6

   'I just don't know how I'm going to explain to my dad, is all,' the Maine Med Supplies clerk said. He wished he had never argued four years ago for expanding their business to include rentals in the first place. His father had thrown that in his face after the old guy rented the flat-pack and never returned it, and now all hell was breaking loose in Haven – the radio said it was a forest fire and then went on to hint that even weirder things might be happening there – and he was betting he'd never see the flat-pack he had rented that morning to the reporter with the thick glasses, either. Now here were two more fellows, state troopers no less, demanding not just one flat-pack each, but six of them.
   'You can tell your dad we requisitioned them,' Torgeson said. 'I mean, you do provide respiration gear for firemen, don't you?'
   'Yes, but – '
   'And there's a forest fire in Haven, isn't there?'
   'Yes, but – '
   'Then get them out here. I don't have time to bullshit.'
   'My father is gonna kill me!' he wailed. 'That's all we got!'
   Torgeson had met Claudell Weems pulling into the parking lot of the barracks just as Torgeson himself was pulling out. Claudell Weems, Maine's only black state trooper, was tall – not as tall as the late Monster Dugan, but a very respectable six-four. Claudell Weems had one gold tooth in the front of his mouth, and when Claudell Weems moved very close to people – suspects, for instance, or a reluctant clerk – and smiled, revealing that sparkling gold incisor, they became very nervous. Torgeson once asked Claudell Weems why this was, and Claudell Weems said he b'leeved it was dat ole black magic. And then laughed until the glass in the barracks windows seemed to tremble in its frames.
   Weems now leaned very close to the clerk and employed dat ole black magic dat he wove so well.
   When they left Maine Med with the flat-packs, the clerk was not really sure what had happened … except that the black fella had the biggest gold tooth he had ever seen in his life.

7

   The toothless old man who had sold Leandro the T-shirt stood on his porch and watched expressionlessly as Torgeson's cruiser blasted by. When it was gone he went inside and made a phone call to a number most people wouldn't have been able to reach; they would have heard the sirening sound which had infuriated Anne Anderson instead. But there was a gadget on the back of the storekeeper's phone, and soon he was talking to an increasingly harried Hazel McCready.

8

   'So!' Claudell Weems said cheerfully after craning his neck to look at the speedometer, 'I see we are driving at just over ninety miles an hour! And since the consensus is that you're probably the shittiest motor-vehicle operator in the entire Maine state police-'
   'What fucking consensus?' Torgeson asked.
   'My fucking consensus,' Claudell Weems said. 'Anyway, that leads to a deduction. The deduction is that I will die very soon. I don't know if you believe in that bullshit about granting a doomed man's last request, but if you do, maybe you'd tell me what this is all about. If you can before we receive our engine-block implants, that is.'
   Andy opened his mouth, then closed it again. 'No,' he said. 'I can't. It's too nuts. Just this much. You may start to feel sick. If you do, put some of that canned air to you right away.'
   'Oh, Christ,' Weems said. 'The air's been poisoned in Haven?'
   'I don't know. I think so.'
   'Oh Christ,' Weems said again. 'Who spilled what beans?'
   Andy only shook his head.
   'That's why no one's fighting the fire.' The smoke boiled up from the horizon in a widening swath – mostly white so far, thank God.
   'I don't know. I think so. Run one of the bands on the radio.'
   Weems blinked as if he thought Torgeson might be crazy. 'Which band?'
   'Any band.'
   So Weems began to run the police band, at first getting nothing but the confused, beginning-to-be-frightened babble of cops and firemen who wanted to fight a fire and somehow couldn't get to where it was at. Then, further down, they heard a request for backup units at the scene of a liquor-store robbery. The address given was 117 Mystic Avenue, Medford.
   Weems looked at Andy. 'Jeepers-creepers, Andy, I didn't know there was any Mystic Avenue in Medford – in fact, I didn't think there was any avenues at all in Medford. Couple of pulproads, maybe.'
   'I think,' Andy said, and his voice seemed to be coming to his own ears from very far away, 'that particular squeal is coming from Medford, Massachusetts.'

9
   Two hundred yards over the Haven town line, Lester Moran's motor died. It did not cough; it did not hitch; it did not backfire. It just died, quietly and without fanfare. He got out without bothering to switch off the key.
   The steady crackle of the fire filled the whole world, it seemed. The air temperature had gone up at least twenty degrees. The wind was carrying the heavy smoke toward him but up, so the air was breathable. It still had a hot, acrid taste.
   Here on the left and right were wide fields – Clarendon land on the right, Ruvall land on the left. It rose in a long, undulating slope toward the woods. In those woods, Lester could see steadily brightening winks of red and orange light; smoke poured up from them in a torrent which was steadily darkening. He could hear the thumping explosions of hollow trees imploding as the fire sucked the oxygen out of them like marrow from old bones. The wind was not straight into his face, but close enough; the fire was going to break out of the woods and into the field in minutes . . . seconds, maybe. Its rush down to where he stood, face red and running with sweat, might be lethally quick. He wanted to be back in his car before that happened – it would start, of course it would, old gal had never failed him yet – and piling up distance between himself and that red, oncoming beast.
   Go, then! Go, for Chrissake! You've seen it, now GO!
   Thing was, he really hadn't seen it. He'd felt its heat, seen it wink its eyes and fume smoke from its dragon's nostrils … but he really hadn't seen the fire.
   But then he did.
   It came out of Luther Ruvall's west field in a pounce. The main fire-front bore on into Big Injun Woods, but this side now broke free of the forest. The trees massed at the far end of the field were no match for the red animal. They seemed for a moment to grow blacker as the light behind them was turned up – yellow to orange, orange to glare-red. Then they simply swept into flame. It happened in an instant. For a moment Lester could see their tops, and then they were gone, too. It was like the act of some fabulous prestidigitator, the sort of magician Hilly Brown had once wanted to be with all his heart and soul.
   The fire-line was before him, eight feet high and eating trees as Lester Moran stood mesmerized, mouth gaping, before it. Flames began to run down the slope of the field. Now the smoke began to rafter around him, thicker, choking. He began to cough.
   Get out! For Christ's sake, get out!
   Yes. Now he would; now he could. He had seen it and it was every bit as spectacular as he had expected it would be. But it was a beast. And what a right-thinking man did when confronted with a beast was run. Run just as fast and far as he could. All living things did it. All living things
   Lester backed halfway to his car and then stopped.
   All living things.
   Yes. All living things ran before a forest fire. The old patterns were suspended. The coyote ran beside the rabbit. But there were no rabbits and no coyotes coming down that field; there were no birds in the gunmetal-colored sky.
   No one here but him.
   No birds or animals running from the fire meant there were none in the woods.
   The overturned F.D. car, the blood everywhere.
   The pumper wrecked in the woods. The bloody arm.
   What's going on here? his mind screamed.
   He didn't know … but he knew he was putting on those fabled boogie shoes. He pulled the door open – and then looked back one final time.
   What he saw rising out of that great pillar of smoke jerked a scream from him. He drew in smoke, coughed on it, screamed again.
   Something – some huge something – was rising out of the smoke like the greatest whale in creation slowly breaching.
   Smoke-hazed sunlight gleamed mellowly on its side – and still it came up, came up, came up, and there was no sound except for the awkward thunder-crunch strides of the fire.
   Up … and up … and up …
   His neck craned to follow its slow, impossible progress, and so he never saw the small, queer thing which came out of the smoke and trundled smartly down the road toward him. It was a red wagon. It had belonged to little Billy Fannin at the beginning of the summer. In the center of the wagon was a platform. On the platform was a Bensohn brush-trimmer – little more than a power blade at the end of a long pole. The blade was controlled by a pistol-grip control. A sales tag reading CUT UP A STORM WITH YOUR BENSOHN! still fluttered from the top of the pole. It was on a moving gimbal, and looked a bit like the jutting prow of an absurd ship.
   Lester was cringing against his car and staring up into the sky when the gadget's EEG-sensor – which had begun life as a digital meat probe – triggered the brush-trimmer's electronic starter (a modification the Bensohn designers had never considered). The blade shrieked into life, the small gas motor howling like a hurt cat.
   Lester turned and saw something like a fishing pole with teeth coming at him. He cried out and ducked toward the rear of his car.
   What's going on here? his mind screamed. What's going on, what's going on, what's going on, what's
   The brush-trimmer swung on its gimbal, seeking Lester, following his brain-waves, which it sensed as neat little pulses, not much different than radar blips. The brush-trimmer was not very bright (its brain came from a programmable toy called The Terrible Tracker Tank), but it was bright enough to stay homed in on the low electrical output of Lester Moran's own brain. His battery, one might say.
   'Get out!' Lester screamed as Billy Fannin's wagon trundled toward him. 'Get away! Get awaaaay!'
   Instead, the wagon seemed to leap at him. Lester Moran, his heart hammering wildly in his chest, zigged. The brush-trimmer zigged with him. Lester Moran tried to zag – and then a huge, slowly moving shadow fell over him, and he looked up in spite of himself … he just couldn't help it. His feet tangled in each other and the brush-cutter pounced. Its whirling blade chewed into Lester's head. It was still working on him when the fire engulfed both it and its victim.

10

   Torgeson and Weems saw the body in the road at the same time. They were both breathing canned air now; nausea had come on them quickly with frightening power, but with the masks in place, it disappeared completely. Leandro had been right. The air. Something in the air.
   Claudell Weems had ceased asking questions after they'd picked up the police-band squeal from Massachusetts. After that he only sat with his hands in his lap, his eyes moving steadily and cautiously. Further down-tuning had brought them news of police doings in such interesting places as Friday, North Dakota, Arnette, Texas.
   Torgeson stopped and the two men got out. Weems paused, then took the riot gun clipped under the dash. Torgeson nodded. Things were starting to come clear. Not sane, but clear. Gabbons and Rhodes had disappeared on their way back from this town. And Monster had been here the day before he committed suicide. What was that Phil Collins song, the one with the spooky drums? I can feel it in the air tonight …
   It was in the air, all right.
   Gently, Torgeson turned over the man he believed to be the one who had finally blown the whistle on this craziness.
   He had cleaned up a lot of ugly messes on the highway, but he still drew in a harsh gasp and shied his face away.
   'Christ, what hit him?' Weems asked. The mask muffled his words, but the tone of dismay came through loud and clear.
   Torgeson didn't know. He had seen a man once who'd been hit by a snowplow. That guy had looked a little like this. That was the closest.
   The guy was blood from the top of what had been his head all the way down to his waist. His belt buckle had been driven deep into his body.
   'Christ, man, I'm sorry,' he murmured, and laid the body down gently. He could go for the wallet, but he wanted nothing more to do with that smashed body. He headed for the car. Weems fell in beside him, riot gun held on a slant against his chest. In the distance, to the west, the smoke was growing thicker by the moment, but here there was only a faint, woodsy tang.
   'This is crazy shit,' Weems said through his mask.
   'Yes.'
   'I have a very bad feeling about being here.'
   'Yes.'
   'I believe we should vacate this area on the dou
   There was a crackling sound from behind them, and for a moment Torgeson thought it must be the fire – it was far away, relatively speaking, but it could be over here, too. Perfectly reasonable! When you were at the Mad Hatter's tea party, anything was. Turning, he realized that the sound was not burning branches but breaking ones.
   'Holy shit!' Claudell Weems cried.
   Torgeson's jaw dropped.
   The Coke machine, stupid but reliable, moved in again. This time it came out of the brush at the side of the road. The glass display front was broken. The sides of the big rectangular box were scratched. And on the metal part of the machine's front, Torgeson saw a horridly suggestive shape driven in so deep it looked almost sculpted.
   It looked like half a head.
   The Coke machine moved out over the road and just hung there for a moment like a coffin painted in incongruously gay colors. They were gay, at least, until you noticed the blood which had dripped and run and was beginning to dry in maroon splotches.
   Torgeson could hear a faint humming, and a clicking sound – Like relays, he thought. Maybe it's been damaged. Maybe, but still
   The Coke machine suddenly arrowed straight at them.
   'MothaFUCKAH!' Weems shouted – there was dismay and terror in his voice, but a kind of crazed laughter as well.
   'Shoot it, shoot it!' Torgeson cried, and leaped to the right.
   Weems took a step back and promptly fell over Leandro's body. This was extremely stupid. It was also extremely lucky. The Coke machine missed him by inches. As it banked for another run, Weems sat up and pumped three quick shotgun blasts into it. Metal exploded inward in metal daisy-shapes with black centers. The machine began to buzz. It stopped, jittering back and forth in the air like a man with Huntington's chorea.
   Torgeson drew his service pistol and fired four rounds. The Coke machine started for him, but now it seemed lethargic, unable to get up any speed. It jerked to a stop, jerked forward, stopped, jerked forward again. It rocked drunkenly from side to side. The buzzing grew louder. Runnels of soda fell from the access door in sticky rivulets.
   As it came at him, Torgeson pivoted easily away.
   'Drop, Andy!' Weems yelled.
   Torgeson dropped. Claudell Weems shot the Coke machine three more times, firing as fast as he could work the pump action. On the third shot, something inside it exploded. Black smoke and a brief belch of fire licked out one side of the machine.
   Green fire, Torgeson saw. Green.
   The Coke machine thumped to the road about twenty feet from Leandro's body. It tottered, then fell forward with a hollow bang. Broken glass jingled. There were three seconds of silence; then a long metallic croaking sound. It stopped. The Coca-Cola machine lay dead across the yellow line in the middle of Route 9. Its red-and-white hide was full of bullet-holes. Smoke poured from it.
   'I have just drawn my weapon and killed a Coke machine, sir,' Claudell Weems said hollowly inside his mask.
   Andy Torgeson turned toward him. 'And you never even ordered it to a halt, or fired a warning shot. Probably draw a suspension, you dumb shit.'
   They stared at each other over the masks, and started to laugh. Claudell Weems laughed so hard he was nearly doubled over.
   Green, Torgeson thought, and although he was still laughing, nothing felt very funny inside, where he lived. The fire that came out of that fucker was green.
   'Never fired a warning shot,' Weems cackled breathlessly. 'No, I never did. Never did at all.'
   'Violated its fucking civil rights,' Torgeson said.
   Have to be an investigation!' Weems laughed. 'Yo, baby! I mean mean . . .' He tottered on his feet, and there was a lot of Claudell Weems to totter. Torgeson suddenly realized he was dizzy himself. They were breathing pure oxygen … hyperventilating.
   'Stop laughing!' he shouted, and his voice seemed to come from a long distance away. 'Claudell, stop laughing!'
   He somehow crossed the distance to where Weems was swaying woozily on his feet. The distance seemed very wide. When he was almost there, he stumbled. Weems somehow caught him and for a moment they stood swaying drunkenly, arms about each other, like Rocky Balboa and Apollo Creed at the end of the first fight.
   'You pullin' me down, asshole,' Weems muttered.
   'Fuck you, you started it.' The world came into focus, wavered, steadied. Slow breaths, Torgeson told himself. Big slow breaths, easy respiration. Be still, my beating heart. That last made him giggle again, but he got hold of it.
   The two of them wavered back toward the cruiser, arms about each other's waists.
   'The body,' Weems said.
   'Leave it for now. He's dead. We're not. Yet.'
   'Look,' Weems said as they passed Leandro's remains. 'The bubs! They're out!'
   The blue flashers, called bubbles or bubs by the troopers, on top of the cruiser were dead and dark. That wasn't supposed to be – leaving the flashers on at the scene of the accident was ingrained behavior.
   'Did you – ' Torgeson began, and then stopped.
   Something in the landscape had changed. The day had darkened, as it does when a large cloud floats over the sun or when an eclipse begins. They looked at each other, then turned. Torgeson saw it first, a great silvery shape emerging from the boil of smoke. Its huge leading edge gleamed.
   'Holy Christ!' Weems almost squealed. His large brown hand found Torgeson's arm and bore down upon it.
   Torgeson barely felt it, although there would be bruises in the shape of Weems's hand the next day.
   Up it came … and up … and up. Smoke-hazed sunlight glinted on its silvery-metallic surface. It rose on an angle of roughly forty degrees. It seemed to be wavering slightly, although that could have been an illusion or heat-haze.
   Of course the whole thing was an illusion – had to be. No way it could be real, Torgeson thought; it was oxygen rapture.
   But how can we both be having the same hallucination?
   'Oh my dear God,' Weems groaned, 'it's a flyin' saucer, Andy, it's a fuckin' flyin' saucer!'
   But to Torgeson it did not look like a saucer. It looked like the underside of an Army mess-plate – the biggest damn plate in creation. Up it came and up it came; you thought it must end, that a hazy margin of sky must appear between it and the rafters of smoke, but still it came, dwarfing the trees, dwarfing all the landscape. It made the smoke of the forest fire look like a couple of cigarette butts smoldering in an ashtray. It filled more and more of the sky, blotting out the horizon, rising, oh, something was rising out of Big Injun woods, and it was deathly silent – there was no sound, no sound at all.
   They stared at it, and then Weems clutched Torgeson and Torgeson clutched Weems, they hugged each other like children and Torgeson thought: Oh, if it falls on us
   And still it came up from the smoke and fire, and up, as if it would never end.
   By nightfall, Haven had been cut off from the outside world by the National Guard. The Guardsmen surrounded it, those downwind wearing oxygen equipment.
   Torgeson and Weems made it out – but not in their cruiser. That was as dead as John Wilkes Booth. They hoofed it. By the time they had used up the oxygen in the last flat-pack, swapping it back and forth, they were well into Troy and found themselves able to deal with the outside air – the wind left them lucky, Claudell Weems said later. They walked out of what would soon be referred to as 'the zone of pollution' in top-secret government reports, and theirs was the first official word of what was going on in Haven, but by then there had been hundreds of unofficial reports on the lethal quality of the air in the area and thousands of reports of a gigantic UFO seen rising from the smoke in Big Injun Woods.
   Weems made it out with a bloody nose. Torgeson lost half a dozen teeth. Both counted themselves lucky.
   The initial perimeter, staffed with National Guardsmen from Bangor and Augusta, was thin. By 9:00 P.M. it had been augmented by Guardsmen from Limestone and Presque Isle and Brunswick and Portland. By dawn, a thousand more battle-equipped Guardsmen had been flown in from Eastern Corridor cities.
   Between the hours of 7:00 P.M. and 1:00 AM--– NORAD stood at DEFCON-2. The President was circling the Midwest at sixty thousand feet in Looking Glass and chewing Tums five and six at a time.
   The FBI was on the scene at 6:00 P.M. the CIA at 7:15 P.M. By 8:00, they were yelling about jurisdiction. At 9:15 P.M. a frightened, infuriated CIA agent named Spacklin shot an FBI agent named Richardson. The incident was hushed up, but both Gardener and Bobbi Anderson would have understood perfectly – the Dallas Police were on the scene and in complete control of the situation.

Chapter 10. Tommyknockers, Knocking at the Door

1

   There was a moment of paralyzed silence in Bobbi's kitchen following the misfire of Ev Hillman's old .45, a silence that was as much mental as it was physical. Gard's wide blue eyes stared into Bobbi's green ones.
   'You tried – ' Bobbi began, and her mind
   (! tried to !)
   produced an echo in Gardener's head. That moment seemed very long. And when it broke, it broke like glass.
   Bobbi had dropped the photon pistol to her side in her surprise. Now she brought it up again. There was to be no second chance. In her agitation, her mind was completely open to Gardener, and he felt her shock at the chance she had given him. She intended that there should be no second chance.
   There was nothing he could do with his right hand; it was under the table. Before she could aim the muzzle of the photon pistol at him, he put his left hand on the edge of the kitchen table and, without thinking, shoved as hard as he could. The table legs squealed harshly on the floor as the table moved. It struck Bobbi's lumped and misshapen chest. At the same instant, a beam of brilliant green light shot from the barrel of the toy gun hooked into Hank Buck's big radio/tape-player. Instead of hitting Gard's own chest, it jerked upward and passed over his shoulder -more than a foot above it, actually, but he could still feel the skin there tingle unpleasantly under the shirt, as if the surface molecules were dancing like drops of water on a hot skillet.
   Gard twisted to the right and dropped down to get away from that beam of what looked like light. His ribs struck the table, struck it hard, and the table rammed Bobbi again, this time even harder. Bobbi's chair rocked backward on its rear legs, teetered, and then both it and she toppled over with a crash. The beam of green light swung upward, and Gardener was momentarily reminded of those guys who stand on airport tarmacs at night, using powerful flashlights to guide planes into their berths.
   He heard a low crunching, crackling sound like splintering plywood coming from overhead, looked up, and saw the photon pistol had drawn a long slit in the kitchen ceiling. Gardener staggered to his feet. Incredibly, his jaws cracked and wavered in another large yawn. His head clanged and echoed with the grassfire alarm of Bobbi's thoughts
   (gun he's got a gun tried to shoot me bastard bastard tried to shoot me gun gun he's got)
   and he tried to shield himself before he went mad. He couldn't. Bobbi was screaming inside his head and as she lay on the floor, pinned for the moment between the table and the overturned chair, she was trying to bring the gun to bear on him for another shot.
   Gardener lifted his foot and shoved the table again, grimacing. It overturned, beers, pills, and boom-box radio all sliding off. Most of the stuff fell on Bobbi. Beer splashed in her face and ran, fizzing and foaming, over her New and Improved transparent skin. The radio hit her neck, then the floor, landing in a shallow puddle of beer.
   Flash, you fucker! Gardener screamed at it. Explode! Self-destruct! Explode, goddammit, ex
   The radio did more than that. It seemed to bulge, and then with a sound like rotten cloth ripping along a seam, it shattered outward in all directions, belching small streaks of green fire like bottled lightning. Bobbi screamed. What he heard with his ears was bad; the sound inside his head was infinitely worse.
   Gardener screamed with her, not hearing himself. He saw that Bobbi's shirt was burning.
   He started for her, not thinking about what he was up to. He dropped the .45 as he did so, without even thinking. This time it did go off, sending a slug into Jim Gardener's ankle, shattering it. Pain blew through his mind like a hot wind. He screamed again. He took a shambling step forward, his head ringing with her horrid mental cries. They would send him mad in a moment. This thought was actually a relief. When he finally went mad, none of this shit would matter anymore.
   Then, for one second, Gard saw his Bobbi for the last time.
   He thought perhaps Bobbi was trying to smile.
   Then the screaming began again. She screamed and tried to beat out the flames that were turning her torso to tallow, and that screaming was too much, far too much, too loud, far too loud; it was unbearable. For them both, he thought. He bent, found the triple-damned pistol on the floor, and picked it up. He needed to use both of his thumbs to get it cocked. The pain in his ankle was bad – he knew that – but for the moment it was lost to him, buried under Bobbi's shrieking agony. He pointed Hillman's pistol at her head.
   Work you goddam thing, oh please, please work
   But if it worked and he missed? There mightn't be another cartridge in the mag.
   His motherfucking hands wouldn't stop shaking.
   He fell to his knees like a man struck with a sudden violent need to pray. He crawled toward Bobbi, who lay shrieking and writhing and burning on the floor. He could smell her; could see black shards of plastic from the radio's case bubbling their way into her flesh. He almost overbalanced and fell on top of her. Then he pressed the .45 against the side of her neck and pulled the trigger.
   Another click.
   Bobbi, screaming and screaming. Screaming inside his head.
   He tried to pull the slide back again. Almost got it. Then it slipped. Snick.
   Please God, oh please let me be her friend this one last time!
   This time he got the slide all the way back. He tried the trigger again. This time the gun went off.
   The scream suddenly became a loud buzz in Gardener's head. He knew he was listening to the mental sound of mortal disconnect. He turned his head upward. A bright stripe of sunlight from the unzipped roof fell across his face, bisecting it. Gardener shrieked.
   Suddenly the buzzing stopped and there was silence.
   Bobbi Anderson – or whatever she had become – was as dead as the pile of autumn-leaf corpses in the control room of the ship, as dead as the galley slaves which had been the ship's drive.
   She was dead and Gardener would have gladly died then, too … but it still wasn't over.
   Not yet.

2

   Kyle Archinbourg was having a Pepsi at Cooder's when the screams began in his head. The bottle dropped from his hand and shattered on the floor as his hands jerked up to his temples. Dave Rutledge, dozing outside Cooder's in a chair which he had caned himself, was tilted back against the building and dreaming weird dreams in alien colors. His eyes snapped open and he sat bolt upright as if someone had touched him with a live wire, scrawny tendons standing out on his throat. His chair slid from under him, and when his head hit the wooden wall of the market, his neck shattered like glass. He was dead before he hit the asphalt. Hazel McCready was making herself a cup of tea. When the screams began, her hands jerked. The one holding the teapot spilled boiling water across the back of the one holding the cup, scalding it badly. She hurled the teapot across the room, screaming in pain and fear. Ashley Ruvall, riding his bike past the town hall, fell over into the street and lay there stunned. Dick Allison and Newt Berringer were playing cribbage at Newt's house, a pretty goddam stupid thing to be doing since each knew what the other held in his hand, but Newt didn't have a Parcheesi board, and besides, they were only passing time, waiting for the telephone to ring, waiting for Bobbi to tell them the drunk was dead and the next phase of the work could begin. Newt was dealing, and he sprayed cards all over the table and floor. Dick bolted to his feet, eyes wild, hair standing on end, and lurched for the door. He ran into the wall three feet to the right of it instead and went sprawling. Doc Warwick was in his study, going over his old diaries. The scream hit him like a wall of cinderblocks being trundled along a set of tracks at brisk speed. His body dumped adrenalin into his heart in lethal quantities, and it blew like a tire. Ad McKeen was in his pickup truck, headed over to Newt's. He ran off the road and into Pooch Bailey's abandoned Hot Dog House. His face hit the steering wheel. He was momentarily stunned, but no more. He had been going slow. He looked around, dazed and terrified. Wendy Fannin was coming up from the cellar with two jars of peach preserves. Since her 'becoming' had started, she ate little else. In the last four weeks she had eaten over ninety jars of peach preserves all by herself. She wailed and threw these two into the air like a spastic juggler. They came down, struck the stairs, shattered. Peaches and sticky juice ran and dripped. Bobbi, she thought numbly, Bobbi Anderson's burning up! Nancy Voss was standing blankly at the back window and thinking about Joe. She missed Joe, missed him a lot. She supposed that the 'becoming' would eventually wipe that longing out -every day it seemed more and more distant – but although it hurt to miss Joe, she didn't want that hurt to stop. It made no sense, but there it was. Then the shrieks began in her head and she jerked forward so suddenly that she broke three of the windowpanes with her forehead.

3

   Bobbi's screams blanketed Haven like an air-raid siren. Everything and everyone came to a complete stop … and then the changed people of Haven drifted into the streets of the village. Their looks were all one look: dismay, pain, and horror at first … then anger.
   They knew who had caused those shrieks of agony.
   While they went on, no other mental voice could be heard, and the only thing anyone could do was listen to them.
   Then came the buzzing death-rattle, and a silence so complete it could only be death.
   A few moments later there was the low pulse of Dick Allison's mind. It was emotionally shaken but clear enough in its command.
   Her farm. Everyone. Stop him before he can do anything else.
   Hazel's voice picked the thought up, strengthening it – the effect was like a second voice joining a first to make a duet.
   Bobbi's farm. Go there. Everybody.
   The beat of Kyle's mental voice made it a trio. The radius of the voice began to spread as it gained strength.
   Everyone. Stop him
   Adley's voice. Newt Berringer's voice.
   – before he can do anything else.
   Those Gardener thought of as the Shed People had welded their voices into one voice of command, clear and beyond denial … not that anyone in Haven even thought of denying it.
   Stop him before he can do anything to the ship. Stop him before he can do anything to the ship.
   Rosalie Skehan left her kitchen sink without bothering to turn off the water running over the cod she had been freshening for supper. She joined her husband, who had been in the back yard chopping wood and who had barely missed amputating several of his toes when Bobbi's screams began. Without a word they went to their car, got in, and started for Bobbi's farm, four miles away. Turning out of their driveway, they nearly struck Elt Barker, who had taken off from his gas station on his old Harley. Freeman Moss was wheeling his pulp-truck. He felt a vague regret – he had sort of liked Gardener. He had what Freeman's pop had called 'sand' – but that wouldn't stop him from tearing the bastard's gizzard out. Andy Bozeman was driving his Oldsmobile Delta 88, his wife sitting beside him with her hands folded neatly on her purse. In it was a molecule-exciter which could raise the spot heat of anything two inches in diameter roughly one thousand degrees in fifteen seconds. She was hoping to boil Gardener like a lobster. Just let me get within five feet she kept thinking. Just five feet, that's all I ask. Beyond that distance, the gadget became unreliable. She knew she could have improved its effectiveness up to half a mile, and now wished she had done so, but if Andy didn't have at least six fresh shirts in the closet, he was like a bear. Bozeman himself wore a frozen sneer of rage, lips skinned back from his few remaining teeth in a dry, spitless grin. I'll whitewash your fence when I get hold of you, fuckface, he thought and pushed the Olds up to ninety, passing a line of slower-moving cars, all headed for Bobbi's place. They all picked up the Command Voice, which was now a hammering litany: STOP HIM BEFORE HE CAN DO ANYTHING TO THE SHIP, STOP HIM BEFORE HE CAN DO ANYTHING TO THE SHIP, STOP HIM, STOP HIM, STOP HIM

4

   Gard stood over Bobbi's corpse, half-mad with pain and grief and shock … and abruptly his jaws snapped open in another wide, tendon-stretching yawn. He reeled to the sink, trying to hop but doing a bad job of it because of the load of dope he'd taken on. Each time he came down on the bad ankle, it felt as if there was a metal claw inside him, relentlessly digging. The dryness in his throat was much worse now. His limbs felt heavy. His thoughts were losing their former acuteness; they seemed to be … spreading, like broken egg yolks. As he reached the sink he yawned again and deliberately took a step on the shattered ankle. The pain slashed through the fog like a sharply honed meat cleaver.
   He barely cracked the tap marked H and got a glass of warm – almost hot – water. Fumbled in the overhead cabinet, knocking a box of cereal and a bottle of maple syrup onto the floor. His hand closed around the carton of salt with the picture of the little girl in the front. When it rains it pours, he thought soupily. That is very true. He fumbled at the pour-spout for what seemed like at least a year and then spilled enough salt into the glass to turn the water cloudy. Stirred it with a finger. Chugged it. The taste was like drowning.
   He retched, bringing up the salt water dyed blue. He saw undissolved chunks of blue pills in the vomitus, as well. Some looked more or less intact. How many did she get me to take?
   Then he threw up again … again … again. It was an encore performance of the projectile vomiting in the woods – some overworked circuit in his brain persistently triggering the gag reflex, a deadly hiccuping that could kill.
   At last it slowed, then stopped.
   Pills in the sink. Bluish water in the sink.
   Blood in the sink. A lot.
   He staggered backward, came down on the bad ankle, screamed, fell on the floor. He found himself looking into one of Bobbi's glazed eyes across the lumpy terrain of the linoleum, and closed his own. Immediately his mind began to drift away … but in that blackness there were voices. No – many voices blended into one. He recognized it. It was the voice of the Shed People.
   They were coming for him, as he supposed he had always known they would … in time.
   Stop him … stop him … stop him!
   Get moving or they won't have to stop you. They'll shoot you or disintegrate you or whatever they want to do to you while you're snoozing on the floor.
   He got to his knees, then managed to get to his feet with the help of the counter. He thought there was a box of No-Doz pills in the bathroom cabinet, but doubted if his stomach would hold them down after the latest insult he had dealt it. Under other circumstances it might have been worth the experiment, but Gardiner was afraid that if the projectile vomiting started again, it might not stop.
   Just keep moving. If it gets really bad, take a few steps on that ankle. That'll sharpen you up in a hurry.
   Would it? He didn't know. All he knew was he had to move fast right now and wasn't sure he would be able to move for long at all.
   He hop-staggered to the kitchen door and looked back one final time. Bobbi, who had rescued Gardener from his demons time after time, was little more than a hulk now. Her shirt was still smoking. In the end he hadn't been able to save her from hers. Just put her out of their reach.
   Shot your best friend. Good fucking deal, uh?
   He put the back of his hand against his mouth. His stomach grunted. He shut his eyes and forced the vomiting down before it could start.
   He turned, opened them again, and started across the living room. The idea was to look for something solid, hop to it, and then hold onto it. His mind kept wanting to be that silver Puffer balloon it became just before he was carried away by the big black twister. He fought it as well as he could and marked things and hopped to them. If there was a God, and if He was
   good, perhaps they all would bear his weight and he would make it across this seemingly endless room like Moses and his troops had the desert.
   He knew that the Shed People would arrive soon. He knew that if he was still here when they did, his goose wasn't just cooked; it was nuked. They were afraid he might do something to the ship. Well, yes. Now that you mentioned it, that was part of what he had in mind, and he knew he would be safest there.
   He also knew he couldn't go there. Not yet.
   He had business in the shed first.
   He made it out onto the porch where he and Bobbi had sat up late on so many summer evenings, Peter asleep on the boards between them. Just sitting here, drinking beers, the Red Sox playing their nightly nine at Fenway, or Comiskey Park, or some damn place, but playing mostly inside Bobbi's radio; tiny baseball men dodging between tubes and circuits. Sitting here with cans of beer in a bucket of cold well water. Talking about life, death, God, politics, love, literature. Maybe even once or twice about the possibility of life on other planets. Gardener seemed to remember such a conversation or two, but perhaps that was only his tired mind goofing with him. They had been happy here. It seemed a very long time ago.
   It was Peter his tired mind fixed on. Peter was really the first goal, the first piece of furniture he had to hop to. This wasn't exactly true – the attempted rescue of David Brown had to come prior to ending Peter's torment, but David Brown did not offer him the emotional pulse-point he required; he had never seen David Brown in his life. Peter was different.
   'Good old Peter,' he remarked to the still hot afternoon (was it yet afternoon? By God it was). He reached the porch steps and then disaster struck. His balance suddenly deserted him. His weight came down on the bad ankle. This time he could almost see the splintered ends of the bones digging into each other. Gardener uttered a high, mewling shriek – not the scream of a woman but of a very young girl in desperate trouble. He grabbed for the porch railing as he collapsed sideways.
   During her frantic early July, Bobbi had fixed the railing between the kitchen and the cellar, but had never bothered with the one between the porch and the dooryard. It had been rickety for years, and when Gard put his weight on it, both of the rotted uprights snapped. Ancient wood-dust puffed out into the summer sunlight … along with the heads of a few startled termites. Gard pitched sideways off the porch, yelling miserably, and fell into the dooryard with a solid meat thump. He tried to get up, then wondered why he was trying. The world was swaying in front of his eyes. He saw first two mailboxes, then three. He decided to forget the whole thing and go to sleep. He closed his eyes.

5

   In this long, strange and painful dream he was having, Ev Hillman felt/saw Gardener fall, and heard Gardener's thought
   (forget the whole thing go to sleep)
   clearly. Then the dream began to break up and that seemed good; it was hard to dream. It made him hurt all over, made him ache. And it hurt to combat the green light. If sunlight was too bright
   (he remembered it a little sunlight)
   you could close your eyes but the green light was inside, always inside – a third eye that saw and a green light that burned. There were other minds here.
   One belonged to THE WOMAN ' the other to THE LESS-MIND which had once been Peter. Now THE LESS-MIND Could only howl. It howled sometimes for BOBBI to come and let it free from the green light but mostly it only howled as it burned in the torment of the draining. THE WOMAN also screamed for release, but sometimes her thoughts cycled into appalling images of hate that Ev could barely stand. So: yes. Better
   (better)
   to go to sleep
   (easier)
   and let it all go but there was David.
   David was dying. Already his thoughts – which Ev had received clearly at first – were falling into a deepening spiral that would end first in unconsciousness and then, swiftly, in death.
   So Ev fought the dark.
   Fought it and began to call:
   Get up! Get up! You out there in sunlight! I remember sunlight! David Brown deserves his time of sunlight. So get up! Get up! Get UP! GET