Bobbi, where did you get that engine? How did you move it from where it was then to where it is now? Good Jesus!

Yet all this, remarkable as it was, could hold his eye for only a moment or two. He walked across the ripped earth to where Bobbi was standing, hands in her pockets, looking down into the slash in the earth.

“What do you think, Gard?”

He didn't know what he thought, and was speechless anyway.

The excavation went down to a really surprising depth: thirty or forty feet, he guessed. If the angle of the sun hadn't been exactly right, he wouldn't have been able to see the bottom of the trench at all. There was a space of about three feet between the side of the excavation and the smooth hull of the ship. That hull was utterly unbroken. There were no numbers, symbols, pictures, or hieroglyphs on it.

At the bottom of the cut, the thing disappeared into the earth. Gardener shook his head. Opened his mouth, found he still had no words, and shut it again.

The part of the hull Anderson had first tripped over and then tried to wriggle with her hand-thinking it might be a tin can left over from a loggers” weekend-was now directly in front of Gardener's nose. He could easily have reached across the three-foot space and grasped it as Anderson herself had just two weeks ago… with this difference: when Anderson first grasped the edge of the ship in the earth, she had been on her knees. Gardener was standing. He had vaguely noted the going-over this slope had taken-rough, muddy terrain, trees that had been cut and moved aside, stumps that had been pulled like rotten teeth-but beyond that momentary observation, he had dismissed it. He would have taken a closer look if Anderson had told him how much of the slope she had simply cut away. The hill had made the thing harder to get out… so she had simply removed half the hillside to make it easier.

Flying saucer, Gardener thought faintly, and then: I did jump. This is a death-fantasy. Any second now I'll come to and find myself trying to breathe salt water. Any second now. Just any old second.

Except nothing of the sort did or would happen, because all this was real. It was a flying saucer.

And that, somehow, was the worst. Not a spaceship, or an alien craft, or an extraterrestrial vehicle. It was a flying saucer. They had been debunked by the Air Force, by thinking scientists, by psychologists. No self-respecting science-fiction writer would put one in his story, and if he did, no self-respecting editor would touch it with a ten-foot pole. Flying saucers had gone out of vogue in the genre at roughly the same time as Edgar Rice Burroughs and Otis Adelbert Kline. It was the oldest wheeze in the book. Flying saucers were more than passe; the idea itself was a joke, given mental house-room these days only by crackpots, religious eccentrics, and, of course, the tabloid newspapers, where any week's budget of news had to include at least one saucer story, such as SIX-YEAR-OLD PREGNANT BY SAUCER ALIEN, TEARFUL MOTHER REVEALS.

These stories, for some odd reason, all seemed to originate in either Brazil or New Hampshire.

And yet here was such a thing-it had been here all the while, as centuries passed above it like minutes. A line from Genesis suddenly occurred to him, making him shiver as if a cold wind had blown past: There were giants in the earth in those days.

He turned toward Anderson, his eyes almost pleading.

“Is it real?” he could do no more than whisper.

“It's real. Touch it.” She knocked on it, producing that dull fist-on-mahogany sound again. Gardener reached out… and then pulled his hand back.

A look of annoyance passed over Anderson's face like a shadow. “I told you, Gard-it won't bite you.”

“It won't do anything to me I don't want it to.”

“Absolutely not.”

Gardener reflected-as much as he was able to reflect in his current state of roaring confusion-that he had once believed that about booze. Come to think of it, he had heard people-most of them his college students in the early seventies-say the same thing about various drugs. Many of them had ended up in clinics or drug-counselling sessions with severe nose-candy problems.

Tell me, Bobbi, did you want to work until you dropped? Did you want to lose so much weight that you looked like an anorexic? I guess all I really want to know is, Did you drive or was you driven? Why did you lie about Peter? Why don't I hear birds in these woods?

“Go on,” Anderson said patiently. “We've got some talking to do and some hard decisions to make, and I don't want you breaking in halfway through to say you've decided the whole thing was just a hallucination that came out of a liquor bottle.”

“That's a shitty thing to say.”

“So are most of the things people really have to say. You've had the DTs before. You know it and so do V

Yeah, but the old Bobbi never would have brought it up… or at least not in that way.

“You touch it, you'll believe it. That's all I'm saying.”

“You make it sound important to you.”

Anderson shifted her feet restlessly.

“All right,” Gardener said. “All right, Bobbi.”

He reached out and grasped the edge of the ship, much as Anderson had grasped it that first day. He was aware-too aware-that an expression of naked eagerness had spread over Bobbi's face. It was the face of someone who is waiting for a firecracker to go off.

Several things happened almost simultaneously.

The first was a sense of vibration settling into his hand-the sort of vibration one might feel when one lays a hand on a power pole carrying high-voltage wires. For a moment it seemed to numb his flesh, as if the vibration was moving at an incredibly high speed. Then the feeling was gone. As it went, Gardener's head filled with music, but it was so loud it was more like a scream than music. It made what he had heard the night before sound like a whisper in comparison-it was like being inside a stereo speaker turned all the way up.

“Daytime turns me off and I don't mean maybe,

Nine-to-five ain't takin” me where I'm bound,

When it's done I come home to s-”

He was opening his mouth to scream when it cut off, all at once. Gardener knew the song, which had been popular when he was in grade school, and later he sang the snatch of lyrics he had heard, looking at his watch as he did so. The sequence seemed to have been a second or two of high-speed vibration; a burst of ear-splitting music which had lasted roughly twelve seconds; then the bloody nose.

Except ear-splitting was wrong. It had been head-splitting. It had never come through his ears at all. It arrowed into his head from that damned piece of steel in his forehead.

He saw Anderson go staggering backward, her hands thrown out in what seemed to be a warding-off gesture. Her look of eagerness became one of surprised fear, bewilderment, and pain.

The last thing was that his headache was gone.

Utterly and completely gone.

But his nose was not just bleeding; it was spouting.

“Here, take it. Christ, Gard, are you all right?”

“I'll be fine,” Gardener said, his voice slightly muffled by her handkerchief. He doubled it and settled it over his nose, pressing down firmly on the bridge. He tilted his head up, and the slimy taste of blood began to fill his throat. “I've had worse ones than this.” So he had… but not for a long time.

They had moved back about ten paces from the edge of the cut and seated themselves on a felled tree. Bobbi was looking at him anxiously.

“Christ, Gard, I didn't know anything like that was going to happen. You believe me, don't you?”

“Yes,” Gardener said. He didn't know precisely what Bobbi had been expecting… but not that. “Did you hear the music?”

“I didn't exactly hear it,” Anderson said, “I got it secondhand from your head. It just about ruptured me.”