“Did it?”

“Yeah.” Bobbi laughed, a little shakily. “When I'm around a lot of people, I turn “em off-”

“You can do that?” He took the handkerchief off his nose. It was sopping with blood-Gardener could have twisted it between his fingers and wrung blood out of it in a gory little stream. But the flow was finally slowing down… thank God. He dropped the handkerchief and tore the tail off his shirt.

“Yes,” Anderson said. “Well… not entirely. I can't turn the thoughts completely off, but I can dial them way down, so it's like… well, like a faint whisper at the bottom of my mind.”

“That's incredible.”

“That's necessary,” Anderson said grimly. “If I couldn't do it, I don't think I'd ever leave this goddam house again. I was in Augusta on Saturday and I opened my mind up to see what it'd be like.”

“And you found out.”

“Yeah, I found out. It was like having a hurricane in your head. And the scary thing was how hard it was to get the door shut again.”

“This door… barrier… whatever… how do you put it up?”

Anderson shook her head. “Can't explain, any more than a guy who can wiggle his ears can explain how he does it.” She cleared her throat and looked down at her shoes for a moment-muddy workboots, Gardener saw. They looked as if they hadn't been off her feet much in the last couple of weeks.

Bobbi grinned a little. The grin was embarrassed and painfully humorous at the same time-and in that moment she looked completely like the old Bobbi. The one who had been his friend after nobody else wanted to be. It was Bobbi's aw-shucks look-Gardener had seen it the very first time he met her, when Bobbi was a freshman English student and Gardener a freshman English instructor banging apathetically away at a PhD thesis he probably knew even then he was never going to finish. Hungover and feeling rather bilious, Gardener had asked his bunch of new freshmen what the dative case was. No one offered an answer and Gardener had been about to take great pleasure in blowing them all out of the water when Anderson, Roberta, Row 5, Seat 3, raised her hand and took a shot at it. Her answer was diffident… but correct. Not surprisingly, she turned out to be the only one of them who'd had Latin in high school. The same aw-shucks grin he was seeing now had been on Bobbi's face then, and Gard felt a wave of affection sweep over him. Shit, Bobbi had been through a tough time… but this was Bobbi. No question about it.

“I keep the barriers up most of the time anyway,” she was saying. “Otherwise it's like peeking in windows. You remember me telling you my mailman, Paulson, has got something going on the side?”

Gardener nodded.

“That isn't anything I want to know. Or if some poor slob is a klepto, or if some guy's a secret drinker… how's your nose?”

“Bleeding's stopped.” Gardener put down the bloody piece of shirting beside Anderson's handkerchief. “So you keep the blocks up, huh?”

“Yes. For whatever reasons-moral, ethical, or just to keep from going batshit with the noise, I keep them up. With you I let them down because I wasn't getting squat even when I tried. I did try a couple of times, and if that makes you mad I understand, but it was only curiosity, because no one else is… blank… like that.”

“No one?”

“Nope. There must be some reason for it, something like having a really rare blood type. Maybe that even is it.”

“Sorry, I'm type O.”

Anderson laughed and got up. “You feel up to going back, Gard?”

It's the plate in my head, Bobbi. He almost said it, and then, for some reason, decided not to. The plate in my head is keeping you out. I don't know how I know that, but I do.

“Yeah, I'm fine,” he said. “I could use

(a drink)

a cup of coffee, that's all.”

“You got it. Come on.”

While part of her had been reacting to Gard with the warmth and genuine good feeling she had always felt for him, even during the worst times, another part of her (a part that was not, strictly speaking, Bobbi Anderson at all anymore) had stood coldly off to one side, watching everything carefully. Assessing. Questioning. And the first question was whether

(they)

she really wanted Gardener around at all. She

(they)

had thought at first that all her problems would now be solved, Gard would join her on the dig and she would no longer have to do this… well, this first part… all alone. He was right about one thing: trying to do it all by herself had nearly killed her. But the change she had expected in him hadn't happened. Only that distressing nosebleed.

He won't touch it again if it makes his nose bleed like that. He won't touch it and he certainly won't go inside it.

It may not come to that. After all, Peter never touched it. Peter didn't want to go near it, but his eye… and the age reversal…

It's not the same. He's a man, not an old beagle dog. And, face it, Bobbi, except for the nosebleed and that blast of music, there was absolutely no change.

No immediate change.

Is it the steel plate in his skull?

Maybe… but why should something like that make any difference?

That cold part of Bobbi didn't know; she only knew that it could have. The ship itself broadcast some kind of tremendous, almost animate force; whatever had come in it was dead, she was sure she hadn't lied about that, but the ship itself was almost alive, broadcasting that enormous energy-pattern through its metal skin… and, she knew, the broadcast area widened its umbrella a little with every inch of its surface she dug free. That energy had communicated itself to Gard. But then it had -what?

Been converted somehow. First converted and then blown off in a short, ferociously powerful radio transmission.

So what do I do?

She didn't know, but she knew it didn't matter.

They would tell her.

When the time came, they would tell her.

In the meantime, he would bear watching. But if only she could read him! It would be so much simpler if she could fucking read him!

A voice responded coldly: Get him drunk. Then you'll be able to read him. Then you'll be able to read him just fine.

They had come out on the Tomcat, which did not fly at all but rolled along the ground just as it always had-but instead of the former racket and roar of its engine, it now rolled in a complete silence that was somehow ghastly.

They came out of the woods and bumped along the edge of the garden. Anderson parked the Tomcat where it had been that morning.

Gardener glanced up at the sky, which was beginning to cloud over again, and said: “You better put it in the shed, Bobbi.”

“It'll be all right,” she said shortly. She pocketed the key and started toward the house. Gardener glanced toward the shed, started after Bobbi, then looked back. There was a big Kreig padlock on the shed door. Another new addition. The woods, you should pardon the pun, seemed to be full of them.

What have you got in there? A time machine that runs on Penlites? What's the New Improved Bobbi got in there?

When he came into the house, Bobbi was rummaging in the fridge. She came up with a couple of beers.

“Were you serious about coffee, or do you want one of these?”

“How about a Coke?” Gardener asked. “Flying saucers go better with Coke, that's my motto.” He laughed rather wildly.

“Sure,” Bobbi said, then stopped in the act of returning the cans of beer and grabbing two cans of Coke. “I did, didn't IT

“Huh?”

“I took you out there and showed it to you. The ship. Didn't I?”

Jesus, Gardener thought. Jesus Christ.