by Stephen King
"Come on," he said. "Let's take a look."
Without waiting, Gardener walked across to the trench and looked in. He could hear rushing water, but it was hard to see. He attached one of the big kliegs they used for night-work to the stirrup of the sling and lowered it about ten feet. That was plenty; if he had lowered it another ten, it would have been underwater. It had been a lake they had broken into, all right; no joke. The trench was filling rapidly.
After a moment, Andy joined him. His face was wretched. "All that work!" he cried.
"Did you bring your diving board, Bozie? Are we going to have Free Swim on Thursdays or Fr--"
"Shut up!" Andy Bozeman screamed at him. "Shut up, I hate you!"
Wild hysteria washed over Gardener. He staggered away to a stump and sat down, wondering if the goddam thing had stayed watertight all these years, wondering what the fair market price was for a flying saucer with water damage. He began to laugh. Even when Andy Bozeman came over and hit him upside the face and knocked him onto the ground, Jim Gardener couldn't stop laughing.
8
Thursday, August 4th:
When it got to be a quarter to nine and still no one had shown up, Gardener began to wonder if maybe they were quitting. He toyed with the idea as he sat in Bobbi's rocker on the porch, fingering the big puffy bruise on the side of his face where Bozeman had clouted him.
A bunch of them had been out in Archinbourg's Cadillac again, after midnight. Mostly the same bunch. Another Midnight Shed Party. Gardener had hiked himself up on one elbow and watched them through the guestroom window, wondering who brought the chips and dip to these soirees. They were just shadows grouped around the long front end of the Coupe DeVille. They stood there for a moment, then went to the shed. When they opened the door, that viciously brilliant light poured out in a flood that lit the entire yard and the guestroom itself with a sick radium-dial glow. They went inside. The glow faded down to a thick vertical bar but didn't go out entirely. They had left the door ajar. The folks in this little jerkwater Maine town were now the brightest people on earth, but apparently not even they had been able to figure out how to padlock a door from the outside, and they hadn't thought to put one on the inside.
Now, sitting on the porch and looking toward the village, Gardener thought: Maybe when they get inside there, they get too exalted to think of mundane things like padlocks.
He shaded his eyes with one hand. A truck was coming. A big old pulp truck that was vaguely familiar. There was a tarpaulin over something in the back. It flapped casually in the wind. Gardener knew it was going to turn in. Of course they hadn't given up.
Woke up last night in the guestroom bed, saw the folks going into the Tommyknockers' shed. Could have looked in, but I didn't quite dare; don't want to know what goes on in there.
He didn't think, somehow, that the judges of the Yale Younger Poets competition would think much of it. But, Gardener thought, This Is Where Jim Gardener Is Now, as they say. Maybe later on they'll call it my Tommyknocker Phase. Or my Shed Period. Or--
The truck changed to a lower gear and came groaning into Bobbi's dooryard. The engine died with a wheeze. The man in the strap-style T-shirt who got out was the man who had given Gard his ride to the Haven town line on July 4th. He recognized the man at once. Coffee, he thought. You gave me coffee with a lot of sugar in it. Tasted good. He looked like an extra from the James Dickey novel about those city boys and their weekend canoe trip down the Cahoolawassee. Gardener didn't think the man was from Haven, though--hadn't he said Albion?
Stuffs spreading, he thought. Well, why not? It's fallout, isn't it? And Albion's downwind.
" 'Lo there," the truck driver said. "Guess you don't 'member me." His tone added: Don't fuck with me, Fred.
"Guess I do," Gard said, and the name rose magically in his mind, even after all this--a single month that seemed more like ten years, with all these strange events. "Freeman Moss. Gave me a ride. I was coming to check on Bobbi. But I guess you know that."
"Ayuh."
Moss went to the back of the truck and began pulling slipknots and yanking rope. "Want to give me a help with this?"
Gardener started down the steps, then stopped, smiling a little. First Tremain, then Enders, then Bozeman with his somehow pitiful pale yellow polyester pants.
"Sure," he said. "Just tell me one thing."
"Ayuh?" Moss left off pulling the ropes. He flipped back the tarpaulin, and Gardener saw about what he had expected: a weird conglomeration of equipment: tanks, hoses, three car batteries nailed to a board. A New and Improved Pump. "Will if I can."
Gardener grinned without much humor. "Did you bring me a dead rat and a string to swing it with?"
9
Friday, August 5th:
No air traffic had overflown Haven on a regular basis since the late 1960s when Dow Air Force Base in Bangor had closed down. If someone had uncovered the ship in the earth back in those days, there might have been trouble; there had been Air Force fighter planes zooming overhead four and five times a day, rattling windows and sometimes breaking them with sonic booms. The pilots weren't supposed to boom over the continental United States unless absolutely necessary, but the hotshots who flew the F-4s, most of them with adolescent acne still fading from their cheeks and foreheads, sometimes got a little exuberant. The jets made the Mustangs and Chargers these overgrown boys had been driving only a year before look mighty tame. When Dow closed there were still a few Air National Guard flights, but the patterns were shifted north, toward Loring in Limestone.
After some dithering, the base was turned into a commercial airfield, named Bangor International Airport. Some thought the name rather grand for an airport that serviced a few wheezy Northeast Airlines flights to Boston each day and a handful of puddle jumper Pipers bound for Augusta and Portland. But the air traffic eventually grew, and by 1983 BIA had become a thriving air terminal. Besides serving two commercial airlines, it was also a refueling point for many international carriers, and so it finally earned its grand name.
For a while, some commercial airliners did overfly Haven--this was in the early seventies. But pilots and navigators regularly reported radar problems in the area coded Quadrant G-3, a square which took in most of Haven, all of Albion, and the China Lakes region. This cloudy interference, known as "popcorn," or "echo-haze," or, even more colorfully, as "ghost-turds," is also reported regularly over the Bermuda Triangle. Compasses went wacky. Sometimes there were funny cuckoo electrical glitches in the equipment.
In 1973 a Delta jet southbound from BIA to Boston nearly collided with a TWA jet bound from London to Chicago. Drinks on both planes were spilled; a TWA stewardess was scalded by hot coffee. No one but the flight crews knew how close it had been. The copilot on the Delta plane ran a hot special-delivery into his pants, laughed hysterically all the way to Boston, and quit flying forever two days later.
In 1974 a Big Sky charter jet loaded with happy gamblers bound for Las Vegas from Bangor and the Canadian Maritimes lost power in one engine over Haven and had to return to Bangor. When the engine was restarted on the ground, it ran fine.
There was another near-miss in 1975. By 1979, all commercial air traffic had been routed out of the area. If you had asked an FAA controller about it, he only would have shrugged and called it a dragon. It was a word they used. There were such places here and there; no one knew why. It was easier to route planes away and forget it.
By 1982, private air traffic was also being routinely vectored away from G-3 by controllers in Augusta, Waterville, and Bangor. So no pilot had seen the great shiny object winking up from the exact center of map-square G-3 on FAA Map ECUS-2.
Not until Peter Bailey saw it on the afternoon of August 5th.
Bailey was a private pilot with two hundred hours on his own in the air. He flew a Cessna Hawk XP, and he would have been the first to tell you that it had cost him a few banana-skins. This was Peter Bailey's phrase for money. He found it hilarious. The Hawk cruised at a hundred
and fifty miles an hour and had good sky capability; 17,000 feet without breathing hard. The Cessna nav-pack made it hard to get lost (the optional nav antenna had also cost a few banana-skins). In other words it was a good plane, one that could damn near fly itself--only it didn't have to with a good pilot like him driving.
If Peter Bailey had a bitch, it was the goddam insurance. It was highway robbery, and he had bored his golfing partners to tears with the outrage the insurance companies had foisted on him.
He had friends who flew, he assured them grimly, plenty of them. A lot with less hours on their licenses than he had were forking over fewer banana-skins to the insurance heathens than he was. Some were guys he wouldn't have flown with, he said, if they owned the last plane on earth and his wife was in Denver dying of a brain hemorrhage. And the amount wasn't the greatest humiliation of all. The greatest humiliation of all was that he, Peter Bailey, he, a respected neurosurgeon who made well over three hundred thousand banana-skins a year, had to accept pool coverage if he wanted to fly. Well, he told his captive audiences (who often wished fervently that they had only played the front nine, or, better, had stayed in the bar and soaked up a few Bloody Marys), pool coverage was assigned-risk coverage, the sort teenagers and convicted drunks had to carry on their cars. Shit! If that wasn't goddam discrimination he didn't know what was. If he wasn't such a busy man he'd slap the bastards with a class action suit and he'd win, too.
Many of Bailey's golf companions were lawyers, and most knew it wouldn't wash. Risk coverage was made on the basis of actuarial tables, and the fact was, Peter Bailey wasn't just a neurosurgeon; he was a doctor, and doctors have the worst record as private pilots of any professional group in the world.
After escaping one of these foursomes, one of the players remarked as Bailey headed toward the clubhouse, still fuming: "I wouldn't even drive to Denver with the long-winded son of a bitch if my wife was dying of a brain hemorrhage."
Peter Bailey was exactly the sort of flier for whom the tables had been invented. There were undoubtedly doctors all over America who were exemplary pilots. Bailey wasn't one of them. Quick and decisive in the operating theater when a patient lay before him with a window of skull cut away to reveal the pinkish-gray brain tissue, as delicate as a dancer with scalpel and laser knife, he was a hamfisted pilot who constantly violated assigned altitudes, FAA safety rules, and his own flight patterns. He was a bold pilot, but with only two hundred hours on his license, he could by no stretch of the imagination be called an old pilot. His status as an assigned risk only confirmed the old saw: a pilot may be one or the other, but no pilot is both.
He was flying alone that day from Teterboro outside New York to Bangor. At Bangor he would rent a car and drive to Derry Home Hospital. He had been asked to consult in the case of young Hillman Brown. Because the case was interesting and the price right (and because he had heard good things about the golf course in Orono), he had agreed.
The weather had been clear the whole way, the air smooth. Bailey had enjoyed the trip tremendously. As usual, his logbook was botched, he had missed one VOR beacon entirely and had decided another must be on the blink (he had hit the frequency dial with his elbow), he had wandered from his assigned altitude of 11,000 feet as high as 15,000 and as low as 6,000, and had once again avoided killing anyone . . . a blessing he was unfortunately too stupid to count.
He also wandered well off his flight-path, and so happened to overfly Haven, where a great blink of light suddenly flicked into his eye; it was as if someone had just flashed the lid of the world's biggest Crisco can up at him.
"What in the Sam Hill--"
He looked down and saw a tantalizing glimmer of that brightness. He might have dismissed it, might have gone on and survived to fight yet another day (or perhaps to collide with a fully loaded airliner), but he was early and intrigued. He banked the Hawk and went back.
"Now where--"
It flashed again, bright enough to dazzle a blue crescent of afterimage onto his eyes. Ripples of light ran across the top of the pilot's cabin.
"Jee-zus!"
There, below him in a clearing in the gray-green woods, was a huge silver object. He could tell little about it before it was gone again under the port wing.
At 6,000 feet for the second time that day, Bailey banked back again. His head had begun to ache--he noticed this and dismissed it as excitement. His first thought had been that it was a water-tower, but no one would locate a water-tower that big in the woods.
He overflew the object again, this time at 4,000. He had the Hawk throttled back as far as he dared (which was a good deal further than a more experienced pilot would have dared do, but the Hawk was a good plane and it forgave him).
Artifact, he thought this time, almost sick with excitement. A great dish-shaped artifact in the earth . . . or some government thing? But if it was government, how come it wasn't covered with a camouflage net? And the ground around it had been excavated--from up here, the trench cut into the earth was perfectly clear.
Bailey determined to overfly it again--hell, he'd buzz it!--and then his eye fell on his gauges and his heart took an unsteady leap. His compass was winding itself around in big stupid circles, the tank indicators were flashing red. The altimeter suddenly ran up to 22,000 feet, stopped briefly, and then dropped back to dead zero.
The Hawk's husky 195-horsepower motor gave a terrifying hitch. The nose dipped. Bailey's heart did the same. His head throbbed. In front of his bulging eyes needles were whirling, lights flashed from green to red like pygmy traffic signals, and the altitude warning beeper, which was supposed to tell a bemused pilot Wake up, dummy, you are about to run into a large immovable object called Mother Earth, began to sound, even though it wasn't supposed to go off until the plane passed through five hundred and Bailey's own eyes told him the Hawk was still at four thousand feet, perhaps a bit more. He looked at the digital thermometer which recorded the outside air temperature. It blinked from 47 to 58, then to 5. It paused there for a moment, then showed 999. The red numerals held there, pulsing distractedly, and then the thermometer shorted out.
"What in Christ's name is going on here?" Bailey screamed, and was stupidly amazed to see one of his front teeth fly out of his mouth, bounce off his airspeed indicator, and fall on the floor.
The engine hitched again.
"Fuck," he whispered. He was now sick with fright. Blood from the socket where his tooth had been trickled down his chin. A drop splashed on his Lacoste shirt.
The gleaming thing in the earth passed under his wings again.
The Hawk's engine ran choppily and stalled. It began to lose altitude. Forgetting all his training, Bailey hauled up on the wheel as hard as he could, but the silent plane didn't, couldn't, answer. Bailey's head pounded and thudded. The Cessna dropped to 4,000 feet . . . 3,500 ... 3,000. Bailey groped out with one hand like a blind man and thumbed the button marked EMERGENCY RESTART. Hi-test av-gas boomed hollowly in the Hawk's carbs. The propeller jerked, then stopped again. Now the Cessna had slid down to 2,500 feet. It passed over the Old Derry Road close enough for Bailey to be able to see the service board in front of the Methodist church.
"Motherfuck," he whispered. "I'm gonna die."
He pulled the choke all the way out and hit the restart button again. The engine coughed, ran for a while, then began to stutter.
"No!" Bailey screamed. One eye ruptured and filled up with blood. The blood sheeted thinly down his left cheek. In his panicky, terrorized state, he didn't even notice. He slammed the choke in again. "No, don't you stall, you ratshit plane!"
The engine roared; the propeller blurred into invisibility with a wedge of reflected sunshine in it. Bailey hauled up on the wheel. The overburdened Hawk began to lug again.
"Ratshit plane! Ratshit plane! Ratshit plane!" he screamed. His left eye was now full of blood and he was on some level aware that the world seemed to have taken on a strange pinkish aspect, but if he'd had the time or inclination to think about this at all,
he would have thought it no more than rage at this idiotic situation.
He let off on the wheel; the Hawk, allowed to climb at an angle which was almost sane, began to buckle down to its job again. Haven Village passed beneath it, and Bailey was aware of people looking up at him. He was low enough so someone could take his number if they thought of it. Go ahead! he thought grimly. Go ahead, take it, because when I finish with Cessna Corporation, every goddam stockholder they have is gonna be standing in his underwear! I'm going to sue those negligent sons of bitches for every banana-skin they've got!
The Hawk was rising smoothly now, its engine smooth and sweet. Bailey's head was trying to tear itself right off his shoulders, but an idea suddenly came to him--an idea of such stupefying simplicity and staggering ramifications that everything else was driven from his mind. He understood nothing less than the physiological basis of bicamerality in the human brain. This led to an instant understanding of race memory, not as a hazy Jungian concept but as a function of recombinant DNA and biological imprinting. And with this came an understanding of what the increased millierg generating capacity of the corpus callosum during periods of increased ductless-gland activity, which had puzzled students of the human brain for thirty years, actually meant.
Peter Bailey suddenly understood that time travel--actual time travel--was in his grasp.
At the same instant, a large portion of his own brain exploded.
White light flashed in his head--white light exactly like the reflection that had winked at him from that object in the woods.
If he had collapsed forward, pushing the wheel in, the people of Haven would have had another mess on their hands. But instead he fell backward, head lolling on his neck, blood running from his ears. He stared up at the ceiling of the pilot's compartment with an expression of stupendous, terminal surprise printed on his face.
If the Cessna's autopilot had been engaged, it would almost certainly have flown serenely on until it ran out of fuel. Weather conditions were optimum, and such things have happened before. As it was, it flew along almost dead level at 5,500 feet for five minutes anyway. The radio squawked at the dead neurosurgeon, telling him to get his ass up to his assigned altitude right now.