Because you were mad, he answered himself. Gard nodded. That was it. No more explanation was needed. He had been mad—and not just for the last month or so. It was late to wake up, oh yes, very late, but late was better than never.
The sound. Slishh-slishhh-slishhh.
The smell. Bland yet meaty. A smell his mind insisted on associating with raw veal slowly spoiling in milk.
His stomach lurched. A burning, acidic burp scorched his throat. Gardener moaned.
The idea—that glimmer—returned to him, and he clutched at it. It might be possible either to abort all of this ... or at least to put it on hold for a long, long time. It just might.
You got to let the world go to hell in its own way, Gard, two minutes to midnight or not.
He thought of Ted the Power Man again, thought of mad military organizations trading ever-more-sophisticated weapons with each other, and that angry, inarticulate, obsessed part of his mind tried to shout down sanity one final time.
Shut up, Gardener told it.
He went into the guest bedroom and pulled off his shirt. He looked out the window and now he could see sparks of light coming out of the woods. Dark had come. They were returning. They would go into the shed and maybe have a little seance. A meeting of minds around the shower cabinets. Fellowship in the homey green glow of raped minds.
Enjoy it, Gardener thought. He put the .45 under the foot of the mattress, then unbuckled his belt. It may be the last time, so—
He looked down at his shirt. Sticking out of the pocket was a bow of metal. It was the padlock, of course. The padlock which belonged on the shed door.
8
For a moment which probably seemed much longer than it actually was, Gardener was unable to move at all. That feeling of unreal fairy-tale terror stole back into his tired heart. He was reduced to a horrified spectator watching those lights move steadily along the path. Soon they would reach the overgrown garden. They would cut through. They would cross the dooryard. They would reach the shed. They would see the missing padlock. Then they would come into the house and either kill Jim Gardener or send his discorporated atoms to Altair-4, wherever that was.
His first coherent thought was simple panic yelling at the top of its voice: Run! Get out of here!
His second thought was the shaky resurfacing of reason. Guard your thoughts. If you ever guarded them before, guard them now.
He stood with his shirt off, his unbuckled and unzipped jeans sagging around his hips, staring at the padlock in his shirt pocket.
Get out there right now and put it back. Right Now! No ... no time ... Christ, there’s no time. They’re at the garden.
There might be. There might be just enough if you quit playing pocket-pool and get moving!
He broke the paralysis with a final harsh effort of will, bent, snatched up the lock with the key still sticking out of the bottom, and ran, zipping his pants as he went. He slipped out the back door, paused for just a moment as the last two flashlights slipped into the garden and disappeared, then ran for the shed.
Faintly, vaguely, he could hear their voices in his mind—full of awe, wonder, jubilation.
He closed them out.
Green light fanning out from the shed door, which stood ajar.
Christ, Gard, how could you have been so stupid? his cornered mind raved, but he knew how. It was easy to forget such mundane things as relocking doors when you had seen a couple of people hung up on posts with coaxial cables coming out of their heads.
He could hear them in the garden now—could hear the rustle of the useless giant cornstalks.
As he reached toward the hasp, lock in hand, he remembered closing it before dropping it into his pocket. His hand jerked at the thought and he dropped the goddam thing. It thumped to the ground. He looked for it, and at first couldn’t see it at all.
No ... there it was, there just beyond the narrow fan of pulsing green light. There was the lock, yes, but the key wasn’t in it anymore. The key had fallen out when the lock thumped to the ground.
God my God my God, his mind sobbed. His body was now covered with oozing sweat. His hair hung in his eyes. He thought he must smell like a rancid monkey.
He could hear cornstalks and leaves rustling louder. Someone laughed quietly—the sound was shockingly near. They would be out of the garden in seconds—he could feel those seconds bustling by, like self-important businessmen with potbellies and attaché cases. He went down on his knees, snatched up the lock, and began to sweep his hand back and forth in the dirt, trying to find the key.
Oh you bastard where are you? Oh you bastard where are you? Oh you bastard where are you?
Aware that even now, in this panic, he had thrown a screen around his thoughts. Was it working? He didn’t know. And if he couldn’t find the key, it didn’t matter, did it?
Oh you bastard where are you?
He saw a dull glint of silver beyond where he was sweeping his hand—the key had gone much further than he would have believed. His seeing it was only dumb luck ... like Bobbi stumbling over that little rim of protruding metal in the earth two months before, he supposed.
Gardener snatched it and bolted to his feet. He would be hidden from them by the angle of the house for just a moment longer, but that was all he had left. One more screw-up—even a little one—would finish him, and there might not be enough time left even if he performed each of the mundane little operations involved in padlocking a door perfectly.
The fate of the world may now depend on whether a man can lock a shed door on the first try, he thought dazedly. Modern life is so challenging.
For a moment he didn’t think he was even going to be able to slot the key in the lock. It chattered all the way around the slit without going in, a prisoner of his shaking hand. Then, when he thought it really was all over, it slid home. He turned it. The lock opened. He closed the door, slipped the arm of the padlock through the hasp, and then clicked it shut. He pulled the key out and folded it into his sweating hand. He slid around the corner of the shed like oil. At the exact moment he did, the men and women who had gone out to the ship emerged into the dooryard, moving in single file.
Gardener reached up to hang the key on the nail where he had found it. For one nightmare moment he thought he was going to drop it again and have to hunt for it in the high weeds growing on this side of the shed. When it slipped onto the nail he let out his breath in a shuddering sigh.
Part of him wanted not to move, to just freeze here. Then he decided he’d better not take the risk. After all, he didn’t know that Bobbi had her key.
He continued slipping along the side of the shed. His left ankle struck the haft of an old harrow that had been left to rust in the weeds, and he had to clamp his teeth over a cry of pain. He stepped over it and slipped around another corner. Now he was behind the shed.
That sudsing sound was maddeningly loud back here.
I’m right behind those goddam showers, he thought. They’re floating inches from me ... literally inches.
A rustle of weeds. A minute scrape of metal. Gardener felt simultaneously like laughing and screeching. They hadn’t had Bobbi’s key. Someone had just come around to the side of the shed and taken the key Gardener had hung up again only seconds before—probably Bobbi herself.
Still warm from my hand, Bobbi, did you notice?
He stood in back of the shed, pressed against the rough wood, arms slightly spread, palms tight on the boards.
Did you notice? And do you hear me? Do any of you hear me? Is someone—Allison or Archinbourg or Berringer—goingto suddenly pop his head around here and yell out “Peekaboo, Gard, we seeee you”? Is the shield still working?
He stood there and waited for them to take him.
They didn’t. On an ordinary summer night he probably would not have been able to hear the metallic rattle as the door was unlocked—it would have been masked by the loud ree-ree-ree of the crickets. But now there were no crickets. He heard the unlocking; heard the creak of the
hinges as the door was opened; heard the hinges creak again as the door was pushed shut. They were inside.
Almost at once the pulses of light falling through the cracks began to speed up and become brighter, and his mind was split by an agonized scream:
Hurts! It hurrrrr—
He moved away from the shed and went back to the house.
9
He lay awake a long time, waiting for them to come out again, waiting to see if he had been discovered.
All right, I can try to put a stop to the “becoming, ” he thought. But it won’t work unless I actually can go inside the ship. Can I do that?
He didn’t know. Bobbi seemed to have no worries, but Bobbi and the others were different now. Oh, he himself was also “becoming”; the lost teeth proved that; the ability to hear thoughts did too. He had changed the words on the computer screen just by thinking them. But there was no use kidding himself: he was far behind the competition. If Bobbi survived the entry into the ship and her old buddy Gard dropped dead, would any of them, even Bobbi herself, spare a tear? He didn’t think so.
Maybe that’s what they all want. Bobbi included. For you to go into the ship and just fall over with your brains exploding in one big harmonic radio transmission. It would save Bobbi the moral pain of taking care of you herself, for one thing. Murder without tears.
That they intended to get rid of him, he no longer doubted. But he thought that maybe Bobbi—the old Bobbi—would let him live long enough to see the interior of the strange thing they had worked so long to dig up. That at least felt right. And in the end, it didn’t matter. If murder was what Bobbi was planning, there was no real defense, was there? He had to go into the ship. Unless he did that, his idea, crazy as it undoubtedly was, had no chance to work at all.
Have to try, Gard.
He had intended to try as soon as they were inside, and that would probably be tomorrow morning. Now he thought that maybe he ought to press his luck a little further. If he went according to the rag and a bone he supposed he had to call his “original plan,” there would be no way he could do anything about that little boy. The kid would have to come first.
Gard, he’s probably dead anyway.
Maybe. But the old man didn’t think so; the old man thought there was still a little boy left to save.
One kid doesn’t matter-not in the face of all this. You know it, too—Haven is like a great big nuclear reactor that’s ready to go red-line. The containment is melting. To coin a phrase.
It was logical, but it was a croupier’s logic. Ultimately, killer logic. Ted the Power Man logic. If he wanted to play the game that way, why even bother?
The kid matters or nothing matters.
And maybe this way he could even save Bobbi. He didn’t think so; he thought Bobbi had gone too far for salvation. But he could try.
Long odds, Gard ole Gard.
Sure. The clock’s at a minute to midnight ... we’re down to counting seconds.
Thinking that, he slipped into the blankness of sleep. This was followed by nightmares where he floated in a clear green bath, tethered by thick coaxial cables. He was trying to scream but he couldn’t, because the cables were coming out of his mouth.
5.
THE SCOOP
1
Entombed in the overdecorated confines of the Bounty Tavern—drinking buck-a-bottle Heinekens and laughed at by David Bright, who had sunk to vulgar depths of humor, who had even ended up comparing John Leandro to Superman’s pal Jimmy Olsen—Leandro had wavered. No use telling himself otherwise. He had, indeed, wavered. But men of vision have always had to endure barbs of ridicule, and not a few have been burned or crucified or had their height artificially extended by five or six inches on the Inquisitorial rack of pain for their visions. Having David Bright ask him over beers in the Bounty if his Secret Wristwatch was in good working order was hardly the worst thing that could have befallen him.
But oh shit it hurt.
John Leandro determined that David Bright, and anyone else to whom Bright had related Crazy Johnny’s ideas that Something Big Was Going on in Haven, would end up laughing on the other side of his or her face. Because something big was going on there. He felt it in every bone in his body. There were days, when the wind was blowing from the southeast, that he almost imagined he could smell it.
His vacation had begun the previous Friday. He had hoped to go down to Haven that very day. But he lived with his widowed mother, and she had been counting so on him running her up to Nova Scotia to see her sister, she said, but if John had commitments, why, she understood; after all, she was old and probably not much fun anymore; just someone to cook his meals and wash his underwear, and that was fine, you go on, Johnny, go on and hunt up your scoop, I’ll just call Megan on the telephone, maybe in a week or two your cousin Alfie will bring her down here to see me, Alfie’s so good to his mother, et cetera, et cetera, ibid., ibid., ad infinitum, ad infinitum.
On Friday, Leandro took his mother to Nova Scotia. Of course they stayed over, and by the time they got back to Bangor, Saturday was shot. Sunday was a bad day to begin anything, what with his Sunday-school class of first- and second-graders at nine, full worship services at ten, and Young Men for Christ in the Methodist rectory at five P.M. At the YMC meeting, a special speaker gave them a slide show on Armageddon. As he explained to them how unrepenting sinners would be inflicted with boils and running sores and ailments of the bowels and the intestines, Georgina Leandro and the other members of the Ladies’ Aid passed out paper cups of Za-Rex and oatmeal cookies. And during the evening there was always a songfest for Christ in the church basement.
Sundays always left him feeling exalted. And exhausted.
2
So it was Monday, the fifteenth of August, before Leandro finally tossed his yellow legal pads, his Sony tape recorder, his Nikon, and a gadget-bag filled with film and various lenses into the front seat of his used Dodge and prepared to set out for Haven ... and what he hoped would be journalistic glory. He would not have been appalled if he had known he was approaching ground-zero of what was shortly to become the biggest story since the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.
The day was calm and blue and mellow—very warm but not so savagely hot and humid as the last few days had been. It was a day everyone on earth would mark forever in his memory. Johnny Leandro had wanted a story, but he had never heard the old proverb that goes, “God says take what you want ... and pay for it.”
He only knew that he had stumbled onto the edge of something, and when he tried to wiggle it, it remained firm ... which meant it was maybe bigger than one might at first think. There was no way he was going to walk away from this; he intended to excavate. All the David Brights in the world with their smart cracks about Jimmy Olsen wristwatches and Fu Manchu could not stop him.
He put the Dodge in drive and began to roll away from the curb.
“Don’t forget your lunch, Johnny!” his mother called. She came puffing down the walk with a brown-paper sack in one hand. Large grease spots were already forming on the brown paper; since grade school, Leandro’s favorite sandwich had been bologna, slices of Bermuda onion, and Wesson Oil.
“Thanks, Mom,” he said, leaning over to take the bag and put it down on the floor. “You didn’t have to do that, though. I could have picked up a hamburger—”
“If I’ve told you once I’ve told you a thousand times,” she said, “you have no business going into those roadside luncheonettes, Johnny. You never know if the kitchen’s dirty or clean.
“Microbes,” she said ominously, leaning forward.
“Ma, I got to g—”
“You can’t see microbes at all,” Mrs. Leandro went on. She was not to be turned from her subject until she had had her say on it.
“Yes, Mom,” Leandro said, resigned.
“Some of those places are just havens for microbes,” she said. “The cooks may not be clean, you know. They may not wash their hands after leaving the lavatory. They may have dirt o
r even excrement under their nails. This isn’t anything I want to discuss, you understand, but sometimes a mother has to instruct her son. Food in places like that can make a person very, very sick.”
“Mom—”
She uttered a long-suffering laugh and dabbed momentarily at the corner of one eye with her apron. “Oh, I know, your mother is silly, just a silly old woman with a lot of funny old ideas, and she probably ought to just learn to shut up.”
Leandro recognized this for the manipulative trick it was, but it still always made him feel squirmy, guilty, about eight years old.
“No, Mom,” he said. “I don’t think that at all.”
“I mean, you are the big newsman, I just sit home and make your bed and wash your clothes and air out your bedroom if you get the farts from drinking too much beer.”
Leandro bent his head, said nothing, and waited to be released.
“But do this for me. Stay out of roadside luncheonettes, Johnny, because you can get sick. From microbes.”
“I promise, Mom.”
Satisfied that she had extracted a promise from him, she was now willing to let him go.
“You’ll be home for supper?”
“Yes,” Leandro said, not knowing any better.
“At six?” she persisted.
“Yes! Yes!”
“I know, I know, I’m just a silly old—”
“Bye, Mom!” he said hastily, and pulled away from the curb.
He looked in the rearview mirror and saw her standing at the end of the walk, waving. He waved back, then dropped his hand, hoping she would go back into the house ... and knowing better. When he made a right turn two blocks down and his mother was finally gone, Leandro felt a faint but unmistakable lightening of his heart. Rightly or wrongly, he always felt this way when his mom finally dropped out of sight.
3
In Haven, Bobbi Anderson was showing Jim Gardener some modified breathing apparatus. Ev Hillman would have recognized it; the respirators looked very similar to the one he had picked up for the cop, Butch Dugan. But that one had been to protect Dugan from the Haven air; the respirators Bobbi was demonstrating drew on reserves of just that—Haven air was what they were used to, and Haven air was what the two of them would breathe if they got inside the Tommyknockers’ ship. It was nine-thirty.
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