Little help for the kid. I know I'm not much, shot my wife, good fucking deal, shot my best friend, another good fucking deal, a New and Improved Good Fucking Deal, you might say, but please, God, I need an assist right now.

That was no exaggeration, either. He needed more than just a little. The thick cable split off into eight thinner ones, each ending not in an earplug but in a set of headphones. If he had been playing Russian roulette back in Bobbi's shed, this was like sticking his head into a cannon and asking someone to pull the lanyard.

But it had to be done.

He picked up one set of phones, noticing again how the centers bulged inward, and then looked toward the tangle of brown, sere bodies in the far corner of the room.

Tommyknockers? Hey-nonny-nonny nonsense name or not, it was still too good for them. Cavemen from space, that was all they had been. Long claws operating machinery they made but didn't even try to understand. Toes like the spurs on fighting cocks. This thing was a malignant tumor that needed quick removal.

Please God, let my little idea be right.

Could he tap all of them? That was really the $64,000 question, wasn't it? If the “becoming” was a closed system-something on the skin of the ship simply biodegrading into the atmosphere-the answer was probably no. But Gardener had come to think-or perhaps only to hope-that it was more, that it was an open system where the ship fed the humans. causing them to “become,” and the humans fed the ship so it could… what? Come again, of course. Could one use the word resurrection? Sorry, no. Too noble. If he was right, this was a kind of freak-show parthenogenesis whose proper place was under tawdry carnival lights and in cheap tabloids, not in undying myths or religious creeds. An open system… a slave system… quite literally a go-fuck-yourself system.

Please, God. Little help right now.

Gardener donned the headphones.

It happened instantaneously. No sensation of pain this time, only a great white radiance. The lights in the control room flashed up to full bright. One of the walls turned into a window again, showing the smoky sky and the fringe of trees. And then another of the room's eight walls went transparent… another… another. In a space of seconds Gard seemed to be sitting in an open space with the sky above him and the trench with its silvery netting on either side. The ship seemed to have disappeared. He had a 360-degree view.

Motors kicked in one by one and cycled up to full running pitch.

A bell was ringing somewhere. Huge thudding relays kicked over one by one, making the metal deck shiver under him.

The feeling of power was incredible; he felt as though the Mississippi was running through his head at flood level. He sensed it was killing him, but that was okay.

I've tapped them all, Gardener thought faintly. Oh God, thank you God I've tapped them all! It worked!

The ship began to tremble. To vibrate. The vibration became spasms of racking shudders. The time had come.

Baring the last few of his teeth, Gardener prepared to reach down and grasp his own bootstraps.

He had tapped all of them, but it was Dick Allison, because of his greater evolution, and Hazel's forty or so border-watchers back in town who bore the brunt of the ship's powering-up process-these latter were all tied together neatly in one unified web, and the ship simply reached out for it.

They slumped over, blood trickling from their eyes and noses, and died as the ship sucked their brains up.

The ship drew from the Tommyknockers in the woods as well, and several of the older ones died; most, however, felt only an excruciating pain in their heads as they either knelt or lay, half-fainting, around the perimeter of the clearing. A few understood that the fire was very close now. As the wind freshened, that burning lady's fan spread… and spread. Smoke ran across the clearing in thick grayish-white clouds. The fire crackled and thundered.

Now, Gardener thought.

He felt something in his mind slip, catch, slip… and catch firmly. It was like a gearshift lever. Now there was pain, but it was bearable.

THEY'RE feeling most of the pain, he thought faintly.

The sides of the trench appeared to move. At first just a little. Then a little more. There was a grinding, squealing sound.

Gardener bore down, his brow locked in a tremendous frown, his eyes squeezed into slits.

The silvery mesh began to slip past, slowly but steadily. Not that it was moving at all, of course; it was the ship that was moving; that grinding noise was the sound of it pulling itself free of the bedrock which had held it so long.

Going up, he thought incoherently. Ladies” lingerie, hosiery, notions, and be sure to visit our pet department

It was gaining speed, the trench walls passing more quickly to either side. The sky widened out ahead-it was a dull gunmetal color. Sparks twisted by like formations of tiny burning birds.

He brimmed with exaltation.

Gardener thought of looking out of a subway window as the train left the station, slowly at first, then beginning to speed up-how the tile walls seemed to unroll backwards like the strip of paper in a player piano, how you could read the ads as they passed from left to right-Annie, A Chorus Line, These Times Demand The Times, Touch the Velvet. Then into the darkness where there was only movement and a vague sensation of black walls rushing past.

I'm going, yes, going now, going

A Klaxon went off three times, nearly deafening him, making him shriek; fresh blood spattered into his lap. The ship shuddered and rumbled and squealed and dragged itself out of the earth's crypt; it rose into thickening bands of smoke and hazy sunlight, its polished flank coming out of the trench, out and out and up and up, a moving metal wall. One standing right next to this insane sight might have been tempted to believe that the earth was creating a stainless-steel mountain or injecting a titanium wall into the air.

As the arc of the edge grew broader and broader, it reached the edges of the trench Bobbi and Gardener had dug steadily wider-ripping at the earth with their smart-stupid tools like half-wits trying to perform a Cesarean section.

Up and out and out and up. Rocks squealed. The earth moaned. Dust and the smoke of friction fumed from the trench. Up close the illusion of an emerging mountain or wall held, but even from such a short distance away as the edge of the clearing, the thing's circular shape was revealed ~ the titanic shape of the saucer, now emerging from the earth like a great engine. It was silent, but the clearing was filled with the coarse thunder of breaking rock. Up and out it came, cutting the trench wider and wider, its shadow gradually covering the whole clearing and burning woods.

Its leading edge-the one Bobbi had stumbled over-sheared off the top of the tallest spruce in the forest and sent it tumbling and crashing to the ground. And still the ship birthed itself from the womb which had held it so long; continued until it covered the whole sky and was reborn.

Then it stopped cutting the trench wider; a moment later there was actually a gap between the edges of the trench and the edge of the emerging ship. Its center had at last been reached and passed.

The ship rumbled out of the smoky trench, emerging into the smoky sunshine, and at last the squealing, rumbling sounds ceased, and there was daylight between the ground and the ship.

It was out.

It rose on a slanted, canted angle, and then came to the horizontal, crushing trees with its unknown, unknowable weight, bursting their trunks open. Sap sprayed the air with thin amber veils.