7

   It was the Coke machine which had been in front of Cooder's market. Leandro stood frozen with amazement, watching it approach: a jolly red-and-white rectangle six and a half feet high and four wide. It was slicing rapidly through the air toward him, its bottom about eighteen inches over the road.
   I've fallen into an ad, Leandro thought. Some kind of weird ad. In a second or two the door of that thing will open and 0. J. Simpson is going to come flying out.
   It was a funny idea. Leandro started to laugh. Even as he was laughing, it occurred to him that here was the picture … oh God, here was the picture, here was a Coca-Cola vending machine floating up a rural stretch of two-lane blacktop!
   He grabbed for the Nikon. The Coke machine, humming to itself, banked around Leandro's stalled car and came on. It looked like a madman's hallucination, but the front of the machine proclaimed that, however much one might want to believe the contrary, this was THE REAL THING.
   Still giggling, Leandro realized it wasn't stopping – it was, in fact, speeding up. And what was a soda machine, really? A refrigerator with ads on it. And refrigerators were heavy. The Coke machine, a red-and-white guided missile, slid through the air at Leandro. The wind made a tiny hollow hooting noise in the coin return.
   Leandro forgot the picture. He leapt to the left. The Coke machine struck his right shin and broke it. For a moment his leg was nothing but a bolt of pure white pain. He screamed into the gold cup as he landed on his stomach at the side of the road, tearing his shirt open. The Nikon flew to the end of its strap and hit the gravelly soft shoulder with a crunch.
   Oh you son of a bitch that camera cost four hundred dollars!
   He got to his knees and turned around, shirt torn open, chest bleeding, leg screaming.
   The Coke machine banked back. It hung in the air for a moment, its front turning back and forth in small arcs that reminded Leandro of the sweeps of a radar dish. The sun flashed off its glass door. Leandro could see bottles of Coke and Fanta inside.
   Suddenly it pointed at him – and accelerated toward him.
   Found me, Christ
   He got up and tried to hop toward his car on his left foot. The soda machine bore down on him, coin return hooting dismally.
   Shrieking, Leandro threw himself forward and rolled. The Coke machine missed him by perhaps four inches. He landed in the road. Pain bellowed up his broken leg. Leandro screamed.
   The machine turned, paused, found him, and started back again.
   Leandro groped for the pistol in his belt and brought it out. He fired four times, balanced on his knees. Each bullet went home. The third shattered the machine's glass door.
   The last thing Leandro saw before the machine – which weighed just a bit over six hundred pounds – hit him was various soft drinks foaming and dripping from the broken necks of the bottles his bullets had shattered.
   Broken bottle-necks coming at him at forty miles an hour.
   Mama! Leandro's mind shrieked, and he threw his arms up in front of his face in a crisscross.
   He didn't have to worry about jagged bottle-necks after all, or the microbes which might have been in the cheeseburgers from the Burger Ranch, for that matter. One of life's great truths is this: when one is about to be struck by a speeding six-hundred-pound Coke machine, one need worry about nothing else.
   There was a thudding, crunching sound. The front of Leandro's skull shattered like a Ming vase hurled onto the floor. A split second later his spine snapped. For a moment the machine carried him along, plastered to it like a very large bug plastered to the windshield of a fast-moving car. His splayed legs dragged on the road, the white line unreeling between them. The heels of his loafers eroded to smoking rubber nodules. One fell off.
   Then he slid down the front of the vending machine and flopped onto the road.
   The Coke machine started back toward Haven Village. Its coin-holder had been jarred when the machine hit Leandro, and as it moved rapidly through the air, humming, a steady stream of quarters, nickels, and dimes spewed out of the coin return and went rolling about on the road.

Chapter 8. Gard and Bobbi

1

   Gardener knew that Bobbi would make her move soon – the old Bobbi had fulfilled what the New and Improved Bobbi saw as its last obligation to good old Jim Gardener, who had come to save his friend and who had stayed on to whitewash one hell of a strange fence.
   He thought, in fact, that it would be the sling – that Bobbi would want to go up first, and, once up, would simply not send it back down. There he'd be, down by the hatch, and there he'd die, next to that strange symbol. Bobbi wouldn't even have to deal with the messy reality of murder; there would be no need to think about good old Gard dying slowly and miserably of starvation, either. Good old Gard would die of multiple hemorrhages very quickly.
   But Bobbi insisted that Gard go up first, and the sardonic cut of her eyes told Gardener that Bobbi knew exactly what he had been thinking … and she hadn't had to read his mind to do it, either.
   The sling rose in the air and Gardener clung tightly to the cable, fighting a need to vomit – that need, he thought, was quickly going to become impossible to deny, but Bobbi had sent him a thought which came through loud and clear as soon as they wriggled out through the hatch again: Don't take the mask off until you get topside. Were Bobbi's thoughts clearer, or was it his imagination? No. Not imagination. They had both gotten another boost inside the ship. His nose was still bleeding and his shirt was sopping with it; the air mask was filling up. It was by far the worst nosebleed he'd had since Bobbi first brought him out here.
   Why not? he had sent back, trying to be very careful and send only that top thought – nothing below it.
   Most of the machines we heard were air-exchangers. Breathing what's in the trench now would do you in just as quick as breathing what was in the ship when we first opened it. The two won't equalize for the rest of the day, maybe longer.
   Not the sort of thinking one would usually suspect in a woman who wanted to kill you – but that look was still in Bobbi's eyes, and the feel of it colored all of Bobbi's thoughts.
   Hanging on to the cable for dear life, biting at the rubber pegs, Gardener fought to hold onto his stomach.
   The sling reached the top. He wandered away on legs that felt as if they were made of rubber bands and paper clips, barely seeing the Electrolux and the length of cable manipulating the buttons; Count ten, he thought. Count ten, get as far from the trench as you can, then take off the mask and take what comes, I think I'd rather die than feel like this, anyway.
   He got as far as five and could hold back no longer. Crazy images danced before his eyes: dumping the drink down Patricia McCardle's dress, seeing Bobbi reeling off her porch to greet him when he finally arrived; the big man with the gold cup over his mouth and nose turning to look at him from the passenger window of a four-wheel-drive as Gardener lay drunk on the porch.
   If I'd dug in a few different places out at that gravel pit, why, I just might have found that one, too! he thought, and that was when his stomach finally rebelled.
   He tore the mouthpiece off and threw up, groping for a pine tree at the edge of the clearing and clinging to it for support.
   He did it again, and realized he had never experienced this sort of vomiting in his entire life. He had read about it, however. He was ejecting stuff – most of it bloody -in wads that flew like bullets. And bullets were almost what they were. He was having a seizure of projectile vomiting. This was not considered a sign of good health in medical circles.
   Gray veils drifted over his sight. His knees buckled.
   Oh fuck I'm dying, he thought, but the idea seemed to have no emotional gradient. It was dreary news, no more, no less. He felt his hand slipping down the rough bark of the pine. He felt tarry sap. Faintly he was aware that the air smelled foul and yellow and sulfuric – it was the way a paper mill smells after a week of still, overcast weather. He didn't care. Whether there were Elysian fields or just a big black nothing, there would not be that stink. So maybe he would come out a winner anyway. Best to just let go. To just …
   No! No, you will not just let go! You came back to save Bobbi and Bobbi was maybe already beyond saving, but that kid's around and he might not be. Please, Gard, at least try!
   'Don't let it be for nothing,' he said in a cracked, wavering voice. 'Jesus Christ, please don't let it be for nothing.'
   The wavering gray mists cleared a little. The vomiting subsided. He raised a hand to his face and flung away a sheet of blood with it.
   A hand touched the back of his neck as he did, and Gardener's flesh pebbled with goosebumps. A hand … Bobbi's hand . . . but not a human hand, not anymore.
   Gard, are you all right?
   'All right,' he answered aloud, and managed to get to his feet.
   The world wavered, then came back into focus. The first thing he saw in it was Bobbi. The look on Bobbi's face was one of cold, cheerless calculation. He saw no love there, not even a counterfeit of concern. Bobbi had become beyond such things.
   'Let's go,' Gardener said hoarsely. 'You drive. I'm feeling . . .'He stumbled and had to grab at Bobbi's bunched, strange shoulder to keep from falling. a little under the weather.'

2

   By the time they got back to the farm, Gardener was better. The bleeding from his nose had subsided into a trickle. He had swallowed a fair amount of blood while wearing the mouthpiece, and a lot of the blood he had seen in his vomit must have been that. He hoped.
   He had lost a total of nine teeth.
   'I want to change my shirt,' he told Bobbi.
   Bobbi nodded without much interest. 'Come on out in the kitchen after you do,' she said. 'We have to talk.'
   'Yes. I suppose we do.'
   In the guestroom, Gardener took off the T-shirt he had been wearing and put on a clean one. He let it hang down over his belt. He went to the foot of the bed, lifted the mattress, and got the .45. He tucked it into his pants. The T-shirt was too big; he had lost a lot of weight. The outline of the gun butt hardly showed at all if he sucked in his gut. He paused for a moment longer, wondering if he was ready for this. He supposed there was no way to tell such a thing in advance. A dull headache gnawed his temples, and the world seemed to move in and out of focus in slow, woozy cycles. His mouth hurt and his nose felt stuffed with drying blood.
   This was it; as much a showdown as any Bobbi had ever written in her westerns. High noon in central Maine. Make yore play, pard.
   A ghost of a smile touched his lips. All of those two-for-a-penny sophomore philosophers said life was a strange proposition, but really, this was outrageous.
   He went out to the kitchen.
   Bobbi was sitting at the kitchen table watching him. Strange, half-glimpsed green fluid circulated below the surface of her transparent face. Her eyes – larger, the pupils oddly misshapen – looked at Gardener somberly.
   On the table was a boom-box radio. Dick Allison had brought it out to Bobbi's three days ago, at her request. It was the one Hank Buck had used to send Pits Barfield to that great repple-depple in the sky. It had taken Bobbi less than twenty, minutes to connect its circuitry to the toy photon pistol she was pointing at Gardener.
   On the table were two beers and a bottle of pills. Gardener recognized the bottle. Bobbi must have gone into the bathroom and gotten it while he was changing his shirt. It was his Valium.
   'Sit down, Gard,' Bobbi said.

3

   Gardener had raised his mental shield as soon as he was out of the ship. The question now was how much of it still remained.
   He walked slowly across the room and sat at the table. He felt the .45 digging into his stomach and groin; he also felt it digging into his mind, lying heavy against whatever was left of that shield.
   'Are those for me?' he asked, pointing at the pills.
   'I thought we'd have a beer or two together,' Bobbi said evenly, 'the way friends do? And you could take a few of those at a time while we talk. I thought it would be the kindest way.'
   'Kind,' Gardener mused. He felt the first faint tug of anger. Won't get fooled again, the song said, but the habit must be awfully hard to break. He himself had been fooled plenty. But then, he thought, maybe you're an exception to the rule, Gard ole Gard.
   'I get the pills and Peter got that weird seaquarium in the shed. Bobbi, your definition of kindness has undergone one fuck of a radical change since the days when you'd cry if Peter brought home a dead bird. Remember those days? We lived here together, we stood your sister off when she came, and never had to stick her in a shower stall to do it. We just kicked her ass the hell out.' He looked at her somberly. 'Remember, Bobbi? That was when we were lovers as well as friends. I thought you might have forgotten. I would have died for you, kiddo. And I would have died without you. Remember? Remember us?'
   Bobbi looked down at her hands. Did he see tears in those strange eyes? Probably all he saw was wishful thinking.
   'When were you in the shed?'
   'Last night.'
   'What did you touch?'
   'I used to touch you,' Gardener mused. 'And you me. And neither of us minded. Remember?'
   'What did you touch?' she screamed shrilly at him, and when she looked back up he didn't see Bobbi but only a furious monster.
   'Nothing,' Gardener said. 'I touched nothing.' The contempt on his face must have been more convincing than any protest would have been, because Bobbi settled back. She sipped delicately at her beer.
   'Doesn't matter. You couldn't have done anything out there anyway.'
   'How could you do it to Peter? That's how it keeps coming at me. The old man I didn't know, and Anne barged in. But I knew Peter. He would have died for you, too. How could you do it? God's name!'
   'He kept me alive when you weren't here,' Bobbi said. There was just the faintest uneasy, defensive note in her voice. 'When I was working around the clock. He was the only reason there was anything left for you to save when you got here.'
   'You fucking vampire!'
   She looked at him, then away.
   'Jesus Christ, you did something like that and I went along with it. Do you know how that hurts? I went along! I saw what was happening to you … to a lesser degree I saw what was happening to the others, but I still went along with it. Because I was crazy. But of course you knew that, didn't you? You used me the same way you used Peter, but I wasn't even as smart as an old beagle dog, I guess, because you didn't even have to put me in the shed and stick one of those filthy stinking rotten cables in my head to do it. You just kept me oiled. You handed me a shovel and said, “Here you go, Gard, let's dig this baby up and stop the Dallas Police.” Except you're the Dallas Police. And I went along with it.'
   'Drink your beer,' Bobbi said. Her face was cold again.
   'And if I don't?'
   'Then I'm going to turn on this radio,' Bobbi said, 'and open a hole in reality, and send you … somewhere.'
   'To Altair-4?' Gardener asked. He kept his voice casual and tightened his mental grip
   (shield-shield-shield-shield)
   on that barrier in his mind. A slight frown creased Bobbi's forehead again, and Gardener felt those mental fingers probing again, digging, trying to find out what he knew, how much … and how.
   'You've been snooping a lot, haven't you?' Bobbi asked.
   'Not until I realized how much you were lying to me.' And suddenly knew. He had gotten it in the shed without even knowing it.
   'Most of the lies you told to yourself, Gard.'
   'Oh? What about the kid that died? Or the one that's blind?'
   'How do you kn -'
   'The shed. That's where you go to get smart, isn't it?'
   She said nothing.
   'You sent them to get batteries. You killed one and blinded the other to get batteries. Jesus, Bobbi, how stupid could you get?'
   'We're more intelligent than you could ever hope to -'
   'Who's talking about intelligence?' he cried furiously. 'I'm talking about smarts! Common-fucking-sense! The CMP power lines run right behind your house! Why didn't you tap them?'
   'Sure.' Bobbi smiled with her weird mouth. 'A really intelligent – pardon me, smart -idea. And the first, time some tech at the Augusta substation saw the power drain on his dials – '
   'You're running almost everything on C, D, and double-A batteries,' Gard said. 'That's a trickle. A guy using house current to run a big band-saw would bang those needles harder.'
   She looked momentarily confused. Seemed to listen – not to anyone else, but to her own interior voice. 'Batteries run on direct current, Gard. AC power lines wouldn't do us any g – '
   He struck his temples with his fists and screamed: 'Haven't you ever seen a goddam DC converter? You can get them at Radio Shack for three bucks! Are you seriously trying to tell me you couldn't have made a simple DC converter when you can make your tractor fly and your typewriter run on telepathy? Are you – '
   'Nobody thought of it!' she screamed suddenly.
   There was a moment of silence. She looked stunned, as if at the sound of her own voice.
   'Nobody thought of it,' he said. 'Right. So you sent those two kids, all ready to do or die for good old Haven, and now one them is dead and the other one's blind. It's shit, Bobbi. I don't care who or what has taken you over – part of you has to be inside someplace. Part of you has to realize that you people haven't been doing anything creative at all. Quite the opposite. You've been taking dumb-pills and congratulating each other on how wonderful it all is. I was the crazy one. I kept telling myself it would be okay even after I knew better. But it's the same old shit it always was. You can disintegrate people, you can teleport them to someplace for safekeeping, or burial, or whatever, but you're as dumb as a baby with a loaded Pistol.'
   'I think you better shut up now, Gard.'
   'You didn't think of it,' he said softly. Jesus, Bobbi! How can you even look at yourself in the mirror? Any of you?'
   'I said I think -'
   'Idiot savant, you said once. It's worse. It's like watching a bunch of kids getting ready to blow up the world with Soapbox Derby plans. You guys aren't even evil. Dumb, but not evil.'
   'Gard -'
   'You're just a bunch of dumbbells with screwdrivers.' He laughed.
   'Shut up!' she shrieked.
   'Jesus,' Card said. 'Did I really think Sissy was dead? Did I?'
   She was trembling.
   He nodded toward the photon gun. 'So if I don't drink the beer and take the pills, you pack me off to Altair-4, right? I get to babysit David Brown until we both drop dead of asphyxiation or starvation or cosmic-ray poisoning.'
   She was viciously cold now, and it hurt – more than he ever would have believed -but at least she wasn't trying to read him. In her anger, she had forgotten.
   The way they had forgotten how simple it was to plug a battery-driven tape recorder into a wall socket with a DC converter between the instrument and the power source.
   'There really isn't an Altair-4, just as there aren't really any Tommyknockers. There aren't any nouns for some things – they just are. Somebody pastes one name on those things in one place, somebody pastes on another someplace else. lt's never a very good name, but it doesn't matter. You came back from New Hampshire talking about Tommyknockers, so here that's what we are. We've been called other things in other places. Altair-4 has, too. It's just a place where things get stored. Usually not live things. Attics can be cold, dark places.'
   'Is that where you're from? Your people?'
   Bobbi – or whatever this was that looked a bit like her – laughed almost gently. 'We're not a “People,” Gard. Not a “race.” Not a “species” Klaatu is not going to appear and say “Take us to your leader.” No, we're not from Altair-4.'
   She looked at him, still smiling faintly. She had recovered most of her equanimity and seemed to have forgotten the pills for the time being.
   'If you know about Altair-4, I wonder if you've found the existence of the ship a little strange. '
   Gardener only looked at her.
   'I don't suppose you've had time enough to wonder why a race with access to teleportation technology' – Bobbi wiggled the plastic gun slightly -'would even bother zipping around in a physical ship.'
   Gardener raised his eyebrows. No, he hadn't considered that, but now that Bobbi brought it up, he remembered a college acquaintance once wondering aloud why Kirk, Spock, and company bothered with the Starship Enterprise when it would have been so much simpler to just beam around the universe.
   'More dumb-pills,' he said.
   'Not at all. It's like radio. There are wavelengths. But beyond that, we don't understand it very well. Which is true of us about most things, Gard. We re builders, not understanders.
   'Anyway, we've isolated something like ninety thousand clear – wave lengths – that is, pro-linear settings which do two things: avoid the binomial paradox that prevents the reintegration of living tissue and unfixed matter, and actually seem to go somewhere. But in almost all cases, it isn't anywhere anyone would want to go.'
   'Like winning an all-expenses-paid trip to Utica, huh?'
   'Much worse. There's a place which seems to be very much like the surface of Jupiter. If you open a door on that place, the difference in pressure is so extreme it starts a tornado in the doorway which quickly assumes an extremely high electrical charge which blows the door open wider and wider like tearing a wound open. The gravity is so much higher that it starts sucking out the earth of the incursive world the way a corkscrew pulls a cork. If left on that particular “station” for long, it would cause a gravonic fault in the planet's orbit, assuming the mass was similar to earth's. Or, depending on the planet's composition, it might just rip it to pieces.'
   'Did anything like that come close to happening here?' Gard's lips were numb. Such a possibility made Chernobyl seem as important as a fart in a phone-booth. And you went along with it, Gard! his mind screamed at him. You helped dig it up!
   'No, although some people had to be dissuaded from doing too much tinkering along transmitter/transmatter lines.' She smiled. 'It happened somewhere else we visited, though.'
   'What happened?'
   'They got the door shut before Shatterday, but a lot of people cooked when the orbit changed.' She sounded bored with the subject.
   'All of them?' Gardener whispered.
   'Nope. There are still nine or ten thousand of them alive at one of the poles,' Bobbi said. 'I think.'
   'Jesus. Oh my Jesus, Bobbi.'
   'There are other channels which open on rock. Just rock. The inside of some place. Most open in deep space. We've never been able to chart a single one of those locations using our star-charts. Think of it, Gard! Every place has been a strange place to us … even to us, and we are great sky-travelers.'
   She leaned forward and sipped a little more beer. The toy pistol which was no longer a toy did not waver from Gardener's chest.
   'So that's teleportation. Some big deal, huh? A few rocks, a lot of holes, one cosmic attic. Maybe someday someone will open a wavelength into the heart of a sun and flash-fry a whole planet.'
   Bobbi laughed, as if this would be a particularly fine jest. The gun didn't waver from Gard's chest, however.
   Growing serious again, Bobbi said: 'But that's not all, Gard. When you turn on a radio, you think of tuning a station. But a band – megaherz, kiloherz, shortwave, whatever – isn't just stations. It's also all the blank space between stations. In fact, that's what some bands are mostly made up of. Do you follow?'
   'Yes.'
   'This is my roundabout way of trying to convince you to take the pills. I won't send you to the place you call Altair-4, Gard – there I know you'd die slowly and unpleasantly.'
   'The way David Brown is dying?'
   'I had nothing to do with that,' she said quickly. 'It was his brother's doing entirely.'
   'It's like Nuremberg, isn't it, Bobbi? Nothing was really anyone's fault
   'You idiot,.' Bobbi said. 'Don't you realize that sometimes that's the truth? Are you so gutless you can't accept the idea of random occurrence?'
   'I can accept it. But I also believe in the ability of the individual to reverse irrational behavior,' he said.
   'Really? You never could.'
   Shot your wife, he heard the booger-picking deputy say. Good fucking deal, uh?
   Maybe sometimes people start the old Atonement Boogie a little late, he thought, looking down at his hands.
   Bobbi's eyes flicked sharply at his face. She had caught some of that. He tried to reinforce the shield – a tangled chain of disconnected thoughts like white noise.
   'What are you thinking about, Gard?'
   'Nothing I want you to know,' he said, and smiled thinly. 'Think of it as … well, let's say a padlock on a shed door.'
   Her lips drew back from her teeth for a moment … then relaxed into that strange gentle smile again. 'It doesn't matter,' she said. 'I might not understand anyway. As I say, we've never been very good understanders. We're not a race of super-Einsteins. Thomas Edison in Space would be closer, I think. Never mind. I won't send you to a place where you'll die a slow, miserable death. I still love you in my way, Gard, and if I have to send you somewhere, I'll send you to … nowhere.'
   She shrugged.
   'It's probably like taking ether . . . but it might be painful. Agony, even. Either way, the devil you know is always better than the devil you don't.'
   Gardener suddenly burst into tears.
   'Bobbi, you could have saved me yea grief if you'd reminded me of that sooner.'
   'Take the pills, Gard. Deal with the devil you know. The way you are now, two hundred milligrams of Valium will take you off very quickly. Don't make me mail you like a letter addressed to nowhere.'
   'Tell me some more about the Tommyknockers,' Gardener said, wiping at his face with his hands.
   Bobbi smiled. 'The pills, Gard. If you start taking the pills, I'll tell you anything you want to know. If you don't – ' She raised the photon pistol.
   Gardener unscrewed the top of the Valium bottle, shook out half a dozen of the blue pills with the heart-shape in the middle (Valentines from the Valley of Torpor, he thought), tossed them into his mouth, cracked the beer, and swallowed them. There went sixty milligrams down the old chute. He could have hidden one under his tongue, maybe, but six? Come on, folks, be real. Not much time now. I vomited my belly empty, I've lost a lot of blood, I haven't been taking this shit and so have no tolerance to it, I'm some thirty pounds lighter than I was when I picked up the first mandatory prescription. If I don't get rid of this shit quick, they'll hit me like a highballing semi.
   'Tell me about the Tommyknockers,' he invited again. One hand dropped into his lap below the table and touched the butt
   (shield-shield-shield-shield)
   of the gun. How long before the stuff started to work? Twenty minutes? He couldn't remember. And nobody had ever told him about OD'ing on Valium.
   Bobbi moved the gun a bit toward the pills. 'Take some more, Gard. As Jacqueline Susann may have once said, six is not enough.'
   He shook out four more but left them on the oilcloth.
   'You were scared shitless out there, weren't you?' Gardener asked. 'I saw the way you looked, Bobbi. You looked like you thought they were all going to get up and walk. Day of the Dead.'
   Bobbi's New and Improved eyes flickered … but her voice remained soft. 'But we are walking and talking, Gard. We are back.'
   Gard picked up the four Valiums, bounced them in his palm. 'I want you to tell me just one thing, and then I'll take these.' Yes. Just that one thing would in some fashion answer all the other questions – the ones he was never going to get a chance to ask. Maybe that was why he hadn't tried Bobbi with the gun yet. Because this was what he really needed to know. This one thing.
   'I want to know what you are,' Gardener said. 'Tell me what you are.

4

   'I'll answer your question, or at least try to,' Bobbi said, 'if you'll take those pills you're bouncing in your hand right now. Otherwise, you're going bye-bye, Gard. There's something in your mind. I can't quite read it – it's like seeing a shape through gauze. But it makes me extremely nervous.'
   Gardener put the pills in his mouth and swallowed them.
   'More.'
   Gardener shook out another four and took them. All the way up to 140 milligrams now. Shooting the moon. Bobbi seemed to relax.
   'I said Thomas Edison was closer than Albert Einstein, and that's as good a way to put it as any,' Bobbi said. 'There are things here in Haven that would have made Albert boggle, I suppose, but Einstein knew what E=mc2 meant. He understood relativity. He knew things. We … we make things. Fix things. We don't theorize. We build. We're handymen.'
   'You improve things,' Gardener said. He swallowed. When Valium took hold of him, his throat began to feel dry. He remembered that much. When it started to happen, he would have to act. He thought maybe he had already taken a lethal dose, and there were at least a dozen pills left in the bottle.
   Bobbi had brightened a little.
   'Improve! That's right! That's what we do. The way they – we – improved Haven. You saw the potential as soon as you got back. No more having to suck the corporate tit! Eventually, it's possible to convert totally to … uh … organic-storage-battery sources. They're renewable and long-lasting.
   'You're talking about people.'
   'Not just people, although higher species do seem to produce longer-lasting power than the lower ones – it may be a function of spirituality rather than intelligence. The Latin word for it, esse, is probably the best. But even Peter has lasted a remarkably long time, produced a great deal of power, and he's only a dog.'
   'Maybe because of his spirit,' Gardener said. 'Maybe because he loved you.' He took the pistol out of his belt. He held it
   (shield-shield-shield-shield)
   against his inner left thigh.
   'That's beside the point,' Bobbi said, waving the subject of Peter's love or spirituality away. 'You have decided for some reason that the morality of what we're doing is unacceptable – but then, the spectrum of what you think of as morally acceptable behavior is very narrow. It doesn't matter; you'll be going to sleep soon.
   'We have no history, written or oral. When you say the ship crashed here because those in charge were, in effect, fighting over the steering wheel, I feel there's an element of truth in that … but I also feel that perhaps it was meant, fated to happen. Telepaths are at least to some degree precognitives, Gard, and precognitives are more apt to let themselves be guided by the currents, both large and small, that run through the universe. “God” is the name some people give those currents, but God's only a word, like Tommyknockers or Altair-4.
   'What I mean is, we would almost certainly be long extinct if we hadn't trusted those currents, because we've always been short-tempered, ready to fight. But “fight” is too general a word. We … we . . .'Bobbi's eyes suddenly glowed a deep, frightful green. Her lips spread in a toothless grin. Gardener's right hand clutched the gun with a sweaty palm.
   'We squabble!' Bobbi said. 'Le mot juste, Gard!'
   'Good for you,' Gardener said, and swallowed. He heard a click. That dryness hadn't just sneaked up – all at once it was just there.
   'Yes, we squabble, we've always squabbled. Like kids, you could say.' Bobbi smiled. 'We're very childlike. That's our good side.'
   'Is it now?' A monstrous image suddenly filled Gardener's head: grammarschool kids heading off to school armed with books and Uzis and Smurfs lunch-boxes and M-16s and apples for the teachers they liked and fragmentation grenades for those they didn't. And, oh Christ, every one of the girls looked like Patricia McCardle and every one of the boys looked like Ted the Power Man. Ted the Power Man with greeny-glowing eyes that explained the whole sorry fucking mess, from Crusades and crossbow to Reagan's missile-tipped satellites.
   We squabble. Every now and then we even tussle a bit. We're grownups – I guess -but we still have bad tempers, like kids do, and we also still like to have fun, like kids do, so we satisfied both wants by building all these nifty nuclear slingshots, and every now and then we leave a few around for people to pick UP, and do you know what? They always do. People like Ted, who are perfectly willing to kill so no woman in Braintree with the wherewithal to buy one shall want for electricity to run her hair-dryer. People like you, Gard, who see only minimal drawbacks to the idea of killing for peace.
   It would be such a dull world without guns and squabbles, wouldn't it?
   Gardener realized he was getting sleepy.
   'Childlike,' she repeated. 'We fight … but we can also be very generous. As we have here.'
   'Yes, you've been very generous to Haven,' Gardener said, and his jaws abruptly cracked open in a huge, tendon-stretching yawn.
   Bobbi smiled.
   'Anyway, we might have crashed because it was “crash-time,” according to those currents I mentioned. The ship wasn't hurt, of course. And when I started to uncover it, we … came back.'
   'Are there more of you out there?'
   Bobbi shrugged. 'I don't know.' And don't care, the shrug said. We're here, There are improvements to be made. That is enough.
   'That's really all you are?' He wanted to make sure; make sure there was no more to it. He was terribly afraid he was taking too long, much too long … but he had to know. 'That's all?'
   'What do you mean, all? Is it so little, what we are?'
   'Frankly, yes,' Gard said. 'You see, I've been looking for the devil outside my life all my life because the one inside was so fucking hard to catch. It's hard to spend such a long time thinking you're … Homer . . .' He yawned again, hugely. His eyelids had bricks on them. and discover you were … Captain Ahab all the time.'
   And finally, for the last time, with a kind of desperation he asked her:
   'Is that all you are? Just people who fix things up?'
   'I guess so,' she said. 'I'm sorry it's such a let-down for y
   Gardener lifted the pistol under the table, and at the same moment felt the drug finally betray him: the shield slipped.
   Bobbi's eyes glowed – no, this time they glared. Her voice, a mental scream, blasted through Gardener's head like a meat-cleaver
   (GUN HE'S GOT A GUN HES GOT A)
   chopping through the rising fog.
   She tried to move. At the same time she tried to bring the photon pistol to bear on him. Gardener aimed the .45 at Bobbi under the table and pulled the trigger. There was only a dry click. The old slug had misfired.

Chapter 9. The Scoop, Concluded

1

   John Leandro died. The scoop did not.
   David Bright had promised to give Leandro until four, and that was a promise he had intended to keep – because it was honorable, of course, but also because he was not sure this was anything he wanted to stick his hand into. It might turn out to be a threshing machine instead of a news story. Nonetheless, he never doubted Johnny Leandro had been telling the truth, or his perception of it, crazed as his story sounded. Johnny was a twerp, Johnny sometimes didn't just jump to conclusions but broad-jumped them completely, but he wasn't a liar (even if he had been, Bright didn't believe he was smart enough to fabricate something this woolly).
   Around two-thirty that afternoon, Bright suddenly began to think of another Johnny – poor, damned Johnny Smith, who had sometimes touched objects and gotten 'feelings' about them. That had been crazy, too, but Bright had believed Johnny Smith, had believed in what Smith said he could do. It was impossible to look into the man's haunted eyes and not believe. Bright was not touching anything which belonged to John Leandro, but he could see his desk across the room, the hood pulled neatly over his word-processor terminal, and he began to get a feeling … a very dismal one. He felt that Johnny Leandro might be dead.
   He called himself an old woman, but the feeling didn't go away. He thought of Leandro's voice, desperate and cracking with excitement. This is my story, and I'm not going to give it up just like that. Thought of Johnny Smith's dark eyes, his trick of constantly rubbing at the left side of his forehead. Bright's eyes were drawn again and again to Leandro's hooded word-cruncher.
   He held out until three o'clock. By then the feeling had become sickening assurance. Leandro was dead. There was just no maybe in it. He might not ever have another genuine premonition in his life, but he was having one now. Not crazy, not wounded, not one of the missing. Dead.
   Bright picked up the phone, and although the number he dialed had a Cleaves Mills exchange, both Bobbi and Gard would have known it was really long-distance: fifty-five days after Bobbi Anderson's stumble in the woods, someone was finally calling the Dallas Police.

2

   The man Bright talked to at the Cleaves Mills state-police barracks was Andy Torgeson. Bright had known him since college, and he could talk to him without feeling that he had the words NEWS SNOOP tattooed on his forehead in bright red letters. Torgeson listened patiently, saying little, as Bright told him everything, beginning with Leandro's assignment to the story of the missing cops.
   'His nose bled, his teeth fell out, he got vomiting, and he was convinced that all of this was coming out of the air?'
   'Yes,' Bright said.
   'Also, this whatever-it-is in the air improved the shit out of his radio reception.'
   'Right.'
   'And you think he might be in a lot of trouble.'
   'Right again.'
   'I think he might be in a lot of trouble, too, Dave – it sounds like he's gone section-eight.'
   'I know how it sounds. I just don't think that's the way it is.'
   'David,' Torgeson said in a tone of great patience, 'it might be possible – at least in a movie – to take over a little town and poison it somehow. But there's a highway that runs through that little town. There's people in that little town. And phones. Do you think someone could poison a whole town, or shut it off from the outside world, with no one the wiser?'
   'Old Derry Road isn't really a highway,' Bright pointed out. 'Not since they finished the stretch of I-95 between Bangor and Newport thirty years ago. Since then, the Old Derry Road has been more like this big deserted landing strip with a yellow line running down the middle of it.'
   'You're not trying to tell me nobody's tried to use it lately, are you?'
   'No. I'm not trying to tell you much of anything . . . but Johnny did say he'd found some people who hadn't seen their relatives in Haven for a couple of months. And some people who tried to go in to check on them got sick and had to leave in a hurry. Most of them chalked it up to food poisoning or something. He also mentioned a store in Troy where this old crock is doing a booming business in T-shirts because people have been coming out of Haven with bloody noses … and that it's been going on for weeks.'
   'Pipe dreams,' Torgeson said. Looking across the barracks ready-room, he saw the dispatcher sit up abruptly and switch the telephone he was holding to his left hand, so he could write. Something had happened somewhere, and from the goosed look on the dispatcher's face, it wasn't a fender-bender or purse-snatching. Of course, people being what they were, something always did happen. And, as little as he liked to admit it, something might be happening in Haven, as well. The whole thing sounded as mad as the tea party in Alice, but David had never impressed him as a member of the fruit-and-nuts brigade. At least not a card-carrying one, he amended.
   'Maybe they are,' Bright was saying, 'but their essential pipe-dreaminess can be proved or disproved by a quick trip out to Haven by one of your guys.' He paused. 'I'm asking as a friend. I'm not one of Johnny's biggest fans, but I'm worried about him.'
   Torgeson was still looking into the dispatcher's office, where Smokey Dawson was now ratchet-jawing away a mile a minute. Smokey looked up, saw Torgeson looking, and held up one hand, all the fingers splayed. Wait, the gesture said. Something big.
   'I'll see that someone takes a ride out there before the end of the day,' Torgeson said. 'I'll go myself if I can, but – '
   'If I was to come over to Derry, could you pick me up?'
   'I'll have to call you,' Torgeson said. 'Something's happening here. Dawson looks like he's having a heart attack.'
   'I'll be here,' Bright said. 'I'm seriously worried, Andy.'
   'I know,' Torgeson said – there had not even been a flicker of interest from Bright when Torgeson mentioned something big was apparently up, and that wasn't like him at all. 'I'll call you.'
   Dawson came out of the dispatcher's office. It was high summer, and, except for Torgeson, who was catching, the entire complement of troopers on duty was out on the roads. The two of them had the barracks to themselves.
   'Jesus, Andy,' Dawson said. 'I dunno what to make of this.'
   'Of what?' He felt the old tight excitement building in the center of his chest -Torgeson had his own intuitions from time to time, and they were accurate within the narrow band of his chosen profession. Something big, all right. Dawson looked as if someone had hit him with a brick. That old, tight excitement – most of him hated it, but part of him was a junkie for it. And now that part of him made a sudden, exhilarating connection – it was irrational but it was also irrefutable. This had something to do with what Bright had just called about. Somebody get the Dormouse and the Mad Hatter, plop the Dormouse into the pot, he thought. I think the tea party's getting under way.
   'There's a forest fire in Haven,' Dawson said. 'Must be a forest fire. The report says it's probably in Big Injun Woods.'
   'Probably? What's this probably shit?'
   'The report came from a fire-watch station in China Lakes,' Dawson said. 'They logged smoke over an hour ago. Around two o'clock. They called Derry Fire Alert and Ranger Station Three in Newport. Engines were sent from Newport, Unity, China, Woolwich -'
   'Troy? Albion? What about them? Christ, they border the town!'
   'Troy and Albion didn't report.'
   'Haven itself?'
   'The phones are dead.'
   'Come on, Smokey, don't break my balls. Which phones?'
   'All of them.' He looked at Torgeson and swallowed. 'Of course, I haven't verified that for myself. But that isn't the nuttiest part. I mean, it's pretty crazy, but – '
   'Go on and spill it.'
   Dawson did. By the time he finished, Torgeson's mouth was dry.
   Ranger Station Three was in charge of fire control in Penobscot County, at least as long as a fire in the woods didn't develop a really broad front. The first task was surveillance; the second was spotting; the third was locating. It sounded easy. It wasn't. In this case, the situation was even worse than usual, because the fire had been reported from twenty miles away. Station Three called for conventional fire engines because it was still technically possible that they might be of some use: they hadn't been able to reach anyone from Haven who could tell them one way or the other. As far as the fire wardens at Three knew, the fire could be in Frank Spruce's east pasture or a mile into the woods. They also sent out three two-man crews of their own in four-wheel-drive vehicles, armed with topographical maps, and a spotterplane. Dawson had called them Big Injun Woods, but Chief Wahwayvokah was long gone, and today the new, non-racist name on the topographical maps seemed more apt: Burning Woods.
   The Unity fire engines arrived first . . . unfortunately for them. Three or four miles from the Haven town line, with the growing pall of smoke still at least eight miles distant, the men on the pumper began to feel ill. Not just one or two; the whole seven-man crew. The driver pressed on . . . until he suddenly lost consciousness behind the wheel. The pumper ran off Unity's Old Schoolhouse Road and crashed into the woods, still a mile and a half shy of Haven. Three men were killed in the crash; two bled to death. The two survivors had literally crawled out of the area on hands and knees, puking as they went.
   'They said it was like being gassed,' Dawson said.
   'That was them on the phone?'
   Christ, no. The two still alive are on their way to Derry Home in an amb'lance. That was Station Three. They're trying to get things together, but right now it looks like there's a hell of a lot more going on in Haven than a forest fire. But that's spreading out of control, the Weather Service says there's going to be an easterly wind by nightfall, and it don't seem like no one can get in there to put it out!'
   'What else do they know?'
   Jack Shit!' Smokey Dawson exclaimed, as if personally offended. 'People who get close to Haven get sick. Closer you get, the sicker you are. That's all anyone knows, besides something's burning.'
   Not a single fire unit had gotten into Haven. Those from China and Woolwich had gotten closest. Torgeson went to the anemometer on the wall and thought he saw why. They'd been coming from upwind. If the air in and around Haven was poisoned, the wind was blowing it the other way.
   Dear God, what if it's something radioactive?
   If it was, it was like no kind of radiation Torgeson had ever heard of – the Woolwich units had reported one-hundred-per-cent engine-failure as they approached the Haven town line. China had sent a pumper and a tanker. The pumper quit on them, but the tanker kept running and the driver had somehow managed to reverse it out of the danger zone with vomiting men stuffed into the cab, clinging to the bumpers, and spreadeagled on top of the tank. Most had nosebleeds; a few earbleeds; one had a ruptured eye.
   All of them had lost teeth.
   What kind of fucking radiation is THAT?
   Dawson glanced into the dispatcher's booth and saw that all of his incoming lines were lighted.
   'Andy, the situation's still developing. I gotta
   'I know,' Torgeson said, 'you've got to go talk to crazy people. I've got to call the attorney general's office in Augusta and talk to other crazy people. Jim Tierney's the best A.G. we've had in Maine since I put on this uniform, and do you know where he is this gay day, Smokey?'
   'No.‘
   'On vacation,' Torgeson said with a laugh that was slightly wild. 'First one since he took the job. The only man in the administration that might be able to understand this nuttiness is camping with his family in Utah. Fucking Utah! Nice, huh?'
   'Nice.'
   'What the fuck's going on?'
   'I don't know.'
   'Any other casualties?'
   'A forest ranger from Newport died,' Dawson said reluctantly.
   'Who?'
   'Henry Amberson.'
   'What? Henry? Christ!'
   Torgeson felt as if he had been hit hard in the pit of the stomach. He had known Henry Amberson for twenty years – the two of them hadn't been best friends, nothing like it, but they had played some cribbage together when times were slow, done a little fly-fishing. Their families had taken dinner together.
   Henry, Jesus, Henry Amberson. And Tierney was in fucking Utah. 'Was he in one of the Jeeps they sent out?'
   'Yeah. He had a pacemaker, you know, and
   'What? What?' Torgeson took a step toward Smokey as if to shake him. 'What?'
   'The guy driving the Jeep apparently radioed in to Three that it exploded in Amberson's chest.'
   'Oh my Jesus Christ!'
   'It's not sure yet,' Dawson said quickly. 'Nothing is. The situation is still developing.'
   'How could a pacemaker explode?' Torgeson asked softly.
   'I don't know.'
   'It's a joke,' Torgeson said flatly. 'Either some weird joke or something like that radio show that time. War of the Worlds.'
   Timidly, Smokey said: 'I don't think it's a joke . . . or a hoax.'
   'Neither do I,' Torgeson said. He headed for his office and the telephone.
   'Fucking Utah,' he said softly, and then left Smokey Dawson to try and keep up with the increasingly unbelievable information that was coming in from the area of which Bobbi Anderson's farm was the center.

3

   Torgeson would have called the A.G.'s office if Jim Tierney hadn't been in fucking Utah. Since he was, he put it off long enough to make a quick call to David Bright at the Bangor Daily News.
   'David? It's Andy. Listen, I – '
   'We've got reports there's a fire in Haven, Andy. Maybe a big one. Have you got that?'
   'Yeah, we do. David, I can't take you over there. The information you gave me checks out, though. Fire crews and recon people can't get into town. They get sick. We've lost a forest ranger. A guy I knew. I heard . . .' He shook his head. 'Forget what I heard. It's too goddam crazy to be true.'
   Bright's voice was excited. 'What was it?'
   'Forget it.'
   'But you say firemen and rescue crews are getting sick?'
   'Recon people. We don't know yet if anyone needs rescuing or not. Then there's the shit about the fire trucks and jeeps. Vehicles seem to stop running when they get close to or into Haven
   'What?'
   'You heard me.'
   'You mean it's like the pulse?'
   'Pulse? What pulse?' He had a crazy idea that Bright was talking about Henry's pacemaker, that he had known all along.
   'It's a phenomenon that's supposed to follow big nuclear bangs. Cars stop dead.'
   'Christ. What about radios?'
   'Them too.'
   'But your friend said -'
   'All over the band, yes. Hundreds. Can I at least quote you on the sick firemen and rescue people? The vehicles stopping?'
   Yeah. As Mr Source. Mr Informed Source.'
   When did you first hear – '
   'I don't have time to do the Playboy interview, David. Your Leandro went to Maine Med Supplies for air?'
   'Yes.'
   'He thought it was the air,' Torgeson said, more to himself than to Bright. 'That's what he thought.'
   'Andy … you know what else stops cars dead, according to the reports we get from time to time?'
   'What?'
   'UFOs. Don't laugh; it's true. People who sight flying saucers at close range when they're in their cars or planes almost always say their motors just drop dead until the thing goes away.' He paused. 'Remember the doctor who crashed his plane in Newport a week or two ago?'
   War of the Worlds, Torgeson thought again. What a pile of crap.
   But Henry Amberson's pacemaker had … what? Exploded? Could that possibly be true?
   He would make it his business to find out; that you could take to the bank.
   'I'll be talking to you, Davey,' Torgeson said, and hung up. It was 3:15. In Haven, the fire which had begun at the old Frank Garrick farm had been burning for over an hour, and was now spreading toward the ship in a widening crescent.

4

   Torgeson called Augusta at 3:17 P.M. At that time, two sedans with a total of six investigators in them were already northbound on 1-95; Fire Station Three had called the A.G.'s office at 2:26 P.M. and the Derry state police barracks at 2:49. The Derry report included the first jagged elements – the crash of the Unity pumper, the death of a forest ranger who appeared to have been shotgunned by his own pacemaker. At 1:30 P.M. mountain time, a Utah state police cruiser stopped at the campground where Jim Tierney and his family were staying. The trooper informed him there was an emergency in his home state. What sort of emergency? That, the trooper had been told, was information obtainable strictly on a need-to-know basis. Tierney could have called Derry, but Torgeson in Cleaves Mills was a guy he knew and trusted. Right now he wanted more than anything else to talk to someone he trusted. He felt a slow sinking dread in his gut, a feeling that it had to be Maine Yankee, had to be something with the state's only nuclear plant, had to be, only something that big could have caused this kind of extraordinary response almost a whole country away. The trooper patched him through. Torgeson was both delighted and relieved to hear Tierney's voice.
   At 1:37 P.M. mountain time, Tierney climbed into the shotgun seat of the cruiser and said, 'How fast does this go?'
   'Sir! This vehicle will go one hundred and thirty miles an hour and I am a Mormon sir and I am not afraid to drive it at that speed sir because I am confident that I will avoid hell! Sir!'
   'Prove it,' Tierney said.
   At 2:03 P.M. mountain time, Tierney was in a Lear jet with no markings but the U.S. flag on its tail. It had been waiting for him at a small private airfield near Cottonwoods … the town of which Zane Grey wrote in Riders of the Purple Sage, the book which had been Roberta Anderson's favorite as a girl, the one which had perhaps set her course forever as a writer of westerns.
   The pilot was in mufti.
   'Are you Defense Department?' Tierney asked.
   The pilot looked at him with expressionless dark glasses. 'Shop.' It was the only word he spoke before, during, or after the flight.
   That was how the Dallas Police entered the game.

5

   Haven had been nothing but a wide place in the road, dreaming its life away comfortably off the major Maine tourist tracks. Now it had been noticed. Now people headed there in droves. Since they knew nothing of the anomalies that were being reported in ever-increasing numbers, it was only the growing pall of smoke on the horizon which drew them at first, like moths to candle flames. It would be almost seven o'clock that evening before the state police, with the help of the local National Guard unit, would be able to block off all the roads to the area – the minor ones as well as the major. By morning, the fire would become the greatest forest fire in Maine history. The brisk easterly wind came up right on schedule, and once it did there was no way the fire's running start could be overcome. The realization did not sink in all at once, but it did sink in: the fire might have burned unchecked even if the day had been dead calm. You couldn't do much about a fire you couldn't get to, and efforts to get near this one had unpleasant results.
   The spotter-plane had crashed.
   A busload of National Guardsmen from Bangor ran off the road, struck a tree, and exploded when the driver's brain simply burst like a tomato loaded with a cherry-bomb. All seventy weekend warriors died, but maybe only half of them in the crash; the rest died in a fruitless effort to crawl out of the poison belt.
   Unfortunately, the wind was blowing the wrong way . . . as Torgeson could have told them.
   The forest fire which had begun in Burning Woods had crisped half of Newport before fire-fighters could properly go to work . . . but by then they were strung too thin to do much good, because the fire line was nearly six miles long.
   By seven that evening, hundreds of people – some self-appointed firefighters, most your common garden variety Homo rubberneckus – had poured into the area. Most promptly poured right back out again, faces white, eyes bulging, noses and ears jetting blood. Some came clutching their lost teeth in their hands like pitted pearls. And not a few of them died … not to mention the hundred or so hapless residents of eastern Newport who got a sudden dose of Haven when the wind turned brisk. Most of those died in their houses. Those who came to gawk and stayed to asphyxiate on the rotten air were found in or beside various roads, curled in fetal positions, hands clutched over their stomachs. Most, one G.I. later told the Washington Post (under the strict condition that he not be identified), looked like bloody human commas.
   Such was not the fate of Lester Moran, a textbook salesman who lived in a Boston suburb and spent most of his days on the highways of northern New England.
   Lester was returning from his annual late-summer selling trip to the schools in the SADs (school administrative districts) of Aroostook County when he saw smoke – a lot of it – on the horizon. This was at about 4:15 P. m.
   Lester diverted immediately. He was in no hurry to get back, being a bachelor and having no plans for the next two weeks or so, but he would have diverted even if the national sales conference had been slated to begin the next day with him as the principal speaker and his speech still unwritten. He couldn't have helped himself. Lester Moran was a fire-freak. He had been one since earliest childhood. In spite of having spent the last five days on the road, in spite of a fanny that felt like a board and kidneys that felt like bricks after the constant jolting his sprung car had taken on the shitty roads of townships so small they mostly had map coordinates for names, Lester never thought twice. His weariness fell away; his eyes glowed with that preternatural light which fire-chiefs from Manhattan to Moscow know and dread: the unholy excitement of the natural-born fire-freak.
   They are the sort of people fire-chiefs will, however, put to use … if driven to the wall. Five minutes ago, Lester Moran, who had applied to the Boston Fire Department at the age of twenty-one and had been turned down because of the steel plate in his skull, had felt like a whipped dog. Now he felt like a man highballing on amphetamines. Now he was a man who would happily don an Indian pump which weighed almost half as much as he did himself and lug it on his back all night, breathing smoke the way some men breathe the perfume on the nape of a beautiful woman's neck, fighting the flames until the skin of his cheeks was cracked and blistered and his eyebrows were burned clean off.
   He exited the turnpike at Newport and burned up the road which led toward Haven.
   The plate in his head was the result of a hideous accident which had occurred when Moran was twelve, and a junior-high patrol-boy. A car had struck him and thrown him thirty feet, where his flight had been interrupted by the obdurate brick wall of a furniture warehouse. He had been given last rites; his weeping parents had been told by the surgeon who operated on him that their son would likely die within six hours, or remain in a coma for several days or weeks before succumbing. Instead, the boy had been awake and asking for ice cream before the end of the day.
   'I think it's a miracle,' the boy's sobbing mother cried. 'A miracle from God!'
   'Me too,' said the surgeon who had operated on Lester Moran, and who had looked at the boy's brain through a gaping hole in the poor kid's shattered skull.
   Now, closing in on all that delightful smoke, Lester began to feel a little sick to his stomach, but he chalked that up to excitement and then forgot all about it. The plate in his skull was, after all, nearly twice the size of the one in Jim Gardener's. The absence of police, fire, or Forestry Department vehicles in the thickening murk he found both extraordinary and oddly exhilarating. Then he rounded a sharp curve and saw a bronze-colored Plymouth lying upside-down in the left-hand ditch, its red dashboard flasher still pulsing. Written on the side was DERRY F.D.
   Lester parked his old Ford wagon, got out, and trotted over to the wreck. There was blood on the steering wheel and the seat and driver's-side floormat. There were droplets of blood on the windshield.
   All in all, quite a lot of blood. Lester stared at it, horrified, and then looked toward Haven. Dull red colored the base of the smoke now, and he realized he could actually hear the dull crackle of burning wood. It was like standing near the world's biggest open-hearth furnace . . . or as if the world's biggest open-hearth furnace had sprouted legs and was slowly approaching him.
   Next to that sound, next to the sight of that dull yet titanic red glow, the overturned Derry fire-chief's car and the blood inside began to seem a good deal less important. Lester went back to his own car, fought a brief battle with his conscience, and won by promising himself he would stop at the first pay phone he came to and call the state police in Cleaves Mills … no, Derry. Like most good salesmen, Lester Moran carried a detailed map of his territory in his head, and after consulting it, he decided Derry was closer.
   He had to resist the yammering urge to goose the wagon up to its top speed … which was about sixty these days. He expected at every turn of the road to come upon sawhorses blocking the road, a confusion of crazily parked vehicles, the sound of CB radios squealing out messages at top gain, shouting men in hard-hats, helmets, and rubber coats.
   It didn't happen. Instead of sawhorses and a boiling nest of activity he came upon the overturned Unity pumper, cab broken off its body, the tank itself still spraying the last of its load. Lester, who was now breathing smoke as well as air that would have killed almost anyone else on earth, stood on the soft shoulder, mesmerized by the limp white arm he saw dangling from the window of the pumper's amputated cab. Rivulets of drying blood ran erratic courses down the arm's white and vulnerable underside.
   Something wrong here. Something a lot more wrong than just a woods fire. You got to get out, Les.
   But instead he turned toward the fire again and was lost.
   The smoky taste in the air was stronger. The sound of burning was now not a crackle but rolling thunder. The truth of it suddenly fell on him like a bucket of cement: No one was fighting this fire. No one at all. For some reason he couldn't understand, they either hadn't been able to get into the area or hadn't been allowed in. As a result, the fire was burning out of control, and with the freshening wind to help, it was growing like a radioactive monster in a horror movie.
   The idea made him ill with terror … and excitement … and sick, dark joy. It was bad to feel a thing like that last, but it was there and it was impossible to deny. Nor was he the only one who had felt it. That dark joy had seemed to be a part of every fire-fighter he had ever bought a drink for (which was almost every fire-fighter he'd ever met since he flunked his own 13FD physical).
   He fumbled and stumbled back to his car, started it with some difficulty (assuming that in his excitement he had probably almost flooded the damned dinosaur), boosted the air-conditioner all the way up, and headed toward Haven again. He was aware this was idiocy of the purest ray serene – he was, after all, not Superman but a forty-five-year-old textbook salesman who was going bald and who was still a bachelor because he was too shy to ask women for dates. He was not just behaving in an idiotic fashion, either. Harsh as that judgment was, it was still a rationalization. The truth was, he was behaving like a lunatic. And yet he could no more stop himself than a junkie can stop himself when he sees his fix cooking in the spoon.
   He couldn't fight it …
   … but he could still go see it.
   And it would really be something to see, wouldn't it? Lester thought. Sweat was already rolling down his face, as if in anticipation of the heat ahead. Something to see, oh yeah. A forest fire that was for some reason being allowed to rage utterly out of control as they had millions of years ago, when men were little more than a small tribe of hairless monkeys cowering in the twin cradles of the Nile and the Euphrates and the great fires themselves were touched off by spontaneous combustion, strokes of lightning, or meteor-falls instead of drunk hunters who didn't give a shit what they did with their cigarette butts. It would be a bright orange furnace, a firewall ninety feet high in the woods; across the clearings and gardens and hayfields it would race like a Kansas prairie fire in the 1840s, gobbling houses so swiftly they would implode from the sudden change in air-pressure, as houses and factories had done during the World War II firebombings. He would be able to see the road he was on, this very road, disappearing into that furnace, like a highway into hell.
   The tar itself, he thought, would first begin to run in sticky little rivulets … and then to burn.
   He stepped down harder on the gas, and thought: How could you not go on? When you had a chance – a once-in-a-lifetime chance – to see something like that, how could you not?