Maybe opening the outer hatch started this stuff up, but I don't believe it. It was us. What starts up next, Bobbi?

Suppose they started up next-the Tommyknockers themselves? Suppose their grayish-transparent six-fingered hands started to clench and unclench, as Bobbi's hands had been doing as she stared at the corpses in the barren control room? What if those taloned feet began to twitch? Or suppose those heads began to turn, and those milky eyes looked at them?

I want out. The ghosts here are very lively and I want out.

He touched Bobbi's shoulder. She jumped. Gardener glanced at his wrist, but there was no watch there-only a fading white shape on his otherwise tanned wrist. It had been a Timex, a tough old baby that had gone on a lot of toots with him and come out alive. But two days of working on the excavation had killed it. THERE'S one John Cameron Swayze never tried in those old TV ads, he thought.

Bobbi took the point. She pointed at the air-bottle clipped to her belt and raised her eyebrows at Gardener. How long has it been?

Gardener didn't know and didn't care. He wanted out before the whole damned ship woke up and did God-knew-what.

He pointed back down the passageway. Long enough. Let's bug out.

A thick, oily chuckling noise began in the wall next to Gardener. He shrank from it. Drops of blood from his slowly bleeding nose splattered the wall. His heart was beating madly.

Stop it, it's just some sort of pump

The oily noise began to smooth out… and then something went wrong. There was a screech of grinding metal and a quick, thudding series of explosions. Gardener felt the wall vibrate, and for a moment the light seemed to flicker and dim.

Could we find our way out of here in the dark if the lights went out? You make thee joke I theenk, senor.

The pump tried to start again. There was a long metallic scream that set Gardener's teeth biting at the rubber plugs in his mouthpiece. It died away at last. There was a long loud rattle, like a straw in an empty glass. Then nothing.

Not everything lasted all that time with no damage, Gardener thought, and found this idea actually relieving.

Bobbi was pointing: Go, Gard.

Before he did, he saw Bobbi pause and look back once at the ranks of the hammocked dead. That frightened look was back on her face.

Then Gard was crawling back the way he came, trying to keep an even, steady pace as the claustrophobia wrapped itself around him.

In the control room, one of the walls had turned into a gigantic picture-window fifty feet long and twenty feet high.

Gardener stood, gape-jawed, looking at the blue Maine sky and the fringe of pines and spruces and maples around the trench. In the lower right-hand corner he could see the rooftree of their equipment lean-to. He stared at this for several seconds-long enough to see big white summer clouds drifting across the blue sky -before realizing it couldn't be a window. They were somewhere toward the middle of the ship, and deep in the ground as well. A window in that wall should show only more ship. Even if they had been near the hull, which they weren't, it would have given on a vista of mesh-covered rock wall, with maybe a squib of blue sky at the very top.

It's a TV picture of some kind. Something like a TV picture, anyway.

But there were no lines. The illusion was perfect.

Forgetting, in this powerful new fascination, his claustrophobic need to get out, Gardener walked slowly toward the wall. The angle gave him a perverse sensation of flying-the effect was like slipping behind the controls of an airline trainer and pulling the mock controls into a steep climb. The sky was so bright he had to squint. He kept looking for the wall, the way you might expect to see a movie screen through the picture as you got closer to it, but the wall just didn't seem to be there. The pines were a true, clear green, and only the fact that he couldn't feel any breeze or smell the woods worked against the persuasive illusion of looking through an open window.

He walked closer, still looking for the wall.

It's a camera, got to be-mounted on the outer rim of the ship, maybe even the part Bobbi stumbled over. The angle confirms that. But, Jesus! It's so fucking real! If the people at Kodak or Polaroid saw this, they'd go out of their gou

His arm was grabbed-grabbed hard-and terror leaped up in him. He turned, expecting to see one of them, a grinning thing with a dog's head, holding a cable with a plug tip in one hand: Just bend down, Mr Gardener; this won't hurt a bit.

It was Bobbi. She pointed to the wall. Held out her hands and arms and jittered them rapidly in some kind of charade. Then pointed at the window-wall again. After a moment, Gardener got it. In a grisly way it was almost funny. Bobbi had been miming electrocution, telling him that touching the window-wall would probably be a lot like touching the third rail of a subway.

Gardener nodded, then pointed toward the wider companionway through which they had entered. Bobbi nodded back and led the way.

As Gardener boosted himself up, he thought he heard a leaf-dry rattle and turned back, feeling a child's dreamy terror tug at his mind. He felt that it must be them, those corpses in the corner; them, rising slowly to their taloned feet like zombies.

But they still lay in their tangled drift of strange arms and legs. The wide, clear view of the sky and the trees on the wall (or through the wall) was dimming, losing reality and definition.

Gardener turned away and crawled after Bobbi as fast as he could.

Chapter 7

The Scoop, Continued

You're crazy, you know, John Leandro told himself as he pulled into exactly the same parking slot Everett Hillman had used not three weeks ago. Leandro did not of course know this. That was probably just as well.

You're crazy, he told himself again. You bled like a stuck pig, there's two teeth less in your head, and you're planning to go back there. You're crazy!

Right, he thought, getting out of the old car. I'm twenty-four, unmarried, getting bulgy around the middle, and if I'm crazy it's because I found this, I did, me, I tripped over it. It's big, and it's mine. My story. No, use the other word. It's old-fashioned, but who gives a fuck-it's the right word. My scoop. I'm not going to let it kill me, but I am going to ride it until it bucks me off.

Leandro stood in the parking lot at a quarter past one on what was rapidly becoming the longest day of his life (it would also be the last, despite all his mental avowals to the contrary) and thought: Good for you. Gonna ride it till it bucks you off. Probably Robert Capa, Ernie Pyle, thought the same thing from time to time.

Sensible. Sarcastic, but sensible. That deeper part of his mind seemed to be beyond such sense, however. My story, it returned stubbornly. My scoop.

John Leandro, now clad in a T-shirt reading WHERE TH” HELL IS TROY, MAINE? (David Bright would probably have laughed himself into a hemorrhage over that one), crossed the small parking lot of Maine Med Supplies ('Specializing in Respiration Supplies and Respiration Therapy since 1946') and went inside.

“Thirty bucks is a stiff deposit for an air mask, don't you think?” Leandro asked the clerk, thumbing through his cash. He guessed he had the thirty, but it was going to leave him with about a buck and a half. “Wouldn't think they'd be a big black-market item.”

“We never used to require one at all,” the clerk said, “and we still don't if we know the individual or the organization, you know. But I lost one a couple, three weeks ago. Old man came in and told me he wanted some air. I figured he meant for diving, you know-he was old, but he looked tough enough for it-so I started telling him about Downeast ScubaDive in Bangor. But he said no, he was interested in ground portability. So I rented it to him. I never got it back. Brand-new Bell flat-pack. Two-hundred-dollar piece of equipment.”