The Tommyknockers (28 page)

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
passé;
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 minutes. 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.

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.

“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.”

“That'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.”

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?