an icy winter afternoon and a skidding bread truck had taken her, his wife Elinor liked to joke that all you needed to do was to put Newt under one ray of sun after the first of May and he turned as brown as an Indian.
   By last Friday afternoon, however, he was no longer able to fool himself about what was going on. He could see the veins, arteries, and capillaries in his cheeks, exactly as you could see them in that model he'd gotten his nephew Michael two Christmases ago – The Amazing Visible Man, it was called. It was damned unsettling. It wasn't just being able to see into himself, either; when he pressed his fingers against his cheeks, the cheekbones felt definitely squashy. It was as if they were … well . . . dissolving.
   I can't go out like this, he thought. Jesus, no.
   But on Saturday, when he had looked in the mirror and realized after some thought and a lot of squinting that the gray shadow he was seeing through the side of his face was his own tongue, he had almost flown over to Dick Allison's.
   Dick answered the door looking so normal that for a few terrible moments Newt believed this was happening to him and him alone. Then Dick's firm, clear thought filled his head, making him weak with relief: Christ, you can't go around looking like that, Newt. You'll scare people. Come in here. I'm going to call Haze].
   (The phone, of course, was really not necessary, but old habits died hard.)
   In Dick's kitchen, under the fluorescent ring in the ceiling, Newt had seen clearly enough that Dick was wearing makeup – Hazel, Dick said, had shown him how to put it on. Yes, it had happened to all the others except Adley, who had gone into the shed for the first time only two weeks ago.
   Where does it all end, Dick? Newt had asked uneasily. The mirror in Dick's hallway drew him like a magnet and he stared at himself, seeing his tongue behind and through his pallid lips, seeing a tangled undergrowth of small, pulsing capillaries in his forehead. He pressed the tips of his fingers against the shelf of bone over his eyebrows, hard, and saw faint finger indentations when he took them away again – they were like fingermarks in hard wax, right down to the discernible loops and sworls of his fingerprints sunk into the livid skin. Looking at that had made him feel sick.
   I don't know, Dick had answered. He was talking on the phone with Hazel at the same time. But it doesn't really matter. It's going to happen to everyone eventually. Like everything else. You know what I mean.
   He knew, all right. The first changes, Newt thought, looking into the mirror on this hot Monday morning, had in many ways been even worse, even more shocking, because they had been so … well, intimate.
   But he had gone a ways toward getting used to it, which only went to show, he supposed, that a person could get used to anything, given world enough and time.
   Now he stood by the mirror, dimly hearing the deejay on the radio informing his listening audience that an influx of hot southern air coming into the area meant they could look forward to at least three days and maybe a week of muggy weather and temps in the upper eighties and low nineties. Newt cursed the coming humid weather – it would make his hemorrhoids itch and burn, it always did – and went on trying to cover his increasingly transparent cheeks, forehead, nose and neck with Elinor's Max Factor Pan-Cake. He finished cursing the weather and went fluently on to the makeup with never a break
   in his monologue, having no idea that makeup grew old and cakey after a long enough period of time (and this particular lot had been in the back of a bathroom drawer since long before Elinor's death in February 1984).
   But he supposed he would get used to putting the crap on … until such time as it was no longer necessary, anyhow. A person could get used to damn near anything. A tentacle, white at its tip, then shading to rose and finally to a dark blood-red as it thickened toward its unseen base, fell out through the fly of his pajama bottoms. Almost as if to prove his thesis, Newt Berringer only tucked it absently back in and went on trying to get his dead wife's makeup to spread evenly on his disappearing face

14

   Tuesday, August 9th:
   Old Doc Warwick slowly pulled the sheet up over Tommy Jacklin and let it drop. It billowed slightly, then settled. The shape of Tommy's nose was clearly defined. He'd been a handsome kid, but he'd had a big nose, just like his dad.
   His dad, Bobbi Anderson thought sickly. Someone's going to have to tell his dad, and guess who's going to be elected? Such things shouldn't bother her anymore, she knew – things like the Jacklin boy's death, things like knowing she would have to get rid of Gard when they reached the ship's hatchway – but they sometimes still did.
   She supposed that would burn away in time.
   A few more trips to the shed. That was all it would take.
   She brushed aimlessly at her shirt and sneezed.
   Except for the sound of the sneeze and the stertorous breathing of Hester Brookline in the other bed of the makeshift little clinic the doc had set up in his sitting-cum-examination room, there was only shocked silence for a moment.
   Kyle: He's really dead?
   No, I just like to cover 'em up that way sometimes for a joke, Warwick said crossly. Shit, man! I knew he was going at four o'clock. That's why I called you all here. After all, you're the town fathers now, ain't you?
   His eyes fixed for a moment on Hazel and Bobbi.
   Excuse me. And two town mothers.
   Bobbi smiled with no humor. Soon there was going to be only one sex in Haven. No mothers; no fathers. Just another Burma-Shave sign, you might say, on the Great Road of 'Becoming.'
   She looked from Kyle to Dick to Newt to Hazel and saw that the others looked as shocked as she felt. Thank God she was not alone, then. Tommy and Hester had gotten back all right – ahead of schedule, actually, because when Tommy started to feel really ill only three hours after they had driven out of the Haven-Troy area, he had begun to push it, moving as fast as he could.
   The damn kid was really a hero, Bobbi thought. I guess the best we can do for him is a plot in Homeland, but he was still a hero.
   She looked toward where Hester lay, pallid as a wax cameo, breathing dryly, eyes closed. They could have – maybe should have – come back when they felt the headaches coming on, when their gums began to bleed, but they hadn't even discussed it. And it wasn't only their gums. Hester, who had been menstruating lightly all during the 'becoming' (unlike older women, teenage girls didn't ever seem to stop … or hadn't yet, anyway), made Tommy stop at the Troy General Store so she could buy heavier sanitary napkins. She had begun to flow copiously. By the time they had bought three car batteries and a good used truck battery in the NewportDerry Town Line Auto Supply on Route 7, she had soaked four Stayfree Maxi-pads.
   Their heads began to ache, Tommy's worse than Hester's. By the time they had gotten half a dozen Allstate batteries at the Sears store and well over a hundred C, D, and double– and triple-A cells at the Derry Tru-Value Hardware
   (which had just gotten a new shipment in), they both knew they had to get back … quick. Tommy had begun to hallucinate; as he drove up Wentworth Street, he thought he saw a clown grinning up at him from an open sewer manhole – a clown with shiny silver dollars for eyes and a clenched white glove filled with balloons.
   Eight miles or so out of Derry, headed back toward Haven on Route 9, Tommy's rectum began to bleed.
   He pulled over, and, face flaming with embarrassment, asked Hester if he could have some of her pads. He was able to explain why when she asked, but not to look at her while he did so. She gave him a handful and he went into the bushes for a minute. He came back to the car weaving like a drunk, one hand outstretched.
   'You got to drive, Hester,' he said. 'I'm not seeing so hot.'
   By the time they got back to the town line, the front seat of the car was splashed with gore and Tommy was unconscious. By then Hester herself was able to see only through a dark curtain; she knew it was four of a bright summer's afternoon, but Doc Warwick seemed to come to her out of a thundery purple twilight. She knew he was opening the door, touching her hands, saying It's all right, my darling, you are back, you can let go of the wheel now, you are back in Haven. She was able to give a more or less coherent account of their afternoon as she lay in the protective circle of Hazel McCready's arms, but she had joined Tommy in unconsciousness long before they got to the doc's, even though Doc was doing an unheard-of sixty-five, his white hair flying in the wind.
   Adley McKeen whispered: What about the girl?
   Well, her blood pressure's dropping, Warwick said. The bleeding's stopped. She is young and tough. Good country stock. I knew her parents and her grandparents. She'll pull through. He looked around at them grimly, his watery old blue eyes not deceived by their makeup, which in this light made them look like half a dozen ghastly suntanned clowns.
   But I don't think she'll ever regain her sight.
   There was a numb silence. Bobbi broke it:
   That's not so.
   Doc Warwick turned to look at her.
   She'll see again, Bobbi said. When the 'becoming' is finished, she'll see. We'll all see with one eye then.
   Warwick met her gaze for a moment, and then his own eyes dropped. Yes, he said. I guess. But it's a damned shame, anyway.
   Bobbi agreed without heat. Bad for her. Worse for Tommy. No bed of roses for their folks. I have to go and see them. I could use company.
   She looked at them, but their eyes dropped away from hers a pair at a time and their thoughts dulled into a smooth hum.
   All right, Bobbi said, I'll manage. I guess.
   Adley McKeen spoke up humbly. I guess I'll come with you if you want, Bobbi. Keep you company.
   Bobbi gave him a tired yet somehow brilliant smile and squeezed his shoulder. Thank you, Ad. For the second time, thank you.
   The two of them went out. The others watched them, and when they heard Bobbi's truck start, they turned toward where Hester Brookline lay unconscious, hooked up to a sophisticated life-support machine whose component parts had come from two radios, a turntable record-changer, the auto-tuning device from Doc's new Sony TV …
   … and, of course, lots of batteries.