“Did anything like that come close to happening here?” Gard's lips were numb. Such a possibility made Chernobyl seem as important as a fart in a phone-booth. And you went along with it, Gard! his mind screamed at him. You helped dig it up!
“No, although some people had to be dissuaded from doing too much tinkering along transmitter/transmatter lines.” She smiled. “It happened somewhere else we visited, though.”
“What happened?”
“They got the door shut before Shatterday, but a lot of people cooked when the orbit changed.” She sounded bored with the subject.
“All of them?” Gardener whispered.
“Nope. There are still nine or ten thousand of them alive at one of the poles,” Bobbi said. “I think.”
“Jesus. Oh my Jesus, Bobbi.”
“There are other channels which open on rock. Just rock. The inside of some place. Most open in deep space. We've never been able to chart a single one of those locations using our star-charts. Think of it, Gard! Every place has been a strange place to us… even to us, and we are great sky-travelers.”
She leaned forward and sipped a little more beer. The toy pistol which was no longer a toy did not waver from Gardener's chest.
“So that's teleportation. Some big deal, huh? A few rocks, a lot of holes, one cosmic attic. Maybe someday someone will open a wavelength into the heart of a sun and flash-fry a whole planet.”
Bobbi laughed, as if this would be a particularly fine jest. The gun didn't waver from Gard's chest, however.
Growing serious again, Bobbi said: “But that's not all, Gard. When you turn on a radio, you think of tuning a station. But a band-megaherz, kiloherz, shortwave, whatever-isn't just stations. It's also all the blank space between stations. In fact, that's what some bands are mostly made up of. Do you follow?”
“Yes.”
“This is my roundabout way of trying to convince you to take the pills. I won't send you to the place you call Altair-4, Gard-there I know you'd die slowly and unpleasantly.”
“The way David Brown is dying?”
“I had nothing to do with that,” she said quickly. “It was his brother's doing entirely.”
“It's like Nuremberg, isn't it, Bobbi? Nothing was really anyone's fault
“You idiot,.” Bobbi said. “Don't you realize that sometimes that's the truth? Are you so gutless you can't accept the idea of random occurrence?”
“I can accept it. But I also believe in the ability of the individual to reverse irrational behavior,” he said.
“Really? You never could.”
Shot your wife, he heard the booger-picking deputy say. Good fucking deal, uh?
Maybe sometimes people start the old Atonement Boogie a little late, he thought, looking down at his hands.
Bobbi's eyes flicked sharply at his face. She had caught some of that. He tried to reinforce the shield-a tangled chain of disconnected thoughts like white noise.
“What are you thinking about, Gard?”
“Nothing I want you to know,” he said, and smiled thinly. “Think of it as… well, let's say a padlock on a shed door.”
Her lips drew back from her teeth for a moment… then relaxed into that strange gentle smile again. “It doesn't matter,” she said. “I might not understand anyway. As I say, we've never been very good understanders. We're not a race of super-Einsteins. Thomas Edison in Space would be closer, I think. Never mind. I won't send you to a place where you'll die a slow, miserable death. I still love you in my way, Gard, and if I have to send you somewhere, I'll send you to… nowhere.”
She shrugged.
“It's probably like taking ether… but it might be painful. Agony, even. Either way, the devil you know is always better than the devil you don't.”
Gardener suddenly burst into tears.
“Bobbi, you could have saved me yea grief if you'd reminded me of that sooner.”
“Take the pills, Gard. Deal with the devil you know. The way you are now, two hundred milligrams of Valium will take you off very quickly. Don't make me mail you like a letter addressed to nowhere.”
“Tell me some more about the Tommyknockers,” Gardener said, wiping at his face with his hands.
Bobbi smiled. “The pills, Gard. If you start taking the pills, I'll tell you anything you want to know. If you don't-” She raised the photon pistol.
Gardener unscrewed the top of the Valium bottle, shook out half a dozen of the blue pills with the heart-shape in the middle (Valentines from the Valley of Torpor, he thought), tossed them into his mouth, cracked the beer, and swallowed them. There went sixty milligrams down the old chute. He could have hidden one under his tongue, maybe, but six? Come on, folks, be real. Not much time now. I vomited my belly empty, I've lost a lot of blood, I haven't been taking this shit and so have no tolerance to it, I'm some thirty pounds lighter than I was when I picked up the first mandatory prescription. If I don't get rid of this shit quick, they'll hit me like a highballing semi.
“Tell me about the Tommyknockers,” he invited again. One hand dropped into his lap below the table and touched the butt
(shield-shield-shield-shield)
of the gun. How long before the stuff started to work? Twenty minutes? He couldn't remember. And nobody had ever told him about OD'ing on Valium.
Bobbi moved the gun a bit toward the pills. “Take some more, Gard. As Jacqueline Susann may have once said, six is not enough.”
He shook out four more but left them on the oilcloth.
“You were scared shitless out there, weren't you?” Gardener asked. “I saw the way you looked, Bobbi. You looked like you thought they were all going to get up and walk. Day of the Dead.”
Bobbi's New and Improved eyes flickered… but her voice remained soft. “But we are walking and talking, Gard. We are back.”
Gard picked up the four Valiums, bounced them in his palm. “I want you to tell me just one thing, and then I'll take these.” Yes. Just that one thing would in some fashion answer all the other questions-the ones he was never going to get a chance to ask. Maybe that was why he hadn't tried Bobbi with the gun yet. Because this was what he really needed to know. This one thing.
“I want to know what you are,” Gardener said. “Tell me what you are.”
“I'll answer your question, or at least try to,” Bobbi said, “if you'll take those pills you're bouncing in your hand right now. Otherwise, you're going bye-bye, Gard. There's something in your mind. I can't quite read it-it's like seeing a shape through gauze. But it makes me extremely nervous.”
Gardener put the pills in his mouth and swallowed them.
“More.”
Gardener shook out another four and took them. All the way up to 140 milligrams now. Shooting the moon. Bobbi seemed to relax.
“I said Thomas Edison was closer than Albert Einstein, and that's as good a way to put it as any,” Bobbi said. “There are things here in Haven that would have made Albert boggle, I suppose, but Einstein knew what E=mc2 meant. He understood relativity. He knew things. We… we make things. Fix things. We don't theorize. We build. We're handymen.”
“You improve things,” Gardener said. He swallowed. When Valium took hold of him, his throat began to feel dry. He remembered that much. When it started to happen, he would have to act. He thought maybe he had already taken a lethal dose, and there were at least a dozen pills left in the bottle.
Bobbi had brightened a little.
“Improve! That's right! That's what we do. The way they-we-improved Haven. You saw the potential as soon as you got back. No more having to suck the corporate tit! Eventually, it's possible to convert totally to… uh… organic-storage-battery sources. They're renewable and long-lasting.
“You're talking about people.”
“Not just people, although higher species do seem to produce longer-lasting power than the lower ones-it may be a function of spirituality rather than intelligence. The Latin word for it, esse, is probably the best. But even Peter has lasted a remarkably long time, produced a great deal of power, and he's only a dog.”