“Not that there'd be any volunteers standing in line. Right?”
Freeman Moss had looked at him silently, saying nothing for a moment. Then he grunted: “Pound those clamps in good. We'll still have to stop pretty often to pound “em back in. They'll loosen up.”
“Can't you control the outflow so you don't have to bother with all this clamping shit?” Gardener asked.
Moss rolled his eyes impatiently at his ignorance. “Sure,” he said, “but there's one fuck of a lot of water down in that hole, and I'd like to get it out before doomsday, if it's all the same to you.”
Gardener held out his hands, half-laughing. “Hey, I was just asking,” he said. “Peace.”
The man had only grunted in his inimitable Freeman Moss style.
By nine-thirty, water was pouring downhill and away from the ship at a great rate. It was cold and clear and as sweet as water can be-which is sweet indeed, as anyone with a good well could attest. By noon they had created a brand-new stream. It was six feet wide, shallow, but brawling right along, carrying pine needles, loamy black topsoil, and small shrubs away. There was not much for the men to do but to sit around and make sure none of the plump, straining dumper hoses came free and started to fly around, spraying water like bombed-out fire hydrants. Moss shut the pumps down regularly, in sequence, so that they could pound in loose clamps or switch them to a new place along the hose if the ground was getting loose where they had been.
By three o'clock, the stream was rolling larger bushes downstream, and just before five o'clock, Gardener heard the rending rumble of a biggish tree going over. He got up and craned his neck, but it had happened too far down the new stream's course to see.
“Sounded like a pine,” Moss said.
It was Gardener's turn to look at Moss and say nothing.
“Might have been a spruce,” Moss said, and although the man's face remained perfectly straight, Gardener believed Moss might just have made a joke. A very small one, but a joke, just the same.
“Is this water reaching the road, do you think?”
“Oh, ayuh, I sh'd suspect.”
“It'll wash it out, won't it?”
“Nope. Town crew's already putting in a new culve't. Large bore. S'pose they'll have to detour traffic for a couple of days while they tear up the tarvy, but there ain't's much traffic out this way as there used to be, anyway.”
“I noticed,” Gardener said.
“Damn good thing, if you ask me. Summer people're always a pain in the ass. Looka here, Gardener-I'm gonna cut the outflow on these pumps way down, but they'll still pump fifteen, maybe seventeen gallons a minute overnight. With four pumps workin”, that's thirty-eight hundred gallons an hour, all night long. Not bad for runnin” on automatic. Come on, let's go. Yon ship's lovely, but it makes my blood pressure jumpy. I'll drink one of your beers before I head home to the missus, if you'll let it be so.”
Moss had shown up again yesterday, Saturday, in his old Pontiac, and had promptly run the pumps up to capacity-thirty-five gallons per minute each, eighty-four hundred gallons an hour.
This morning, no Freeman Moss. He had finally played out like the others, leaving Gardener to consider the same old options.
First option: Business as usual.
Second option: Run like hell. He had already come to the conclusion that if Bobbi died, he would suffer a fatal accident soon afterward. It might take as long as half an hour for him to have it. If he decided to run, would they know in advance? Gardener didn't think so. He and the rest of Haven still played poker the old-fashioned way: with all the cards dealt face down. Oh, and by the way, gang-how far would he have to run to get out of the reach of them and their Buck Rogers gadgetry?
Actually, Gard didn't think it would be all that far. Derry, Bangor, even Augusta… all those might be too close. But Portland? Maybe. Probably. Because of what he thought of as the Cigarette Analogy.
When a kid started to smoke, he was lucky if he could get through half a butt without puking his guts out or almost fainting. After six months” experience, he might be able to get through five or ten butts a day. Give a kid three years and you had yourself a two-and-a-half-pack-a-day candidate for lung cancer.
Then turn it over. Tell a kid who has just finished his first butt and who is wandering around green-faced and gagging that he has to quit smoking, and he'll probably fall down and kiss your ass. Catch him when he's doing five or ten smokes a day and you've got a kid who probably doesn't care much one way or another… although a kid habituated even at that level may find himself eating too many sweets, and wishing for a smoke when he's bored or nervous.
Ah, Gardener thought, but take your smoking vet. Tell him he's got to quit the coffin-nails and he clutches his chest like a man who's having a heart attack… only he's just protecting the smokes in the breast pocket of his shirt. Smoking, Gardener knew from his own mostly successful efforts to either quit the habit or at least damp it down to a less lethal vice, is a physical addiction. In the first week off cigarettes, smokers suffer from jitters, headaches, musclespasms. Doctors may prescribe B-12 to quiet the worst of these symptoms. They know, however, that there are no pills to combat the ex-smoker's feelings of loss and depression during the six months which begin the instant the smoker crushes out his last butt and starts his or her lonely voyage out of addiction.
And Haven, Gardener thought now, running the pumps up to full power, is like a smoke-filled room. They were sick here at first… they were like a bunch of kids learning to smoke cornshucks out behind the barn. But now they like the air in the room, and why not? They're the ultimate chainsmokers. It's in the air they breathe, and God knows what kinds of physiological changes are going on in their brains and bodies. Lung sections show formation of oat cells in the lung tissue of people who have only been smoking for eighteen months. There's a high incidence of brain tumors in towns where there are high-pollution milling operations or, God save us, nuclear reactors. So what is this doing to them?
He didn't know-he had seen no surface, observable changes except for the loss of teeth and the increased shortness of temper. But he didn't think they'd chase him very far if he split. They might begin by lighting out after him with the fervor of a posse in a Republic western, but he somehow thought they would lose interest very quickly… as soon as the withdrawal symptoms set in.
He got all four pumps running at top speed, swelling the creek into a wide stream almost at once. Then he began the day's work of checking the U-clamps which held the hoses still.
If he got away, his choices were two: keep his mouth shut or blow the whistle. He knew that, for a variety of reasons, he would probably keep quiet. Which meant simply dealing himself-writing off the last month of back-breaking labor, writing off any chance to change the suicidal course of world politics at a stroke, most of all writing off his good friend and erstwhile lover Bobbi Anderson, who had been in absentia for the best part of two weeks now.
Third option: Get rid of it. Blow it up. Destroy it. Make it no more than another vague rumor, like the supposed aliens in Hangar 18.
In spite of his dull fury at the insanity of nuclear power and the energyswilling technocratic pigs who had created it and underwritten it and refused to see its dangers even in the wake of Chernobyl, in spite of his depression at the AP wirephoto of the scientists advancing the Black Clock to two minutes before midnight, he fully recognized the possibility that destroying the ship might be the best thing he could possibly do. The oxidation of whatever had been impregnated in the surface of its hull (deliberately, he had no doubt) had created a cornucopia of mind-blowing gadgets out here; God alone knew what wonderful things might be waiting inside. But there was the other stuff, wasn't there? The neurosurgeon in the crashed plane, that old man and the big state cop, maybe the lady constable, Mrs McCausland, maybe the two other state cops who had disappeared, maybe even the Brown kid… how much of this could be laid at the door of this thing he was staring at, which was jutting out of the ground like the breeching snout of the greatest white whale ever dreamed of? Some? All? None of the above?