“Maybe because of his spirit,” Gardener said. “Maybe because he loved you.” He took the pistol out of his belt. He held it

(shield-shield-shield-shield)

against his inner left thigh.

“That's beside the point,” Bobbi said, waving the subject of Peter's love or spirituality away. “You have decided for some reason that the morality of what we're doing is unacceptable-but then, the spectrum of what you think of as morally acceptable behavior is very narrow. It doesn't matter; you'll be going to sleep soon.

“We have no history, written or oral. When you say the ship crashed here because those in charge were, in effect, fighting over the steering wheel, I feel there's an element of truth in that… but I also feel that perhaps it was meant, fated to happen. Telepaths are at least to some degree precognitives, Gard, and precognitives are more apt to let themselves be guided by the currents, both large and small, that run through the universe. “God” is the name some people give those currents, but God's only a word, like Tommyknockers or Altair-4.

“What I mean is, we would almost certainly be long extinct if we hadn't trusted those currents, because we've always been short-tempered, ready to fight. But “fight” is too general a word. We… we… “Bobbi's eyes suddenly glowed a deep, frightful green. Her lips spread in a toothless grin. Gardener's right hand clutched the gun with a sweaty palm.

“We squabble!” Bobbi said. “Le mot juste, Gard!”

“Good for you,” Gardener said, and swallowed. He heard a click. That dryness hadn't just sneaked up-all at once it was just there.

“Yes, we squabble, we've always squabbled. Like kids, you could say.” Bobbi smiled. “We're very childlike. That's our good side.”

“Is it now?” A monstrous image suddenly filled Gardener's head: grammarschool kids heading off to school armed with books and Uzis and Smurfs lunch-boxes and M-16s and apples for the teachers they liked and fragmentation grenades for those they didn't. And, oh Christ, every one of the girls looked like Patricia McCardle and every one of the boys looked like Ted the Power Man. Ted the Power Man with greeny-glowing eyes that explained the whole sorry fucking mess, from Crusades and crossbow to Reagan's missile-tipped satellites.

We squabble. Every now and then we even tussle a bit. We're grownups-I guess -but we still have bad tempers, like kids do, and we also still like to have fun, like kids do, so we satisfied both wants by building all these nifty nuclear slingshots, and every now and then we leave a few around for people to pick UP, and do you know what? They always do. People like Ted, who are perfectly willing to kill so no woman in Braintree with the wherewithal to buy one shall want for electricity to run her hair-dryer. People like you, Gard, who see only minimal drawbacks to the idea of killing for peace.

It would be such a dull world without guns and squabbles, wouldn't it?

Gardener realized he was getting sleepy.

“Childlike,” she repeated. “We fight… but we can also be very generous. As we have here.”

“Yes, you've been very generous to Haven,” Gardener said, and his jaws abruptly cracked open in a huge, tendon-stretching yawn.

Bobbi smiled.

“Anyway, we might have crashed because it was “crash-time,” according to those currents I mentioned. The ship wasn't hurt, of course. And when I started to uncover it, we… came back.”

“Are there more of you out there?”

Bobbi shrugged. “I don't know.” And don't care, the shrug said. We're here, There are improvements to be made. That is enough.

“That's really all you are?” He wanted to make sure; make sure there was no more to it. He was terribly afraid he was taking too long, much too long… but he had to know. “That's all?”

“What do you mean, all? Is it so little, what we are?”

“Frankly, yes,” Gard said. “You see, I've been looking for the devil outside my life all my life because the one inside was so fucking hard to catch. It's hard to spend such a long time thinking you're… Homer…” He yawned again, hugely. His eyelids had bricks on them. and discover you were… Captain Ahab all the time.”

And finally, for the last time, with a kind of desperation he asked her:

“Is that all you are? Just people who fix things up?”

“I guess so,” she said. “I'm sorry it's such a let-down for y

Gardener lifted the pistol under the table, and at the same moment felt the drug finally betray him: the shield slipped.

Bobbi's eyes glowed-no, this time they glared. Her voice, a mental scream, blasted through Gardener's head like a meat-cleaver

(GUN HE'S GOT A GUN HES GOT A)

chopping through the rising fog.

She tried to move. At the same time she tried to bring the photon pistol to bear on him. Gardener aimed the. 45 at Bobbi under the table and pulled the trigger. There was only a dry click. The old slug had misfired.

Chapter 9

The Scoop, Concluded

John Leandro died. The scoop did not.

David Bright had promised to give Leandro until four, and that was a promise he had intended to keep-because it was honorable, of course, but also because he was not sure this was anything he wanted to stick his hand into. It might turn out to be a threshing machine instead of a news story. Nonetheless, he never doubted Johnny Leandro had been telling the truth, or his perception of it, crazed as his story sounded. Johnny was a twerp, Johnny sometimes didn't just jump to conclusions but broad-jumped them completely, but he wasn't a liar (even if he had been, Bright didn't believe he was smart enough to fabricate something this woolly).

Around two-thirty that afternoon, Bright suddenly began to think of another Johnny-poor, damned Johnny Smith, who had sometimes touched objects and gotten “feelings” about them. That had been crazy, too, but Bright had believed Johnny Smith, had believed in what Smith said he could do. It was impossible to look into the man's haunted eyes and not believe. Bright was not touching anything which belonged to John Leandro, but he could see his desk across the room, the hood pulled neatly over his word-processor terminal, and he began to get a feeling… a very dismal one. He felt that Johnny Leandro might be dead.

He called himself an old woman, but the feeling didn't go away. He thought of Leandro's voice, desperate and cracking with excitement. This is my story, and I'm not going to give it up just like that. Thought of Johnny Smith's dark eyes, his trick of constantly rubbing at the left side of his forehead. Bright's eyes were drawn again and again to Leandro's hooded word-cruncher.

He held out until three o'clock. By then the feeling had become sickening assurance. Leandro was dead. There was just no maybe in it. He might not ever have another genuine premonition in his life, but he was having one now. Not crazy, not wounded, not one of the missing. Dead.

Bright picked up the phone, and although the number he dialed had a Cleaves Mills exchange, both Bobbi and Gard would have known it was really long-distance: fifty-five days after Bobbi Anderson's stumble in the woods, someone was finally calling the Dallas Police.

The man Bright talked to at the Cleaves Mills state-police barracks was Andy Torgeson. Bright had known him since college, and he could talk to him without feeling that he had the words NEWS SNOOP tattooed on his forehead in bright red letters. Torgeson listened patiently, saying little, as Bright told him everything, beginning with Leandro's assignment to the story of the missing cops.

“His nose bled, his teeth fell out, he got vomiting, and he was convinced that all of this was coming out of the air?”