“Wonderful,” he said, the word muffled to something that sounded like wunnel. “Wonderful, wonderful.”

Microbes do your worst! he thought with almost drunken defiance as he pulled out onto Route 9. He was, of course, unaware that things were changing rapidly in Haven now, and had been ever since noon; the situation in Haven was, in nuclear parlance, critical. Haven had in fact become a separate country, and its borders were now policed.

Not knowing this, Leandro drove on, tearing into his second cheeseburger and regretting only that he hadn't ordered a vanilla shake to go with them.

By the time he passed the Troy general store, his euphoria had dissipated, and his former low nervousness had returned-the sky overhead was a clear blue in which a few wispy-white clouds floated, but his nerves felt as if there were a thunderstorm on the way. He glanced at the flat-pack on the seat beside him, the gold cup covered with a round of cellophane which read SANI-SEALED FOR YOUR PROTECTION. In other words, Leandro thought, microbes keep out.

No cars on the road. No tractors in the fields. No boys walking barefoot along the side of the road with fishing rods. Troy dreamed silent (and, Leandro guessed, toothless) under the August sun.

He kept the radio tuned to WZON, and as he passed the Baptist church, he began to lose the signal in a rising mutter of other voices. Not long after that, his cheeseburgers began to first walk around uneasily in his stomach, and then to jump up and down. He could imagine them squirting grease as they did so. He was very close to the place where he had pulled over on his first effort to get into Haven. He pulled over now without delay-he didn't want the symptoms to get any worse. Those cheeseburgers had been too damned good to lose.

With the oxygen mask in place, the queasiness went away at once. That sense of low, gnawing nervousness did not. He caught a glimpse of himself, gold cup bobbing on his mouth and nose, in the rearview mirror and felt a moment of fright -was that him? That man's eyes looked too serious, too intent… they looked like the eyes of a jet fighter pilot. Leandro didn't want people like David Bright to think he was a twerp, but he wasn't sure he wanted to look that serous.

Too late now. You're in it.

The radio babbled in a hundred voices, maybe a thousand. Leandro turned it off. And there, up ahead, was the Haven town line. Leandro, who knew nothing at all about invisible nylon stockings, drove up to the town-line marker… and then past it, into Haven, with no trouble at all.

Although the battery situation in Haven was approaching the critical point again, force-fields could have been set up along most of the roads leading into town. But in the frightened confusion over the developing events of the morning, Dick Allison and Newt had made one decision that came to directly affect John Leandro. They wanted Haven closed, but they didn't want anyone to strike an inexplicable barrier in the middle of what appeared to be thin air, turn around, and carry the tale back to the wrong people…

…which was everyone else on earth just now.

I don't believe anyone could get that close, Newt said. He and Dick were in Dick's pickup truck, part of a procession of cars and trucks racing out to Bobbi Anderson's place.

I used to think so too, Dick replied. But that was before Hillman… and Bobbi's sister. No, someone could get in… but if they do, they'll never get out again.

All right, fine. You're Queen for a Day. Now can't you drive this fucker any faster?

The texture of both men's thoughts-of the thoughts all around them-was dismayed and furious. At that moment the possible incursion of outsiders into Haven seemed the least of their worries.

“I knew we should have gotten rid of that goddam drunk!” Dick cried out loud, and slammed his fist down on the dashboard. He was wearing no makeup today. His skin, as well as becoming increasingly transparent, had begun to roughen. The center of his face-and Newt's face, and the faces of all of those who had spent time in Bobbi's shed-had begun to swell. To grow decidedly snoutlike.

John Leandro of course knew nothing of this-he knew only that the air around him was poisonous-more poisonous than even he would have believed. He had slipped the gold cup down long enough to take a single shallow breath, and the world had immediately begun to fade into dimness. He put the cup back quickly, heart racing, hands cold.

Some two hundred yards past the town-line marker, his Dodge simply died. Most Haven cars and trucks had been customized in such a way as to make them immune to the steadily increasing electromagnetic field thrown off by the ship in the earth over the last two months or so (much of this work was done at Elt Barker's Shell), but Leandro's car had undergone no such treatment.

He sat behind the wheel a moment, staring stupidly down at the red idiot lights. He threw the transmission into Park and turned the key. The motor didn't crank. Hell, the solenoid didn't even click.

Battery cable came off, maybe.

It wasn't a battery cable. If it had been, the OIL and AMP lights wouldn't be glowing. But that was minor. Mostly he knew it wasn't his battery cable just because he knew it.

There were trees along both sides of the road here. The sun through their moving leaves made dappled patterns on the asphalt and white dirt of the soft shoulders. Leandro suddenly felt that eyes were looking out at him from behind trees. This was silly, of course, but the idea was nonetheless very powerful.

Okay, now you have got to get out, and see if you can walk out of the poison belt before your air runs out. The odds get longer every second you sit here giving yourself the creeps.

He tried the ignition key once more. Still nothing.

He got his camera, hooked the strap over his shoulder, and got out. He stood looking uneasily at the woods on the right side of the road. He thought he heard something behind him-a shuffling sound-and whirled quickly, lips pulled up in a dry grin of fear.

Nothing… nothing he could see.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep…

Get moving. You're just standing here using up your air.

He opened the door again, leaned in, and got the gun out of the glove compartment. He loaded it, then tried to put it in his right front pocket. It was too big. He was afraid it would fall out and go off if he left it there. He pulled up his new T-shirt, stuck it in his belt, then pulled the shirt down over it.

He looked at the woods again, then bitterly at the car. He could take pictures, he supposed, but what would they show? Nothing but a deserted country road. You could see those all over the state, even at the height of the summer tourist season. The pictures wouldn't convey the lack of woods sounds; the pictures would not show that the air had been poisoned.

There goes your scoop, Johnny. Oh, you'll write plenty of stories about it, and I've got a feeling you'll be telling a lot of network-news filming crews which is your good side, but your picture on the cover of Newsweek? The Pulitzer Prize? Forget it.

Part of him-a more adult part-insisted that was dumb, that half a loaf was better than none, that most of the reporters in the world would kill to get just a slice from this loaf, whatever it turned out to be.

But John Leandro was a man younger than his twenty-four years. When David Bright, believed he had seen a generous helping of twerp in Leandro, he hadn't been wrong. There were reasons, of course, but the reasons didn't change the fact. He felt like a rookie who gets a fat pitch during his first at-bat in the majors and hits an opposite-field triple. Not bad… but in his heart a voice cries out: Hey, God, if you was gonna give me a fat one, why didn't You let me get it all?