But get rid of it how? Blow it up how? Even supposing he wanted to, how would he do it? The packet charges they had used to chop up the bedrock holding the ship fast were more powerful than dynamite, but they didn’t even scratch the hull of the thing. Was he supposed to trot off to Limestone Air Force Base, steal an A-bomb, moving with the silky, unbelievable smoothness of Dirk Pitt in a Clive Cussler novel? And wouldn’t it be funny, wouldn’t it really be the last laugh, if he actually did manage to get a nuke and set it off, only to discover that all he’d really managed to do was to set the ship, still uncannily unharmed and unscratched, free at a stroke?
Those were his options, the third of which was not an option at all ... and apparently his hands had known more than his brain, for while he went on turning them over in his mind for the umptieth time, he had gone calmly about the morning’s work—driving the pumps up to full blast and making sure that the dumper hoses were solidly planted. Now he was back at the trench checking the sucker hoses, and the level of the water. He was happy to find he needed a powerful flashlight to see the water—it was falling rapidly. He guessed that blasting and excavation could begin again by Wednesday, Thursday at the latest ... and once they got going again, the work would go fast. The rock of an aquifer was spongy and large-pored. They wouldn’t need to waste time digging glory-holes for explosives, because there would be enough natural spots for not just exploding radios but satchel charges. The next phase would be like moving from a dense, gluey batter to a freshly risen dough.
Gard stood bent over the cut in the earth for some time, shining the big light into the black depths. Then he clicked it off, meaning to inspect the clamps again. Here it was, only eight-thirty in the morning, and already he wanted a drink.
He turned around.
Bobbi was standing there.
Gardener’s mouth dropped open. He closed it with a snap after a moment and started toward her, fully expecting this hallucination to grow transparent, then be gone. But Bobbi stayed solid, and Gard saw that she had lost a great deal of hair—her brow, a pale and shining white, extended back nearly to the middle of her skull, leaving the world’s biggest widow’s peak in the center. Nor were these newly exposed sections of skull the only pale things about her; she looked like someone who had been through a terrible debilitating illness. Her right arm was in a sling. And—
—and she’s wearing makeup. Pan-Cake makeup. I’m pretty sure that’s what it is—she’s laid it on heavy the way a lady does when she wants to cover up a bruise. But it’s her ... Bobbi ... no dream ...
His eyes suddenly filled with tears. Bobbi doubled, then trebled. It wasn’t until then—that moment—that he realized just how scared he had been. And how lonely.
“Bobbi?” he asked hoarsely. “Is it really you?”
Bobbi smiled, that old sweet smile he loved so well, the one that had saved him from his own idiot self so often. It was Bobbi. It was Bobbi and he loved her.
He went to her, put his arms around her, laid his tired face against her neck. He had done this before, too.
“Hello, Gard,” she said, and began to cry.
He was crying too. He kissed her. Kissed her. Kissed her.
His hands were suddenly all over her; her free one was on him.
No, he said, still kissing her. No, you can’t—
Shh. I have to. It’s my last chance, Gard. Our last chance.
Kissed. They kissed. Oh they kissed and now her shirt was unbuttoned and this was not the body of a sex goddess, it was white and sickish, the muscles flabby, the breasts saggy, but he loved it and he kissed her and kissed her and their tears were all over each other’s faces.
Gard my dear, my dear, always my
shhhh
Oh please I love you
Bobbi I love
love
kiss me
kiss
yes
Pine needles under them. Sweetness. Her tears. His tears. They kissed, kissed, kissed. And as he entered her, Gard realized two things at once: how much he had missed her, and that not a single bird was singing. The woods were dead.
Kissed.
12
Gard used his shirt, not very clean anyway, to wipe swatches of brown makeup from his naked body. It hadn’t just been on her face. Had she come out here expecting to make love to him? Something it might be just as well not to think about. Now, anyway.
Although they both should have been Thanksgiving dinner for the noseeums and moose-flies, spouting sweat as they had been doing, he hadn’t a single bite. He didn’t think Bobbi had any, either. It’s not only an IQ booster, he thought, looking at the ship, it’s got every insect repellent on the market beat hollow.
He tossed his shirt aside and touched Bobbi’s face, running a finger down her cheek, picking up a little more of the makeup. Most of it, however, had either been sweated off ... or washed away by her tears.
“I hurt you,” he said.
You loved me, she answered.
“What?”
You hear me, Gard. I know you do.
“Are you angry?” he asked, aware that the barriers were going up again, aware that he was acting again, aware that it was over, all the things they’d had were finally over. These were sorry things to be aware of. “Is that why you won’t talk to me?” He paused. “I wouldn’t blame you. You’ve put up with a lot of shit from me over the years, woman.”
“I was talking to you,” she said, and, sorry as he was to be lying to her after loving her, he was glad to sense her doubt. “With my mind.”
“I didn’t hear.”
“You did before. You heard ... and you answered. We talked, Gard.”
“We were closer to ... that.” He flagged an arm at the ship.
She smiled wanly up at him and put her cheek against his shoulder. With most of the makeup scrubbed away, her flesh had an unsettling translucence.
“Did I? Hurt you?”
“No. Yes. A little.” She smiled. It was that old Bobbi Anderson go-to-hell grin, but a final tear ran slowly down her cheek nonetheless. “It was worth it. We saved the best for last, Gard.”
He kissed her gently, but now her lips were different. The lips of the New and Improved Roberta Anderson.
“First, last, or in the middle, I didn’t have any business making love to you, and you don’t have any business out here.”
“I look tired, I know,” Bobbi said, “and I’m wearing a lot of goop, as you already found out. You were right—I let myself get overtired and I had something like a complete physical breakdown.”
Bullshit, Gardener thought, but he covered this thought with white noise so Bobbi couldn’t read it—he did this with barely a conscious thought. Such hiding was becoming second nature to him now.
“The treatment was ... radical. It’s resulted in some superficial skin problems and some hair loss. But it’ll all grow back.”
“Oh,” Gardener said, thinking: You still can’t lie for shit, Bobbi. “Well, I’m glad you’re all right. But you maybe ought to take a couple of days off, put your feet up—”
“No,” Bobbi said quietly. “This is the time for the final push, Gard. We’re almost there. We started this, you and me—”
“No,” Gardener said. “You started it, Bobbi. You literally stumbled over it. Back when Peter was alive. Remember?”
Gard saw pain in Bobbi’s eyes at the mention of Peter. Then it was gone. She shrugged Gard’s qualification off.
“You were here soon enough. You saved my life. I wouldn’t be here without you. So let’s do it together, Gard. I bet it’s no more than another twenty-five feet down to that hatchway.”
Gardener had a strong hunch she was right, but he suddenly didn’t feel like admitting it. There was a spike turning and turning in his heart, and the pain was worse than any hangover headache he’d ever had.
“If you think so, I’ll take your word for it.”
“What do you say, Gard? One more mile. You and me.”
He sat thou
ghtfully, looking at Bobbi, noticing again how still, how almost malignant the woods seemed with no birdsong in them.
This is how it would be—this is how it will be—if one of their asshole power plants ever does melt down. The people will have smarts enough to get out—if they’re warned in time, that is, and if the power plant in question and the NRC have balls enough to tell them—but you can’t tell an owl or woodpecker to clear the area. You can’t tell a scarlet tanager not to look at the fireball. So their eyes will melt and they’ll just go flapping around, blind as bats, running into trees and the sides of buildings until they starve to death or break their necks. Is this a spaceship, Bobbi? Or is it a great big containment housing that’s already leaking? It has, hasn’t it? That’s why these woods are so quiet, and that’s why the Polyester-Clad Neurologist Bird fell out of the sky on Friday, isn’t it?
“What do you say, Gard? One more mile?”
So where’s the good solution? Where’s peace with honor? Do you run? Do you turn it over to the American Dallas Police so they can use it on the Soviet Dallas Police? What? What? Any new ideas, Gard?
And suddenly he did have an idea ... or the glimmer of one.
But a glimmer was better than nothing.
He hugged Bobbi with a lying arm. “Okay. One more mile.”
Bobbi’s grin started to widen ... and then it became a look of curious surprise. “How much did he leave you, Gard?”
“How much did who leave me?”
“The Tooth Fairy,” Bobbi said. “You finally lost one.
Right there in the front.”
Startled and a little afraid, Gard raised his hand to his mouth. Sure enough, there was a gap where one of his incisors had been yesterday.
It had started, then. After a month working in the shadow of this thing, he had foolishly assumed immunity, but it wasn’t so. It had started; he was on his way to becoming New and Improved.
On his way to “becoming.”
He forced an answering smile. “I hadn’t noticed,” he said.
“Do you feel any different?”
“No,” Gard said truthfully. “Not yet, anyway. What do you say, you want to do some work?”
“I’ll do what I can,” Bobbi said. “With this arm—”
“You can check the hoses and tell me if any of them are starting to come loose. And talk to me.” He looked at Bobbi with an awkward smile. “None of those other guys knew how to talk, man. I mean, they were sincere, but ...” He shrugged. “You know?”
Bobbi smiled back, and Gardener saw another brilliant, unalloyed flash of the old Bobbi, the woman he had loved. He remembered the safe dark harbor of her neck and that screw in his heart turned again. “I think I do,” she said, “and I’ll talk your ear off, if that’s what you want. I’ve been lonely, too.”
They stood together, smiling at each other, and it was almost the same, but the woods were silent with no birdsong to fill them up.
The love’s over, he thought. Now it’s the same old poker game, except the Tooth Fairy came last night and I guess the bastard will be back tonight. Probably along with his cousin and his brother-in-law. And when they start seeing my cards, maybe exposing that glimmer of an idea like an ace in the hole, it’ll be all over. In a way, it’s funny. We always assumed the aliens would have to at least be alive to invade. Not even H. G. Wells expected an invasion of ghosts.
“I want to have a look into the trench,” Bobbi said.
“Okay. You’ll like the way it’s draining, I think.”
Together they walked into the shadow cast by the ship.
13
Monday, August 8th:
The heat was back.
The temperature outside of Newt Berringer’s kitchen window was seventy-nine at a quarter past seven that Monday morning, but Newt wasn’t in the kitchen to read it; he was standing in the bathroom in his pajama bottoms, inexpertly applying his late wife’s makeup to his face and cursing the way the sweat made the Pan-Cake clump up. He had always thought makeup a lot of harmless ladies’ foofraw, but now, trying to use it according to its original purpose—not to accent the good but to conceal the bad (or, at least, the startling)—he was discovering that putting on makeup was like giving someone a haircut. It was a fuck of a lot harder than it looked.
He was trying to cover up the fact that, over the last week or so, the skin of his cheeks and forehead had begun to fade. He knew, of course, that it had something to do with the trips he and the others had made into Bobbi’s shed—trips he could not remember afterward; only that they had been frightening but even more exhilarating, and that he had come out all three times feeling ten feet tall and ready to have sex in the mud with a platoon of lady wrestlers. He knew enough to associate what was happening with the shed, but at first he had thought it was simply a matter of losing his usual summer tan. In the years before an icy winter afternoon and a skidding bread truck had taken her, his wife Elinor liked to joke that all you needed to do was to put Newt under one ray of sun after the first of May and he turned as brown as an Indian.
By last Friday afternoon, however, he was no longer able to fool himself about what was going on. He could see the veins, arteries, and capillaries in his cheeks, exactly as you could see them in that model he’d gotten his nephew Michael two Christmases ago—the Amazing Visible Man, it was called. It was damned unsettling. It wasn’t just being able to see into himself, either; when he pressed his fingers against his cheeks, the cheekbones felt definitely squashy. It was as if they were ... well ... dissolving.
I can’t go out like this, he thought. Jesus, no.
But on Saturday, when he had looked in the mirror and realized after some thought and a lot of squinting that the gray shadow he was seeing through the side of his face was his own tongue, he had almost flown over to Dick Allison’s.
Dick answered the door looking so normal that for a few terrible moments Newt believed this was happening to him and him alone. Then Dick’s firm, clear thought filled his head, making him weak with relief: Christ, you can’t go around looking like that, Newt. You’ll scare people. Come in here. I’m going to call Hazel.
(The phone, of course, was really not necessary, but old habits died hard.)
In Dick’s kitchen, under the fluorescent ring in the ceiling, Newt had seen clearly enough that Dick was wearing makeup—Hazel, Dick said, had shown him how to put it on. Yes, it had happened to all the others except Adley, who had gone into the shed for the first time only two weeks ago.
Where does it all end, Dick? Newt had asked uneasily. The mirror in Dick’s hallway drew him like a magnet and he stared at himself, seeing his tongue behind and through his pallid lips, seeing a tangled undergrowth of small pulsing capillaries in his forehead. He pressed the tips of his fingers against the shelf of bone over his eyebrows and saw faint finger indentations when he took them away. They were like fingermarks in hard wax, right down to the discernible loops and sworls of his fingertips sunk into the livid skin. Looking at that had made him feel sick.
I don’t know, Dick had answered. He was talking on the phone with Hazel at the same time. But it doesn’t really matter. It’s going to happen to everyone eventually. Like everything else. You know what I mean.
He knew, all right. The first changes, Newt thought, looking into the mirror on this hot Monday morning, had in many ways been even worse, more shocking, because they had been so ... well, intimate.
But he had gone a ways toward getting used to it, which only went to show, he supposed, that a person could get used to anything, given world enough and time.
Now he stood by the mirror, dimly hearing the deejay on the radio informing his listening audience that an influx of hot southern air coming into the area meant they could look forward to at least three days and maybe a week of muggy weather and temps in the upper eighties and low nineties. Newt cursed the coming humid weather —it would make his hemorrhoids itch and burn, it always did—and went on trying to cover his increasingly transparent cheeks
, forehead, nose, and neck with Elinor’s Max Factor Pan-Cake. He finished cursing the weather and went fluently on to the makeup with never a break in his monologue, having no idea that makeup grew old and cakey after a long period of time (and this particular lot had been in the back of a bathroom drawer since long before Elinor’s death in February 1984).
But he supposed he would get used to putting the crap on ... until such time as it was no longer necessary, anyhow. A person could get used to damn near anything. A tentacle, white at its tip, then shading to rose and finally to a dark blood-red as it thickened toward its unseen base, fell out through the fly of his pajama bottoms. Almost as if to prove his thesis, Newt Berringer only tucked it absently back in and went on trying to get his dead wife’s makeup to spread evenly on his disappearing face.
14
Tuesday, August 9th:
Old Doc Warwick slowly pulled the sheet up over Tommy Jacklin and let it drop. It billowed slightly, then settled. The shape of Tommy’s nose was clearly defined. He’d been a handsome kid, but he’d had a big nose, just like his dad.
His dad, Bobbi Anderson thought sickly. Someone’s going to have to tell his dad, and guess who’s going to be elected? Such things shouldn’t bother her anymore, she knew—things like the Jacklin boy’s death, things like knowing she would have to get rid of Gard when they reached the ship’s hatchway—but they sometimes still did.
She supposed that would burn away in time.
A few more trips to the shed. That was all it would take.
She brushed aimlessly at her shirt and sneezed.
Except for the sound of the sneeze and the stertorous breathing of Hester Brookline in the other bed of the makeshift little clinic the Doc had set up in his sitting-cum -examination room, there was only shocked silence for a moment.
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