The Tommyknockers Read online

  "Is that where you're from? Your people?"

  Bobbi--or whatever this was that looked a bit like her--laughed almost gently. "We're not a 'people,' Gard. Not a 'race.' Not a 'species.' Klaatu is not going to appear and say 'Take us to your leader.' No, we're not from Altair-4."

  She looked at him, still smiling faintly. She had recovered most of her equanimity ... and seemed to have forgotten the pills for the time being.

  "If you know about Altair-4, I wonder if you've found the existence of the ship a little strange."

  Gardener only looked at her.

  "I don't suppose you've had time enough to wonder why a race with access to teleportation technology"--Bobbi wiggled the plastic gun slightly--"would even bother zipping around in a physical ship."

  Gardener raised his eyebrows. No, he hadn't considered that, but now that Bobbi brought it up, he remembered a college acquaintance once wondering aloud why Kirk, Spock, and company bothered with the starship Enterprise when it would have been so much simpler to just beam around the universe.

  "More dumb-pills," he said.

  "Not at all. It's like radio. There are wavelengths. But beyond that, we don't understand it very well. Which is true of us about most things, Gard. We're builders, not understanders.

  "Anyway, we've isolated something like ninety thousand 'clear' wavelengths--that is, pro-linear settings which do two things: avoid the binomial paradox that prevents the reintegration of living tissue and unfixed matter, and actually seem to go somewhere. But in almost all cases, it isn't anywhere anyone would want to go."

  "Like winning an all-expenses-paid trip to Utica, huh?"

  "Much worse. There's a place which seems to be very much like the surface of Jupiter. If you open a door on that place, the difference in pressure is so extreme it starts a tornado in the doorway which quickly assumes an extremely high electrical charge which blows the door open wider and wider ... like tearing a wound open. The gravity is so much higher that it starts sucking out the earth of the incursive world the way a corkscrew pulls a cork. If left on that particular 'station' for long, it would cause a gravonic fault in the planet's orbit, assuming the mass was similar to earth's. Or, depending on the planet's composition, it might just rip it to pieces."

  "Did anything like that come close to happening here?" Gard's lips were numb. Such a possibility made Chernobyl seem as important as a fart in a phone-booth. And you went along with it, Gard! his mind screamed at him. You helped dig it up!

  "No, although some people had to be dissuaded from doing too much tinkering along transmitter/transmatter lines." She smiled. "It happened somewhere else we visited, though."

  "What happened?"

  "They got the door shut before Shatterday, but a lot of people cooked when the orbit changed." She sounded bored with the subject.

  "All of them?" Gardener whispered.

  "Nope. There are still nine or ten thousand of them alive at one of the poles," Bobbi said. "I think."

  "Jesus. Oh my Jesus, Bobbi."

  "There are other channels which open on rock. Just rock. The inside of some place. Most open in deep space. We've never been able to chart a single one of those locations using our star-charts. Think of it, Gard! Every place has been a strange place to us ... even to us, and we are great sky travelers."

  She leaned forward and sipped a little more beer. The toy pistol which was no longer a toy did not waver from Gardener's chest.

  "So that's teleportation. Some big deal, huh? A few rocks, a lot of holes, one cosmic attic. Maybe someday someone will open a wavelength into the heart of a sun and flash-fry a whole planet."

  Bobbi laughed, as if this would be a particularly fine jest. The gun didn't waver from Gard's chest, however.

  Growing serious again, Bobbi said: "But that's not all, Gard. When you turn on a radio, you think of tuning a station. But a band--megahertz, kilohertz, shortwave, whatever--isn't just stations. It's also all the blank space between stations. In fact, that's what some bands are mostly made up of. Do you follow?"

  "Yes."

  "This is my roundabout way of trying to convince you to take the pills. I won't send you to the place you call Altair-4, Gard--there I know you'd die slowly and unpleasantly."

  "The way David Brown is dying?"

  "I had nothing to do with that," she said quickly. "It was his brother's doing entirely."

  "It's like Nuremberg, isn't it? Nothing was really anyone's fault."

  "You idiot," Bobbi said. "Don't you realize that sometimes that's the truth? Are you so gutless you can't accept the idea of random occurrence?"

  "I can accept it. But I also believe in the ability of the individual to reverse irrational behavior," he said.

  "Really? You never could."

  Shot your wife, he heard the booger-picking deputy say. Good fucking deal, uh?

  Maybe sometimes people start the old Atonement Boogie a little late, he thought, looking down at his hands.

  Bobbi's eyes flicked sharply at his face. She had caught some of that. He tried to reinforce the shield--a tangled chain of disconnected thoughts like white noise.

  "What are you thinking about, Gard?"

  "Nothing I want you to know," he said, and smiled thinly. "Think of it as ... well, let's say a padlock on a shed door."

  Her lips drew back from her teeth for a moment ... then relaxed into that strange gentle smile again. "It doesn't matter," she said. "I might not understand anyway. As I say, we've never been very good understanders. We're not a race of super-Einsteins. Thomas Edison in Space would be closer, I think. Never mind. I won't send you to a place where you'll die a slow, miserable death. I still love you in my way, Gard, and if I have to send you somewhere, I'll send you to ... nowhere."

  She shrugged.

  "It's probably like taking ether ... but it might be painful. Agony, even. Either way, the devil you know is always better than the devil you don't."

  Gardener suddenly burst into tears.

  "Bobbi, you could have saved me yea grief if you'd reminded me of that sooner."

  "Take the pills, Gard. Deal with the devil you know. The way you are now, two hundred milligrams of Valium will take you off very quickly. Don't make me mail you like a letter addressed to nowhere."

  "Tell me some more about the Tommyknockers," Gardener said, wiping at his face with his hands.

  Bobbi smiled. "The pills, Gard. If you start taking the pills, I'll tell you anything you want to know. If you don't--" She raised the photon pistol.

  Gardener unscrewed the top of the Valium bottle, shook out half a dozen of the blue pills with the heart shape in the middle (Valentines from the Valley of Torpor, he thought), tossed them into his mouth, cracked the beer, and swallowed them. There went sixty milligrams down the old chute. He could have hidden one under his tongue, maybe, but six? Come on, folks, be real. Not much time now. I vomited my belly empty, I've lost a lot of blood, I haven't been taking this shit and so have no tolerance to it, I'm some thirty pounds lighter than I was when I picked up the first mandatory prescription. If I don't get rid of this shit quick, they'll hit me like a highballing semi.

  "Tell me about the Tommyknockers," he invited again. One hand dropped into his lap below the table and touched the butt

  (shield-shield-shield-shield)

  of the gun. How long before the stuff started to work? Twenty minutes? He couldn't remember. And nobody had ever told him about OD'ing on Valium.

  Bobbi moved the gun a bit toward the pills. "Take some more, Gard. As Jacqueline Susann may have once said, six is not enough."

  He shook out four more but left them on the oilcloth.

  "You were scared shitless out there, weren't you?" Gardener asked. "I saw the way you looked, Bobbi. You looked like you thought they were all going to get up and walk. Day of the Dead."

  Bobbi's New and Improved eyes flickered ... but her voice remained soft. "But we are walking and talking, Gard. We are back."

  Gard picked up the four Valiums, boun
ced them in his palm. "I want you to tell me just one thing, and then I'll take these." Yes. Just that one thing would in some fashion answer all the other questions--the ones he was never going to get a chance to ask. Maybe that was why he hadn't tried Bobbi with the gun yet. Because this was what he really needed to know. This one thing.

  "I want to know what you are," Gardener said. "Tell me what you are. "

  4

  "I'll answer your question, or at least try to," Bobbi said, "if you'll take those pills you're bouncing in your hand right now. Otherwise, you're going bye-bye, Gard. There's something in your mind. I can't quite read it--it's like seeing a shape through gauze. But it makes me extremely nervous."

  Gardener put the pills in his mouth and swallowed them.

  "More."

  Gardener shook out another four and took them. All the way up to 140 milligrams now. Shooting the moon. Bobbi seemed to relax.

  "I said Thomas Edison was closer than Albert Einstein, and that's as good a way to put it as any," Bobbi said. "There are things here in Haven that would have made Albert boggle, I suppose, but Einstein knew what E=mc2 meant. He understood relativity. He knew things. We ... we make things. Fix things. We don't theorize. We build. We're handymen."

  "You improve things," Gardener said. He swallowed. When Valium took hold of him, his throat began to feel dry. He remembered that much. When it started to happen, he would have to act. He thought maybe he had already taken a lethal dose, and there were at least a dozen pills left in the bottle.

  Bobbi had brightened a little.

  "Improve! That's right! That's what we do. The way they--we--improved Haven. You saw the potential as soon as you got back. No more having to suck the corporate tit! Eventually it's possible to convert totally to ... uh ... organic-storage-battery sources. They're renewable and long-lasting."

  "You're talking about people."

  "Not just people, although higher species do seem to produce longer-lasting power than the lower ones--it may be a function of spirituality rather than intelligence. The Latin word for it, esse, is probably the best. But even Peter has lasted a remarkably long time, produced a great deal of power, and he's only a dog." "Maybe because of his spirit," Gardener said. "Maybe because he loved you." He took the pistol out of his belt. He held it

  (shield-shield-shield-shield)

  against his inner left thigh.

  "That's beside the point," Bobbi said, waving the subject of Peter's love or spirituality away. "You have decided for some reason that the morality of what we're doing is unacceptable--but then, the spectrum of what you think of as morally acceptable behavior is very narrow. It doesn't matter; you'll be going to sleep soon.

  "We have no history, written or oral. When you say the ship crashed here because those in charge were, in effect, fighting over the steering wheel, I feel there's an element of truth in that ... but I also feel that perhaps it was meant, fated, to happen. Telepaths are at least to some degree precognitives, Gard, and precognitives are more apt to let themselves be guided by the currents, both large and small, that run through the universe. 'God' is the name some people give those currents, but God's only a word, like Tommyknockers or Altair-4.

  "What I mean is, we would almost certainly be long extinct if we hadn't trusted those currents, because we've always been short-tempered, ready to fight. But 'fight' is too general a word. We ... we ..." Bobbi's eyes suddenly glowed a deep, frightful green. Her lips spread in a toothless grin. Gardener's right hand clutched the gun with a sweaty palm.

  "We squabble!" Bobbi said. "Le mot juste, Gard!"

  "Good for you," Gardener said, and swallowed. He heard a click. That dryness hadn't just sneaked up--all at once it was just there.

  "Yes, we squabble, we've always squabbled. Like kids, you could say." Bobbi smiled. "We're very childlike. That's our good side."

  "Is it now?" A monstrous image suddenly filled Gardener's head: grammar-school kids heading off to school armed with books and Uzis and Smurf lunchboxes and M-16s and apples for the teachers they liked and fragmentation grenades for those they didn't. And, oh Christ, every one of the girls looked like Patricia McCardle and every one of the boys looked like Ted the Power Man. Ted the Power Man with greeny-glowing eyes that explained the whole sorry fucking mess, from Crusades and crossbow to Reagan's missile-tipped satellites.

  We squabble. Every now and then we even tussle a bit. We're grownups--I guess--but we still have bad tempers, like kids do, and we also still like to have fun, like kids do, so we satisfied both wants by building all these nifty nuclear slingshots, and every now and then we leave a few around for people to pick up, and do you know what? They always do. People like Ted, who are perfectly willing to kill so no woman in Braintree with the wherewithal to buy one shall want for electricity to run her hair dryer. People like you, Gard, who see only minimal drawbacks to the idea of killing for peace.

  It would be such a dull world without guns and squabbles, wouldn't it?

  Gardener realized he was getting sleepy.

  "Childlike," she repeated. "We fight ... but we can also be very generous. As we have here."

  "Yes, you've been very generous to Haven," Gardener said, and his jaws abruptly cracked open in a huge, tendon-stretching yawn.

  Bobbi smiled.

  "Anyway, we might have crashed because it was 'crash-time,' according to those currents I mentioned. The ship wasn't hurt, of course. And when I started to uncover it, we ... came back."

  "Are there more of you out there?"

  Bobbi shrugged. "I don't know." And don't care, the shrug said. We're here. There are improvements to be made. That is enough.

  "That's really all you are?" He wanted to make sure; make sure there was no more to it. He was terribly afraid he was taking too long, much too long ... but he had to know. "That's all?"

  "What do you mean, all? Is it so little, what we are?"

  "Frankly, yes," Gard said. "You see, I've been looking for the devil outside my life all my life because the one inside was so fucking hard to catch. It's hard to spend such a long time thinking you're ... Homer ..." He yawned again, hugely. His eyelids had bricks on them. "... and discover you were ... Captain Ahab all the time. "

  And finally, for the last time, with a kind of desperation, he asked her:

  "Is that all you are? Just people who fix things up?"

  "I guess so," she said. "I'm sorry it's such a letdown for y--"

  Gardener lifted the pistol under the table, and at the same moment felt the drug finally betray him: the shield slipped.

  Bobbi's eyes glowed--no, this time they glared. Her voice, a mental scream, blasted through Gardener's head like a meat cleaver

  (GUN HE'S GOT A GUN HE'S GOT A)

  chopping through the rising fog.

  She tried to move. At the same time, she tried to bring the photon pistol to bear on him. Gardener aimed the .45 at Bobbi under the table and pulled the trigger. There was only a dry click. The old slug had misfired.

  9.

  THE SCOOP, CONCLUDED

  1

  John Leandro died. The scoop did not.

  David Bright had promised to give Leandro until four, and that was a promise he had intended to keep--because it was honorable, of course, but also because he was not sure this was anything he wanted to stick his hand into. It might turn out to be a threshing machine instead of a news story. Nonetheless, he never doubted Johnny Leandro had been telling the truth, or his perception of it, crazed as his story sounded. Johnny was a twerp, Johnny sometimes didn't just jump to conclusions but broad-jumped them completely, but he wasn't a liar (even if he had been, Bright didn't believe he was smart enough to fabricate something this woolly).

  Around two-thirty that afternoon, Bright suddenly began to think of another Johnny--poor, damned Johnny Smith, who had sometimes touched objects and gotten "feelings" about them. That had been crazy, too, but Bright had believed Johnny Smith, had believed in what Smith said he could do. It was impossible to look into
the man's haunted eyes and not believe. Bright was not touching anything which belonged to John Leandro, but he could see his desk across the room, the hood pulled neatly over his word-processor terminal, and he began to get a feeling ... a very dismal one. He felt that Johnny Leandro might be dead.

  He called himself an old woman, but the feeling didn't go away. He thought of Leandro's voice, desperate and cracking with excitement. This is my story, and I'm not going to give it up just like that. Thought of Johnny Smith's dark eyes, his trick of constantly rubbing at the left side of his forehead. Bright's eyes were drawn again and again to Leandro's hooded word-cruncher.

  He held out until three o'clock. By then the feeling had become sickening assurance. Leandro was dead. There was just no maybe in it. He might not ever have another genuine premonition in his life, but he was having one now. Not crazy, not wounded, not one of the missing. Dead.

  Bright picked up the phone, and although the number he dialed had a Cleaves Mills exchange, both Bobbi and Gard would have known it was really long-distance: fifty-five days after Bobbi Anderson's stumble in the woods, someone was finally calling the Dallas Police.

  2

  The man Bright talked to at the Cleaves Mills state police barracks was Andy Torgeson. Bright had known him since college, and he could talk to him without feeling that he had the words NEWS SNOOP tattooed on his forehead in bright red letters. Torgeson listened patiently, saying little, as Bright told him everything, beginning with Leandro's assignment to the story of the missing cops.

  "His nose bled, his teeth fell out, he got vomiting, and he was convinced that all of this was coming out of the air?"

  "Yes," Bright said.

  "Also, this whatever-it-is in the air improved the shit out of his radio reception."

  "Right."

  "And you think he might be in a lot of trouble."

  "Right again."