Tommy Jacklin and Hester Brookline? Newt asked dubiously. Christ,

they're just kids! Has Tommy got a driver's license, Dick?”

No, Dick said reluctantly. But he's fifteen and he's got a permit and he drives real safe. Besides, he's big. Looks older than he really is. They'll be okay.

Christ, it's so fucking risky!

It is, but

They communed in thoughts that were more images than words; this was happening more and more in Haven, as the people in town learned this strange new thought-language. For all of his misgivings, Newt understood the basic problem that had caused Dick to send a couple of underage kids to Derry in the Fannins” pickup truck. They needed batteries, needed them, but it was getting harder and harder for the people who lived in Haven to leave Haven. If a codger like Dave Rutledge or an old coot like John Harley tried it, they would be dead-and probably rotting-before they got to the Derry city line. It would take younger men like Newt and Dick a slightly longer time, but they would also go… and probably in agony, because of the physical changes that had begun in Bobbi's shed. It didn't surprise either man that Hilly Brown was in a coma, and he had left when things were just starting to really roll. Tommy Jacklin was fifteen, Hester Brookline a well-developed thirteen. They at least had youth on their side, and could hope to leave and come back alive without the equivalent of NASA spacesuits to protect them from what was now an alien and inimical atmosphere. Such equipment would have been out of the question even if they'd had it. They probably could have cobbled something together, but if a couple of folks showed up at the Napa auto-parts store in Derry wearing moonsuits, there might be a few questions. Or more than a few.

I don't like it, Newt said at last.

Hell, I don't either, Dick replied. I'm not going to have a minute's peace until they get back, and I've got ole Doc Warwick parked out by the HavenTroy line to take care of “em just as soon as they do

I they do.

Ayuh… if. I think they will, but they'll be hurting.

What kind of problems do you expect?

Dick shook his head. He didn't know, and Doc Warwick refused to even guess… except to ask Dick in a cross mental voice what he, Dick, thought would happen to a salmon if it decided to ride a bike upstream to the spawning grounds instead of swimming.

Well… Newt said doubtfully.

Well, nothing, Dick returned. We can't leave that thing-he nodded toward the oscillating clock tower-the way it is.

Newt returned: We're almost down to the hatchway now. I think we could leave it.

Maybe. Maybe not. But we need batteries for other things, and you know it. And we need to keep being careful. You know that, too.

Don't teach your grammy to suck eggs, Dick.

(Fu)

Fuck that, asshole, was what Newt had been about to say, but he squashed it, although he found more to dislike about Dick Allison with every passing day. The truth was, Haven ran on batteries now, just like a kid's toy car from FAO Schwarz. And they kept needing more, and bigger ones, and mail-order was not only too slow, it was the sort of thing that might send up a warning flag to someone somewhere. You could never tell.

All in all, Newt Berringer was a troubled man. They had survived the plane crash; if something happened to Tommy and Hester, could they survive that?

He didn't know. He only knew he wouldn't have much peace until the kids were back in Haven, where they belonged.

Sunday, August 7th:

Gardener was at the ship, looking at it, trying to decide again-if any good could be turned from this weird mess… and if not, if there was any way out of it. He had heard the light plane two days before, although he had been in the house and had come out a moment too late to see it on its third pass. Three passes was just about two too many; he had been pretty sure the pilot had spotted the ship and the excavation. The thought had afforded Gardener a strange, bitter relief. Then, yesterday, he had seen the story in the paper. You didn't have to be a college graduate to see the connection. Poor old Dr Bailey had wandered off-course, and that leftover from the space armada of Ming the Merciless had stripped his gears.

Did that make him, Jim Gardener, an accessory to murder? It might, and, wifeshooter or not, Gard didn't care for the thought.

Freeman Moss, the dour woodsman from Albion, hadn't shown up this morning -Gard supposed the ship had blown his fuses as it had those of the others before him. Gard was alone for the first time since Bobbi had disappeared. On the surface, that seemed to open things up some. But when you looked deeper, the same old conundrums remained.

The story of the dead neurosurgeon and the crashed plane had been bad, but to Gard's mind, the story above the fold-the one Newt and Dick had ignored-was much worse. The Mideast was getting ready to explode again, and if there was shooting this time, some of it might be nuclear. The Union of Concerned Scientists, those happy folks who kept the Black Clock, had advanced the hands two minutes to nuclear midnight yesterday, the paper reported. Happy days were here again, all right. The ship could maybe pull the pin on all that… but was that what Freeman Moss and Kyle Archinbourg and old Bozie and all the rest of them wanted? Sometimes Gard felt a sickening surety that cooling out the powderkeg the planet was sitting on was the last thing which the New and Improved Haven was concerned with. And so?

He didn't know. Sometimes being a telepathic zero was a pain in the ass.

His eye moved to the pumping machinery squashed into the mud at the edge of the trench. Working at the ship had previously been a matter of dust and dirt and rocks and stumps that wouldn't come up until you were just about half-crazy with frustration. Now it was wet work-very wet work indeed. The last couple of nights he had gone home with wet clay in his hair, between his toes, and in the crack of his ass. Mud was bad, but clay was worse. Clay stuck.

The pumping equipment was the strangest, ugliest conglomeration yet, but it worked. It also weighed tons, but the mostly silent Freeman Moss had transported it from Bobbi's dooryard all by himself… it had taken him most of Thursday and about five hundred batteries to do it, but he had done it, something which would have taken an ordinary construction crew a week or more to accomplish.

Moss had used a gadget like a metal-detector to guide each component to its final resting-place-first off the truck, then through the garden, then out along the well-worn path to the dig. The components floated serenely through the warm summer air, their shadows pooled beneath them. Moss carried the thing which had once been a metal-detector in one hand, and something which looked like a walkie-talkie handset in the other. When he raised the curved stainless-steel antenna on the end of the walkie-talkie gadget and moved the dish at the end of the detector, the motor or pump would rise. When he moved them to the left, the piece of equipment went left. Gard, watching this with the bemusement of a veteran drunk (and surely no one sees as many strange things as one of those), thought that Moss looked like a scrofulous animal trainer leading mechanical elephants through the woods to the site of some unimaginable circus.

Gardener had seen the laborious moving of enough heavy equipment to know that this device could revolutionize construction techniques. Such things were outside his practical knowledge, but he guessed that a single gadget such as the one Moss had used on Thursday with such absent ease could cut the cost of a project the size of the Aswan Dam by twenty-five per cent or more.

In at least one respect, however, it was like the illusion being maintained at the town hall-it required a lot of juice.