The Tommyknockers Page 21

  Several things happened almost simultaneously.

  The first was a sense of vibration settling into his hand--the sort of vibration one might feel when one lays a hand on a power pole carrying high-voltage wires. For a moment it seemed to numb his flesh, as if the vibration was moving at an incredibly high speed. Then the feeling was gone. As it went, Gardener's head filled with music, but it was so loud it was more like a scream than music. It made what he had heard the night before sound like a whisper in comparison--it was like being inside a stereo speaker turned all the way up.

  Daytime turns me off and I don't mean maybe, Nine-to-five ain't takin' me where I'm bound, When it's done I come home to s--

  He was opening his mouth to scream when it cut off, all at once. Gardener knew the song, which had been popular when he was in grade school, and later he sang the snatch of lyrics he had heard, looking at his watch as he did so. The sequence seemed to have been a second or two of highspeed vibration; a burst of ear-splitting music which had lasted roughly twelve seconds; then the bloody nose.

  Except ear-splitting was wrong. It had been head-splitting. It had never come through his ears at all. It arrowed into his head from that damned piece of steel in his forehead.

  He saw Anderson go staggering backward, her hands thrown out in what seemed to be a warding-off gesture. Her look of eagerness became one of surprised fear, bewilderment, and pain.

  The last thing was that his headache was gone.

  Utterly and completely gone.

  But his nose was not just bleeding; it was spouting.

  3

  "Here, take it. Christ, Gard, are you all right?"

  "I'll be fine," Gardener said, his voice slightly muffled by her handkerchief. He doubled it and settled it over his nose, pressing down firmly on the bridge. He tilted his head up, and the slimy taste of blood began to fill his throat. "I've had worse ones than this." So he had ... but not for a long time.

  They had moved back about ten paces from the edge of the cut and seated themselves on a felled tree. Bobbi was looking at him anxiously.

  "Christ, Gard, I didn't know anything like that was going to happen. You believe me, don't you?"

  "Yes," Gardener said. He didn't know precisely what Bobbi had been expecting ... but not that. "Did you hear the music?"

  "I didn't exactly hear it," Anderson said, "I got it secondhand from your head. It just about ruptured me."

  "Did it?"

  "Yeah." Bobbi laughed a little shakily. "When I'm around a lot of people, I turn 'em off--"

  "You can do that?" He took the handkerchief off his nose. It was sopping with blood--Gardener could have twisted it between his fingers and wrung blood out of it in a gory little stream. But the flow was finally slowing down ... thank God. He dropped the handkerchief and tore the tail off his shirt.

  "Yes," Anderson said. "Well ... not entirely. I can't turn the thoughts completely off, but I can dial them way down, so it's like ... well, like a faint whisper at the bottom of my mind."

  "That's incredible."

  "T'hat's necessary, " Anderson said grimly. "If I couldn't, I don't think I'd ever leave this goddam house again. I was in Augusta on Saturday and I opened my mind up to see what it'd be like."

  "And you found out."

  "Yeah, I found out. It was like having a hurricane in your head. And the scary thing was how hard it was to get the door shut again."

  "This door ... barrier ... whatever ... how do you put it up?"

  Anderson shook her head. "Can't explain, anymore than a guy who can wiggle his ears can explain how he does it." She cleared her throat and looked down at her shoes for a moment--muddy workboots, Gardener saw. They looked as if they hadn't been off her feet much in the last couple of weeks.

  Bobbi grinned a little. The grin was embarrassed and painfully humorous at the same time--and in that moment she looked completely like the old Bobbi. The one who had been his friend after nobody else wanted to be. It was Bobbi's aw-shucks look--Gardener had seen it the very first time he met her, when Bobbi was a freshman English student and Gardener a freshman English instructor banging apathetically away at a PhD thesis he probably knew even then he was never going to finish. Hung-over and feeling bilious, Gardener had asked the class of new freshmen what the dative case was. No one offered an answer. Gardener had been about to take great pleasure in blowing them all out of the water when Anderson, Roberta, Row 5, Seat 3, raised her hand and took a shot at it. Her answer was diffident ... but correct. Not surprisingly, she turned out to be the only one of them who'd had Latin in high school. The same aw-shucks grin he was seeing now had been on Bobbi's face then, and Gard felt a wave of affection sweep over him. Shit, Bobbi had been through a tough time ... but this was Bobbi. No question about it.

  "I keep the barriers up most of the time anyway," she was saying. "Otherwise it's like peeking in windows. You remember me telling you my mailman, Paulson, has got something going on the side?"

  Gardener nodded.

  "That isn't anything I want to know. Or if some poor slob is a klepto, or if some guy's a secret drinker ... how's your nose?"

  "Bleeding's stopped." Gardener put down the bloody piece of shirting beside Bobbi's handkerchief. "So you keep the blocks up."

  "Yes. For whatever reasons--moral, ethical, or just to keep from going batshit with the noise, I keep them up. With you I let them down because I wasn't getting squat even when I tried. I did try a couple of times, and if that makes you mad I understand, but it was only curiosity, because no one else is ... blank ... like that."

  "No one?"

  "Nope. There must be some reason for it, something like having a really rare blood type. Maybe that even is it. "

  "Sorry, I'm type O."

  Anderson laughed and got up. "You feel up to going back, Gard?"

  It's the plate in my head, Bobbi. He almost said it, and then, for some reason, decided not to. The plate in my head is keeping you out. I don't know how I know that, but I do.

  "Yeah, I'm fine," he said. "I could use

  (a drink)

  a cup of coffee, that's all."

  "You got it. Come on."

  4

  While part of her had been reacting to Gard with the warmth and genuine good feeling she had always felt for him, even during the worst times, another part of her (a part that was not, strictly speaking, Bobbi Anderson at all anymore) had stood coldly off to one side, watching everything carefully. Assessing. Questioning. And the first question was whether

  (they)

  she really wanted Gardener around at all. She

  (they)

  had thought at first that all her problems would now be solved, Gard would join her on the dig and she would no longer have to do this ... well, this first part ... all alone. He was right about one thing: trying to do it all by herself had nearly killed -her. But the change she had expected in him hadn't happened. Only that distressing nosebleed.

  He won't touch it again if it makes his nose bleed like that. He won't touch it and he certainly won't go inside it.

  It may not come to that. After all, Peter never touched it. Peter didn't want to go near it, but his eye... and the age reversal ...

  It's not the same. He's a man, not an old beagle dog. And, face it, Bobbi, except for the nosebleed and that blast of music, there was absolutely no change.

  No immediate change.

  Is it the steel plate in his skull?

  Maybe... but why should something like that make any difference?

  That cold part of Bobbi didn't know; she only knew that it could have. The ship itself broadcast some kind of tremendous, almost animate force; whatever had come in it was dead, she was sure she hadn't lied about that, but the ship itself was almost alive, broadcasting that enormous energy pattern through its metal skin ... and, she knew, the broadcast area widened its umbrella a little with every inch of its surface she dug free. That energy had communicated itself to Gard. But then it had ... what?

  Been conv
erted somehow. First converted and then blow off in a short, ferociously powerful radio transmission.

  So what do I do?

  She didn't know, but she knew it didn't matter.

  They would tell her.

  When the time came, they would tell her.

  In the meantime, he would bear watching. But if only she could read him! It would be so much simpler if she could fucking read him!

  A voice responded coldly: Get him drunk. Then you'll be able to read him. Then you'll be able to read him just fine.

  5

  They had come out on the Tomcat, which did not fly at all but rolled along the ground just as it always had--but instead of the former racket and roar of its engine, it now rolled in a complete silence that was somehow ghastly.

  They came out of the woods and bumped along the edge of the garden. Anderson parked the Tomcat where it had been that morning.

  Gardener glanced up at the sky, which was beginning to cloud over again, and said: "You better put it in the shed, Bobbi."

  "It'll be all right," she said shortly. She pocketed the key and started toward the house. Gardener glanced toward the shed, started after Bobbi, then looked back. There was a big Kreig padlock on the shed door. Another new addition. The woods, you should pardon the pun, seemed to be full of them.

  What have you got in there? A time machine that runs on Penlites? What's the New Improved Bobbi got in there?

  6

  When he came into the house, Bobbi was rummaging in the fridge. She came up with a couple of beers.

  "Were you serious about coffee, or do you want one of these?"

  "How about a Coke?" Gardener asked. "Flying saucers go better with Coke, that's my motto." He laughed rather wildly.

  "Sure," Bobbi said, then stopped in the act of returning the cans of beer and grabbing two cans of Coke. "I did, didn't I?"

  "Huh?"

  "I took you out there and showed it to you. The ship. Didn't I?"

  Jesus, Gardener thought. Jesus Christ.

  For a moment, standing there with the bottles in her hands, she looked like someone with Alzheimer's disease.

  "Yes," Gardener said, feeling his skin grow cold. "You did."

  "Good," Bobbi said, relieved. "I thought I did."

  "Bobbi? You all right?"

  "Sure," Anderson said, and then added offhandedly, as if it were a thing of little or no importance: "It's just that I can't remember much from when we left the house until now. But I guess it doesn't really matter, does it? Here's your Coke, Gard. Let's drink to life on other worlds, what do you say?"

  7

  So they drank to other worlds and then Anderson asked him what they should do with the spaceship she had stumbled on in the woods behind her house.

  "We're not going to do anything. You're going to do something."

  "I already am, Gard," she said gently.

  "Of course you are," he said a little testily, "but I'm talking about some final disposition. I'll be happy to give you all the advice you want--us drunken, broken-down poets are great at giving advice--but in the end, you're going to do something. Something a little more far-reaching than just digging it up. Because it's yours. It's down on your land and it's yours."

  Anderson looked shocked. "You don't really think that thing belongs to anyone, do you? Why, because Uncle Frank left me this place in his will? Because he had a clear title going back to part of a crown parcel that King George III swiped from the French after the French had swiped it from the Indians? Good Christ, Gard, that thing was fifty million years old when the forebears of the whole damned human race were squatting on their hunkers in caves and picking their noses!"

  "I'm sure that's very true," Gardener said dryly, "but it doesn't change the law. And anyway, are you going to sit there and try to tell me you're not possessive of it?"

  Anderson looked both upset and thoughtful.

  "Possessive? No--I wouldn't say that. It's responsibility I feel, not possessiveness."

  "Well, whatever. But since you asked my opinion, I'll give it to you. Call Limestone Air Force Base. Tell whoever answers that you've found an unidentified object down on your land that looks like an advanced flying machine of some sort. You might have some trouble at first, but you'll convince them. Then--"

  Bobbi Anderson laughed. She laughed long and hard and loud. It was genuine laughter, and there was nothing mean about it, but it made Gardener feel acutely uncomfortable all the same. She laughed until tears streamed down her face. He felt himself stiffening.

  "I'm sorry," she said, seeing his expression. "It's just that I can't believe I'm hearing this from you, of all people. You know ... it's just ..." She snorted laughter again. "Well, it's a shock. Like having a Baptist preacher advise drinking as a cure for lust."

  "I don't understand what you mean."

  "Sure you do. I'm listening to the guy who got arrested at Seabrook with a gun in his pack, the guy who thinks the government won't really be happy until we all glow in the dark like radium watches, tell me to just call up the Air Force so they can come down here and take charge of an interstellar spacecraft."

  "It's your land--"

  "Shit, Gard! My land is as vulnerable to the U.S. government's right of eminent domain as anyone else's. Eminent domain's what gets turnpikes built.

  "And sometimes nuclear reactors."

  Bobbi sat down again and looked at Gardener in level silence.

  "Think about what you're saying," she said softly. "Three days after I made a call like that, neither the land nor the ship would be 'mine' anymore. Six days after, they'd have barbed wire strung around the whole place and sentries posted every fifty feet. Six weeks after, I think you'd probably find eighty percent of Haven's population bought out, kicked out ... or simply lost. They could do it, Gard. You know they could. What it comes down to is this: you want me to pick up the phone and call the Dallas police."

  "Bobbi--"

  "Yes. That's what it boils down to. I've found an alien spacecraft and you want me to turn it over to the Dallas police. Do you think they're going to come down here and say, 'Please come to Washington with us, Ms. Anderson, the Joint Chiefs of Staff are very anxious to hear your ideas on this matter, not only because you own--well, used to own--the land the thing is on, but because the Joint Chiefs always poll western writers before they decide what they should do about such things. Also, the President wants you to pop around to the White House so he can get your thinking. In addition, he wants to tell you how much he liked Rimfire Christmas. ' "

  Anderson threw back her head and this time the laughter she uttered was wild, hysterical, and quite creepy. Gardener barely noticed. Did he really think they were going to come down here and be polite? With something as potentially enormous as this on the line? The answer was no. They would take the land. They would gag him and Bobbi ... but even that might not be enough to make them feel comfortable. Could be they'd wind up someplace like a weird cross between a Russian gulag and a posh Club Med resort. All the beads are free, and the only catch is you never get out.

  Or even that might not be enough ... so mourners please omit flowers. Then and only then could the ship's new caretakers sleep easy at night.

  After all, it wasn't exactly an artifact, like an Etruscan vase or minie balls dug out of the ground at the site of some long-ago Civil War battle, was it? The woman who had found it had subsequently managed to power her entire house on D-cells ... and he was now ready to believe that, even if the new gear on the Tomcat didn't work yet, it soon would.

  And what, exactly, would make it work? Microchips? Semiconductors? No. Bobbi was the extra added ingredient, the New Improved Bobbi Anderson. Bobbi. Or maybe it was anybody who got close to the thing. And a thing like that ... well, you couldn't let an ordinary private citizen hold on to it, now could you?

  "Whatever else it is," he muttered, "the goddam thing must be one hell of a brain booster. It's turned you into a genius."

  "No. An idiot savant," Anderson said quietly
.

  "What?"

  "Idiot savant. They've got maybe half a dozen of them down at Pineland--that's the state facility for the severely retarded. I was there for two summers on a work-study program while I was in college. There was a guy who could multiply two six-digit numbers in his head and give you a correct answer in less than five seconds ... and he was just as apt to piss in his pants while he was doing it as not. There was a twelve-year-old kid who was hydrocephalic. His head was as big as a prize pumpkin. But he could set perfectly justified type at the rate of a hundred and sixty words a minute. Couldn't talk, couldn't read, couldn't think, but he could set type like a hurricane."

  Anderson pawed a cigarette out of the pack and lit it. Her eyes looked steadily at Gardener out of her thin, haggard face.

  "That's what I am. An idiot savant. That's all I am, and they'd know it. Those things--customizing the typewriter, fixing the water heater--I only remember them in bits and pieces. When I'm doing them, everything seems as clear as a bell. But later--" She looked pleadingly at Gardener. "Do you get it?"

  Gardener nodded.

  "It's coming from the ship, like radio transmissions from a broadcast tower. But just because a radio can pick up transmissions and send them to a human ear, it's not talking. The government would be happy to take me, lock me up somewhere, and then to cut me into little pieces to see if there had been any physical changes ... just as soon as my unfortunate accident gave them a reason to do an autopsy, that is."

  "Are you sure you're not reading my mind, Bobbi?"

  "No. But do you really think they'd scruple at wasting some people over a thing like this?"

  Gardener slowly shook his head.

  "So taking your advice would amount to this," Anderson said. "First, call the Dallas police; then get taken into custody by the Dallas police; then get killed by the Dallas police."

  Gard looked at her, troubled, and then said, "All right. I cry uncle. But what's the alternative? You have to do something. Christ, the thing is killing you."

  "What?"

  "You've lost thirty pounds, how's that for a start?"

  "Thir--" Anderson looked startled and uneasy. "No, Gard, no way. Fifteen, maybe, but I was getting love handles anyway, and--"