The Tommyknockers (71 page)

I don't like it, Newt said at last.

Hell, I don't either, Dick replied. I'm not going to have a minute's peace until they get back, and I've got ole Doc Warwick parked out by the Haven-Troy line to take care of em just as soon as they do—

If
they do.

Ayuh . . .
if.
I think they will, but they'll be hurting.

What kind of problems do you expect?

Dick shook his head. He didn't know, and Doc Warwick refused to even guess . . . except to ask Dick in a cross mental voice what he, Dick, thought would happen to a salmon if it decided to ride a bike upstream to the spawning grounds instead of swimming.

Well . . . Newt said doubtfully.

Well, nothing, Dick returned. We can't leave that thing—he nodded toward the oscillating clock-tower—the way it is.

Newt returned: We're almost down to the hatchway now. I think we could leave it.

Maybe. Maybe not. But we need batteries for other things, and you know it. And we need to keep being careful. You know
that,
too.

Don't teach your grammy to suck eggs, Dick.

(Fu)

Fuck
that,
asshole, was what Newt had been about to say, but he squashed it, although he found more to dislike about Dick Allison with every passing day. The truth was, Haven
ran
on batteries now, just like a kid's toy car from FAO Schwarz. And they kept needing more, and bigger ones, and mail-order was not only too slow, it was the sort of thing that might send up a warning flag to someone somewhere. You could never tell.

All in all, Newt Berringer was a troubled man. They had survived the plane-crash; if something happened to Tommy and Hester, could they survive that?

He didn't know. He only knew he wouldn't have much peace until the kids were back in Haven, where they belonged.

Sunday, August 7th:

Gardener was at the ship, looking at it, trying to decide—again—if any good could come of this mess . . . and if not, if there was any way out. He had heard the light plane two days before, although he had been in the house and had come out a moment too late to see it on its third pass. Three passes was just about two too many; he had been pretty sure the pilot had spotted the ship and the excavation. The thought had afforded Gardener a strange, bitter relief. Then, yesterday, he had seen the story in the paper. You didn't have to be a college graduate to see the connection. Poor old Dr. Bailey had wandered off-course, and that leftover from the space armada of Ming the Merciless had stripped his gears.

Did that make him, Jim Gardener, an accessory to murder? It might, and, wifeshooter or not, Gard didn't care for the thought.

Freeman Moss, the dour woodsman from Albion, hadn't shown up this morning—Gard supposed the ship had blown his fuses as it had those of the others before him. Gard was alone for the first time since Bobbi had disappeared. On the surface, that seemed to open things up. But when you looked deeper, the same old conundrums remained.

The story of the dead neurosurgeon and the crashed plane had been bad, but to Gard's mind, the story above the fold—the one Newt and Dick had ignored—was worse. The Mideast was getting ready to explode again, and if there was shooting this time, some of it might be nuclear. The Union of Concerned Scientists, those happy folks who kept the Black Clock, had advanced the hands to two minutes to nuclear midnight yesterday, the paper reported. Happy days were here again, all right. The ship could maybe pull the pin on all that . . . but was that what Freeman Moss, Kyle Archinbourg, Bozie, and all the rest of them wanted? Sometimes Gard felt a sickening surety that cooling out the powderkeg the planet was sitting on was the
last
thing the New and Improved Haven was concerned with. And so?

He didn't know. Sometimes being a telepathic zero was a pain in the ass.

His eye moved to the pumping machinery squashed into the mud at the edge of the trench. Working at the ship had previously been a matter of dust and dirt and rocks and stumps that wouldn't come up until you were just about half-crazy with frustration. Now it was wet work—very wet work indeed. The last couple of nights he had gone home with wet clay in his hair, between his toes, and in the crack of his ass. Mud was bad, but clay was worse. Clay
stuck.

The pumping equipment was the strangest, ugliest conglomeration yet, but it worked. It also weighed tons, but the mostly silent Freeman Moss had transported it from Bobbi's dooryard all by himself . . . it had taken him most of Thursday and about five hundred batteries to do it, but he
had
done it, something which would have taken an ordinary construction crew a week or more to accomplish.

Moss had used a gadget like a metal-detector to guide each component to its final resting-place—first off the truck, then through the garden, then out along the well-worn path to the dig. The components floated serenely through the warm summer air, their shadows pooled beneath them. Moss carried the thing which had once been a metal-detector in one hand, and something which looked like a walkie-talkie handset in the other. When he raised the curved stainless-steel antenna on the end of the walkie-talkie gadget and moved the dish at the end of the detector, the motor or pump would rise. When he moved them to the left, the piece of equipment went left. Gard, watching this with the bemusement of a veteran drunk (and surely no one sees as many strange things as one of those), thought that Moss looked like a scrofulous animal trainer leading mechanical elephants through the woods to the site of some unimaginable circus.

Gardener had seen the laborious moving of enough heavy equipment to know that this device could revolutionize construction techniques. Such things were outside his practical knowledge, but he guessed that a single gadget such as the one Moss had used on Thursday with such absent ease could cut the cost of a project the size of the Aswan Dam by twenty-five percent or more.

In at least one respect, however, it was like the illusion being maintained at the town hall—it required a lot of juice.

“Here,” Moss said, handing Gard a heavy packsack. “Put this on.”

Gard winced shouldering the straps. Moss saw it and smiled a little. “It'll get lighter as the day goes along. Don't you worry about
that.”
He plugged the jack of a transistor earphone into the side of the radio-controller and pushed the phone into his ear.

“What's in the pack?” Gardener asked.

“Batteries. Let's go.”

Moss had switched the gadget on, seemed to listen, nodded, then pointed the curved antenna at the first motor. It rose in the air and hung there. Holding the controller in one hand and the customized metal-detector in the other, Moss walked toward the motor. For every step he took, the motor retreated a similar distance. Gard brought up the rear.

Moss walked the motor between the house and the shed, urging it around the Tomcat, and then ahead of him through Bobbi's garden. A wide path had been worn through this, but on both sides of it the plants continued to grow in rampant splendor. Some of the sunflowers were now twelve feet high. They reminded Gardener of
The Day of the Triffids.
One night about a week ago he had awakened from a terrible nightmare. In it, the sunflowers in the garden had uprooted themselves and begun to walk, eldritch light shining from their centers and onto the ground like the beams of flashlights with green lenses.

There were summer squashes in the garden as big as U-boat torpedoes. Tomatoes the size of basketballs. Some of the corn was nearly as high as the sunflowers. Curious, Gardener had picked one of the ears; it was easily two feet long. A single ear, had it been good, would have fed two hungry men. But Gard had spat out the single mouthful of butter-and-sugar kernels he had bitten off, grimacing and wiping his mouth. The taste had been meaty and hideous. Bobbi was growing a garden full of huge plants, but the vegetables were inedible . . . perhaps even poisonous.

The motor had cruised serenely ahead of them along the path, cornstalks rustling and bending on either side as it pushed its way through. Gardener saw smears and swatches of grease and engine oil on some of the militantly
green, swordlike leaves. On the far side of the garden, the motor began to sag. Moss had lowered the antenna, and the motor settled to the earth with a gentle thump.

“What's up?” Gardener had asked.

Moss only grunted and produced a dime. He stuck it in the base of his controller, twisted it, and pulled six double-A Duracells out of the battery compartment. He tossed them indifferently on the ground. “Gimme some more,” he said.

Gardener unshouldered the knapsack, undid the straps, opened the flap, and saw what looked at first glance like a billion double-A's; it was as if someone had hit the Grand Jackpot at Atlantic City and the machine had paid off in batteries instead of bucks.

“Jesus!”

“I ain't Him,” Moss said. “Gimme half a dozen of those suckers.”

For once Gardener didn't seem to have a wisecrack left in him. He handed six batteries over and watched Moss fit them into the compartment. Then Moss replaced the battery hatch, turned it on, refitted the earplug in his ear, and said, “Let's go.”

Forty yards into the woods there was another battery change; sixty yards later, another. Floating the motor sucked less juice when it was going downhill, but by the time Moss had finally settled the big motor-block on the edge of the trench, they had gone through forty-two batteries.

Back and forth, back and forth; one by one they brought the pieces of pumping machinery from Freeman Moss's truck to the edge of the trench. The knapsack on Gardener's back grew steadily lighter.

On the fourth trip, Gard had asked Moss if he could try. A large industrial pump, whose
raison d'être
before this odd little side-trip had probably been pumping sewage from clogged septic tanks, was sitting on a tilted angle about a hundred yards from the trench. Moss was once more changing batteries. Dead double-A's lay all along the path now, reminding Gard with odd poignance of the kid at Arcadia Beach. The kid with the firecrackers. The kid whose mother had given up drinking . . . and everything else. The kid who had known about the Tommyknockers.

“Well, you can give her a try.” Moss handed over the gadget.
“I could use a smidge of help, and I don't mind sayin so. Wears a man out, liftin all that.” He saw Gardener's look and said: “Oh, ayuh, I'm doin part of it m'self; that's what the plug's for. You can try it, but I don't think you'll have much luck. You ain't like us.”

“I noticed. I'm the one that isn't going to have to buy a set of teeth from Sears and Roebuck when all this is over.”

Moss looked at him sourly and said nothing.

Gard used his handkerchief to wipe off the brown coating of wax Moss had left on the earplug, then stuck it in his ear. He heard a distant sound like the one you heard when you held a conch shell to your ear. He pointed the antenna at the pump as he had seen Moss do, then cautiously flickered the antenna upward. The quality of the dim seashore rumble in his ear changed. The pump moved the tiniest bit—he was sure it wasn't just his imagination. But an instant later, two other things happened. He felt warm blood coursing down his face from his nose, and his head was filled with a blaring voice. “
CARPET YOUR DEN OR YOUR WHOLE HOME FOR LESS!
” screamed some radio announcer, who was suddenly sitting right in the middle of Gardener's head and apparently yelling into an electric bullhorn.
“AND YES WE DO HAVE A NEW SHIPMENT OF THROW RUGS! THE LAST ONE SOLD OUT FAST, SO BE SURE—
”

“Owww, Jesus, shut up!”
Gardener had cried. He dropped the handset and reached for his head. The earphone was dragged out of his ear, and the blaring announcer cut out. He had been left with a nosebleed and a head that was ringing like a bell.

Freeman Moss, startled out of his taciturnity, stared at Gardener with wide eyes. “What in Christ's name was that?” he asked.

“That,” Gardener said weakly, “was WZON, Where It's Only Rock and Roll Because That's the Way You Like It. You mind if I sit down for a minute, Moss? Think I just pissed myself.”

“Your nose is bleedin, too.”

“No shit, Sherlock,” Gardener said.

“Think maybe you better let me use the lifter after this.” Gard had been more than happy to abide by that. It took them the rest of the day to get all the equipment
out to the trench, and Moss was so tired when the last piece arrived that Gardener had to practically carry the man back to his truck.

“Feel like I just chopped two cord of wood and shit m'brains out while I was doin it,” the older man gasped.

After that, Gard hadn't really expected the man to come back. But Moss had shown up promptly at seven the next day. He had been driving a beat-up split-grille Pontiac instead of his truck. He got out of the Pontiac banging a dinner bucket against his leg.

“Come on. Let's get to it.”

Gardener respected Moss more than the other three “helpers” put together . . . in fact, he liked him.

Moss glanced at him as they walked out to the ship with the morning dew of that Friday morning wetting down the cuffs of their pants. “Caught that one,” he grunted. “You're okay too, I guess.”

That was about all Mr. Freeman Moss had to say to him that day.

They sank a nest of hoses into the trench and rigged more hoses—outflow hoses, this time—to direct the water they pumped out downhill, on a slope that ran a bit southeast of Bobbi's place. These “dumper hoses,” as Moss called them, were big wide-bore rolls of canvas that Gard supposed had been scavenged from the VFD.

“Ayuh, got a few there, got a few other places,” Moss said, and would offer no more on that subject.

Before starting the pumps, he had Gardener pound a number of U-shaped clamps over the dumper hoses. “Else they'll go whippin around, sprayin water everywhere. If you've ever seen a fireman's hose outta control, you know someone c'n get hurt. And we ain't got enough men to stand around holdin a bunch of pissin hoses all day.”