The Tommyknockers (29 page)

Been converted 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.

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?

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?”

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 minié 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—”

“Go weigh yourself,” Gardener said. “If you can get the needle over ninety-five, even with your boots on, I'll eat the scale. Lose a few more pounds and you'll get sick. The state you're in, you could go into heartbeat arrhythmia and die in two days.”

“I needed to lose some weight. And I was—”

“—too busy to eat, was that what you were going to say?”

“Well, not exactly in those w—”

“When I saw you last night, you looked like a survivor of the Bataan death march. You knew who I was, and that was
all
you knew. You're still not tracking. Five minutes after we got back in here from looking at your admittedly amazing find, you were asking me if you'd taken me to see it yet.”

Bobbi's eyes were still on the table, but he could see her expression: it was set and sullen.

He touched her gently. “All I'm saying is that no matter how wonderful that thing in the woods is, it's done things to your body and mind that have been terrible for you.”

Bobbi drew away from him. “If you're saying I'm crazy—”

“No, I'm not saying you're crazy, for God's sake! But you could
get
crazy if you don't slow down. Do you deny you've been having blackouts?”

“You're cross-examining me, Gard.”

“And for a woman who was asking my advice fifteen minutes ago, you're being a pretty fucking hostile witness.”

They glared at each other across the table for a moment.

Anderson gave first. “Blackouts isn't the right word. Don't try to equate what happens to you when you drink too much with what's been happening to me. They're not the same.”

“I'm not going to argue semantics with you, Bobbi. That's a sidetrack and you know it. The thing out there is dangerous. That's what seems important to me.”

Anderson looked up at him. Her face was unreadable. “You think it is,” she said, the words making neither a question nor a declarative sentence—they came out perfectly flat and inflectionless.

“You haven't just been getting or receiving ideas,” Gardener said. “You've been
driven.”

“Driven.” Anderson's expression did not change.

Gardener rubbed at his forehead. “Driven, yes. Driven the way a bad, stupid man will drive a horse until it drops dead in the traces . . . then stand over it and whip the carcass because the damned nag had the nerve to die. A man like that is dangerous to horses, and whatever there is in that ship . . . I think it's dangerous to Bobbi Anderson. If I hadn't shown up . . .”

“What? If you hadn't shown up, what?”

“I think you'd still be at it right now, working day and night, not eating . . . and that by this coming weekend you'd have been dead.”