“Stop fucking with me, Bobbi!” Her voice rose unevenly.

“Oh, listen!” Bobbi said. “I never thought I'd hear anything like that from you, Anne. After all the years you fucked with me… with all of us. But okay. If you insist. If you insist, that's fine. Just fine.”

She didn't want to see. Suddenly Anne didn't want anything but to run, and keep running until she was far from this shadowy place and this town where they left you fainting all day at the side of the road. But it was too late. She saw the blurred movement of her younger sister's hand, and the lights went on at the same moment the robe dropped with a soft rustle.

The shower had washed off the makeup. Bobbi's entire head and neck were transparent and jellylike. Her breasts had swelled bulbously outward and seemed to be merging into one single nippleless outcropping of flesh. Anne could see dim organs in Bobbi's stomach that looked nothing at all like human organs-there was fluid circulating in there but it looked green.

Behind Bobbi's forehead she could see the quivering sac of mind.

Bobbi grinned toothlessly.

“Welcome to Haven, Anne,” she said.

She felt herself stepping backward in a spongy dream. She was trying to scream but there was no air.

At Bobbi's crotch, a grotesque thatch of tentacles like sea-grass wavered from her vagina… the place where her vagina had been, anyway. Anne had no idea if it was still there or not, and didn't care. The sunken valley which had replaced her crotch was enough. That… and the way the tentacles seemed to be pointing toward her… reaching for her.

Naked, Bobbi began walking toward her. Anne tried to back away and stumbled over a footstool.

“No,” she whispered, trying to crawl away. “No… Bobbi… no.

“Good to have you here,” Bobbi said, still smiling. “I hadn't counted on you… not at all… but I think we can find a job for you. Positions, as they say, are still open.”

“Bobbi…” She managed this one final terrified whisper, and then she felt the tentacles, moving lightly on her body. She jerked, tried to move away… and they slithered around her wrists. Bobbi's hips thrust out in a movement that was like an obscene parody of copulation.

Chapter 2

Gardener Takes a Walk

Gardener took Anne's advice and went for a walk. He went, in fact, all the way out to the ship in the woods. This was the first time he had been out here by himself, he realized, and it would soon be full dark. He felt vaguely afraid, as a child might passing near a haunted house. Are there ghosts in there? The ghosts of Tommyknockers Past? Or are the real Tommyknockers themselves still in there, maybe in suspended animation, beings like freeze-dried coffee, waiting to be thawed out? And just what were they, anyhow?

He sat on the ground by the lean-to, looking at the ship. After a while the moon rose and lit its surface an even more ghostly silver. It was strange and yet very beautiful.

What's going on around here?

I don't want to know.

What it is ain't precisely clear…

I don't want to know.

Hey stop, what's that sound, everybody look what's going down…

He tipped the bottle up and drank deep. He put it aside, rolled over, and rested his throbbing head on his arms. He fell asleep that way, in the woods near the graceful circular jut of the ship.

He slept there all night.

In the morning there were two teeth on the ground.

It's what I get for sleeping so close to it, he thought dully, but there was at least one compensation-he had no headache at all, although he had put away nearly a fifth of Scotch. He had noticed before that, all its other attributes aside, the ship-or the change in the atmosphere the ship had generated-seemed, at very close range, to provide hangover protection.

He didn't want to leave his teeth just lying there. Heeding an obscure urge, he kicked dirt over them. As he did it he thought again: Playing Hamlet is a luxury you can no longer afford, Gard. If you don't commit to one course or the other very soon-in the next day or so, I think-you're not going to be able to do anything but march along with the rest of them.

He looked at the ship, thought of the deep ravine which extended down its smooth, unmarked side, and thought again: We'll be down to the hatchway soon, if there is a hatchway… what then?

Rather than trying to answer, he struck off for home.

The Cutlass was gone.

“Where were you last night?” Bobbi asked Gardener.

“I slept in the woods.”

“Did you get really drunk?” Bobbi asked with surprising gentleness. Her face was dark with makeup again. And Bobbi had been wearing shirts which seemed oddly loose and baggy the last few days; this morning he thought he could see why. Her chest was thickening. Her breasts had begun to look like a single unit instead of two separate things. It made Gardener think of guys who pumped iron.

“Not very. One or two nips and I passed out. No hangover this morning. And no bug bites.” He raised his arms, darkly tanned on top, white and strangely vulnerable beneath. “Any other summer, you'd wake up the next morning so bug-bit you couldn't open your eyes. But now they're gone. Along with the birds. And the beasts. In fact, Roberta, it seems to repel everything but fools like us.”

“Have you changed your mind, Gard?”

“You keep asking me that, have you noticed?”

Bobbi didn't reply.

“Did you hear the news on the radio yesterday?” He knew she hadn't. Bobbi didn't see, hear, or think about anything now but the ship. Her headshake was no surprise. “Troops massing in Libya. More fighting in Lebanon. American troop movements. The Russians getting louder and louder about SDI. We're all still sitting on the powderkeg. That hasn't changed a bit since 1945 or so. Then you discover a deus ex machina in your back yard, and now you keep wanting to know if I've changed my mind about using it.”

“Have you?”

“No,” Gardener said, not sure if he was lying or not-but he was very glad Bobbi couldn't read him.

Oh, can't she? I think she can. Not much, but more than she could a month ago… more and more each day. Because you're “becoming” now, too. Changed your mind? That's a laugh; you can't fucking make up your mind!

Bobbi dismissed it, or appeared to do so. She turned toward the pile of hand-tools stacked on the corner of the porch. She had missed making up a spot just below her right ear, Gardener saw-it was the same spot many men miss when they are shaving. He realized with a sickish lack of surprise that he could see into Bobbi -her skin had changed, had become some kind of semi-transparent jelly. Bobbi had grown thicker, shorter over the last two days-and the change was accelerating.

God, he thought, horrified and bitterly amused, is that what happens when you turn into a Tommyknocker? You start looking like someone who got caught in a great big messy atomic meltdown?

Bobbi, who had been bending over the tools and gathering them up in her arms, turned quickly to look at Gardener, her face wary.

“What?”

I said let's get moving, you lazy juggins, Gardener sent clearly, and that wary, puzzled expression became a reluctant smile.

“Okay. Help me with these, then.”

No, of course victims of high-gamma radiation didn't turn transparent, like Claude Raines in The Invisible Man. They didn't start to lose inches as their bodies twisted and thickened. But, yes, they were apt to lose teeth, their hair was apt to fall out-in other words, there was a kind of physical “becoming” in both cases.

He thought again: Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.

Bobbi was looking narrowly at him again.