8

   Bobbi joined him. Gard saw awe on her face – but no revulsion.
   These are her gods now, and one is rarely if ever revolted by one's own gods, Gardener thought. These are her gods now, and why not? They made her what she is today.
   He pointed to each one of them in turn, deliberately, like an instructor. They were naked, and their wounds were clear. Interstellar car crash, yes. But he didn't believe there had been any mechanical failure. Those weird, scaly bodies were slashed; scored with ragged cuts. One six-fingered hand was still wrapped around the haft of something that looked like a knife with a circular blade.
   Look at them, Bobbi, he thought, even though he knew Bobbi couldn't read him in here even if he opened up all the way. He pointed here, to a grinning mouth buried in another creature's throat; there, to a wide wound gaping in a thick, inhuman chest; there, to a knife still clutched in one hand.
   Look at them, Bobbi. You don't have to be Sherlock Holmes to see they were fighting. Having a good old knock-down-drag-out here in the old control room. None of this 'Come-let-us-reason-together' shit for your gods. They were whipping some heavy numbers on each other. Maybe it started as an argument about whether or not to land here, or maybe it was about whether or not they should have hooked a left at Alpha Centauri. Anyway, the results are the same. Remember how we always assumed a technologically advanced race of beings would be, if one ever made contact with us? We thought they'd be smart like Mr Wizard and wise like Robert Young on Father Knows Best. Well, here's the truth, Bobbi. The ship crashed because they were having a fight. And where are the blasters? The phasers? The transporter room? I see one knife. The rest they must have done with mirrors … or their bare hands … or those big claws.
   Bobbi looked away, frowning strenuously – a pupil who didn't want to learn the lesson, a pupil who was in fact determined not to learn it. She started to move off. Gardener caught her by the arm and pulled her back. Pointed at the feet.
   If Bruce Lee had had afoot like that, he would have killed a thousand people a week, Bobbi.
   The Tommyknockers' legs were grotesquely long – they made Gardener think of those guys who don stilts and Uncle Sam suits and march in Fourth of July parades. The muscles below the semi-transparent skins were long, ropy, gray. The feet were narrow, and not precisely toed. Instead, each foot sloped into that one thick, chitinous claw, like a bird's talon. Something like a giant vulture's.
   Gardener thought of the dips in the ladder rungs. He shuddered.
   Look, Bobbi. See how dark the claws are. That's blood, or whatever they had inside them. It's on the claws because they did most of the damage. This place sure as shit didn't look like the bridge of the starship Enterprise before it crashed. Just before it hit, it probably looked more like a free-for-all cockfight out behind some redneck's barn. This is progress, Bobbi? Next to these guys, Ted the Power Man looks like Gandhi.
   Frowning, Bobbi pulled away. Leave me alone, her eyes said.
   Bobbi, can't you see
   Bobbi turned away. She wasn't into seeing.
   Gardener stood by the desiccated bodies, watching her climb the deck like a woman climbing a steep smooth hill. She didn't slip at all. She turned toward a far wall where there was another round opening and boosted herself in. For a moment Gardener could see her legs and the dirty soles of her tennis shoes, and then she was gone.
   Gard walked up the slope and stood for a moment near the center of the room, looking at the single thick cord coming out of the floor, at the earphones that split off from it. The similarity to the set-up in Bobbi's shed was perfectly clear. Otherwise …
   He looked around. Hexagonal room. Barren. No chairs. No pictures of Niagara Fails – or Cygnus-B Falls, for that matter. No astrogation charts, no Mad Labs equipment. All the big-time science-fiction producers and special-effects men would have been disgusted by this emptiness, Gardener thought. Nothing but some earphones lying tangled on the floor, and the bodies, perfectly preserved but probably as light as autumn leaves by now. Earphones and remains like husks piled in that far corner, where gravity had tossed them. Nothing very interesting about it. Nothing very smart. That fit. Because the Havenites were doing lots of stuff, but none of it was very smart, when you got right down to where the short hairs grew.
   It wasn't disappointment he felt so much as stupid correctness. Not rightness -God knew there was nothing right about this – but correctness, as if part of him had always known it would be this way when and if they got in. No Disneyland razzmatazz; only a dreary species of blankness. He found himself remembering W. H. Auden's poem about running away: sooner or later you always ended up in one room, under a naked light bulb, playing solitaire at three in the morning. Tomorrowland, it seemed, ended up being an empty place where people smart enough to capture the stars got mad and tore each other to shreds with the claws on their feet.
   So much for Robert Heinlein, Gard thought, and followed Bobbi.

9

   He trekked uphill, realizing he had entirely lost track of what his position was in relation to the world outside. It was easier not to think about it. He used the ladder to help himself along as he went. He came to a rectangular porthole and looked through it into something that might have been an engine room – big metal blocks, square on one end, rounded on the other, marched off in a double row. Pipes, thick and dull silver in color, protruded from the square ends of these blocks and moved off at strange, crooked angles.
   Like straight-pipes coming out of a kid's jalopy, Gard thought. He became aware of liquid warmth on the skin above his mouth. It divided in two and ran down his chin. His nose was bleeding again … slowly, but as if it meant to keep it up for a while.
   Is the light brighter in here now?
   He stopped and looked around.
   Yes. And could he hear a faint humming, or was that imagination?
   He cocked his head. No; not imagination. Machinery. Something had started up.
   It didn't just start, and you know it. We started it up. We're kicking it over.
   He bit down hard on the mouthpiece. He wanted out of here. Wanted to get Bobbi out. The ship was alive; in a weird way he supposed it was the Ultimate Tommyknocker. It was a howl. It was also the most horrible thing of all. Sentient creature … What? Woke it up, of course. Gard wanted it asleep. All of a sudden he felt too much like Jack nosing around the castle while the giant slept. They had to get out. He began to crawl faster. Then a new thought struck him, stopping him dead.
   What if it won't let you out?
   He pushed the idea away and kept going.

10

   The corridor branched into a Y, left arm continuing to angle up, the right turning steeply downward. He listened and heard Bobbi crawling to the left. He moved that way and came to another hatch. She was standing below it. She glanced briefly up at Gardener with eyes that were wide and frightened. Then she looked back again.
   He got one leg over the lip of the hatch and paused. No way he was going in there.
   The room was lozenge-shaped. It was full of hammocks suspended in metal frames – there were hundreds of them. All were canted drunkenly upward and to the left; the room looked like a snapshot of a sailing ship's bunkroom taken just as the ship rolled in the trough of a swell. All the hammocks were full, their occupants strapped in. Transparent skins, doglike snouts; milky, dead eyes.
   A cable ran from each scaled, triangular head.
   Not just strapped, Gardener thought. CHAINED. They were the ship's drive, weren't they, Bobbi? If this is the future, it's time to eat the gun. These are dead galley slaves.
   They were snarling, but Gardener saw that some of the snarls were halfobliterated, because some of their heads seemed to have exploded – as if, when the ship crashed, there had been some gigantic backflow of energy that had literally blown their brains out.
   All dead. Strapped forever in their hammocks, heads lolling, snouts frozen in eternal snarls. All dead in this tilted room.
   Close by, another engine started up – chopping rustily at first, then smoothing out. A moment later fans whirred into life – he supposed the newly started engine was driving them. Air blew against his face – whether or not it was fresh was something he didn't intend to personally check on.
   Maybe opening the outer hatch started this stuff up, but I don't believe it. It was us. What starts up next, Bobbi?
   Suppose they started up next – the Tommyknockers themselves? Suppose their grayish-transparent six-fingered hands started to clench and unclench, as Bobbi's hands had been doing as she stared at the corpses in the barren control room? What if those taloned feet began to twitch? Or suppose those heads began to turn, and those milky eyes looked at them?
   I want out. The ghosts here are very lively and I want out.
   He touched Bobbi's shoulder. She jumped. Gardener glanced at his wrist, but there was no watch there – only a fading white shape on his otherwise tanned wrist. It had been a Timex, a tough old baby that had gone on a lot of toots with him and come out alive. But two days of working on the excavation had killed it. THERE'S one John Cameron Swayze never tried in those old TV ads, he thought.
   Bobbi took the point. She pointed at the air-bottle clipped to her belt and raised her eyebrows at Gardener. How long has it been?
   Gardener didn't know and didn't care. He wanted out before the whole damned ship woke up and did God-knew-what.
   He pointed back down the passageway. Long enough. Let's bug out.
   A thick, oily chuckling noise began in the wall next to Gardener. He shrank from it. Drops of blood from his slowly bleeding nose splattered the wall. His heart was beating madly.
   Stop it, it's just some sort of pump
   The oily noise began to smooth out … and then something went wrong. There was a screech of grinding metal and a quick, thudding series of explosions. Gardener felt the wall vibrate, and for a moment the light seemed to flicker and dim.
   Could we find our way out of here in the dark if the lights went out? You make thee joke I theenk, senor.
   The pump tried to start again. There was a long metallic scream that set Gardener's teeth biting at the rubber plugs in his mouthpiece. It died away at last. There was a long loud rattle, like a straw in an empty glass. Then nothing.
   Not everything lasted all that time with no damage, Gardener thought, and found this idea actually relieving.
   Bobbi was pointing: Go, Gard.
   Before he did, he saw Bobbi pause and look back once at the ranks of the hammocked dead. That frightened look was back on her face.
   Then Gard was crawling back the way he came, trying to keep an even, steady pace as the claustrophobia wrapped itself around him.

11

   In the control room, one of the walls had turned into a gigantic picture-window fifty feet long and twenty feet high.
   Gardener stood, gape-jawed, looking at the blue Maine sky and the fringe of pines and spruces and maples around the trench. In the lower right-hand corner he could see the rooftree of their equipment lean-to. He stared at this for several seconds – long enough to see big white summer clouds drifting across the blue sky -before realizing it couldn't be a window. They were somewhere toward the middle of the ship, and deep in the ground as well. A window in that wall should show only more ship. Even if they had been near the hull, which they weren't, it would have given on a vista of mesh-covered rock wall, with maybe a squib of blue sky at the very top.
   It's a TV picture of some kind. Something like a TV picture, anyway.
   But there were no lines. The illusion was perfect.
   Forgetting, in this powerful new fascination, his claustrophobic need to get out, Gardener walked slowly toward the wall. The angle gave him a perverse sensation of flying – the effect was like slipping behind the controls of an airline trainer and pulling the mock controls into a steep climb. The sky was so bright he had to squint. He kept looking for the wall, the way you might expect to see a movie screen through the picture as you got closer to it, but the wall just didn't seem to be there. The pines were a true, clear green, and only the fact that he couldn't feel any breeze or smell the woods worked against the persuasive illusion of looking through an open window.
   He walked closer, still looking for the wall.
   It's a camera, got to be – mounted on the outer rim of the ship, maybe even the part Bobbi stumbled over. The angle confirms that. But, Jesus! It's so fucking real! If the people at Kodak or Polaroid saw this, they'd go out of their gou
   His arm was grabbed – grabbed hard – and terror leaped up in him. He turned, expecting to see one of them, a grinning thing with a dog's head, holding a cable with a plug tip in one hand: Just bend down, Mr Gardener; this won't hurt a bit.
   It was Bobbi. She pointed to the wall. Held out her hands and arms and jittered them rapidly in some kind of charade. Then pointed at the window-wall again. After a moment, Gardener got it. In a grisly way it was almost funny. Bobbi had been miming electrocution, telling him that touching the window-wall would probably be a lot like touching the third rail of a subway.
   Gardener nodded, then pointed toward the wider companionway through which they had entered. Bobbi nodded back and led the way.
   As Gardener boosted himself up, he thought he heard a leaf-dry rattle and turned back, feeling a child's dreamy terror tug at his mind. He felt that it must be them, those corpses in the corner; them, rising slowly to their taloned feet like zombies.
   But they still lay in their tangled drift of strange arms and legs. The wide, clear view of the sky and the trees on the wall (or through the wall) was dimming, losing reality and definition.
   Gardener turned away and crawled after Bobbi as fast as he could.

Chapter 7. The Scoop, Continued

1

   You're crazy, you know, John Leandro told himself as he pulled into exactly the same parking slot Everett Hillman had used not three weeks ago. Leandro did not of course know this. That was probably just as well.
   You're crazy, he told himself again. You bled like a stuck pig, there's two teeth less in your head, and you're planning to go back there. You're crazy!
   Right, he thought, getting out of the old car. I'm twenty-four, unmarried, getting bulgy around the middle, and if I'm crazy it's because I found this, I did, me, I tripped over it. It's big, and it's mine. My story. No, use the other word. It's old-fashioned, but who gives a fuck – it's the right word. My scoop. I'm not going to let it kill me, but I am going to ride it until it bucks me off.
   Leandro stood in the parking lot at a quarter past one on what was rapidly becoming the longest day of his life (it would also be the last, despite all his mental avowals to the contrary) and thought: Good for you. Gonna ride it till it bucks you off. Probably Robert Capa, Ernie Pyle, thought the same thing from time to time.
   Sensible. Sarcastic, but sensible. That deeper part of his mind seemed to be beyond such sense, however. My story, it returned stubbornly. My scoop.
   John Leandro, now clad in a T-shirt reading WHERE TH' HELL IS TROY, MAINE? (David Bright would probably have laughed himself into a hemorrhage over that one), crossed the small parking lot of Maine Med Supplies ('Specializing in Respiration Supplies and Respiration Therapy since 1946') and went inside.

2

   'Thirty bucks is a stiff deposit for an air mask, don't you think?' Leandro asked the clerk, thumbing through his cash. He guessed he had the thirty, but it was going to leave him with about a buck and a half. 'Wouldn't think they'd be a big black-market item.'
   'We never used to require one at all,' the clerk said, 'and we still don't if we know the individual or the organization, you know. But I lost one a couple, three weeks ago. Old man came in and told me he wanted some air. I figured he meant for diving, you know – he was old, but he looked tough enough for it – so I started telling him about Downeast ScubaDive in Bangor. But he said no, he was interested in ground portability. So I rented it to him. I never got it back. Brand-new Bell flat-pack. Two-hundred-dollar piece of equipment.'
   Leandro looked at the clerk, almost sick with excitement. He felt like a man following arrows deeper and deeper into a frightening but fabulous and totally unexplored cavern.
   You rented this mask? Personally?'
   Well, it was a flat-pack, actually, but yes. My dad and I run the place. He was delivering oxy bottles down to Augusta. I caught hell from him. I don't know if he'll like me renting another Bell, even, but with the deposit I guess it's okay.'
   'Can you describe the man?'
   'Mister, do you feel okay? You look a little white around the
   'I'm fine. Can you describe the man who rented the flat-pack?'
   'Old. Had a tan. He was mostly bald. He was skinny … stringy, I guess you'd say. Like I say, he looked tough.' The clerk thought. 'He was driving a Valiant.'
   'Could you check the day he rented the flat-pack?'
   'You a cop?'
   Reporter. Bangor Daily News.' Leandro showed the clerk his press card. Now the clerk also began to look excited.
   'He do Somethin' else? Besides rip off our flat-pack, I mean?'
   'Could you look up the name and date for me?'
   'Sure.'
   The clerk flipped back through his rental book. He found the entry and turned the book so Leandro could read it. The date was July 26th. The name was scrawled but still legible. Everett Hillman.
   'You never reported the loss of the equipment to the police,' Leandro said. It was not a question. If a complaint of theft had been lodged against the old geezer to complement his landlady's understandable unhappiness at being stiffed for two weeks' rent, the cops might have taken more interest in how or why Hillman had disappeared … or where he had disappeared to.
   'No, Dad said not to bother. Our insurance doesn't cover the theft of rented equipment, see, and … well, that's why.'
   The clerk shrugged and smiled, but the shrug was slightly embarrassed, the smile slightly uneasy, and taken together they told Leandro a lot. He might be a terminal twerp, as David Bright feared, but he was not a stupid one. If they had reported the theft or disappearance of the flat-pack, the insurance company wouldn't cover the loss. But this fellow's father knew some other way they could stick it to the insurance company. But for now all that was very much a secondary consideration.
   'Well, thank you for all your help,' Leandro said, turning the book back around. 'Now if we could finish up here – '
   'Sure, of course.' The clerk was obviously happy to leave the subject of insurance behind. 'And you won't put any of this in the paper until you check with my father, will you?'
   'Absolutely not,' Leandro said with a warm sincerity that P. T. Barnum himself would have admired. 'Now, if I could just sign the agreement – '
   'Right. I'll have to see some ID first, though. I didn't ask the old guy, and I also heard from Dad about that, I can tell you.'
   'I just showed you my press card.'
   'I know, but maybe I ought to see some real identification.'
   Sighing, Leandro pushed his driver's license across the counter.

3

   'Slow down, Johnny,' David Bright said. But Leandro was standing at an outdoor phone kiosk near the edge of a drive-in-restaurant parking lot. He heard the beginnings of excitement in Bright's voice. He believes me. Son of a bitch, I think he finally believes me!
   As he had driven away from Maine Med Supplies and back toward Haven, Leandro's excitement and tension had grown until he thought he might explode if he didn't talk to someone else. And he had to; he recognized that as a responsibility that superseded his desire to get his scoop alone. He had to because he was going back, and something could easily happen to him, and if it did, he wanted to be sure somebody knew what he was onto. And Bright, as insufferable as he could be, was at least utterly honest; he wouldn't double-cross him.
   Slow down, yeah, I got to.
   He switched the phone to his other ear. The afternoon sun was hot on his neck, but it didn't feel bad at all. He started with the ride to Haven: the incredible jam-up of stations on the radio; the violent nausea; the bloody nose; the lost teeth. He told him about his conversation with the old man in the general store, how empty the place had been, how the whole area could have been wearing a big sign that said GONE FISHIN. He didn't mention his mathematical insights, because he could barely remember having them. Something had happened, but it was now all vague and diffuse in his mind.
   Instead, he told Bright that he had gotten the idea that the air in Haven had been poisoned, somehow – that there had been a chemical spill or something, or maybe the escape of some natural but deadly gas from inside the earth.
   'A gas that improves radio transmissions, Johnny?'
   Yes, he knew it was unlikely, he knew all the pieces didn't fit yet, but he had been there and he was sure it was the air that had made him sick. So he had decided to get some portable oxygen and go back.
   He related his coincidental discovery that Everett Hillman, whom Bright himself had dismissed as a nutty old man, had been there before him, on exactly the same errand.
   'So what do you think?' Leandro said finally.
   There was a momentary lag, and then Bright said what Leandro believed to be the sweetest words he had ever heard in his life. 'I think you were right all the time, Johnny. Something very weird is happening out there, and I advise you very strongly to stay away.'
   Leandro closed his eyes for a moment and leaned his head against the side of the telephone. He was smiling. It was a large and blissful smile. Right. Right all the time. Ah, they were good words; fine words; words of balm and beatitude. Right all the time.
   'John? Johnny? Are you still there?'
   Eyes still closed, still smiling, Leandro said: 'I'm here.' Just relishing it, David, old man, because I think I have been waiting my entire life for someone to tell me I was right all the time. About something. About anything.
   'Stay away. Call the state cops.'
   'Would you?'
   'Fuck, no!'
   Leandro laughed. 'Well, there you go. I'll be okay. I've got oxygen
   'According to the guy at the medical-supply place, Hillman did too. He's just as gone.'
   'I'm going,' Leandro repeated. 'Whatever's going on in Haven, I'm going to be the first one to see it … and get pictures of it.'
   'I don't like it.'
   'What time is it?' Leandro's own watch had stopped. Which was funny; he was almost sure he'd wound it when he got up that morning.
   'Almost two.'
   'Okay. I'll call in by four. Again at six. Et cetera, until I'm home and dry. If you or somebody there doesn't hear from me every two hours, call the cops.'
   'Johnny, you sound like a kid playing with matches telling his father if he catches on fire, Dad has permission to put him out.'
   'You're not my father,' Leandro said sharply.
   Bright sighed. 'Look, Johnny. If it makes any difference, I'm sorry I called you fucking Jimmy Olson. You were right, isn't that enough? Stay out of Haven.'
   'Two hours. I want two hours, David. I deserve two hours, goddammit.' Leandro hung up the phone.
   He started back to his car … then turned and marched defiantly back to the walk-up window and ordered two cheeseburgers with everything on them. It was the first time in his life he had ever ordered food from one of those places his mother called roadside luncheonettes – only when she said the words she made such places sound like the blackest pits of horror, as in It Came from the Roadside Luncheonette, or Earth vs. The Microbe Monsters.
   When they came, the cheeseburgers were hot and wrapped in grease-spotted sheets of waxed paper with the marvelous words DERRY BURGER RANCH printed all over them. He had gobbled the first even before he got back to his Dodge.
   'Wonderful,' he said, the word muffled to something that sounded like wunnel. 'Wonderful, wonderful.'
   Microbes do your worst! he thought with almost drunken defiance as he pulled out onto Route 9. He was, of course, unaware that things were changing rapidly in Haven now, and had been ever since noon; the situation in Haven was, in nuclear parlance, critical. Haven had in fact become a separate country, and its borders were now policed.
   Not knowing this, Leandro drove on, tearing into his second cheeseburger and regretting only that he hadn't ordered a vanilla shake to go with them.

4

   By the time he passed the Troy general store, his euphoria had dissipated, and his former low nervousness had returned – the sky overhead was a clear blue in which a few wispy-white clouds floated, but his nerves felt as if there were a thunderstorm on the way. He glanced at the flat-pack on the seat beside him, the gold cup covered with a round of cellophane which read SANI-SEALED FOR YOUR PROTECTION. In other words, Leandro thought, microbes keep out.
   No cars on the road. No tractors in the fields. No boys walking barefoot along the side of the road with fishing rods. Troy dreamed silent (and, Leandro guessed, toothless) under the August sun.
   He kept the radio tuned to WZON, and as he passed the Baptist church, he began to lose the signal in a rising mutter of other voices. Not long after that, his cheeseburgers began to first walk around uneasily in his stomach, and then to jump up and down. He could imagine them squirting grease as they did so. He was very close to the place where he had pulled over on his first effort to get into Haven. He pulled over now without delay – he didn't want the symptoms to get any worse. Those cheeseburgers had been too damned good to lose.

5

   With the oxygen mask in place, the queasiness went away at once. That sense of low, gnawing nervousness did not. He caught a glimpse of himself, gold cup bobbing on his mouth and nose, in the rearview mirror and felt a moment of fright -was that him? That man's eyes looked too serious, too intent … they looked like the eyes of a jet fighter pilot. Leandro didn't want people like David Bright to think he was a twerp, but he wasn't sure he wanted to look that serous.
   Too late now. You're in it.
   The radio babbled in a hundred voices, maybe a thousand. Leandro turned it off. And there, up ahead, was the Haven town line. Leandro, who knew nothing at all about invisible nylon stockings, drove up to the town-line marker … and then past it, into Haven, with no trouble at all.
   Although the battery situation in Haven was approaching the critical point again, force-fields could have been set up along most of the roads leading into town. But in the frightened confusion over the developing events of the morning, Dick Allison and Newt had made one decision that came to directly affect John Leandro. They wanted Haven closed, but they didn't want anyone to strike an inexplicable barrier in the middle of what appeared to be thin air, turn around, and carry the tale back to the wrong people …
   … which was everyone else on earth just now.
   I don't believe anyone could get that close, Newt said. He and Dick were in Dick's pickup truck, part of a procession of cars and trucks racing out to Bobbi Anderson's place.
   I used to think so too, Dick replied. But that was before Hillman … and Bobbi's sister. No, someone could get in … but if they do, they'll never get out again.
   All right, fine. You're Queen for a Day. Now can't you drive this fucker any faster?
   The texture of both men's thoughts – of the thoughts all around them – was dismayed and furious. At that moment the possible incursion of outsiders into Haven seemed the least of their worries.
   'I knew we should have gotten rid of that goddam drunk!' Dick cried out loud, and slammed his fist down on the dashboard. He was wearing no makeup today. His skin, as well as becoming increasingly transparent, had begun to roughen. The center of his face – and Newt's face, and the faces of all of those who had spent time in Bobbi's shed – had begun to swell. To grow decidedly snoutlike.

6

   John Leandro of course knew nothing of this – he knew only that the air around him was poisonous – more poisonous than even he would have believed. He had slipped the gold cup down long enough to take a single shallow breath, and the world had immediately begun to fade into dimness. He put the cup back quickly, heart racing, hands cold.
   Some two hundred yards past the town-line marker, his Dodge simply died. Most Haven cars and trucks had been customized in such a way as to make them immune to the steadily increasing electromagnetic field thrown off by the ship in the earth over the last two months or so (much of this work was done at Elt Barker's Shell), but Leandro's car had undergone no such treatment.
   He sat behind the wheel a moment, staring stupidly down at the red idiot lights. He threw the transmission into Park and turned the key. The motor didn't crank. Hell, the solenoid didn't even click.
   Battery cable came off, maybe.
   It wasn't a battery cable. If it had been, the OIL and AMP lights wouldn't be glowing. But that was minor. Mostly he knew it wasn't his battery cable just because he knew it.
   There were trees along both sides of the road here. The sun through their moving leaves made dappled patterns on the asphalt and white dirt of the soft shoulders. Leandro suddenly felt that eyes were looking out at him from behind trees. This was silly, of course, but the idea was nonetheless very powerful.
   Okay, now you have got to get out, and see if you can walk out of the poison belt before your air runs out. The odds get longer every second you sit here giving yourself the creeps.
   He tried the ignition key once more. Still nothing.
   He got his camera, hooked the strap over his shoulder, and got out. He stood looking uneasily at the woods on the right side of the road. He thought he heard something behind him – a shuffling sound – and whirled quickly, lips pulled up in a dry grin of fear.
   Nothing … nothing he could see.
   The woods are lovely, dark and deep …
   Get moving. You're just standing here using up your air.
   He opened the door again, leaned in, and got the gun out of the glove compartment. He loaded it, then tried to put it in his right front pocket. It was too big. He was afraid it would fall out and go off if he left it there. He pulled up his new T-shirt, stuck it in his belt, then pulled the shirt down over it.
   He looked at the woods again, then bitterly at the car. He could take pictures, he supposed, but what would they show? Nothing but a deserted country road. You could see those all over the state, even at the height of the summer tourist season. The pictures wouldn't convey the lack of woods sounds; the pictures would not show that the air had been poisoned.
   There goes your scoop, Johnny. Oh, you'll write plenty of stories about it, and I've got a feeling you'll be telling a lot of network-news filming crews which is your good side, but your picture on the cover of Newsweek? The Pulitzer Prize? Forget it.
   Part of him – a more adult part – insisted that was dumb, that half a loaf was better than none, that most of the reporters in the world would kill to get just a slice from this loaf, whatever it turned out to be.
   But John Leandro was a man younger than his twenty-four years. When David Bright, believed he had seen a generous helping of twerp in Leandro, he hadn't been wrong. There were reasons, of course, but the reasons didn't change the fact. He felt like a rookie who gets a fat pitch during his first at-bat in the majors and hits an opposite-field triple. Not bad … but in his heart a voice cries out: Hey, God, if you was gonna give me a fat one, why didn't You let me get it all?
   Haven Village was less than a mile away. He could walk it in fifteen minutes … but then he would never get out of the poison belt before the air in the flat-pack ran out, and he knew it.
   If only I'd rented two of these goddam things.
   Even if you'd thought of it, you didn't have cash enough to pay the frigging security deposit on two. The question is, Johnny, do you want to die for your scoop or not?
   He didn't. If his picture was going to be on the cover of Newsweek, he didn't want there to be a black border around it.
   He began to trudge back toward the Troy town line. He got five dozen steps before realizing he could hear engines – a lot of them, very faint.
   Something going on over on the other side of town.
   Might as well be something happening on the dark side of the moon. Forget it.
   With another uneasy glance at the woods, he started walking again. Got another dozen steps and realized he could hear another sound: a low, approaching hum from behind him.
   He turned. His jaw dropped. In Haven, most of July had been Municipal Gadget Month. As the 'becoming' progressed, most Havenites had lost interest in such things … but the gadgets were still there, strange white elephants such as the ones Gardener had seen in Bobbi's shed. Many had been pressed into service as border guards. Hazel McCready sat in her town-hall office before a bank of earphones, monitoring each briefly in turn. She was furious at being left behind to do this duty while the future of everything hung in the balance out at Bobbi's farm. But now … someone had entered town after all.
   Glad of the diversion, Hazel moved to take care of the intruder.