All of them had lost teeth.

What kind of fucking radiation is THAT?

Dawson glanced into the dispatcher's booth and saw that all of his incoming lines were lighted.

“Andy, the situation's still developing. I gotta

“I know,” Torgeson said, “you've got to go talk to crazy people. I've got to call the attorney general's office in Augusta and talk to other crazy people. Jim Tierney's the best A. G. we've had in Maine since I put on this uniform, and do you know where he is this gay day, Smokey?”

“No.”

“On vacation,” Torgeson said with a laugh that was slightly wild. “First one since he took the job. The only man in the administration that might be able to understand this nuttiness is camping with his family in Utah. Fucking Utah! Nice, huh?”

“Nice.”

“What the fuck's going on?”

“I don't know.”

“Any other casualties?”

“A forest ranger from Newport died,” Dawson said reluctantly.

“Who?”

“Henry Amberson.”

“What? Henry? Christ!”

Torgeson felt as if he had been hit hard in the pit of the stomach. He had known Henry Amberson for twenty years-the two of them hadn't been best friends, nothing like it, but they had played some cribbage together when times were slow, done a little fly-fishing. Their families had taken dinner together.

Henry, Jesus, Henry Amberson. And Tierney was in fucking Utah. “Was he in one of the Jeeps they sent out?”

“Yeah. He had a pacemaker, you know, and

“What? What?” Torgeson took a step toward Smokey as if to shake him. “What?”

“The guy driving the Jeep apparently radioed in to Three that it exploded in Amberson's chest.”

“Oh my Jesus Christ!”

“It's not sure yet,” Dawson said quickly. “Nothing is. The situation is still developing.”

“How could a pacemaker explode?” Torgeson asked softly.

“I don't know.”

“It's a joke,” Torgeson said flatly. “Either some weird joke or something like that radio show that time. War of the Worlds.”

Timidly, Smokey said: “I don't think it's a joke… or a hoax.”

“Neither do I,” Torgeson said. He headed for his office and the telephone.

“Fucking Utah,” he said softly, and then left Smokey Dawson to try and keep up with the increasingly unbelievable information that was coming in from the area of which Bobbi Anderson's farm was the center.

Torgeson would have called the A. G. “s office if Jim Tierney hadn't been in fucking Utah. Since he was, he put it off long enough to make a quick call to David Bright at the Bangor Daily News.

“David? It's Andy. Listen, I-”

“We've got reports there's a fire in Haven, Andy. Maybe a big one. Have you got that?”

“Yeah, we do. David, I can't take you over there. The information you gave me checks out, though. Fire crews and recon people can't get into town. They get sick. We've lost a forest ranger. A guy I knew. I heard…” He shook his head. “Forget what I heard. It's too goddam crazy to be true.”

Bright's voice was excited. “What was it?”

“Forget it.”

“But you say firemen and rescue crews are getting sick?”

“Recon people. We don't know yet if anyone needs rescuing or not. Then there's the shit about the fire trucks and jeeps. Vehicles seem to stop running when they get close to or into Haven

“What?”

“You heard me.”

“You mean it's like the pulse?”

“Pulse? What pulse?” He had a crazy idea that Bright was talking about Henry's pacemaker, that he had known all along.

“It's a phenomenon that's supposed to follow big nuclear bangs. Cars stop dead.”

“Christ. What about radios?”

“Them too.”

“But your friend said-”

“All over the band, yes. Hundreds. Can I at least quote you on the sick firemen and rescue people? The vehicles stopping?”

Yeah. As Mr Source. Mr Informed Source.”

When did you first hear-”

“I don't have time to do the Playboy interview, David. Your Leandro went to Maine Med Supplies for air?”

“Yes.”

“He thought it was the air,” Torgeson said, more to himself than to Bright. “That's what he thought.”

“Andy… you know what else stops cars dead, according to the reports we get from time to time?”

“What?”

“UFOs. Don't laugh; it's true. People who sight flying saucers at close range when they're in their cars or planes almost always say their motors just drop dead until the thing goes away.” He paused. “Remember the doctor who crashed his plane in Newport a week or two ago?”

War of the Worlds, Torgeson thought again. What a pile of crap.

But Henry Amberson's pacemaker had… what? Exploded? Could that possibly be true?

He would make it his business to find out; that you could take to the bank.

“I'll be talking to you, Davey,” Torgeson said, and hung up. It was 3:15. In Haven, the fire which had begun at the old Frank Garrick farm had been burning for over an hour, and was now spreading toward the ship in a widening crescent.

Torgeson called Augusta at 3:17 P. M. At that time, two sedans with a total of six investigators in them were already northbound on 1-95; Fire Station Three had called the A. G. “s office at 2:26 P. M. and the Derry state police barracks at 2:49. The Derry report included the first jagged elements-the crash of the Unity pumper, the death of a forest ranger who appeared to have been shotgunned by his own pacemaker. At 1:30 P. M. mountain time, a Utah state police cruiser stopped at the campground where Jim Tierney and his family were staying. The trooper informed him there was an emergency in his home state. What sort of emergency? That, the trooper had been told, was information obtainable strictly on a need-to-know basis. Tierney could have called Derry, but Torgeson in Cleaves Mills was a guy he knew and trusted. Right now he wanted more than anything else to talk to someone he trusted. He felt a slow sinking dread in his gut, a feeling that it had to be Maine Yankee, had to be something with the state's only nuclear plant, had to be, only something that big could have caused this kind of extraordinary response almost a whole country away. The trooper patched him through. Torgeson was both delighted and relieved to hear Tierney's voice.

At 1:37 P. M. mountain time, Tierney climbed into the shotgun seat of the cruiser and said, “How fast does this go?”

“Sir! This vehicle will go one hundred and thirty miles an hour and I am a Mormon sir and I am not afraid to drive it at that speed sir because I am confident that I will avoid hell! Sir!”

“Prove it,” Tierney said.

At 2:03 P. M. mountain time, Tierney was in a Lear jet with no markings but the U. S. flag on its tail. It had been waiting for him at a small private airfield near Cottonwoods… the town of which Zane Grey wrote in Riders of the Purple Sage, the book which had been Roberta Anderson's favorite as a girl, the one which had perhaps set her course forever as a writer of westerns.

The pilot was in mufti.

“Are you Defense Department?” Tierney asked.

The pilot looked at him with expressionless dark glasses. “Shop.” It was the only word he spoke before, during, or after the flight.

That was how the Dallas Police entered the game.

Haven had been nothing but a wide place in the road, dreaming its life away comfortably off the major Maine tourist tracks. Now it had been noticed. Now people headed there in droves. Since they knew nothing of the anomalies that were being reported in ever-increasing numbers, it was only the growing pall of smoke on the horizon which drew them at first, like moths to candle flames. It would be almost seven o'clock that evening before the state police, with the help of the local National Guard unit, would be able to block off all the roads to the area-the minor ones as well as the major. By morning, the fire would become the greatest forest fire in Maine history. The brisk easterly wind came up right on schedule, and once it did there was no way the fire's running start could be overcome. The realization did not sink in all at once, but it did sink in: the fire might have burned unchecked even if the day had been dead calm. You couldn't do much about a fire you couldn't get to, and efforts to get near this one had unpleasant results.