“Am I different? Did they change something?”

NOTHING CHANGED

NOT VERY SUCCESSFUL

Pause.

WE CAN CHANGE YOU IF YOU LIKE

TALK MORE DIRECTLY

“No! Jesus, no thank you!” Empty screen.

Tom ran his hand over his face. Too much information to absorb, here. He thought about machine bugs small enough to slip into his bloodstream. Machine germs. It was a terrifying concept.

He conceived another question …then wondered whether it would be wise to ask.

He said, “If you could have changed me—changed me so we could talk—why didn’t you?”

The TV set hummed faintly.

TOO INTRUSIVE

“What are you saying, that it’s unethical?”

NEED PERMISSION

“Permission not granted!”

HELP US

Tom stood and approached the television in small, cautious sidesteps. Pushing the power switch, he felt like a man trying to disarm a potent, unfamiliar bomb. His hands were still shaking when the screen faded to black.

He stood staring at it a long, frozen moment; then—an afterthought—he reached down and pulled out the plug.

The invasion of his television set left him shaken and ambivalent. On three different occasions he picked up the phone and began dialing Doug Archer’s number. He wanted to talk to someone about this—but “wanted” was too pallid a word. The need he felt was physical, almost violent. But so was its parallel urge: the urge to keep silent. The urge to play these strange cards very close to his chest.

He dialed Archer’s number three times, and once he let it ring a couple of times; but he ended up dropping the receiver in its cradle and turning away. His motives were mixed, and he didn’t want to examine them too closely, but he reasoned that Archer—desperate for some kind of metaphysical revenge on Belltower, Washington—would intrude on what had been exclusively Tom’s magical playground.

He liked Archer. Liked him instinctively. But—and here was a thought he didn’t want to consider too closely—maybe that was another reason for not calling him up. He liked Archer, and he sensed that getting him involved in all this wouldn’t be doing him a favor. Help us, the machine bugs had said. Broken, they had said. Need to be repaired. The implication? Something was wrong here. Something had gone wrong with some very powerful machinery. Tom couldn’t turn away; he’d made his choice. But if he liked Archer—the unwelcome thought persisted—then maybe he ought to keep him well away from this house up along the Post Road.

He went to work during this time—he was even punctual— but his performance suffered; he couldn’t deny it, couldn’t help it. The act of selling secondhand automobiles to even the most willing customer had begun to seem nonsensical, ludicrous. Tom noticed Klein watching him on the lot, his face screwed up into something like The Frown, but this was another irrelevancy. During the hot afternoons Tom achieved a sort of Zen quiescence, as if he were surveying all this bustle from a hot-air balloon. Abstractly, he understood that he needed this job to eat; but he could coast awhile even if he lost it, and there were other jobs. Above all, there was an impossible tunnel hidden behind the sheetrock in his basement; his home was full of gemlike creatures the size of his thumb; his bloodstream carried benign microscopic robots and his TV had begun to talk to him. In the face of which, it was extremely difficult not to smile cheerfully and suggest some alternative ways of disposing of that troublesome 76 Coronet.

At home, he kept the TV unplugged most of the time. He called it the TV, but he supposed it wasn’t that anymore; it was a private phone line for the creatures (or devices) with whom he shared the house. He resolved to use it only when he had a specific question—not that the answers were likely to be helpful.

He plugged it in one evening and asked what was at the other end of the tunnel in the basement—what he would find if he went there, destruction, the machine replied. The answer was chilling and it prompted Tom to ask, “For me? You mean I would be destroyed?”

THE TERMINAL HAS BEEN DESTROYED

NOT YOU

ALTHOUGH THAT POSSIBILITY EXISTS

The tunnel continued to occupy his thoughts. He guessed it was inevitable that he would reopen that passage, enter it, follow its distant curve. He had been postponing the act, fearing it—but wanting it, too, with a ferocity that was sometimes alarming. It had gone past curiosity. Buying this house had been the beginning of a tide of events which wouldn’t be complete until he followed the tunnel as far as it would take him.

But that was frightening, and this razor-thin balance of fear and obsession kept him out of the basement—postponing what he couldn’t resist.

His dreams had ceased to beg for help … but when he came home Friday night and found the clock radio on his bedside table pronouncing the words “Help us, Tom Winter” in the voice of a popular Seattle AM radio announcer, he yanked the appliance’s wall cord and went looking for his crowbar. He had waited too long already. It was time to live out this peculiar dream his life had become, to ride it down to its conclusion.

He opened the healed wallboard. A line of machine bugs sat watching him from the lid of the automatic dryer, with wide, blank eyes and no perceptible expression. He supposed he only imagined their patient, grim disapproval of what he was doing.

Events began to happen quickly then.

Within the next week, he made three separate journeys down the tunnel.

The first—that night—was exploratory. His doubts came flooding back when he saw the tunnel again, as its illumination flowed around him. He took a few tentative steps into its luminous white space, then stopped and looked back. Here was the frame wall of his basement standing exposed and absurd, as if it had interrupted this continuous flow of space almost by accident—as incongruous as Dorothy’s farmhouse in Munchkinland. (But the tunnel couldn’t have been here when the house was erected, could it? The contractors would have had a word or two to say.) The tunnel itself was broadly rectangular; its walls were smooth and warm to the touch; the air felt pleasant and not at all stale. He took a tentative step, then began to walk with more confidence. The floor was faintly elastic and gave back no echo of his footsteps. Every few yards, Tom turned and tried to gauge the distance he had come.

By his own estimate he had traveled several hundred yards —well under the Post Road hill and presumably deep in the earth—when the curve of the tunnel was finally great enough to hide any glimpse of home. As strange as that sight had been, it had also been a comfort. He stood a moment while fresh uncertainties crowded his mind. “Fucking crazy place to be,” he said aloud—expecting an echo; but the tunnel absorbed the sound. There was nothing in either direction now but this bland curve of wall.

He walked on. He had no way to measure the angle of the tunnel’s ellipse, but the curve was remorseless—he could swear in fact, that he had turned a full 180 degrees. He should have carried a compass … but he had a notion that a compass might not work here; that its needle would swing wildly, or perhaps point consistently forward. The idea was spooky and he thought again about turning back. He was way out of his depth in this pale, featureless artery. A cold sweat began to bead out on his forehead. He was taking tiny silent cat-steps, straining to hear any sound ahead of him—the fear setting in again, with a strong rider of claustrophobia. The tunnel was a few feet higher than his head with as much as a yard’s clearance on each side: not much room to turn around. And nowhere to run, except that long circle back.