“If you ever do do it, I'll see it's written on your tombstone, Gard. ASSHOLE in letters carved deep enough so they won't wear off for at least a century.”

“Well, thanks,” Gardener said, “but you don't have to worry about it for a while. Because I still got it.”

“What?”

“That feeling that you're in trouble.”

She tried to look away, tried to take her hand away.

“Look at me, Bobbi, goddammit.”

At last, reluctantly, she did, her lower lip slightly pushed out in that stubborn expression he knew so well-but didn't she also look just the tiniest bit uneasy? He thought so.

“All of this seems so wonderful-house-power from D-cells, books that write themselves, God knows what else-so why should I feel that you're in trouble?”

“I don't know,” she said softly, and got up to do the dishes.

“Of course I worked until I damn near dropped, that's one thing,” Anderson said. Her back was to him now, and he had a feeling she liked it that way fine. Dishes rattled in hot, soapy water. “And I didn't just say “Aliens from space, ho-hum, cheap clean electric power and mental telepathy, big deal,” you know. My mailman's cheating on his wife, I know about it-I don't want to know about it, hell, I'm no snoop, but it was just there, Gard, right there in the front of his head. Not seeing it would be like not seeing a neon sign a hundred feet high. Christ, I've been rocking and reeling.”

“I see,” he said, and thought: She's not telling the truth, at least not all of it, and I don't think she even knows it. “The question remains: what do we do now?”

“I don't know.” She glanced around, saw Gardener's raised eyebrows, and said, “Did you think I was going to give you the answer in a neat little essay, five hundred words or less? I can't. I've got some ideas, but that's all. Maybe not even very good ones. I suppose the first thing is to take you out so you can

(be persuaded)

have a look at it. Afterward well.

Gardener looked at her for a long time. Bobbi did not drop her eyes this time; they were open and guileless. But things were wrong here, off-note and off-key. Things like that note of fake schmaltz in Bobbi's voice when she spoke of Peter. Maybe the tears had been real, but that tone it had been all wrong.

“All right. Let's go take a look at your ship in the earth.”

“But let's have lunch first,” Anderson said placidly.

“You're hungry again?”

“Sure. Aren't you?”

“Christ, no!”

“Then I'll eat for both of us,” Anderson said, and she did.

Chapter 10

Gardener Decides

“Good God.” Gardener sat down heavily on a fresh stump. It felt like a case of sit down or fall down. Like being punched hard in the stomach. No; it was stranger and more radical than that. It was more like someone had slammed the hose of an industrial vacuum cleaner into his mouth and turned it on, sucking all the wind out of his lungs in a second's time. “Good God,” he repeated in a tiny breathless voice. It seemed to be all of which he was capable.

“It's something, isn't it?”

They were halfway down the slope, not far from where Anderson had found the dead chuck. Before, the slope had been pretty heavily wooded. Now a lane had been cut through the trees to admit a strange vehicle which Gardener almost recognized. It stood at the edge of Anderson's dig, and it was dwarfed both by the excavation and the thing which was being unearthed.

The trench was now two hundred feet long and twenty feet wide at either end. The cut bulged to thirty feet or so in width for perhaps forty feet of the slit's total length-that bulge made a shape like a woman's hips seen in silhouette. The gray leading edge of the ship, its curvature now triumphantly revealed, rose out of this bulge like the edge of a giant steel tea saucer.

“Good God,” Gardener gasped again. “Look at that thing.”

“I have been,” Bobbi said, a distant little smile playing over her lips. “For over a week I've been looking at it. It's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen. And it's going to solve a lot of problems, Gard. “There came a man on horseback, riding and riding-””

That cut through the fog. Gardener looked around at Anderson, who might have been drifting in the dark places from which that incredible thing had come. The look on her face chilled Gardener. Bobbi's eyes were not just far-off. They were vacant windows.

“What do you mean?”

“Hmmm?” Anderson looked around as if coming out of a deep daze.

“What do you mean, a man on horseback?”

“I mean you, Gard. I mean me. But I think… I think I mostly mean you. Come on down here and take a look.”

Anderson started down the slope quickly, with the casual grace of previous experience. She got maybe twenty feet before she realized Gardener wasn't with her. She looked back. He had gotten up from the stump, but that was all.

“It won't bite you,” Anderson said.

“No? What will it do to me, Bobbi?”

“Nothing! They're dead, Gard! Your Tommyknockers were real enough, but they were mortal, and this ship has been here for at least fifty million years. The glacier broke around it! It covered it, but it couldn't move it. Not even all those tons of ice could move it! So the glacier broke around it. You can look into the cut and see it, like a frozen wave. Dr Borns from the university would go batshit over this… but they're dead enough, Gard.”

“Have you been inside?” Gardener asked, not moving.

“No. The hatch-I think, I feel, there is one-is still buried. But that doesn't change what I know. They're dead, Gard. Dead.”

“They're dead, you haven't been in the ship, but you're inventing like Thomas Edison on a speed trip and you can read minds. So I repeat: what's it going to do to me?”

So she told the biggest lie of all-told it calmly, with no regret at all. She said: “Nothing you don't want it to.” And started down again, without looking back to see if he was following.

Gardener hesitated, his head throbbing miserably, and then he started down after her.

The vehicle by the trench was Bobbi's old truck-only before that it had been a Country Squire station wagon. Anderson had driven it from New York to Maine when she came to college. That had been seventeen years ago, and it had not been new then. She had run it on the road until 1984, when even Elt Barker down at the Shell station, Haven's only garage and gas stop, would no longer slap an inspection sticker on it. Then, in one weekend of frenzied work-they had been drunk for most of it, and Gardener still thought it something of a miracle that neither of them had blown themselves up with Frank Garrick's old blowtorch rig-they had cut off the roof of the wagon from above the front seat on back, turning it into a half-assed truck.

“Lookit that, Gard-old-Gard,” Bobbi Anderson had proclaimed solemnly, staring at the remains of the wagon. “We done made ourselves an honest-to-God fiel'-bomber.” Then she leaned over and threw up. Gardener had picked her up and carried her onto the porch (Peter twining anxiously around his feet the whole way). By the time he got her there, she had passed out. He put her down carefully, and then passed out himself.

The half-assed truck had been a tough old Detroit rod-bucket, but it had finally gone toes-up. Anderson had put it on blocks at one end of the garden, claiming no one would want to buy it even for parts. Gardener thought she just felt sentimental.

Now the truck had been resurrected-although it hardly looked like the same vehicle, except for the blue paint and the remains of fake wood siding that had been one of the Country Squire's trademarks. The driver's door and most of the front end were gone entirely. The latter had been replaced with a weird conglomeration of digging and earth-moving equipment. To Gardener's disturbed eye, Anderson's truck now looked like a deranged child's bulldozer. Something which looked like a giant screwdriver blade protruded from the place where the grille had been. The engine looked like something which had been yanked whole from an old D-9 Caterpillar.