Broken bottle-necks coming at him at forty miles an hour.
Mama! Leandro’s mind shrieked, and he threw his arms up in front of his face in a crisscross.
He didn’t have to worry about jagged bottle-necks after all, or the microbes which might have been in the cheeseburgers from the Burger Ranch, for that matter. One of life’s great truths is this: when one is about to be struck by a speeding six-hundred-pound Coke machine, one need worry about nothing else.
There was a thudding, crunching sound. The front of Leandro’s skull shattered like a Ming vase hurled onto the floor. A split second later his spine snapped. For a moment the machine carried him along, plastered to it like a very large bug plastered to the windshield of a fast-moving car. His splayed legs dragged on the road, the white line unreeling between them. The heels of his loafers eroded to smoking rubber nodules. One fell off.
Then he slid down the front of the vending machine and flopped onto the road.
The Coke machine started back toward Haven Village. Its coin-holder had been jarred when the machine hit Leandro, and as it moved rapidly through the air, humming, a steady stream of quarters, nickels, and dimes spewed out of the coin return and went rolling about on the road.
8.
GARD ANDBOBBI
1
Gardener knew that Bobbi would make her move soon—the old Bobbi had fulfilled what the New and Improved Bobbi saw as its last obligation to good old Jim Gardener, who had come to save his friend and who had stayed on to whitewash one hell of a strange fence.
He thought, in fact, that it would be the sling—that Bobbi would want to go up first, and, once up, would simply not send it back down. There he’d be, down by the hatch, and there he’d die, next to that strange symbol. Bobbi wouldn’t even have to deal with the messy reality of murder. There would be no need to think about good old Gard dying slowly and miserably of starvation, either. Good old Gard would die of multiple hemorrhages very quickly.
But Bobbi insisted that Gard go up first, and the sardonic cut of her eyes told Gardener that Bobbi knew exactly what he had been thinking ... and she hadn’t had to read his mind to do it, either.
The sling rose in the air and Gardener clung tightly to the cable, fighting a need to vomit—that need, he thought, was quickly going to become impossible to deny, but Bobbi had sent him a thought which came through loud and clear as soon as they wriggled out through the hatch again: Don’t take the mask off until you get topside. Were Bobbi’s thoughts clearer, or was it his imagination? No. Not imagination. They had both gotten another boost inside the ship. His nose was still bleeding and his shirt was sopping with it; the air mask was filling up. It was by far the worst nosebleed he’d had since Bobbi first brought him out here.
Why not? he had sent back, trying to be very careful and send only that top thought—nothing below it.
Most of the machines we heard were air-exchangers. Breathing what’s in the trench now would do you in just as quick as breathing what was in the ship when we first opened it. The two won’t equalize for the rest of the day, maybe longer.
Not the sort of thinking one would usually suspect in a woman who wanted to kill you—but that look was still in Bobbi’s eyes, and the feel of it colored all of Bobbi’s thoughts.
Hanging on to the cable for dear life, biting at the rubber pegs, Gardener fought to hold on to his stomach.
The sling reached the top. He wandered away on legs that felt as if they were made of rubber bands and paper clips, barely seeing the Electrolux and the length of cable manipulating the buttons; Count ten, he thought. Count ten, get as far from the trench as you can, then take off the mask and take what comes. I think I’d rather die than feel like this, anyway.
He got as far as five and could hold back no longer. Crazy images danced before his eyes: dumping the drink down Patricia McCardle’s dress, seeing Bobbi reeling off her porch to greet him when he finally arrived; the big man with the gold cup over his mouth and nose turning to look at him from the passenger window of a four-wheel-drive as Gardener lay drunk on the porch.
If I’d dug in a few different places out at that gravel pit, why, I just might have found that one too! he thought, and that was when his stomach finally rebelled.
He tore the mouthpiece off and threw up, groping for a pine tree at the edge of the clearing and clinging to it for support.
He did it again, and realized he had never experienced this sort of vomiting in his entire life. He had read about it, however. He was ejecting stuff—most of it bloody—in wads that flew like bullets. And bullets were almost what they were. He was having a seizure of projectile vomiting. This was not considered a sign of good health in medical circles.
Gray veils drifted over his sight. His knees buckled.
Oh fuck I’m dying, he thought, but the idea seemed to have no emotional gradient. It was dreary news, no more, no less. He felt his hand slipping down the rough bark of the pine. He felt tarry sap. Faintly he was aware that the air smelled foul and yellow and sulfuric—it was the way a paper mill smells after a week of still, overcast weather. He didn’t care. Whether there were Elysian fields or just a big black nothing, there would not be that stink. So maybe he would come out a winner anyway. Best to just let go. To just—
No! No, you will not just let go! You came back to save Bobbi, and Bobbi was maybe already beyond saving, but that kid’s around and he might not be. Please, Gard, at least try!
“Don’t let it be for nothing,” he said in a cracked, wavering voice. “Jesus Christ, please don’t let it be for nothing.”
The wavering gray mists cleared a little. The vomiting subsided. He raised a hand to his face and flung away a sheet of blood with it.
A hand touched the back of his neck as he did, and Gardener’s flesh pebbled with goosebumps. A hand ... Bobbi’s hand ... but not a human hand, not anymore.
Gard, are you all right?
“All right,” he answered aloud, and managed to get to his feet.
The world wavered, then came back into focus. The first thing he saw in it was Bobbi. The look on Bobbi’s face was one of cold, cheerless calculation. He saw no love there, not even a counterfeit of concern. Bobbi had become beyond such things.
“Let’s go,” Gardener said hoarsely. “You drive. I’m feeling ...” He stumbled and had to grab at Bobbi’s bunched, strange shoulder to keep from falling. “... a little under the weather.”
2
By the time they got back to the farm, Gardener was better. The bleeding from his nose had subsided to a trickle. He had swallowed a fair amount of blood while wearing the mouthpiece, and a lot of the blood he had seen in his vomit must have been that. He hoped.
He had lost a total of nine teeth.
“I want to change my shirt,” he told Bobbi.
Bobbi nodded without much interest. “Come on out in the kitchen after you do,” she said. “We have to talk.”
“Yes. I suppose we do.”
In the guestroom, Gardener took off the T-shirt he had been wearing and put on a clean one. He let it hang down over his belt. He went to the foot of the bed, lifted the mattress, and got the .45. He tucked it into his pants. The T-shirt was too big; he had lost a lot of weight. The outline of the gun butt hardly showed at all if he sucked in his gut. He paused for a moment longer, wondering if he was ready for this. He supposed there was no way to tell such a thing in advance. A dull headache gnawed his temples, and the world seemed to move in and out of focus in slow, woozy cycles. His mouth hurt and his nose felt stuffed with drying blood.
This was it; as much a showdown as any Bobbi had ever written in her westerns. High noon in central Maine. Make yore play, pard.
A ghost of a smile touched his lips. All of those two-for-a-penny sophomore philosophers said life was a strange proposition, but really, this was outrageous.
He went out to the kitchen.
Bobbi was sitting at the kitchen table watching him. Strange, half-glimpsed green fluid circulated below t
he surface of her transparent face. Her eyes—larger, the pupils oddly misshapen—looked at Gardener somberly.
On the table was a boom-box radio. Dick Allison had brought it out to Bobbi’s three days ago, at her request. It was the one Hank Buck had used to send Pits Barfield to that great repple-depple in the sky. It had taken Bobbi less than twenty minutes to connect its circuitry to the toy photon pistol she was pointing at Gardener.
On the table were two beers and a bottle of pills. Gardener recognized the bottle. Bobbi must have gone into the bathroom and gotten it while he was changing his shirt. It was his Valium.
“Sit down, Gard,” Bobbi said.
3
Gardener had raised his mental shield as soon as he was out of the ship. The question now was how much of it still remained.
He walked slowly across the room and sat at the table. He felt the .45 digging into his stomach and groin; he also felt it digging into his mind, lying heavy against whatever was left of that shield.
“Are those for me?” he asked, pointing at the pills.
“I thought we’d have a beer or two together,” Bobbi said evenly, “the way friends do? And you could take a few of those at a time while we talk. I thought it would be the kindest way.”
“Kind,” Gardener mused. He felt the first faint tug of anger. Won’t get fooled again, the song said, but the habit must be awfully hard to break. He himself had been fooled plenty. But then, he thought, maybe you’re an exception to the rule, Gard ole Gard.
“I get the pills and Peter got that weird seaquarium in the shed. Bobbi, your definition of kindness has undergone one fuck of a radical change since the days when you’d cry if Peter brought home a dead bird. Remember those days? We lived here together, we stood your sister off when she came, and never had to stick her in a shower stall to do it. We just kicked her ass the hell out.” He looked at her somberly. “Remember, Bobbi? That was when we were lovers as well as friends. I thought you might have forgotten. I would have died for you, kiddo. And I would have died without you. Remember? Remember us?”
Bobbi looked down at her hands. Did he see tears in those strange eyes? Probably all he saw was wishful thinking.
“When were you in the shed?”
“Last night.”
“What did you touch?”
“I used to touch you, ”Gardener mused. “And you me. And neither of us minded. Remember?”
“What did you touch?” she screamed shrilly at him, and when she looked back up he didn’t see Bobbi but only a furious monster.
“Nothing,” Gardener said. “I touched nothing.” The contempt on his face must have been more convincing than any protest would have been, because Bobbi settled back. She sipped delicately at her beer.
“Doesn’t matter. You couldn’t have done anything out there anyway.”
“How could you do it to Peter? That’s how it keeps coming at me. The old man I didn’t know, and Anne barged in. But I knew Peter. He would have died for you too. How could you do it? God’s name!”
“He kept me alive when you weren’t here,” Bobbi said. There was just the faintest uneasy, defensive note in her voice. “When I was working around the clock. He was the only reason there was anything left for you to save when you got here.”
“You fucking vampire!”
She looked at him, then away.
“Jesus Christ, you did something like that and I went along with it. Do you know how that hurts? I went along! I saw what was happening to you ... to a lesser degree I saw what was happening to the others, but I still went along with it. Because I was crazy. But of course you knew that, didn’t you? You used me the same way you used Peter, but I wasn’t even as smart as an old beagle dog, I guess, because you didn’t even have to put me in the shed and stick one of those filthy stinking rotten cables in my head to do it. You just kept me oiled. You handed me a shovel and said, ‘Here you go, Gard, let’s dig this baby up and stop the Dallas Police.’ Except you’re the Dallas Police. And I went along with it.”
“Drink your beer,” Bobbi said. Her face was cold again.
“And if I don’t?”
“Then I’m going to turn on this radio,” Bobbi said, “and open a hole in reality, and send you ... somewhere.”
“To Altair-4?” Gardener asked. He kept his voice casual and tightened his mental grip (shield-shield-shield-shield)
on that barrier in his mind. A slight frown creased Bobbi’s forehead again, and Gardener felt those mental fingers probing again, digging, trying to find out what he knew, how much ... and how.
Distract her. Make her mad and distract her. How?
“You’ve been snooping a lot, haven’t you?” Bobbi asked.
“Not until I realized how much you were lying to me.” And suddenly knew. He had gotten it in the shed without even knowing it.
“Most of the lies you told to yourself, Gard.”
“Oh? What about the kid that died? Or the one that’s blind?”
“How do you kn—”
“The shed. That’s where you go to get smart, isn’t it?” She said nothing.
“You sent them to get batteries. You killed one and blinded the other to get batteries. Jesus, Bobbi, how stupid could you get?”
“We’re more intelligent than you could ever hope to—”
“Who’s talking about intelligence?” he cried furiously. “I’m talking about smarts! Common-fucking-sense! The CMP power lines run right behind your house! Why didn’t you tap them?”
“Sure.” Bobbi smiled with her weird mouth. “A really intelligent—pardon me, smart—idea. And the first time some tech at the Augusta substation saw the power drain on his dials—”
“You’re running almost everything on C, D, and double-A batteries,” Gard said. “That’s a trickle. A guy using house current to run a big band-saw would bang those needles harder.”
She looked momentarily confused. Seemed to listen—not to anyone else, but to her own interior voice. “Batteries run on direct current, Gard. AC power lines wouldn’t do us any g—”
He struck his temples with his fists and screamed: “Haven’t you ever seen a goddam DC converter? You can get them at Radio Shack for three bucks! Are you seriously trying to tell me you couldn’t have made a simple DC converter when you can make your tractor fly and your typewriter run on telepathy? Are you—”
“Nobody thought of it!” she screamed suddenly.
There was a moment of silence. She looked stunned, as if at the sound of her own voice.
“Nobody thought of it,” he said. “Right. So you sent those two kids, all ready to do or die for good old Haven, and now one of them is dead and the other one’s blind. It’s shit, Bobbi. I don’t care who or what has taken you over—part of you has to be inside someplace. Part of you has to realize that you people haven’t been doing anything creative at all. Quite the opposite. You’ve been taking dumb-pills and congratulating each other on how wonderful it all is. I was the crazy one. I kept telling myself it would be okay even after I knew better. But it’s the same old shit it always was. You can disintegrate people, you can teleport them to someplace for safekeeping, or burial, or whatever, but you’re as dumb as a baby with a loaded pistol. ”
“I think you better shut up now, Gard.”
“You didn’t think of it,” he said softly. “Jesus, Bobbi! How can you even look at yourself in the mirror? Any of you?”
“I said I think—”
“Idiot savant, you said once. It’s worse. It’s like watching a bunch of kids getting ready to blow up the world with Soapbox Derby plans. You guys aren’t even evil. Dumb, but not evil.”
“Gard—”
“You’re just a bunch of dumbbells with screwdrivers.” He laughed.
“Shut up!” she shrieked.
“Jesus,” Gard said. “Did I really think Sissy was dead? Did I?”
She was trembling.
He nodded toward the photon gun. “So if I don’t drink the beer and take the pills, you p
ack me off to Altair-4, right? I get to babysit David Brown until we both drop dead of asphyxiation or starvation or cosmic-ray poisoning.”
She was viciously cold now, and it hurt—more than he ever would have believed—but at least she wasn’t trying to read him. In her anger, she had forgotten.
The way they had forgotten how simple it was to plug a battery-driven tape recorder into a wall socket with a DC converter between the instrument and the power source.
“There really isn’t an Altair-4, just as there aren’t really any Tommyknockers. There aren’t any nouns for some things—they just are. Somebody pastes one name on those things in one place, somebody pastes on another someplace else. It’s never a very good name, but it doesn’t matter. You came back from New Hampshire talking and thinking about Tommyknockers, so here that’s what we are. We’ve been called other things in other places. Altair-4 has, too. It’s just a place where things get stored. Usually not live things. Attics can be cold, dark places.”
“Is that where you’re from? Your people?”
Bobbi—or whatever this was that looked a bit like her—laughed almost gently. “We’re not a ‘people,’ Gard. Not a ‘race.’ Not a ‘species.’ Klaatu is not going to appear and say ‘Take us to your leader.’ No, we’re not from Altair-4.”
She looked at him, still smiling faintly. She had recovered most of her equanimity ... and seemed to have forgotten the pills for the time being.
“If you know about Altair-4, I wonder if you’ve found the existence of the ship a little strange.”
Gardener only looked at her.
“I don’t suppose you’ve had time enough to wonder why a race with access to teleportation technology”—Bobbi wiggled the plastic gun slightly—“would even bother zipping around in a physical ship.”
Gardener raised his eyebrows. No, he hadn’t considered that, but now that Bobbi brought it up, he remembered a college acquaintance once wondering aloud why Kirk, Spock, and company bothered with the starship Enterprise when it would have been so much simpler to just beam around the universe.
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