The Tommyknockers (92 page)

“I want to change my shirt,” he told Bobbi.

Bobbi nodded without much interest. “Come on out in the kitchen after you do,” she said. “We have to talk.”

“Yes. I suppose we do.”

In the guestroom, Gardener took off the T-shirt he had been wearing and put on a clean one. He let it hang down over his belt. He went to the foot of the bed, lifted the mattress, and got the .45. He tucked it into his pants. The T-shirt was too big; he had lost a lot of weight. The outline of the gun butt hardly showed at all if he sucked in his gut. He paused for a moment longer, wondering if he was ready for this. He supposed there was no way to tell such a thing in advance. A dull headache gnawed his temples, and the world seemed to move in and out of focus in slow, woozy cycles. His mouth hurt and his nose felt stuffed with drying blood.

This was it; as much a showdown as any Bobbi had ever written in her westerns. High noon in central Maine. Make yore play, pard.

A ghost of a smile touched his lips. All of those two-for-a-penny sophomore philosophers said life was a strange proposition, but really, this was outrageous.

He went out to the kitchen.

Bobbi was sitting at the kitchen table watching him. Strange, half-glimpsed green fluid circulated below the surface of her transparent face. Her eyes—larger, the pupils oddly misshapen—looked at Gardener somberly.

On the table was a boom-box radio. Dick Allison had brought it out to Bobbi's three days ago, at her request. It was the one Hank Buck had used to send Pits Barfield to that great repple-depple in the sky. It had taken Bobbi less than twenty minutes to connect its circuitry to the toy photon pistol she was pointing at Gardener.

On the table were two beers and a bottle of pills. Gardener recognized the bottle. Bobbi must have gone into the bathroom and gotten it while he was changing his shirt. It was his Valium.

“Sit down, Gard,” Bobbi said.

Gardener had raised his mental shield as soon as he was out of the ship. The question now was how much of it still remained.

He walked slowly across the room and sat at the table. He felt the .45 digging into his stomach and groin; he also felt it digging into his mind, lying heavy against whatever was left of that shield.

“Are those for me?” he asked, pointing at the pills.

“I thought we'd have a beer or two together,” Bobbi said evenly, “the way friends do? And you could take a few of those at a time while we talk. I thought it would be the kindest way.”

“Kind,” Gardener mused. He felt the first faint tug of anger. Won't get fooled again, the song said, but the habit must be awfully hard to break. He himself had been fooled plenty.
But then,
he thought,
maybe you're an exception to the rule, Gard ole Gard
.

“I get the pills and Peter got that weird seaquarium in the shed. Bobbi, your definition of kindness has undergone one
fuck
of a radical change since the days when you'd cry if Peter brought home a dead bird. Remember those days? We lived here together, we stood your sister off when she came, and never had to stick her in a shower stall to do it. We just kicked her ass the hell out.” He looked at her somberly. “Remember, Bobbi? That was when we were lovers as well as friends. I thought you might have forgotten. I would have died for you, kiddo. And I would have died
without
you. Remember? Remember
us?”

Bobbi looked down at her hands. Did he see tears in those strange eyes? Probably all he saw was wishful thinking.

“When were you in the shed?”

“Last night.”

“What did you touch?”

“I used to touch
you,”
Gardener mused. “And you me. And neither of us minded. Remember?”

“What did you touch?”
she screamed shrilly at him, and when she looked back up he didn't see Bobbi but only a furious monster.

“Nothing,” Gardener said. “I touched nothing.” The
contempt on his face must have been more convincing than any protest would have been, because Bobbi settled back. She sipped delicately at her beer.

“Doesn't matter. You couldn't have done anything out there anyway.”

“How could you do it to Peter? That's how it keeps coming at me. The old man I didn't know, and Anne barged in. But I knew
Peter. He
would have died for you too. How could you do it? God's name!”

“He kept me alive when you weren't here,” Bobbi said. There was just the faintest uneasy, defensive note in her voice. “When I was working around the clock. He was the only reason there was anything left for you to save when you got here.”

“You fucking
vampire!”

She looked at him, then away.

“Jesus
Christ,
you did something like that and
I went along with it.
Do you know how that hurts?
I went along!
I saw what was happening to you . . . to a lesser degree I saw what was happening to the others, but
I still went along with it.
Because I was crazy. But of course you knew that, didn't you? You used me the same way you used Peter, but I wasn't even as smart as an old beagle dog, I guess, because you didn't even have to put me in the shed and stick one of those
filthy stinking rotten
cables in my head to do it. You just kept me oiled. You handed me a shovel and said, ‘Here you go, Gard, let's dig this baby up and stop the Dallas Police.'
Except
you're
the Dallas Police. And I went along with it.”

“Drink your beer,” Bobbi said. Her face was cold again.

“And if I don't?”

“Then I'm going to turn on this radio,” Bobbi said, “and open a hole in reality, and send you . . . somewhere.”

“To Altair-4?” Gardener asked. He kept his voice casual and tightened his mental grip

(shield-shield-shield-shield)

on that barrier in his mind. A slight frown creased Bobbi's forehead again, and Gardener felt those mental fingers probing again, digging, trying to find out what he knew, how much . . . and how.

Distract her. Make her mad and distract her. How?

“You've been snooping a
lot,
haven't you?” Bobbi asked.

“Not until I realized how much you were lying to me.” And suddenly knew. He had gotten it in the shed without even knowing it.

“Most of the lies you told to yourself, Gard.”

“Oh? What about the kid that died? Or the one that's blind?”

“How do you kn—”

“The shed. That's where you go to get smart, isn't it?”

She said nothing.

“You sent them to get
batteries
. You killed one and blinded the other to get
batteries.
Jesus, Bobbi, how stupid could you get?”

“We're more intelligent than you could ever hope to—”

“Who's talking about
intelligence?”
he cried furiously. “I'm talking about
smarts!
Common-fuckin
g-sense!
The CMP power lines run right behind your
house!
Why didn't you tap them?”

“Sure.” Bobbi smiled with her weird mouth. “A really intelligent—pardon me,
smart—
idea. And the first time some tech at the Augusta substation saw the power drain on his dials—”

“You're running almost everything on C, D, and double-A batteries,” Gard said. “That's a
trickle.
A guy using house current to run a big band-saw would bang those needles harder.”

She looked momentarily confused. Seemed to listen—not to anyone else, but to her own interior voice. “Batteries run on direct current, Gard. AC power lines wouldn't do us any g—”

He struck his temples with his fists and screamed:
“Haven't you ever seen a goddam DC converter?
You can get them at Radio Shack for three bucks! Are you seriously trying to tell me you couldn't have made a simple DC converter when you can make your tractor fly and your typewriter run on telepathy? Are you—”

“
Nobody thought of it!”
she screamed suddenly.

There was a moment of silence. She looked stunned, as if at the sound of her own voice.

“Nobody thought of it,” he said. “Right. So you sent those two kids, all ready to do or die for good old Haven, and now one of them is dead and the other one's blind. It's shit, Bobbi. I don't care who or what has taken you over—part of you has to be inside
someplace.
Part of you has to realize that you people haven't been doing anything
creative at all. Quite the opposite. You've been taking dumb-pills and congratulating each other on how wonderful it all is.
I
was the crazy one. I kept telling myself it would be okay even after I knew better. But it's the same old shit it always was. You can disintegrate people, you can teleport them to someplace for safekeeping, or burial, or whatever, but you're as dumb as a baby with a loaded pistol.”

“I think you better shut up now, Gard.”

“You didn't think of it,” he said softly. “Jesus, Bobbi! How can you even look at yourself in the mirror?
Any
of you?”

“I said I think—”

“Idiot savant, you said once. It's worse. It's like watching a bunch of kids getting ready to blow up the world with Soapbox Derby plans. You guys aren't even evil. Dumb, but not evil.”

“Gard—”

“You're just a bunch of dumbbells with screwdrivers.” He laughed.

“Shut up!”
she shrieked.

“Jesus,” Gard said. “Did I really think Sissy was dead?
Did
I?”

She was trembling.

He nodded toward the photon gun. “So if I don't drink the beer and take the pills, you pack me off to Altair-4, right? I get to babysit David Brown until we both drop dead of asphyxiation or starvation or cosmic-ray poisoning.”

She was viciously cold now, and it hurt—more than he ever would have believed—but at least she wasn't trying to read him. In her anger, she had forgotten.

The way they had forgotten how simple it was to plug a battery-driven tape recorder into a wall socket with a DC converter between the instrument and the power source.

“There really isn't an Altair-4, just as there aren't really any Tommyknockers. There
aren't
any nouns for some things—they just
are.
Somebody pastes one name on those things in one place, somebody pastes on another someplace else. It's never a very good name, but it doesn't matter. You came back from New Hampshire talking and thinking about Tommyknockers, so here that's what we are. We've been called other things in other places. Altair-4
has, too. It's just a place where things get stored. Usually not live things. Attics can be cold, dark places.”

“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?”