Now he set his boot into a rope stirrup, slid the knot tight, and put the Snoopy radio in his shirt. “Let me down easy, Johnny.”
Enders began to turn a windlass and Gardener began to slide downward. Beside him the smooth gray hull slid up and up and up.
If they wanted to get rid of him, this would be as easy a way as any, he supposed. Just send a telepathic order to Enders: Let go of the wheel, John. We’re through with him. And down he would plunge, forty feet to the solid bedrock at the bottom, slack rope trailing up behind him. Crunch.
But of course he was at their mercy anyhow ... and he supposed they recognized his usefulness, however reluctantly. The Tremain kid was young, strong as a bull, but he had fagged out in two days. Enders was going to last out today—maybe—but Gardener would have bet his watch and chain (what watch and chain, ha-ha?) that there would be somebody else out here tomorrow to keep tabs on him.
Bobbi was okay.
Bullshit she was—if you hadn’t come back, she would’ve killed herself.
But she hung in there better than Enders or the Tremain kid—
His mind returned inexorably: Bobbi went into the shed with the others. Tremain and Enders never did... at least, not that you ever saw. Maybe that’s the difference.
So what’s in there? Ten thousand angels dancing on the head of a pin? The ghost of James Dean? The Shroud of Turin? What?
He didn’t know.
His foot touched down at the bottom.
“I’m down!” he yelled.
Enders’ face, looking very small, appeared at the edge of the cut. Beyond, Gardener could see a tiny wedge of blue sky. Too tiny. Claustrophobia whispered in his ear—a voice as rough as sandpaper.
The space between the side of the ship and the wall covered with that silvery netting was very narrow down here. Gardener had to move with great care to avoid touching the ship’s side and setting off one of those brainbursts.
The bedrock was very dark. He squatted and ran his fingers over it. They came away wet. They had come away a little wetter each day for the last week.
That morning he had cut a small square four inches on a side and a foot into the floor of the bedrock using a gadget that had once been a blowdryer. Now he opened his toolkit, removed a flashlight, and shone the light into it.
Water down there.
He got to his feet and screamed: “Send down the hose!”
“... what? ...” drifted down. Enders sounded apologetic. Gardener sighed, wondering just how much longer he himself could hold out against the steady drag of exhaustion. All this Hugo Gernsback Whole Universe equipment, and no one thought to rig an intercom between up there and down here. Instead, they were screaming their throats out.
Oh, but none of their bright ideas run in that direction, and you know it. Why would they think about intercoms when they can read thoughts? You’re the horse-and-buggy human here, not them.
“The hose!” he shrieked. “Send down the motherfucking hose, tripehead!”
“... oh ... kay ...”
Gardener stood waiting for the hose to come down, wishing miserably that he was anywhere else in the world than here, wishing he could convince himself all of it was only a nightmare.
It was no good. The ship was madly exotic, but this reality was also too prosy to be a dream: the acrid smell of John Enders’ sweat, the slightly boozy smell of his own, the dig of the rope loop into his instep as he went down into the cut, the feel of rough, moist bedrock under his fingers.
Where’s Bobbi, Gard? Is she dead?
No. He didn’t think she was dead, but he had become convinced that she was desperately ill. Something had happened to her on Wednesday. Something had happened to all of them on Wednesday. Gardener could not quite bring his memories into focus, but he knew there had been no real blackout or DT nightmare. It would have been better for him if there had been. There had been some sort of cover-up last Wednesday—a frantic cut-and-paste. And in the course of it, he believed that Bobbi had been hurt... taken ill ... something.
But they’re not talking about it.
Bobby Tremain: Bobbi? Heck, Mr. Gardener, nothing wrong with Bobbi—just a li’l ole heatstroke. She’ll be back in no time. She can use the rest! You know that better’n anyone, I guess!
It sounded great. So great you’d almost think the Tremain kid believed it himself until you looked closely at his odd eyes.
He could see himself going to those he was coming to think of as the Shed People, demanding to know what had happened to her.
Newt Berringer: Next thing you know, he’ll be trying to tell us that we’re the Dallas Police.
And boy, they’d sure all start to laugh then, wouldn’t they? Them, the Dallas Police? That was pretty funny. That was a scream.
Maybe, Gard thought, that’s why I feel so much like doing it. Screaming, I mean.
Now he stood deep in this manmade crack in the earth, a crack that contained a titanic alien flying ship, waiting for the hose to come down. And suddenly the final, horrible passage of George Orwell’s Animal Farm clanged in his head like a death-cry. It was strange, the things you discovered you’d gotten by heart. “Clover’s old eyes flitted from one face to another. And as the animals outside looked from pig to man, and man to pig, and pig to man again, it seemed that some strange thing was happening. It was impossible to say which was which.”
Jesus, Gard, cut it out!
Here came the hose at last, a seventy-footer from the volunteer fire department. It was of course meant to spray water, not suck it up, but a vacuum pump had neatly reversed its function.
Enders paid it out jerkily. The end swung back and forth, sometimes striking the hull of the ship. Each time this happened there was a cludding sound that was dull yet curiously penetrating. Gardener didn’t like it and quickly came to anticipate each clud.
Christ, I wish he hadn’t got that thing swinging.
Clud ... clud ... clud. Why can’t it just clink? Why does it have to keep making that other sound, like dirt being shoveled on top of a coffin?
Clud ... clud ... clud.
Christ, I should have jumped when I had the chance. Just stepped off that fucking breakwater at Arcadia Beach. July 4th, wasn’t it? Shit, I could have been a Yankee Doodle Deader.
Well, go on, then. When you go back to the house tonight, gobble all the Valium in the medicine cabinet. Kill yourself if you haven’t got the guts to either see this thing through or put a stop to it. The good people of Haven will probably throw a party over your body. You think they want you here? If there wasn’t some of the Old, Unimproved Bobbi still around, I think you’d be gone already. If she wasn’t standing between you and them ...
Clud ... clud ... clud.
Was Bobbi still standing between him and the rest of Haven? Yeah. But if she died, how long would it be before he himself was scrubbed from the equation?
Not long, buddy. Not long at all. Like maybe fifteen minutes.
Clud ... clud . . . cl—
Wincing, teeth set against the dull dead sound, Gard leapt up and caught the brass nozzle of the hose before it could rap against the side of the ship again. He pulled it down, knelt over the hole, and craned his head up at Enders’ small face.
“Start the pump!” he yelled.
“... what? . . .”
Jesus wept, Gardener thought.
“Start the motherfucking pump!” he shrieked, and this time he felt, actually felt his head fall apart. He closed his eyes.
“... oh ... kay . . .”
When he looked up, Enders was gone.
Gardener plunged the end of the hose into the glory-hole he had cut out from rock that morning. The water began to bubble slowly, almost contemplatively. It was frigid at first, but his hands quickly became numb. Although the trench he was in was only forty feet deep, they had removed a whole hillside in the process of cutting a base level, so that the place where Gardener now crouched had probably been, until late June, ninety feet under the earth. Measuring
the freeboard surface of the ship would have given an exact figure, but Gardener didn’t give a shit. The simple fact was that they seemed to have nearly reached the aquifer: spongy rock filled with water. Apparently the bottom half or two-thirds of the ship was floating in a large underground lake.
His hands were now so numb they had forgotten what they were.
“Come on, asshole,” he muttered.
As if in answer, the hose began to vibrate and wriggle. He couldn’t hear the pump’s motor from here, but he didn’t have to. As the water level in the glory-hole dropped, Gardener was able to see his reddened, dripping hands again. He watched as the water level continued to drop.
If we hit the aquifer, it’s going to slow us down.
Yeah. We might lose a whole day while they figure out some sort of super-pump. There might be a delay, but nothing’s going to stop them, Gard. Don’t you know that?
The hose began to emit the sound of a giant soda straw in a giant Coke glass. The glory-hole was empty.
“Turn it off!” he shouted. Enders just went on looking down at him. Gardener sighed and yanked hard on the hose. Enders looked startled, then made a thumb-and-forefinger circle at Gardener. He disappeared. A few seconds later the hose stopped vibrating. Then it began to rise as Enders wound it up.
Gardener made sure that the end of it was perfectly still and wouldn’t pendulum before he let it go.
He now took the radio out of his shirt and turned it on. There was a built-in ten-minute delay. He put the radio on the bottom of the glory-hole, then covered it with loose chunks of rock. A lot of the explosion’s force would be channeled upward anyway, but this was powerful stuff, whatever it was—enough would be left to tear perhaps three vertical feet of bedrock into chunks which they could quickly load into a sling and power-winch up. And the ship would not be hurt. Apparently nothing could do that.
Gardener slid his foot into the sling and shouted: “Pull me up!”
Nothing happened.
“PULL ME UP, JOHNNY”! he screamed. Once again there was that feeling that his head was splitting along some rotted midseam.
Still nothing.
His wrist-deep plunge into the icy water had dropped Gardener’s body temperature perhaps two whole degrees. Nonetheless, a damp and slickly unpleasant sweat suddenly sprang out on his forehead. He looked at his wristwatch. Two minutes had passed since he had turned on the Snoopy radio. From his watch, his eyes moved to the loose pile of chunked granite in the glory-hole. Plenty of time to yank the rocks out and turn off the radio.
Except turning off the radio wouldn’t stop whatever was going on inside the radio. He knew that somehow.
He looked up for Enders and Enders wasn’t there.
This is how they’re getting rid of you, Gard.
A drop of sweat ran into his eyes. He brushed it away with the back of his hand.
“ENDERS! HEY, JOHNNY!”
Shinny up the rope, Gard.
Forty feet? Dream on. Maybe in college. Maybe not even then.
He looked at his watch. Three minutes.
Yeah, this is how. Poof. All gone. A sacrifice to the Great Ship. A little something to propitiate the Tommyknockers.
“. . . start it going yet?”
He looked up so quickly his neck popped, his growing fear turning immediately to rage.
“I started it almost five minutes ago you fucking shit-for-brains! Get me out of here before it goes off and blows me sky-high!”
Enders’ mouth dropped into an O that was almost comical. He disappeared again and Gardener was left looking at his watch through what was becoming a blur of sweat.
Then the loop around his foot jerked and a moment later he began to rise. Gardener closed his eyes and clung to the rope. Apparently he wasn’t quite as ready to sniff the pipe as he thought he was. Maybe that wasn’t such a bad thing to know, either.
He reached the top of the cut, stepped out, loosened the loop around his foot, and walked over to where Enders stood.
“Sorry,” Enders said, smiling fussily. “I thought we’d agreed that you’d give me a shout before—”
Gardener hit him. The thing was done and Enders was on the ground, his glasses hanging from one ear and his mouth bloody, before Gardener was even wholly aware of what he meant to do. And although he was not telepathic, he thought he could feel every head in Haven suddenly turn toward this place, alert and listening.
“You left me down there with that thing going, asshole,” he said. “If you—or anyone else in this town—ever does it again, you better just leave me down there. Do you hear me?”
Rage dawned in Enders’ eyes. He fixed his glasses back in place as well as he could and got to his feet. There was dirt on his bald head. “I don’t think you know who you’re talking to.”
“I know more than you think,” Gardener said. “Listen, Johnny. And the rest of you, if you’re hearing this, and I think you are, you listen too. I want an intercom down there. I want some ordinary fucking consideration. I’ve played square with you; I’m the only one in this town that didn’t have to have his brains scrambled to do it, either. I want some fucking consideration. Do you hear me?”
Enders looked at him, but Gardener thought he was listening too. Listening to other voices. Gardener waited for their decision. He was too angry to really care much.
“All right,” Enders said softly, pressing the back of his hand against his bloody mouth. “You may have a point. We’ll put in an intercom, and we’ll see that you have a bit more . . . what did you call it?” A contemptuous flick of smile touched his lips. It was a smile with which Gardener was extremely familiar. It was the way the Arbergs and McCardles of the world smiled. It was the way the guys who ran the nukes smiled when they talked about atomic-power facilities.
“The word was ‘consideration.’ You want to remember it. But smart guys can learn, yeah, Johnny? There’s a dictionary back at the house. You need it, asshole?” He took a step toward Enders and had the distinct satisfaction of seeing the man fall back two steps, the contemptuous little smile disappearing. It was replaced with a look of nervy apprehension. “Consideration, Johnny. You remember. All of you remember. If not for me, then for Bobbi.”
They were standing by the equipment lean-to now, Enders’ eyes small and nervous, Gardener’s large and bloodshot and still angry.
And if Bobbi dies, your idea of consideration may extend all the way to a quick and painless death. That’s about the size of it, am I right? Would you say that just about describes the topography of this situation, you bald-headed little fuck?
“I—we—appreciate your plain speaking,” Enders said. His lips, with no teeth to back them up, pooched in and out nervously.
“I bet you do.”
“Perhaps a little plain speaking of our own is in order.” He took off his glasses, began to wipe them on the sweaty front of his shirt (an action which Gardener thought would only leave them more smeared than before), and Gardener saw a dirty, furious gleam in his eyes. “You don’t want to ... to strike out like that, Jim. I advise you—we all advise you—never do it again. There are . . . uh ... changes . . . yes, changes . . . going on in Haven—”
“No shit.”
“And some of these changes have made people . . . uh ... short-tempered. So striking out like that could be ... well, a bad mistake.”
“Do sudden noises bother you?” Gardener inquired.
Enders looked wary. “I don’t understand your p—”
“Because if the timer in that radio is jake, you’re about to hear one.”
He stepped behind the lean-to, not quite running, but by no means lingering. Enders threw a startled glance toward the ship and then ran after him. He tripped over a shovel and went sprawling in the dirt, grabbing at his shin and grimacing. A moment later a loud, crumping roar shook the earth. There was a series of those.dull yet penetrating cludding sounds as chunks of rock flew against the ship’s hull. Others sprayed into the air, then fell onto the edge of the
cut or rattled back into it. Gardener saw one rebound from the ship’s hull and bounce an amazing distance.
“You small-minded, practical-joking son of a bitch!” Enders shouted. He was still lying on the ground, still clutching his shin.
“Small-minded, hell,” Gardener said. “You left me down there.”
Enders glared at him.
Gardener stood where he was for a moment, then walked over to him and held out his hand. “Come on, Johnny. Time to let bygones be bygones. If Stalin and Roosevelt could cooperate long enough to fight Hitler, I guess we ought to be able to cooperate long enough to unglue this sucker from the ground. What do you say?”
Enders would say nothing, but after a moment he took Gardener’s hand and got up. He brushed sullenly at his clothes, occasionally favoring Gardener with an almost catlike expression of dislike.
“Want to go see if we brought in our well yet?” Gardener asked. He felt better than he had in days—months, actually, maybe even years. Blowing up at Enders had done him a world of good.
“What do you mean?”
“Never mind,” Gardener said, and went over to the cut alone. He peered down, looking for water, listening for gurgles and splashes. He saw nothing, heard nothing. It seemed they had lucked out again.
It suddenly occurred to him that he was standing here with his hands planted on his upper thighs, bent over a forty-foot drop with a man somewhere behind him to whom he had just administered a punch in the mouth. If Enders wanted, he could run up behind me and tumble me into this hole with one hard push, he thought, and heard Enders saying: Striking out like that could be a very bad mistake.
But he didn’t look around, and that sense of well-being, absurdly out of place or not, held. He was in a fix, and strapping a rearview mirror onto his head so he could see who was coming up behind him wasn’t going to get him out of it.
Stephen King Page 49
