“I don't know what you're talking about,” Andy Bozeman said slowly. He had only gotten two years of college, business admin, before having to drop out and go to work. His father had a heart condition and chronic high blood pressure. High-flown fellows like this made him nervous and angry. Lording it over ordinary folks, as if being able to quote from something written by someone who had died a long time ago made their shit smell sweeter than other people's.

Gardener said, “That's okay. It's from chapter two of Tom Sawyer. When Bobbi was a kid back in Utica, seventh grade, they had this thing called Junior Exhibition. It was a recitation competition. She didn't want to be in it, but her sister Anne decided she ought to be, that it would be good for her, or something, and when sister Anne decided something, brother, it was decided. Anne was a real tartar then, Bozie, and she's a real tartar now. At least I guess she is. I haven't seen her in a long time, and that's the way, oh-ho, uh-huh, I like it. But I think it's fair to say she's still the same. People like her very rarely change.”

“Don't call me Bozie,” Andy said, hoping he sounded more dangerous than he felt. “I don't like it.”

“When I had Bobbi in freshman comp, she wrote once about how she froze trying to recite Tom Sawyer. I just about cracked up.” Gardener got to his feet and started walking toward Andy, a development the ex-realtor viewed with active alarm. “I saw her after class the next day and asked her if she still remembered how “Whitewashing the Fence'” went. She did. I wasn't surprised. There are some things you never forget, like when your sister or your mother bulldozed you into some horror-show like Junior Ex. You may forget the piece when you're standing up there in front of all those people. Otherwise, you could recite it on your deathbed.”

“Look,” Andy said, “we ought to get back to work

“I let her get about four sentences in, and then I joined her. Her jaw dropped almost down to her knees. Then she started grinning, and we went through it together, word for word. It wasn't so strange. We were both shy kids, Bobbi and I. Her sister was the dragon in front of her cave, my mother was the dragon in front of mine. People like that often get this very weird idea that the way to cure a shy kid is to put him into the sort of situation he dreads the most-something like Junior Ex. It wasn't even much of a coincidence that we'd both gotten that whitewashing thing by heart. The only one more popular for recitation is “The Tell-Tale Heart.

Gardener drew in breath and screamed:

“Stop, fiends! Dissemble no more! Tear up the floor-boards! Here! Here! “Tis the beating of his hideous heart!”

Andy had uttered a small shriek. He dropped his Thermos, and half a cup of cold coffee stained the crotch of his pants.

“Uh-oh, Bozie,” Gardener said conversationally. “Never get that out of those polyester slacks.

“Only difference between the two of us was that I didn't freeze,” he went on. “In fact, I won a second-prize ribbon. But it didn't cure my fear of talking in front of crowds… only made it worse. Whenever I stand up in front of a group to read poetry, I look at all those hungry eyes… I think of “Whitewashing the Fence” Also, I think about Bobbi. Sometimes that's enough to get me through. Anyway, it made us friends.”

“I don't see what any of that has to do with getting this work done!” Andy cried in a hectoring voice utterly unlike him. But his heart had been beating too fast. For a moment there, when Gardener had shrieked, he really had believed the man had gone insane.

“You don't see what this has to do with whitewashing the fence?” Gardener asked, and laughed. “Then you must be blind, Bozie.”

He pointed to the ship leaning skyward at its perfect forty-five-degree angle, rising out of the wide trench.

“We're digging it up instead of whitewashing it, but that doesn't change the principle a bit. I have fagged out Bobby Tremain and John Enders, and if you're back tomorrow I'll eat your Hush Puppies. Thing is, I never seem to get any prizes for it. You tell whoever comes out tomorrow I want a dead rat and a string to swing it by, Bozie… or a bully taw, at the very least.” Gardener had stopped halfway to the trench. He looked around at Andy. Andy's failure to read this big man with the sloping shoulders and the indistinct, oddly broken face had never made Bozeman more uncomfortable than it did then.

“Better still, Bozie,” Gardener had said in a voice so soft Andy could hardly hear it, “get Bobbi out here tomorrow. I'd like to find out if the New Improved Bobbi still remembers how to recite “Whitewashing the Fence” from Tom Sawyer.”

Then, without another word, he had gone to the sling and waited for Andy to lower him down.

If that whole thing hadn't been Ieft-field, Andy didn't know what was. And, he added to himself as he turned the winch, that had only been Gardener's first beer of the day. He'll put away another five or six at lunch and really get wild and crazy.

Gardener now came swaying to the top of the trench, and Andy had an urge to let go of the windlass crank. Solve the problem himself.

Except he couldn't-Gardener belonged to Bobbi Anderson, and until Bobbi either died or came out of the shed, things had to go on pretty much as they were.

“Come on, Bozie. Some of those rocks fly a long way.” He started toward the lean-to. Andy fell in beside him, hurrying to keep up.

“I told you I don't like you calling me Bozie,” he said.

Gardener spared him a curiously flat glance. “I know,” he said.

They went around the lean-to. About three minutes later another of those loud, crumping roars shuddered out of the trench. A spray of rocks rose into the sky and came down, rattling off the hull of the ship with dull clangs and clongs.

“Well, let's-'Bozeman began.

Gardener grabbed his arm. His head was tilted, his face alert, his eyes Clark and lively. “Shhh!”

Andy wrenched his arm away. “What in the hell's wrong with you?”

“Don't you hear it?”

“I don't h-”

Then he did. A hissing sound, like a giant tea-kettle, was coming from the trench. It was growing. A mad excitement suddenly seized Andy. There was more than a little terror in it.

“It's them!” he whispered, and turned toward Gard. His eyes were the size of doorknobs, his lips, shiny with loose spittle, were trembling. “They weren't dead, we woke them up… they're coming out!”

“Jesus is coming and is He pissed,” Gardener remarked, unimpressed.

The hissing grew louder. Now there was another crunching thud-this wasn't an explosion; it was the sound of something heavy collapsing. A moment later something else collapsed: Andy. The strength ran out of his legs and he fell to his knees.

“It's them, it'them, it's them!” he slobbered.

Gardener hooked a hand into the man's armpit, wincing a little at the hot, jungly dampness there, and pulled him to his feet.

“That's not the Tommyknockers,” he said. “It's water.”

“Huh?” Bozeman looked at him with dazed incomprehension.

“Water!” Gardener cried, giving Bozeman a brisk little shake. “We just brought in our swimming pool, Bozie!”

“Wh-”

The hiss suddenly exploded into a soft, steady roar. Water jetted out of the trench and into the sky in a widening sheet. This was no column of water; it was as if a giant child had just pressed his finger over a giant faucet to watch the water spray everywhere. At the bottom of the trench, water was driving up through a number of fissures in just that way.

“Water?” Andy asked weakly. He couldn't get it right in his mind.

Gardener didn't reply. Rainbows danced in the water; it ran down the sleek hull of the ship in rivulets, leaving beads behind… and as he watched, he saw those drops begin to skitter, the way water flicked into hot fat on a griddle will skitter and hop. Only this was not random. The drops were lining up in obedience to lines of force which ran down the hull of the ship like lines of longitude on a globe.