The Tommyknockers Read online

  Anderson began with her stumble, told of coming back and digging out more of the ship--enough to realize she had found something utterly unique--and then going back a third time. She did not tell Gardener about Chuck the Woodchuck, who had been dead but not flyblown; nor about Peter's shrinking cataract; nor about the visit to Etheridge, the vet. She passed over those things smoothly, saying only that when she came back from her first whole day of work on the thing, she had found Peter dead on the front porch.

  "It was as if he'd gone to sleep," Anderson said, and there was a note of schmaltz in her voice so unlike the Bobbi he knew that Gardener looked up sharply ... and then looked down at his hands quickly. Anderson was crying a little.

  After a few moments Gardener asked: "What then?"

  "Then you came up the road just in time to grab me when I passed out," Anderson said, smiling.

  "I don't understand what you mean."

  "Peter died on the twenty-eighth of June," Anderson said. She had never had much practice as a liar, but thought this one came out sounding smooth and natural. "That's the last day I remember clearly and sequentially. Until you showed up last night, that is." She smiled openly and guilelessly at Gardener, but this was also a lie--her clear, sequential, unjumbled memories ended the day before, on June 27th, with her standing above that titantic thing buried in the earth, gripping the handle of the shovel. They ended with her whispering, "Everything's fine," and then beginning to dig. There was more to the tale, all right, all kinds of more, but she couldn't remember it sequentially and what she could remember would have to be edited ... carefully edited. For instance, she couldn't really tell Gard about Peter. Not yet. They had told her she couldn't, but on that one she didn't need any telling.

  They had also told her Jim Gardener would have to be watched very, very closely. Not for long, of course--soon Gard would be

  (part of us)

  on the team. Yes. And it would be great to have him on the team, because if there was anyone in the world Anderson loved, it was Jim Gardener.

  Bobbi, who are "they"?

  The Tommyknockers. That word, which had risen out of the queer opaqueness in Gard's mind like a silvery bubble, was as good a name as any, wasn't it? Sure. Better than some.

  "So what now?" Gardener asked, lighting her last cigarette. He looked both dazed and wary. "I'm not saying I can swallow all this ..." He laughed a bit wildly. "Or maybe it's just that my throat's not big enough for it all to go down at once."

  "I understand," Anderson said. "I think the main reason I remember so little about the last week or so is that it's all so ... weird. It's like having your mind strapped to a rocket-sled. "

  She didn't like lying to Gard; it made her uneasy. But all the lying would be done soon enough. Gard would be ... would be ...

  Well ... persuaded.

  When he saw the ship. When he felt the ship.

  "No matter how much I do or don't believe, I'm forced to believe most of it, I guess."

  " 'When you remove the impossible, whatever remains is the truth, no matter how improbable.' "

  "You got that too, did you?"

  "The shape of it. I might not have even known what it was if I hadn't heard you say it once or twice."

  Gardener nodded. "Well, I guess it fits the situation we have here. If I don't believe the evidence of my senses, I have to believe I'm crazy. Although God knows there are enough people in the world who would be more than happy to testify that's just what I am."

  "You're not crazy, Gard," Anderson said quietly, and put her hand over his. He turned his own over and squeezed it.

  "Well ... you know, a man who shot his wife ... there are people who'd say that's pretty persuasive evidence of insanity. You know?"

  "Gard, that was eight years ago."

  "Sure. And that guy I elbowed in the tit, that was eight days ago. I also chased a guy down Arberg's hall and across his dining room, with an umbrella, did I tell you that? My behavior over the last five years has been increasingly self-destructive--"

  "Hi, folks, and welcome once more to the National Self-Pity Hour!" Bobbi Anderson chirruped brightly. "Tonight's guest is--"

  "I was going to kill myself yesterday morning," Gardener said quietly. "If I hadn't gotten the idea--really strong idea--that you were in trouble, I'd be fishfood now."

  Anderson looked at him closely. Her hand slowly tightened down on his until it was hurting. "You mean it, don't you? Christ!"

  "Sure. You want to know how bad it's gotten? It seemed like the sanest thing I could do under the circumstances."

  "Come off it."

  "I'm serious. Then this idea came. The idea you were in trouble. So I put it off long enough to call you. But you weren't here."

  "I was probably in the woods," Anderson said. "And you came running." She lifted his hand to her mouth and kissed it gently. "If this whole crazy business doesn't mean anything else, at least it means you're still alive, you asshole."

  "As always, I'm impressed by the almost Gallic range of your compliments, Bobbi."

  "If you ever do do it, I'll see it's written on your tombstone, Gard. ASSHOLE in letters carved deep enough so they won't wear off for at least a century."

  "Well, thanks," Gardener said, "but you won't have to worry about it for a while. Because I still got it."

  "What?"

  "That feeling that you're in trouble."

  She tried to look away, tried to take her hand away.

  "Look at me, Bobbi, goddammit."

  At last, reluctantly, she did, her lower lip slightly pushed out in that stubborn expression he knew so well--but didn't she also look just the tiniest bit uneasy? He thought so.

  "All of this seems so wonderful--house-power from D-cells, books that write themselves, God knows what else--so why should I feel that you're in trouble?"

  "I don't know," she said softly, and got up to do the dishes.

  9

  "Of course I worked until I damn near dropped, that's one thing," Anderson said. Her back was to him now, and he had a feeling she liked it that way fine. Dishes rattled in hot, soapy water. "And I didn't just say 'Aliens from space, ho-hum, cheap clean electric power and mental telepathy, big deal,' you know. My mailman's cheating on his wife, I know about it--I don't want to know about it, hell, I'm no snoop, but it was just there, Gard, right there in the front of his head. Not seeing it would be like not seeing a neon sign a hundred feet high. Christ, I've been rocking and reeling."

  "I see," he said, and thought: She's not telling the truth, at least not all of it, and I don't think she even knows it. "The question remains: what do we do now?"

  "I don't know." She glanced around, saw Gardener's raised eyebrows, and said, "Did you think I was going to give you the answer in a neat little essay, five hundred words or less? I can't. I've got some ideas, but that's all. Maybe not even very good ones. I suppose the first thing is to take you out so you can

  (be persuaded)

  have a look at it. Afterward ... well ..."

  Gardener looked at her for a long time. Bobbi did not drop her eyes this time; they were open and guileless. But things were wrong here, off-note and off-key. Things like that note of fake schmaltz in Bobbi's voice when she spoke of Peter. Maybe the tears had been real, but that tone ... it had been all wrong.

  "All right. Let's go take a look at your ship in the earth."

  "But let's have lunch first," Anderson said placidly.

  "You're hungry again?"

  "Sure. Aren't you?"

  "Christ, no!"

  "Then I'll eat for both of us," Anderson said, and she did.

  10.

  GARDENER DECIDES

  1

  "Good God." Gardener sat down heavily on a fresh stump. It felt like a case of sit down or fall down. Like being punched hard in the stomach. No; it was stranger and more radical than that. It was more like someone had slammed the hose of an industrial vacuum cleaner into his mouth and turned it on, sucking all the wind out of his lungs in
a second's time. "Good God," he repeated in a tiny breathless voice. It seemed to be all of which he was capable.

  "It's something, isn't it?"

  They were halfway down the slope, not far from where Anderson had found the dead chuck. Before, the slope had been pretty heavily wooded. Now a lane had been cut through the trees to admit a strange vehicle which Gardener almost recognized: It stood at the edge of Anderson's dig, and it was dwarfed both by the excavation and by the thing which was being unearthed.

  The trench was now two hundred feet long and twenty feet wide at either end. The cut bulged to thirty feet or so in width for perhaps forty feet of the slit's total length--that bulge made a shape like a woman's hips seen in silhouette. The gray leading edge of the ship, its curvature now triumphantly revealed, rose out of this bulge like the edge of a giant steel tea saucer.

  "Good God," Gardener gasped again. "Look at that thing."

  "I have been," Bobbi said, a distant little smile playing over her lips. "For over a week I've been looking at it. It's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen. And it's going to solve a lot of problems, Gard. 'There came a man on horseback, riding and riding--' "

  That cut through the fog. Gardener looked around at Anderson, who might have been drifting in the dark places from which that incredible thing had come. The look on her face chilled Gardener. Bobbi's eyes were not just far-off. They were vacant windows.

  "What do you mean?"

  "Hmmm?" Anderson looked around as if coming out of a deep daze.

  "What do you mean, a man on horseback?"

  "I mean you, Gard. I mean me. But I think ... I think I mostly mean you. Come on down here and take a look. "

  Anderson started down the slope quickly, with the casual grace of previous experience. She got maybe twenty feet before she realized Gardener wasn't with her. She looked back. He had gotten up from the stump, but that was all.

  "It won't bite you," Anderson said.

  "No? What will it do to me, Bobbi?"

  "Nothing! They're dead, Gard! Your Tommyknockers were real enough, but they were mortal,and this ship has been here for at least fifty million years. The glacier broke around it! It covered it but it couldn't move it. Not even all those tons of ice could move it. So the glacier broke around it. You can look into the cut and see it, like a frozen wave. Dr. Borns from the university would go batshit over this ... but they're dead enough, Gard."

  "Have you been inside?" Gardener asked, not moving.

  "No. The hatch--I think, I feel, there is one--is still buried. But that doesn't change what I know. They're dead, Gard. Dead."

  "They're dead, you haven't been in the ship, but you're inventing like Thomas Edison on a speed trip and you can read minds. So I repeat: what's it going to do to me?"

  So she told the biggest lie of all--told it calmly, with no regret at all. She said: "Nothing you don't want it to." And started down again, without looking back to see if he was following.

  Gardener hesitated, his head throbbing miserably, and then he started down after her.

  2

  The vehicle by the trench was Bobbi's old truck--only before that, it had been a Country Squire station wagon. Anderson had driven it from New York when she came to college. That had been thirteen years ago, and it had not been new then. She had run it on the.road until 1984, when even Elt Barker down at the Shell station, Haven's only garage and gas stop, would no longer slap an inspection sticker on it. Then, in one weekend of frenzied work--they had been drunk for most of it, and Gardener still thought it something of a miracle that they hadn't blown themselves up with Frank Garrick's old blowtorch rig--they had cut off the roof of the wagon from above the front seat on back, turning it into a half-assed truck.

  "Lookit that, Gard-ole-Gard," Bobbi Anderson had proclaimed solemnly, staring at the remains of the wagon. "We done made ourselves an honest-to-God fiel'-bomber." Then she leaned over and threw up. Gardener had picked her up and carried her onto the porch (Peter twining anxiously around his feet the whole way). By the time he got her there, she had passed out. He put her down carefully, and then passed out himself.

  The half-assed truck had been a tough old Detroit rod-bucket, but it had finally gone toes-up. Anderson had put it on blocks at one end of the garden, claiming no one would want to buy it even for parts. Gardener thought she just felt sentimental.

  Now the truck had been resurrected--although it hardly looked like the same vehicle, except for the blue paint and the remains of fake wood siding that had been one of the Country Squire's trademarks. The driver's door and most of the front end were gone entirely. The latter had been replaced with a weird conglomeration of digging and earth-moving equipment. To Gardener's disturbed eye, Anderson's truck now looked like a deranged child's bulldozer. Something which looked like a giant screwdriver blade protruded from the place where the grille had been. The engine looked like something which had been yanked whole from an old D-9 Caterpillar.

  Bobbi, where did you get that engine? How did you move it from where it was then to where it is now? Good Jesus!

  Yet all this, remarkable as it was, could hold his eye for only a moment or two. He walked across the ripped earth to where Bobbi was standing, hands in pockets, looking into the slash in the earth.

  "What do you think, Gard?"

  He didn't know what he thought, and was speechless anyway.

  The excavation went down to an amazing depth: thirty or forty feet, he guessed. If the angle of the sun hadn't been exactly right, he wouldn't have been able to see the bottom of the trench at all. There was a space of about three feet between the side of the excavation and the smooth hull of the ship. That hull was utterly unbroken. There were no numbers, symbols, pictures, or hieroglyphs on it.

  At the bottom of the cut, the thing disappeared into the earth. Gardener shook his head. Opened his mouth, found he still had no words, and shut it again.

  The part of the hull Anderson had first tripped over and then tried to wriggle with her hand--thinking it might be a tin can left over from a loggers' weekend--was now directly in front of Gardener's nose. He could easily have reached across the three-foot space and grasped it as Anderson herself had just two weeks ago ... with this difference: when Anderson first grasped the edge of the ship in the earth, she had been on her knees. Gardener was standing. He had vaguely noted the going-over this slope had taken--rough, muddy terrain, trees that had been cut and moved aside, stumps that had been pulled like rotten teeth--but beyond that momentary observation, he had dismissed it. He would have taken a closer look if Anderson had told him how much of the slope she had simply cut away. The hill had made the thing harder to get out ... so she had simply removed half the hillside to make it easier.

  Flying saucer, Gardener thought faintly, and then: I did jump. This is a death fantasy. Any second now I'll come to and find myself trying to breathe salt water. Any second now. Just any old second.

  Except that nothing of the sort did or would happen, because all this was real. It was a flying saucer.

  And that, somehow, was the worst. Not a spaceship, or an alien craft, or an extraterrestrial vehicle. It was a flying saucer. They had been debunked by the Air Force, by thinking scientists, by psychologists. No self-respecting science-fiction writer would put one in his story, and if he did, no self-respecting editor would touch it with a ten-foot pole. Flying saucers had gone out of vogue in the genre at roughly the same time as Edgar Rice Burroughs and Otis Adelbert Kline. It was the oldest wheeze in the book. Flying saucers were more than passe; the idea itself was a joke, given mental house-room these days only by crackpots, religious eccentrics, and, of course, the tabloid newspapers, where any week's budget of news had to include at least one saucer story, such as SIX-YEAR-OLD PREGNANT BY SAUCER ALIEN, TEARFUL MOTHER REVEALS.

  These stories, for some odd reason, all seemed to originate in either Brazil or New Hampshire.

  And yet here was such a thing--it had been here all the while, as centuries passed above it like minute
s. A line from Genesis suddenly occurred to him, making him shiver as if a cold wind had blown past: There were giants in the earth in those days.

  He turned toward Anderson, his eyes almost pleading.

  "Is it real?" he could no more than whisper.

  "It's real. Touch it." She knocked on it, producing that dull fist-on-mahogany sound again. Gardener reached out ... then pulled his hand back.

  A look of annoyance passed over Anderson's face like a shadow. "I told you, Gard--it won't bite you."

  "It won't do anything to me I don't want it to."

  "Absolutely not."

  Gardener reflected--as much as he was able to reflect in his current state of roaring confusion--that he had once believed that about booze. Come to think of it, he had heard people--most of them his college students in the early seventies--say the same thing about various drugs. Many of them had ended up in clinics or drug-counseling sessions with severe nose-candy problems.

  Tell me, Bobbi, did you want to work until you dropped? Did you want to lose so much weight that you looked like an anorexic? I guess all I really want to know is, Did you drive or was you driven? Why did you lie about Peter? Why don't I hear birds in these woods?

  "Go on," Anderson said patiently. "We've got some talking to do and some hard decisions to make, and I don't want you breaking in halfway through to say you've decided the whole thing was just a hallucination that came out of a liquor bottle."

  "That's a shitty thing to say."

  "So are most of the things people really have to say. You've had the DTs before. You know it and so do I."

  Yeah, but the old Bobbi never would have brought it up ... or at least not in that way.

  "You touch it, you'll believe it. That's all I'm saying."

  "You make it sound important to you."

  Anderson shifted her feet restlessly.

  "All right," Gardener said. "All right, Bobbi."

  He reached out and grasped the edge of the ship, much as Anderson had that first day. He was aware--too aware--that an expression of naked eagerness had spread over Bobbi's face. It was the face of a someone who is waiting for a firecracker to go off.