The fuck you're not. A man on horseback? You? Man, that's a laugh. You'd have a heart attack if someone asked you to be a man on a tricycle. Your own personal life has been nothing but a constant effort to destroy every power-base you have. Take marriage. Nora was tough, you finally had to shoot her to get rid of her, but when the chips were down, you didn't stick at it, did you? You're a man who manages to rise to every occasion, I'll give you that. You got yourself fired from your teaching job, thus eliminating another power-base. You've spent twelve years pouring enough booze onto the little spark of talent God gave you to put it out. Now this. You better run, Gard.
That's not fair! Honest to God, it's not!
No? Isn't there enough truth in it to make a comeuppance?
Maybe. Maybe so. Either way, he discovered that the decision had already been made. He would stick with Bobbi, at least for a while, do it her way.
Bobbi's blithe assurances that everything was just ducky didn't jibe very well with her exhaustion and weight-loss. What the ship in the earth could do to Bobbi it would probably do to him. What had happened-or failed to happen-today proved nothing; he would not have expected all the changes to come at once. Yet the ship-and whatever force emanated from it-had a great capacity to do good. That was the main thing, and… well, fuck the Tommyknocker man.
Gardener got up and walked toward the house. The sun had gone down, and the twilight was turning ashy. His back was stiff. He stretched, standing on his toes, and grimaced as his spine crackled. He looked past the dark, silent shape of the Tomcat to the shed door with its new padlock. He thought of going to it, trying to look through one of the dirt-grimed windows… and decided not to. Perhaps he was afraid a white face would pop up inside the dark window, its grin showing a mouthful of filed cannibal teeth in a deadly ring. Hello, Gard, you want to meet some genuine Tommyknockers? Come on in! There's lots of us in here!
Gardener shivered-he could almost hear thin, evil fingers scrabbling on the panes. Too much had happened today and yesterday. His imagination had gotten out. Tonight it would walk and talk. He didn't know if he should hope for sleep or for it to stay away.
Once he was back inside, his uneasiness began to fade. With it went some of his craving for drink. He took off his shirt and then peered into Anderson's room. Bobbi lay just as she had lain before, blankets caught between her dreadfully thin legs, one hand thrown out, snoring.
Hasn't even moved. Christ, she must be tired.
He took a long shower, turning the water up as hot as he dared (with Bobbi Anderson's new water heater, that meant barely jogging the knob five degrees west of dead cold). When his skin began to turn red. he stepped out into a bathroom as steamy as London in the grip of a Sherlockian fog. He towelled, brushed his teeth with a finger-got to do something about getting some supplies here, he thought -and went to bed.
Drifting off, he found himself thinking again about the last thing Bobbi had said during their discussion. She believed the ship in the earth had begun to affect the townspeople. When he asked for specifics, she grew vague, then changed the subject. Gardener supposed anything was possible in this crazy business. Although the old Frank Garrick place was in the boonies, it was almost exactly in the geographic center of the township itself. There was a Haven Village, but that was five miles further north.
“You make it sound as if it was throwing off poison gas,” he had said, hoping he didn't sound as uneasy as he felt. “Paraquat from Space. They Came from Agent Orange.”
“Poison gas?” Bobbi repeated. She had gone off by herself again. Her face, so thin now, was closed and distant. “No, not poison gas. Call it fumes if you want to call it anything. But it's more than just the vibration when a person touches it.”
Gardener said nothing, not wanting to break her mood.
“Fumes? Not that, either. But like fumes. If EPA came in here with sniffers, I don't think they'd find any pollutants at all. If there's any actual, physical residue from the ship in the air, it's nothing but the tiniest trace.”
“Do you think that's possible, Bobbi?” Gardener asked quietly.
“Yes. I'm not telling you I know that's what's happening, because I don't. I have no inside information. But I think that a very thin layer of the ship's hull-and I mean thin, maybe no more than a single molecule or two in depth-could be oxidizing as I uncover it and the air hits it. That means I'd get the first, heaviest dose… and then it would go with the wind, like fallout. The people in town would get most of it… but “most” would really mean-damn little” in this case.”
Bobbi shifted in her rocker and reached down with her right hand. It was a gesture Gardener had seen her make many times before, and his heart went out to his friend when he saw the look of sorrow cross Bobbi's face. Bobbi put her hand back into her lap.
“But I'm not sure that's what's going on at all, you know. There's a novel by a man named Peter Straub called Floating Dragon-have you read it?”
Gardener had shaken his head.
“Well, it postulates something similar to your Agent Orange from Space or Paraquat of the Gods or whatever you called it.”
Gardener smiled.
“In the story, an experimental chemical is sucked out into the atmosphere and falls on a piece of suburban Connecticut. This stuff really is poison-a kind of insanity gas. People get in fights for no reason, some fellow decides to paint his whole house-including the windows-bright pink, a woman jogs until she drops dead of a massive coronary and so on.
“There's another novel-this one is called Brain Wave, and it was written by…” Anderson wrinkled her brow, thinking. Her hand stole down to the right of the rocker again, then came back. “Same name as mine, Anderson. Poul Anderson. In that one, the earth passes through the tail of a comet and some of the fallout makes animals smarter. The book starts with a rabbit literally reasoning its way out of a trap.”
“Smarter,” Gardener echoed.
“Yes. If you had an IQ of 120 before the earth went through the comet, you'd end up with an IQ of 180. Get it?”
“Well-rounded intelligence?”
“Yes.”
“But the term you used before was idiot savant. That's the exact opposite of well-rounded intelligence, isn't it? It's a kind of… of bump.”
Anderson waved this aside. “Doesn't matter,” she said.
Now, lying here in bed, drifting off to sleep, Gardener wondered.
That night he had the dream. It was simple enough. He was standing in darkness outside of the shed between the farmhouse and the garden. To his left, the Tomcat was a dark shape. He was thinking exactly what he had been
thinking tonight-that he would go over and look in one of the windows. And what would he see? Why, the Tommyknockers, of course. But he wasn't afraid. Instead of fear he felt delighted, relieved joy. Because the Tommyknockers weren't monsters or cannibals; they were like the elves in that story about the good shoemaker. He would look in through the dirty shed window like a delighted child looking out a bedroom window in an illustration from “The Night Before Christmas” (and what was Santa Claus, that right jolly old elf, but a great big old Tommyknocker in a red suit?), and he would see them, laughing and chattering as they sat at a long table, cobbling together power generators and levitating skateboards and televisions which showed mindmovies instead of regular ones.
He drifted toward the shed, and suddenly it was lighted by the same glare he had seen coming out of Bobbi's modified typewriter-it was as if the shed had turned into some weird jack-o'-lantern, only this light was not a warm yellow but an awful, rotten green. It spilled out between the boards; it spilled rays through knotholes and tattooed evil cats” eyes on the ground, it filled the windows. And now he was afraid, because no friendly little aliens from space had made that light; if cancer had a color, it would be the one that spilled from every chink and crack and knothole and window of Bobbi Anderson's shed.