“All right,” Enders said softly, pressing the back of his hand against his bloody mouth. “You may have a point. We'll put in an intercom, and we'll see that you have a bit more… what did you call it?” A contemptuous flick of smile touched his lips. It was a smile with which Gardener was extremely familiar. It was the way the Arbergs and McCardles of the world smiled. it was the way the guys who ran the nukes smiled when they talked about atomicpower facilities.
“The word was consideration. You want to remember it. But smart guys can learn, yeah, Johnny? There's a dictionary back at the house. You need it, asshole?” He took a step toward Enders and had the distinct satisfaction of seeing the man fall back two steps, the contemptuous little smile disappearing. It was replaced with a look of nervy apprehension. “Consideration, Johnny. You remember. All of you remember. If not for me, then for Bobbi.”
They were standing by the equipment lean-to now, Enders's eyes small and nervous, Gardener's large and bloodshot and still angry.
And if Bobbi dies, your idea of consideration may extend all the way to a quick and painless death. That's about the size of it, am I right? Would you say that just about describes the topography of this situation, you bald-headed little fuck?
“I-we-appreciate your plain speaking,” Enders said. His lips, with no teeth to back them up, pooched in and out nervously.
“I bet you do.”
“Perhaps a little plain speaking of our own is in order.” He took off his glasses, began to wipe them on the sweaty front of his shirt (an action which Gardener thought would only leave them more smeared than before), and Gardener saw a dirty, furious gleam in his eyes. “You don't want to… to strike out like that, Jim. I advise you-we all advise you-never to do it
again. There are… uh… changes… yes, changes… going on in Haven-”
“No shit.”
“And some of these changes have made people… uh… short-tempered. So striking out like that could be… well, a bad mistake.”
“Do sudden noises bother you?” Gardener inquired.
Enders looked wary. “I don't understand your p-”
“Because if the timer in that radio is jake, you're about to hear one.”
He stepped behind the lean-to, not quite running, but by no means lingering. Enders threw a startled glance toward the ship, and then ran after him. He tripped over a shovel and went sprawling in the dirt, grabbing at his shin and grimacing. A moment later a loud, crumping roar shook the earth. There was a series of those dull yet penetrating cludding sounds as chunks of rock flew against the ship's hull. Others sprayed into the air, then fell onto the edge of the cut or rattled back into it. Gardener saw one rebound from the ship's hull and bounce an amazing distance.
“You small-minded, practical joking son of a bitch!” Enders shouted. He was still lying on the ground, still clutching his shin.
“Small-minded, hell,” Gardener said. “You left me down there.”
Enders glared at him.
Gardener stood where he was for a moment, then walked over to him and held out his hand. “Come on, Johnny. Time to let bygones be bygones. If Stalin and Roosevelt could cooperate long enough to fight Hitler, I guess we ought to be able to cooperate long enough to unglue this sucker from the ground. What do you say?”
Enders would say nothing, but after a moment he took Gardener's hand and got up. He brushed sullenly at his clothes, occasionally favoring Gardener with an almost catlike expression of dislike.
“Want to go see if we brought in our well yet?” Gardener asked. He felt better than he had in days-months, actually, maybe even years. Blowing up at Enders had done him a world of good.
“What do you mean?”
“Never mind,” Gardener said, and went over to the cut alone. He peered down, looking for water, listening for gurgles and splashes. He saw nothing, heard nothing. It seemed they had lucked out again.
It suddenly occurred to him that he was standing here with his hands planted on his upper thighs, bent over a forty-foot drop with a man somewhere behind him to whom he had just administered a punch in the mouth. If Enders wanted to, he could run up behind me and tumble me into this hole with one hard push, he thought, and heard Enders saying: Striking out like that could be a very bad mistake.
But he didn't look around, and that sense of well-being, absurdly out of place or not, held. He was in a fix, and strapping a rearview mirror onto his head so he could see who was coming up behind him wasn't going to get him out of it.
When he turned around at last, Enders was still standing by the lean-to, looking at him with that sulky kicked-cat expression. Gardener suspected he had been on the party-line again with his fellow mutations.
“What do you say?” Gardener called over to him. There was an edged pleasantness in his voice. “There's a lot of broken rock down there. Do we go back to work, or do we air a few more grievances?”
Enders went into the shed, grabbed the levitation-pack they used to move the bigger rocks, and started toward Gardener with it. He held it out. Gardener shouldered the pack. He started back toward the sling, then looked back at Enders.
“Don't forget to hoist me up when I yell.”
“I won't.” Enders's eyes-or perhaps that was only the lenses of his spectacles
were murky. Gardener discovered he didn't really care which. He put his foot into the rope sling and tightened it as Enders went back to the winch.
“Remember, Johnny. Consideration. That's the word for today.”
John Enders lowered him down without saying anything.
Sunday, July 31st:
Henry Buck, known to his friends as Hank, committed the last act of outright irrational craziness to take place in Haven at a quarter past eleven on that Sunday morning.
People in Haven are short-tempered, Enders had told Gard. Ruth McCausland had seen evidences of this short temper during the search for David Brown: hot words, scuffles, a thrown punch or two. Ironically, it had always been Ruth herself -Ruth and the clear moral imperative she had always represented in these people's lives-who had prevented the search from turning into a free-for-all.
Short-tempered? “Crazy” was probably a better word.
In the shock of the “becoming,” the entire town had been like a gas-filled room, waiting only for someone to light a match… or to do something even more accidental but just as deadly, as an explosion in a gas-filled room may be set off by an innocent delivery-boy pushing a doorbell and creating a spark.
That spark never came. Part of it was Ruth's doing. Part of it was Bobbi's doing. Then, after the visits to the shed, a group of half a dozen men and one woman began to work like the hippie LSD-trip-guides of the sixties, helping Haven through to the end of the first difficult stage of “becoming.”
It was well for the people of Haven that the big bang never did come, well for the people of Maine, New England, perhaps for the whole continent or the whole planet. I would not be the one to tell you there are no planets anywhere in the universe that are not large dead cinders floating in space because a war over who was or was not hogging too many dryers in the local Laundromat escalated into Doomsville. No one ever really knows where things will end-or if they will. And there had been a time in late June when the entire world might well have awakened to discover a terrible, world-ripping conflict was going on in an obscure Maine town-an exchange which had begun over something as deeply important as whose turn it had been to pick up the coffee-break check at the Haven Lunch.
Of course we may blow up our world someday with no outside help at all, for reasons which look every bit as trivial from a standpoint of light-years; from where we rotate far out on one spoke of the Milky Way in the Lesser Magellanic Cloud, whether or not the Russians invade the Iranian oilfields or whether NATO decides to install American-made Cruise missiles in West Germany may seem every bit as important as whose turn it is to pick up the tab for five coffees and a like number of Danish. Maybe it all comes down to the same thing, when viewed from a galactic perspective.