Stephen King

by The Tommyknockers (v5)

  8

  When the laughter passed, Gardener found that the atmosphere in Bobbi’s kitchen had eased considerably.

  Anderson asked: “What do you think would happen to the ship if the Dallas Police got hold of it?”

  “Have you ever heard of Hangar 18?” Gard asked.

  “No.”

  “According to the stories, Hangar 18’s supposed to be part of an Air Force base outside of Dayton. Or Dearborn. Or somewhere. Anywhere, USA. It’s where they’re supposed to have the bodies of about five little men with fishy faces and gills on their necks. Saucerians. It’s just one of those stories you hear, like how somebody found a rat head in his fast-food burger, or how there are alligators in the New York sewers. Only now I sort of wonder if it is a fairy tale. But I think that would be the end.”

  “Can I tell you one of those modern fairy tales, Gard?”

  “Lay it on me.”

  “Have you ever heard the one,” she asked, “about the guy who invented a pill to take the place of gasoline?”

  9

  The sun was going down in a bright blaze of reds and yellows and purples. Gardener sat on a big stump in Bobbi Anderson’s back yard, watching it go. They had talked most of the afternoon, sometimes discussing, sometimes reasoning, sometimes arguing. Bobbi had ended the palaver by declaring herself ravenous again. She made a huge pot of spaghetti and broiled thick pork chops. Gardener had followed her out into the kitchen, wanting to reopen the discussion—thoughts were rolling around in his mind like balls on a pooltable. Anderson wouldn’t allow it. She offered Gardener a drink, which Gardener, after a long, thoughtful pause, took. The whiskey went down good, and felt good, but he seemed to have no need for a second—well, no great need. Now, sitting here full of food and drink and looking at the sky, he supposed Bobbi had been right. They’d done all the constructive talking there was to do.

  It was decision time.

  Bobbi had eaten a tremendous supper. “You’re gonna puke, Bobbi,” Gardener said. He was serious but still couldn’t help laughing.

  “Nope,” Bobbi said placidly. “Never felt better.” She burped. “In Portugal, that’s a compliment to the cook.”

  “And after a good lay—” Gard lifted one leg and broke wind. Bobbi laughed gustily.

  They did the dishes (“Haven’t invented anything to do this yet, Bobbi?” “It’ll come, give me time.”) and then they went into the small drab living room, which hadn’t changed much since the time of Bobbi’s uncle, to watch the evening news. None of it was very good. The Middle East was smoldering again, with Israel flying air strikes against Syrian ground forces in Lebanon (and hitting a school by accident—Gardener winced at the pictures of burned, screaming children), the Russians driving against the mountain strongholds of the Afghan rebels, a coup in South America.

  In Washington, the NRC had issued a list of ninety nuclear facilities in thirty-seven states with safety problems ranging from “moderate to serious.”

  Moderate to serious, great, Gardener thought, feeling the old impotent rage stir and twist, biting into him like acid. If we lose Topeka, that’s moderate. If we lose New York, that’s serious.

  He became aware that Bobby was looking at him a little sadly. “The beat goes on, right?” she said.

  “Right.”

  When the news was over, Anderson told Gardener she was going to bed.

  “At seven-thirty?”

  “I’m still bushed.” And she looked it.

  “Okay. I’ll sack out myself pretty soon. I’m tired too. It’s been a crazy couple of days, but I’m not completely sure I’d sleep, the way this stuff is whizzing around in my head.”

  “You want a Valium?”

  He smiled. “I saw they were still there. I’ll pass. You were the one who could have used a trank or two, last couple of weeks.”

  The State of Maine’s price for going along with Nora’s decision not to press charges was that Gardener should go into a counseling program. The program had lasted six months; the Valium was apparently going to go on forever. Gardener hadn’t actually taken any in almost three years, but every now and then—usually when he was going traveling—he filled the prescription. Otherwise, some computer might burp up his name and a psychologist picking up a few extra bucks courtesy of the State of Maine might drop by to make sure his head was staying shrunk to a suitable size.

  After she was in bed, Gardener had turned off the TV and sat awhile in Bobbi’s rocker, reading The Buffalo Soldiers. In a short time, he heard her snoring away. Gardener supposed Bobbi’s snores would also be part of a conspiracy to keep him awake, but he didn’t really mind—Bobbi had always snored, the price of a deviated septum, and that had always annoyed Gardener, but he had discovered last night that some things were worse. The ghastly silence in which she had slept on the couch, for instance. That was much worse.

  Gardener had poked his head in for a moment, had seen Bobbi in a much more typical Bobbi Anderson sleeping posture, naked except pajama bottoms, small breasts bare, blankets kicked into disarray between her legs, one hand curled under her cheek, the other by her face, her thumb almost in her mouth. Bobbi was okay.

  So Gardener had come out here to make his decision.

  Bobbi’s patch of garden was going great guns—the corn was taller than any Gardener had seen on his way north from Arcadia Beach, and her tomatoes were going to be blue-ribbon winners. Some of them would have come to the chest of a man walking down the row. In the middle of it all was a cluster of giant sunflowers, ominous as triffids, nodding in the slight breeze.

  When Bobbi asked him earlier if he’d ever heard of the so-called “gasoline pill,” Gardener had smiled and nodded. More twentieth-century fairy tales, all right. She’d then asked him if he believed it. Gardener, still smiling, said no. Bobbi reminded him about-Hangar 18.

  “Are you saying you do believe there’s such a pill? Or was? Something you’d just drop into your gas tank and run on all day?”

  “No,” Bobbi said quietly. “Nothing I’ve ever read suggests the possibility of such a pill.” She leaned forward, forearms on her thighs. “But I’ll tell you what I do believe: if there was, it wouldn’t be on the market. Some big cartel, or maybe the government itself, would buy it ... or steal it.”

  “Yeah,” Gard said. He had thought more than once about the crazy ironies inherent in every status quo: open the U.S. borders and put all those customs people out of work? Legalize dope and destroy the DEA? You might as well try to shoot the man in the moon with a BB gun.

  Gard burst out laughing.

  Bobbi looked at him, puzzled but also smiling a little. “So? Share.”

  “I was just thinking that if there was a pill like that, the Dallas Police would shoot the guy who invented it and then put it next to the green guys in Hangar 18.”

  “Not to mention his whole family,” Bobbi agreed.

  Gard didn’t laugh this time. This time it didn’t seem quite so hilarious.

  “In that light,” Anderson had said, “look at what I’ve done here. I’m not even a good handyman, let alone anyone’s scientist, and so the force that worked through me produced a bunch of stuff that looks more like stuff from Boy’s Life plans than anything else—built by a fairly incompetent boy, at that.”

  “They work,” Gardener replied.

  Yes, Anderson had agreed. They did. She even had a vague idea of how they worked—on a principle which could be called “collapsing-molecule fusion.” It was nonatomic, totally clean. The telepathic typewriter, she said, depended on collapsing-molecule fusion for juice, but the actual principle of that one was much different, and she didn’t understand it. There was a powerpack inside that had begun life as a fuzz-buster, but beyond that she was blank.

  “You get a bunch of scientists in here from the NSA or the Shop, and they’d probably have this stuff down pat in six hours,” Anderson said. “They’d go around looking like somebody just kicked them in the balls, asking each other how the hell they could have
missed such elementary concepts for so long. And do you know what would happen next?”

  Gardener thought about it hard, his head down, one hand gripping the can of beer Bobbi had given him, the other gripping his forehead, and suddenly he was back at that terrible party listening to Ted the Power Man defend the Iroquois plant, which even now was loading hot rods: If we gave these nuke-freaks what they wanted, they’d turn around a month or so later and start whining about not being able to use their blow-dryers, or found out their Cuisinarts weren’t going to work when they wanted to mix up a bunch of macrobiotic food. He saw himself leading Ted the Power Man over to Arberg’s buffet—he saw this as clearly as if it had happened ... shit, as if it was happening right then. On the table, between the chips and the bowl of raw veggies, was one of Bobbi’s contraptions. The batteries were hooked up to a circuit board; that was in turn hooked up to an ordinary wall switch, the sort available in any hardware store for a buck or so. Gardener saw himself turn this switch, and suddenly everything on the table—chips, raw veggies, the lazy Susan with its five different kinds of dip, the remains of the cold cuts and the carcass of the chicken, the ashtrays, the drinks—rose six inches into the air and then simply held there, their shadows pooling decorously beneath them on the linen. Ted the Power Man looked at this for a moment, mildly annoyed. Then he swept the contraption off the table. The wires snapped. Batteries rolled hither and yon. Everything fell back to the table with a crash, glasses spilling, ashtrays overturning and scattering butts. Ted took off his sport coat and covered the remains of the gadget, the way you might cover the corpse of an animal hit and killed in the road. That done, he turned back to his small captive audience and resumed speaking. These people think they can go on having their cake and eating it too forever. These people assume that there is always going to be a fallback position. They are wrong. There is no fallback position. It’s simple: nukes or nothing. Gardener heard himself screaming in a rage that was, for a change, totally sober: What about the thing you just broke? What about that? Ted bent and picked up his sport coat as gracefully as a magician waving his cape before a bedazzled audience. The floor beneath was bare except for a few potato chips. No sign of the gadget. No sign at all. What about what thing? Ted the Power Man asked, looking straight at Gardener with an expression of sympathy into which a liberal helping of contempt had been mixed. He turned to his audience. Does anybody here see anything? ... No, they were answering in unison, like children reciting: Arberg, Patricia McCardle, all the rest; even the young bartender and Ron Cummings were reciting it. No, we don’t see anything, we don’t see anything at all, Ted, not a thing, you’re right, Ted, it’s the nukes or nothing. Ted was smiling. Next thing you know, he’ll be telling us that old wheeze about the itty-bitty pill you can put in your gas tank and run your car on all day. Ted the Power Man began to laugh. All the others joined in. All of them were laughing at him.

  Gardener raised his head and turned agonized eyes on Bobbi Anderson. “You think they’d ... what? Classify all this?”

  “Don’t you?” And, after a moment, in a very gentle voice, Anderson prompted: “Gard?”

  “Yes,” Gardener said after a long time, and for a moment he was very close to bursting into tears. “Yeah, sure. Sure they would.”

  10

  Now he sat on a stump in Bobbi’s back yard without the slightest idea there was a loaded shotgun pointed at the back of his head.

  He sat thinking of his mental replay of the party. It was so horrifying and so utterly obvious that he supposed he could be forgiven the time it had taken him to see it and grasp it. The ship in the earth could not be dealt with just on the basis of Bobbi’s welfare, or Haven’s welfare. Regardless of what it was or what it was doing to Bobbi or anyone else in the immediate area, the ultimate disposition of the ship in the earth would have to be made on the basis of the world’s welfare. Gardener had served on dozens of committees whose goals ranged from the possible to the wildly crazed. He had marched; had given more than he could afford to help pay for newspaper ads in two unsuccessful campaigns to close Maine Yankee by referendum; as a college student he had marched against the U.S. involvement in Vietnam; he belonged to Greenpeace; he supported NARAL. In half a dozen muddled ways he had tried to deal with the world’s welfare, but his efforts, although growing out of individual thought, had always been expressed as part of a group. Now ...

  Up to you, Gard-ole-Gard. Just you. He sighed. It was like a sob. Ring those funky changes, white boy ... sure. But first ask yourself who wants the world to change? The unfed, the unwell, the unhomed, right? The parents of those kids in Africa with the big bellies and the dying eyes. The blacks in South Africa. The PLO. Does Ted the Power Man want a big helping of funky changes? Bite your tongue! Not Ted, not the Russian Politburo, not the Knesset, not the President of the United States, not the Seven Sisters, not Xerox, not Barry Manilow.

  Oh no, not the big boys, not the ones with the real power, the ones who drove the Status Quo Machine. Their motto was “Get the funk outta my face.”

  There was a time when he would not have hesitated for a moment, and that time was not so long past. Bobbi wouldn’t have needed any arguments; Gard himself would have been the guy flogging the horse until its heart burst ... only he would have been right there in harness too, pulling alongside. Here, at last, was a source of clean power, so abundant and easy to produce it might as well be free. Within six months, every nuclear reactor in the United States could be brought to a cold stop. Within a year, every reactor in the world. Cheap power. Cheap transport. Travel to other planets, even other star-systems seemed possible—after all, Bobbi’s ship had not gotten to Haven, Maine, on the good ship Lollypop. It was, in fact—give us a drumroll, please, maestro—THE ANSWER TO EVERYTHING.

  Are there weapons on board that ship, do you think?

  He had started to ask Bobbi that and something had stopped his mouth. Weapons? Maybe. And if Bobbi could receive enough of that residual “force” to create a telepathic typewriter, could she also create something that would look like a Flash Gordon stun-gun but which might actually work? Or a disintegrator? A tractor-beam? Something which would, instead of just going Brummmmmmmm or Wacka-Wacka-Wacka, would actually turn people into piles of smoldering ash? Possibly. And if not, wouldn’t some of Bobbi’s hypothetical scientists adapt things like the water-heater gadget or the customized Tomcat motor to something that would put a radical hurt on people? Sure. After all, long before toasters and hair dryers and baseboard heaters were ever thought of, the State of New York was using electricity to fry murderers at Sing-Sing.

  What scared Gardener was that the idea of weapons held a certain attractiveness. Part of it, he supposed, was just self-interest. If the order came down to put a sport coat over the mess, then surely he and Bobbi would be part of what was to be covered. But beyond that were other possibilities. One of them, wild but not unattractive, was the idea that he and Bobbi might be able to kick a lot of asses that deserved kicking. The idea of sending happy-time folks like the Ayatollah into the Phantom Zone was so delightful that it almost made Gardener chuckle. Why wait for the Israelis and the Arabs to sort out their problems? And terrorists of all stripes ... goodbye, fellas. Catch you on the flip-flop.

  Wonderful, Gard! I love it! We’ll put it on network TV! It’ll be better than Miami Vice! Instead of two fearless drug-busters, we got Gard and Bobbi, cruising the planet in their flying saucer! Gimme the phone, someone! I got to call CBS!

  You’re not funny, Gardener thought.

  Who’s laughing? Isn’t that what you’re talking about? You and Bobbi playing the Lone Ranger and Tonto?

  So what if it is? How long does it take before that option starts looking good? How many suitcase bombs? How many women shot in embassy toilets? How many dead kids? How long do we let it all go on?

  Love it, Gard. “Okay, everyone on Planet Earth, sing along with Gard and Bobbi—just follow the bouncing ball: ‘The aaanswer, my friend, is blooowin’ in the wind...’
”

  You’re disgusting.

  And you’re starting to sound downright dangerous. You remember how scared you were when that state trooper found the pistol in your pack? How scared you were because you didn’t even remember putting it in there? This is it all over again. The only difference is that now you’re talking about a bigger caliber. Dear Christ, are you ever.

  As a younger man, these questions never would have occurred to him ... and if they had, he would simply have brushed them aside. Apparently Bobbi already had. She was, after all, the one who had mentioned the man on horseback.

  What do you mean, a man on horseback?

  I mean us, Gard. But I think... I think I mostly mean you.

  Bobbi, when I was twenty-five I burned all the time. When I was thirty, I burned some of the time. But the oxygen in here must be getting thin, because now I only burn when I’m drunk. I’m scared to climb up on that horse, Bobbi. If history ever taught me anything, it taught me that horses like to bolt.

  He shifted on the stump again, and the shotgun followed him. Anderson sat in the kitchen on a stool, the barrels swiveling a bit on the window-sill with every move Gardener made. She was getting very little of his thoughts; it was frustrating, maddening. But she was getting enough to know that Gardener was approaching a decision ... and when he made it, Anderson thought she would know what it was.

  If it was the wrong one, she was going to blow off the back of his head and bury the body in the soft soil at the foot of the garden. She would hate to do that, but if she had to, she would.

  Anderson waited calmly for the moment, her mind tuned to the faint run of Gardener’s thoughts, making the tenuous connection.

  It would not be long now.

  11

  What really scares you is the chance to deal from a position of strength for the first time in your miserable, confused life.

  He sat up straighter, an expression of dismay on his face. It wasn’t true, was it? Surely it wasn’t.