36

   Hazel screamed and bolted upright in her old swivel chair. A tremendous backflow of energy surged through the earplug. She clawed at it – and missed. The plug was in her left ear. From her right one came a sudden squirt of greenish, soupy liquid. It looked like radioactive oatmeal. For a moment her brains continued to hose out of her head through her ear, and then the pressure became too great. The right side of her skull pushed open like a strange flower and her brains hit her Currier&Ives wall calendar with a liquid smack.
   Hazel fell forward limply onto her desk, her hands outstretched, her glazing eyes staring unbelievingly at nothing.
   The ghetto-blaster radio buzzed for a while and then stopped.

37
   Bobbi? Gardener thought, looking around wildly.
   Fuck you, old hoss, an amused voice returned. That's all the help you get – after all, I'm dead, remember?
   I remember, Bobbi.
   One piece of advice: watch out for rabid vacuum cleaners.
   Then she was gone, if she had ever been there. From behind him came the rending, grinding crash of a tree falling over. The woods between here and the farm had begun to sound like a big open-hearth fireplace. Now he could hear voices from behind him, both mental and shouted aloud. Tommyknocker voices.
   But Bobbi was gone.
   You imagined it, Gard. The part of you that wants Bobbi – that NEEDS Bobbi – is trying to reinvent her, that's all.
   Yeah, and what about the hand? The hand over my hand? Did I make that up? I couldn't have hit that thing all by myself. Annie Oakley couldn't have hit that thing without help.
   But the voices – those in the air and those inside his head – were getting closer. So was the fire. Gardener drew in a throatful of smoke, put the Tomcat in gear again, and got going. There was no time for debate right now.
   Gard headed for the ship. Five minutes later he came out in the clearing.

38

   'Hazel?' Newt cried in a kind of religious terror. 'Hazel? Hazel?'
   Yes, Hazel! Dick Allison shouted back at him furiously, and could restrain himself no longer. He threw himself upon Newt. Stupid bastard!
   Whoreboy! Newt spat back, and the two of them rolled about on the ground, green eyes glaring, grabbing for each other's throats. This was not at all logical under the circumstances, but any resemblance between the Tommyknockers and the likes of Mr Spock was purely coincidental.
   Dick's hands found the wattled folds of Newt's throat and began to squeeze. His fingers punched through the flesh and green blood bubbled up over Dick's fingers. He began to raise Newt up and slam him back down. Newt's struggles lessened … lessened … lessened. Dick choked him until he was quite dead.
   With that done, Dick discovered that he felt a little better.

39

   Gard dismounted the Tomcat, staggered, lost his balance, fell down. At that same instant, a buzzing, snarling projectile blasted through the air where he had been a moment before. Gardener stared stupidly at the Electrolux vacuum cleaner which had nearly torn his head off.
   It bulleted across the clearing like a torpedo, banked, and came back at him. There was something on one end that distorted the air into a silvery ripple -something like a propeller.
   Gardener thought of that round, chewed hole in the bottom of the shed door and all the spittle in his mouth dried up.
   Watch out for
   It dive-bombed him, the cutter attachment whining and buzzing like the motor of a kid's gas-powered fighter plane. The little wheels, which were supposed to make the weary housewife's work easier as she trundled her faithful vacuum cleaner along behind her from room to room, spun lazily in the air. The hole where one was supposed to clip various attachment hoses gaped like an open mouth.
   Gardener made as if to dive to the right, then held position a moment longer – if he jumped too soon, the vacuum cleaner would jog with him and chew through his guts as easily as it had chewed through the shed door when Bobbi called it.
   He waited, feinted left this time, then threw himself to the right at the last moment. He thudded painfully into the dirt. The bones in his shattered ankle ground together. Gardener screamed miserably.
   The Electrolux crashed. The propeller ate dirt. Then it bounced, like a plane rising into the air again after touching down too hard on a runway. It whistled off toward the great canted dish of the ship and then banked around for another run at Gardener. Now the cable it had used to run the buttons was emerging from the hose attachment hole. The cable whistled in the air – a dry, snakelike sound that Gardener could just hear under the rumble-roar of the fire. The cable whickered, and for a moment Gardener was reminded of a wild west rodeo his mother had taken him to once (in that rootin', tootin' trail-drive town of Portland, Maine). There had been a cowboy in a tall white hat who had done rope tricks. In one of the tricks, he had floated a big lasso at ankle height, dancing in and out of its circle while playing 'My Gal Sal' on a harmonica. The cable whirling out from the attachment hole looked like that rope.
   Fucker'll cut your head off just as slick as shit through a goose, if you let it, Gard ole Gard.
   The Electrolux whistled at him, shadow tracking beneath.
   On his knees, Gardener held out the Sonic Blaster and fired. The vacuum cleaner sheared off as he aimed, but Gardener winged it just the same. A chunk of chrome above a rear wheel blew off. The cable drew a wavering line through the dirt.
   get him
   yes get him before
   before he can hurt the ship
   Closer. The voices were closer. He had to end this.
   The vacuum cleaner skirted a tree and circled back. It tilted upward, climbed, then dropped in a kamikaze power dive, its chopping blade turning faster and faster.
   Gardener steadied himself by thinking of Ted the Power Man.
   You oughtta take a look at this shit, Teddy-boy, he thought crazily. You'd go ape for it! Better living through electricity!
   He pulled the trigger on the toy gun, saw the green pencil-beam splash off the vacuum cleaner's snout, and then shoved himself forward, digging with both feet, and never mind the shattered ankle. The Electrolux struck the ground beside the Tomcat and buried itself three feet deep in the dirt. Black smoke jetted from the protruding end in a tight, compact little cloud. It made a thick farting noise and died.
   Gardener got to his feet, holding onto the Tomcat for support, the Sonic Space Blaster dangling from his right hand. The plastic barrel, he saw, was partially melted. It wasn't going to be any good much longer. The same was undoubtedly true of himself.
   The vacuum cleaner was dead – dead and sticking out of the ground like a dud bomb. But there were plenty of other gadgets on their way, some flying, some trundling enthusiastically through the woods on makeshift wheels. He couldn't wait around.
   What was it the old man had been thinking at the end? The last thing … and then … Deliverance
   'Good word,' Gardener said hoarsely. 'Dee-liverance. Great word.'
   Also, he realized, the name of a novel. A novel by a poet. James Dickey. A novel about city men who had to get slugged, mugged, and buggered before discovering they were good ole boys after all. But there was a line in that book … one of the men looking at one of the others and telling him calmly, 'Machines are gonna fail, Lewis.'
   Gardener certainly hoped so.
   He hopped over to the lean-to, then pushed the button which started the sling's descent. He was going to have to go down the cable hand over hand. It was stupid, but that was Tommyknocker technology for you. The motor began to whine. The cable began to descend. Gardener hopped over to the cut and stared down. If he could actually work his way down there, he would be safe.
   Safe among the Tommyknocker dead.
   The motor stopped. He could faintly see the useless sling at the bottom. The voices were closer, the fire was closer, and he sensed a rogue's gallery of gadgets closing in. Didn't matter. He had shot the chutes, climbed the ladders, and somehow got to the finish line before the others.
   Congratulations, Mr Gardener! You've won a flying saucer! Do you want to quit or go for the all-expenses-paid vacation in deep space?
   'Fuck,' Gardener croaked, tossing the half-melted toy gun aside. 'Let's do it.'
   That also had reverberations.
   He seized the cable and swung out over the cut. As he did, it came to him. Sure. Gary Gilmore. It was what Gary Gilmore said just before stepping in front of the firing squad in Utah.

40

   He was halfway down when he realized the last of his physical strength had run out. If he didn't do something quick, he would fall.
   He began to descend more quickly, cursing their thoughtless decision to put the motor controls so far from the trench. Hot, stinging sweat ran into his eyes. His muscles jumped and fluttered. His stomach was beginning to do long, lazy flips again. His hands slipped … held … slipped again. Then, suddenly, the cable was running through his hands like hot butter. He squeezed it, screaming in pain as the friction built. A steel thread which had popped up from one of the cable's steel pigtails punched through his palm.
   'God!' Gardener screamed. 'Oh dear God!'
   He thudded neatly into the descending sling on his bad foot. Pain roared up his leg, through his stomach, through his neck. It seemed to rip off the top of his head. His knee buckled and struck the side of the ship. The kneecap popped like a bottlecap.
   Gardener felt himself graying out and fought it. He saw the hatch. It was still open. The air-exchangers were still droning.
   His left leg was a frozen wall of pain. He looked down at it and saw it had become magically shorter than his right leg. And it looked … well, it looked croggled, like an old stogie that has been carried around too long in someone's pocket.
   'Christ, I'm failing apart,' he whispered, and then, amazing himself, he laughed. It did have this to recommend it: it was a hell of a lot more interesting than just stepping off a breakwater with a hangover would have been.
   There was a high, sweet buzzing sound from overhead. Something else had arrived. Gardener didn't wait to see what it was. Instead, he pushed himself into the hatch and began to crawl up the round corridor. The light from the walls glowed softly on the planes of his haggard face, and that light – white, not green – was kind. Someone seeing Gardener in that light might almost have believed he was not dying. Almost.

41

   Late last night and the night before,
   (over the hills and through the woods)
   Tommyknockers, Tommyknockers, knocking at the door.
   (to grandmother's house we go)
   They look so quiet, but they ain't quite dead,
   (the horse knows the way to carry the sleigh)
   You get that Tommyknocker flu inside your head!
   (over the frozen fields of snow)
   Doggerel chiming in his head, Gardener crawled up the corridor, pausing once to turn his head and vomit. The air in here was still pretty fucking rank. He thought a miner's canary would already be lying at the bottom of its cage, alive but only by an inch or so.
   But the machinery, Gard … do you hear it? Do you hear how much louder it's gotten just since you came in?
   Yes. Louder, more confident. Nor was it just the air-exchangers. Deeper in the ship, other machinery was humming into life. The lights were brightening. The ship was feeding off whatever was left of him. Let it.
   He reached the first interior hatchway. He looked back. Frowned at the hatch giving on the trench. They would be arriving in the clearing very soon now; perhaps already had. They might try to follow him in. Judging by the awed reactions of his 'helpers' (even hard-headed Freeman Moss hadn't been completely immune), he didn't think they would … but it wouldn't do to forget how desperate they were. He wanted to be sure the loonies were out of his life once and for all. God knew he hadn't much left; he didn't need those assholes fucking up what little there was.
   Fresh pain blossomed in his head, making his eyes water, tugging at his brain like a fishhook. Bad, but nothing compared to the pain in his ankle and leg. He was not surprised to see the main hatchway had irised. Could he open it again, if he wanted to? He somehow doubted it. He was locked in now … locked in with the dead Tommyknockers.
   Dead? Are you sure they're dead?
   No; to the contrary. He was sure they were not. They had been lively enough to start it all up again. Lively enough to turn Haven into one weird munitions factory. Dead?
   'Un-fucking-likely,' Gardener croaked, and pulled himself through another hatchway and into the corridor beyond. Machinery pounded and hummed in the guts of the ship; when he touched the glowing, curved wall, he could feel the vibration.
   Dead? Oh, no. You're crawling around inside the oldest haunted house in the universe, Gard ole Gard.
   He thought he heard a noise and turned around quickly, heart speeding up, saliva glands squirting bitter juice into his mouth. Nothing there, of course. Except there was. I had a perfectly good reason to raise this fuss; I met the Tommyknockers, and they were us.
   'Help me, God,' Gardener said. He flicked his stinking hair out of his eyes. Over him was the spidery-thin ladder with its wide-spaced rungs … each with that deep, disquieting dip in the middle. That ladder would rotate to the vertical when … if … the ship ever heeled over to its proper horizontal flight position.
   There's a smell in here now. Air-exchangers or not, a smell, it's the smell of death, I think. Long death. And insanity.
   'Please help me, God, just a little help, okay? Just a few breaks for the kid is all I'm asking for, 'kay?'
   Still conversing to God, Gardener pressed onward. Shortly he reached the control room and lowered himself into it.

42

   The Tommyknockers stood at the edge of the clearing, looking at Dick. More arrived each minute. They arrived – then just stopped, like simple computer devices whose few programmed operations had all been performed.
   They stood looking from the canted plane of the ship … to Dick … back to the ship … to Dick again. They were like a crowd of sleepwalkers at a tennis match. Dick could sense the others, who had gone back to the village to run the border defenses, also simply waiting … looking through the eyes of those who were actually here.
   Behind them, growing closer, gaining strength, came the fire. Already the clearing had begun to fill with tendrils of smoke. A few people coughed … but no one moved.
   Dick looked back at them, puzzled – what, exactly, did they want from him? Then he understood. He was the last of the Shed People. The rest of them were gone, and directly or indirectly, the death of each had been Gardener's fault. It was really inexplicable, and more than a little frightening. Dick became more and more convinced that nothing quite like this had happened in all of the Tommyknockers' long, long experience.
   They're looking at me because I'm the last. I'm supposed to tell them what to do next.
   But there was nothing they could do. There had been a race, and Gardener should have lost, but somehow he hadn't, and now there was nothing to do but wait. Watch and wait and hope that the ship would kill him somehow before he could do anything. Before
   The Tommyknockers
   A large hand suddenly reached into Dick Allison's head and squeezed the meat of his brain. His hands flew up to his temples, the fingers splayed into stiff, galvanic spider-shapes. He tried to scream but was unable. Below him, in the clearing, he was vaguely aware that people were falling to their knees in ranks, like pilgrims witnessing a miracle or a divine visitation.
   The ship had begun to vibrate – the sound filled the air with a thick, subaural hum.
   Dick was aware of this … and then, as his eyes blew out of his head like half-congealed chunks of moldy jelly, he knew no more. Then, or ever.

43

   Little help, God, we got a deal?
   He sat in the middle of the canted hexagonal room, his twisted, broken leg stuck out in front of him (croggled, that word wouldn't go away, his leg had been croggled), near where the thick mastercable came out of the gasket in the floor.
   Little help for the kid. I know I'm not much, shot my wife, good fucking deal, shot my best friend, another good fucking deal, a New and Improved Good Fucking Deal, you might say, but please, God, I need an assist right now.
   That was no exaggeration, either. He needed more than just a little. The thick cable split off into eight thinner ones, each ending not in an earplug but in a set of headphones. If he had been playing Russian roulette back in Bobbi's shed, this was like sticking his head into a cannon and asking someone to pull the lanyard.
   But it had to be done.
   He picked up one set of phones, noticing again how the centers bulged inward, and then looked toward the tangle of brown, sere bodies in the far corner of the room.
   Tommyknockers? Hey-nonny-nonny nonsense name or not, it was still too good for them. Cavemen from space, that was all they had been. Long claws operating machinery they made but didn't even try to understand. Toes like the spurs on fighting cocks. This thing was a malignant tumor that needed quick removal.
   Please God, let my little idea be right.
   Could he tap all of them? That was really the $64,000 question, wasn't it? If the 'becoming' was a closed system – something on the skin of the ship simply biodegrading into the atmosphere – the answer was probably no. But Gardener had come to think – or perhaps only to hope – that it was more, that it was an open system where the ship fed the humans. causing them to 'become,' and the humans fed the ship so it could … what? Come again, of course. Could one use the word resurrection? Sorry, no. Too noble. If he was right, this was a kind of freak-show parthenogenesis whose proper place was under tawdry carnival lights and in cheap tabloids, not in undying myths or religious creeds. An open system … a slave system … quite literally a go-fuck-yourself system.
   Please, God. Little help right now.
   Gardener donned the headphones.
   It happened instantaneously. No sensation of pain this time, only a great white radiance. The lights in the control room flashed up to full bright. One of the walls turned into a window again, showing the smoky sky and the fringe of trees. And then another of the room's eight walls went transparent … another … another. In a space of seconds Gard seemed to be sitting in an open space with the sky above him and the trench with its silvery netting on either side. The ship seemed to have disappeared. He had a 360-degree view.
   Motors kicked in one by one and cycled up to full running pitch.
   A bell was ringing somewhere. Huge thudding relays kicked over one by one, making the metal deck shiver under him.
   The feeling of power was incredible; he felt as though the Mississippi was running through his head at flood level. He sensed it was killing him, but that was okay.
   I've tapped them all, Gardener thought faintly. Oh God, thank you God I've tapped them all! It worked!
   The ship began to tremble. To vibrate. The vibration became spasms of racking shudders. The time had come.
   Baring the last few of his teeth, Gardener prepared to reach down and grasp his own bootstraps.

44

   He had tapped all of them, but it was Dick Allison, because of his greater evolution, and Hazel's forty or so border-watchers back in town who bore the brunt of the ship's powering-up process – these latter were all tied together neatly in one unified web, and the ship simply reached out for it.
   They slumped over, blood trickling from their eyes and noses, and died as the ship sucked their brains up.
   The ship drew from the Tommyknockers in the woods as well, and several of the older ones died; most, however, felt only an excruciating pain in their heads as they either knelt or lay, half-fainting, around the perimeter of the clearing. A few understood that the fire was very close now. As the wind freshened, that burning lady's fan spread … and spread. Smoke ran across the clearing in thick grayish-white clouds. The fire crackled and thundered.

45

   Now, Gardener thought.
   He felt something in his mind slip, catch, slip … and catch firmly. It was like a gearshift lever. Now there was pain, but it was bearable.
   THEY'RE feeling most of the pain, he thought faintly.
   The sides of the trench appeared to move. At first just a little. Then a little more. There was a grinding, squealing sound.
   Gardener bore down, his brow locked in a tremendous frown, his eyes squeezed into slits.
   The silvery mesh began to slip past, slowly but steadily. Not that it was moving at all, of course; it was the ship that was moving; that grinding noise was the sound of it pulling itself free of the bedrock which had held it so long.
   Going up, he thought incoherently. Ladies' lingerie, hosiery, notions, and be sure to visit our pet department
   It was gaining speed, the trench walls passing more quickly to either side. The sky widened out ahead – it was a dull gunmetal color. Sparks twisted by like formations of tiny burning birds.
   He brimmed with exaltation.
   Gardener thought of looking out of a subway window as the train left the station, slowly at first, then beginning to speed up – how the tile walls seemed to unroll backwards like the strip of paper in a player piano, how you could read the ads as they passed from left to right – Annie, A Chorus Line, These Times Demand The Times, Touch the Velvet. Then into the darkness where there was only movement and a vague sensation of black walls rushing past.
   I'm going, yes, going now, going
   A Klaxon went off three times, nearly deafening him, making him shriek; fresh blood spattered into his lap. The ship shuddered and rumbled and squealed and dragged itself out of the earth's crypt; it rose into thickening bands of smoke and hazy sunlight, its polished flank coming out of the trench, out and out and up and up, a moving metal wall. One standing right next to this insane sight might have been tempted to believe that the earth was creating a stainless-steel mountain or injecting a titanium wall into the air.
   As the arc of the edge grew broader and broader, it reached the edges of the trench Bobbi and Gardener had dug steadily wider – ripping at the earth with their smart-stupid tools like half-wits trying to perform a Cesarean section.
   Up and out and out and up. Rocks squealed. The earth moaned. Dust and the smoke of friction fumed from the trench. Up close the illusion of an emerging mountain or wall held, but even from such a short distance away as the edge of the clearing, the thing's circular shape was revealed ~ the titanic shape of the saucer, now emerging from the earth like a great engine. It was silent, but the clearing was filled with the coarse thunder of breaking rock. Up and out it came, cutting the trench wider and wider, its shadow gradually covering the whole clearing and burning woods.
   Its leading edge – the one Bobbi had stumbled over – sheared off the top of the tallest spruce in the forest and sent it tumbling and crashing to the ground. And still the ship birthed itself from the womb which had held it so long; continued until it covered the whole sky and was reborn.
   Then it stopped cutting the trench wider; a moment later there was actually a gap between the edges of the trench and the edge of the emerging ship. Its center had at last been reached and passed.
   The ship rumbled out of the smoky trench, emerging into the smoky sunshine, and at last the squealing, rumbling sounds ceased, and there was daylight between the ground and the ship.
   It was out.
   It rose on a slanted, canted angle, and then came to the horizontal, crushing trees with its unknown, unknowable weight, bursting their trunks open. Sap sprayed the air with thin amber veils.
   It moved with slow, ponderous elegance through the burning day, cutting a swath along the top of the trees like a clipper trimming a hedge. Then it hovered, as if waiting for something.