“Can you make it, Johnny?” he asked the school principal.

Enders got up, wincing, putting his hands in the small of his back. He looked desperately tired, but he managed a small smile just the same. Looking at the ship seemed to refresh him. Blood was trickling from the corner of one eye, however-a single red tear. Something in there had ruptured. It's being this close to the ship, Gard thought. On the first of the two days Bobby Tremain had spent “helping” him, he had spit out his last few teeth like machinegun bullets almost as soon as they got here.

He thought of telling Enders that something behind his right eye was leaking, then decided to let him discover it on his own. The guy would be all right. Probably. Even if he wasn't, Gardener wasn't sure he cared… this more than anything else shocked him.

Why should it? Are you kidding yourself that these cats are human anymore? If you are, you better wise up, Gard ole Gard.

He headed down the slope, stopping at the last stump before rocky soil gave way to chipped and runnelled bedrock. He picked up a cheap transistor radio made of yellow high-impact plastic. It looked like Snoopy. Attached to it was the board from a Sharp calculator. And, of course, batteries.

Humming, Gardener made his way down to the edge of the trench. There the music dried up and he was quiet, only staring at the titanic gray flank of the ship. The view did not refresh him, but it did inspire a deep awe which had overtones of steadily darkening fear.

But you still hope, too. You'd be a liar if you said you didn't. The key could still be here… somewhere.

As the fear darkened, however, that hope did too. Soon he thought it would be gone.

The hillside excavation now made the ship's flank too far away to touch-not that he wanted to; he didn't enjoy the sensation of having his head turning into a very large speaker. It hurt. He rarely bled now when he did touch it (and touching it was sometimes inevitable), but the blast of radio always came, and on occasion his nose or ears could still spray a hell of a lot more blood than he cared to look at. Gardener wondered briefly just how much borrowed time he was now living on, but that question was also moot. From the morning he had awakened on that New Hampshire breakwater, it had all been borrowed time. He was a sick man and he knew it, but not too sick to appreciate the irony of the situation in which he found himself: after busting his hump to dig this fucker up with a variety of tools which looked as if they might have come out of The Hugo Gernsback Whole Universe Catalogue, after doing what the rest of them probably couldn't have done without working themselves to death in a kind of hypnotic trance, he might not be able to go inside when and if they came to the hatch Bobbi believed was there. But he meant to try. You could bet your watch and chain on that.

Now he set his boot into a rope stirrup, slid the knot tight, and put the Snoopy radio in his shirt. “Let me down easy, Johnny.”

Enders began to turn a windlass and Gardener began to slide downward. Beside him the smooth gray hull slid up and up and up.

If they wanted to get rid of him, this would be as easy a way as any, he supposed. Just send a telepathic order to Enders: Let go of the wheel, John. We're through with him. And down he would plunge, forty feet to the solid bedrock at the bottom, slack rope trailing up behind him. Crunch.

But of course he was at their mercy anyhow… and he supposed they recognized his usefulness, however reluctantly. The Tremain kid was young, strong as a bull, but he had fagged out in two days. Enders was going to last out today-maybe -but Gardener would have bet his watch and chain (what watch and chain, ha-ha?) that there would be somebody else out here tomorrow to keep tabs on him.

Bobbi was okay.

Bullshit she was-if you hadn't come back, she would've killed herself.

But she hung in there better than Enders or the Tremain kid

His mind returned inexorably: Bobbi went into the shed with the others. Tremain and Enders never did… at least, not that you ever saw. Maybe that's the difference.

So what's in there? Ten thousand angels dancing on the head of a pin? The ghost of James Dean? The Shroud of Turin? What?

He didn't know.

His foot touched down at the bottom.

“I'm down!” he yelled.

Enders's face, looking very small, appeared at the edge of the cut. Beyond, Gardener could see a tiny wedge of blue sky. Too tiny. Claustrophobia whispered in his ear-a voice as rough as sandpaper.

The space between the side of the ship and the wall covered with that silvery netting was very narrow down here. Gardener had to move with great care to avoid touching the ship's side and setting off one of those brainbursts.

The bedrock was very dark. He squatted and ran his fingers over it. They came away wet. They had come away a little wetter each day for the last week.

That morning he had cut a small square four inches on a side and a foot into the floor of the bedrock using a gadget that had once been a blow-dryer. Now he opened his toolkit, removed a flashlight, and shone the light into it.

Water down there.

He got to his feet and screamed: “Send down the hose!”

“… what?…” drifted down. Enders sounded apologetic. Gardener sighed, wondering just how much longer he himself could hold out against the steady drag of exhaustion. All this Hugo Gernsback Whole Universe equipment, and no one thought to rig an intercom between up there and down here. Instead, they were screaming their throats out.

Oh, but none of their bright ideas run in that direction, and you know it Why would they think about intercoms when they can read thoughts? You “ re the horse-and-buggy human here, not them.

“The hose!” he shrieked. “Send down the motherfucking hose, tripehead!”

“… oh… kay…”

Gardener stood waiting for the hose to come down, wishing miserably that he was anywhere else in the world than here, wishing he could convince himself all of it was only a nightmare.

It was no good. The ship was madly exotic, but this reality was also too prosy to be a dream: the acrid smell of John Enders's sweat, the slightly boozy smell of his own, the dig of the rope loop into his instep as he went down into the cut, the feel of rough, moist bedrock under his fingers.

Where's Bobbi, Gard? Is she dead?

No. He didn't think she was dead, but he had become convinced that she was desperately ill. Something had happened to her on Wednesday. Something had happened to all of them on Wednesday. Gardener could not quite bring his memories into focus, but he knew there had been no real blackout or DT nightmare. It would have been better for him if there had been. There had been some sort of cover-up last Wednesday-a frantic cut-and-paste. And in the course of it, he believed that Bobbi had been hurt… taken ill… something.

But they're not talking about it.

Bobby Tremain: Bobbi? Heck, Mr Gardener, nothing wrong with Bobbi just a li'l ole heatstroke. She'll be back in no time. She can use the rest! You know that better'n anyone, I guess!

It sounded great. So great you'd almost think the Tremain kid believed it himself until you looked closely at his odd eyes.

He could see himself going to those he was coming to think of as the Shed People, demanding to know what had happened to her.

Newt Berringer: Next thing you know, he'll be trying to tell us that we're the Dallas Police.

And oh boy, they'd sure all start to laugh then, wouldn't they? Them, the Dallas Police? Oh, that was pretty funny. In fact, that was a scream.

Maybe, Gard thought, that's why I feel so much like doing it. Screaming, I mean.

Now he stood deep in this man-made crack in the earth, a crack that contained a titanic, alien flying ship, waiting for the hose to come down. And suddenly the final, horrible passage of George Orwell's Animal Farm clanged in his head like a death-cry. It was strange, the things you discovered you'd gotten by heart. “Clover's old eyes flitted from one face to another. And as the animals outside looked from pig to man, and man to pig, and pig to man again, it seemed that some strange thing was happening. It was impossible to say which was which.”