“You're not to blame yourself,” she said softly. “There were other circumstances. We all know that.” The others nodded.

I can't hear their minds anymore, Ruth realized suddenly, and her mind responded: Could you ever, Ruth? Really? Or was that a hallucination brought on by your worry over David Brown?

Yes, Yes, I could.

It would be easier to believe it had been a hallucination, but that wasn't the truth. And realizing that, she realized something else: she could still do it. It was like hearing a faint roaring sound in a conch shell, that sound children mistake for the ocean. She had no idea what their thoughts were, but she was still hearing them. Were they hearing her?

ARE YOU STILL THERE? she shouted as loudly as she could.

Marie Brown's hand went to her temple, as if she had felt a sudden stab of pain. Newt Berringer frowned deeply. Hazel McCready, who had been doodling on the pad in front of her, looked up as if Ruth had spoken aloud.

Oh yes, they still hear me.

“Whatever happened, right or wrong, is done now,” Ruth said. “It's time-and overtime-that I contacted the state police about David. Do I have your approval to take this step?”

Under normal circumstances, it never would have crossed her mind that she should ask them a question like that. After all, they paid her pittance of a salary to answer questions, not ask them.

But things were different in Haven now. Fresh breeze and clear air or not, things were still different in Haven now.

They looked at her, surprised and a little shocked.

Now the voices came back to her clearly: No, Ruth, no… no outsiders… we'll take care… we don't need any outsiders while we “become”.

shhh… for your life, Ruth… shhh…

Outside, the wind blew a particularly hard gust. rattling the windows of Ruth's office. Adley McKeen looked toward the sound… they all did. then Adley smiled a puzzled, peculiar little smile…

“O'course, Ruth,” he said. “If you think it's time to notify the staties, you got to go ahead. We trust your judgment, don't we?”

The others agreed.

The weather had changed. the wind was blowing, and by Wednesday afternoon, the state police were in charge of the search for David Brown. That night his picture was shown statewide on the news, with a hot-line number for people to call if they had seen him.

By Friday, Ruth McCausland understood that Wednesday and Thursday had been an untrustworthy respite in an ongoing process. She was being driven steadily toward some alien madness.

A dim part of her mind recognized the fact, bemoaned it… but was unable to stop it. lt could only hope that the voices of her dolls held some truth as well as madness.

Watching as if from outside herself, she saw her hands take her sharpest kitchen knife-the one she used for boning fish-from the drawer. She took it upstairs, into the schooIroom.

The schoolroom glowed, rotten with green light. Tommyknocker-light. That was what everyone in town was calling them now, and it was a good name, wasn't it? Yes. As good as any. The Tommyknockers.

Send a signal. That's all you can do now. They want to get rid of you, Ruth. They love you, but their love has turned homicidal. I suppose you can find a twisted sort of respect in that. Because they're still afraid of YOU. Even now, now when you're almost as nutty as the rest of them, they're afraid of you. Maybe someone will hear the signal… hear it… see it… understand it.

Now there was a shaky drawing of the town-hall clock tower on her board… the scrawled work of a first-grader.

Ruth could not stand to work on the dolls in the schoolroom… not in that terrible light that waxed and pulsed. She took them, one by one, into her husband's study, and slit their bellies open like a surgeon-the French madame, the nineteenth-century clown, the Kewpie, all of them-one by one. And into each she put a small gadget made of C-cells, wires, electroniccalculator circuit boards, and the cardboard cores from toilet-paper rolls. She sewed the incisions up quickly, using a coarse black thread. As the line of naked dolls grew longer on her husband's desk, they began to look like dead children, victims of some grisly mass poisoning, perhaps, who had been stripped and robbed after death.

Each sewn incision parted in the middle so that one of the toilet-paper rolls could poke out like the barrel of some odd telescope. Only cardboard, the rolls would still serve to channel the force when it was generated. She didn't know how she knew this, or how she had known to build the gadgets in the first place… the knowledge seemed to have come shimmering out of the air. The same air into which David Brown

(is on Altair-4)

had disappeared.

As she plunged the knife into their plump, defenseless bellies, the green light puffed out of it.

I'm

(sending a signal)

murdering the only children I ever had.

The signal. Think of the signal, not the children.

She used extension cords to wire the dolls neatly together in a chain. She had stripped the insulation from the last four inches of these cords and slipped the gleaming copper into an M-16 firecracker she had confiscated from Beach Jernigan's fourteen-year-old son Hump (thus known because one shoulder rode slightly higher than the other) about a week before all this madness began. She looked back, doubtful for a moment, into her schooIroom with its now empty benches. Enough light fell through the archway for her to be able to see the drawing she had done of the town-hall clock tower. She had done it in one of those blank periods that seemed to be getting longer and longer.

The hands of the clock in the drawing were set at three.

Ruth set her work aside and went to bed. She fell asleep but her sleep was not easy; she twisted and turned and moaned. Even in her sleep the voices ran through her head-thoughts of revenge planned, of cakes to be baked, sexual fantasies, worries about irregularity, ideas for strange gadgets and machines, dreams of power. And below them all, a thin, irrational yammer like a polluted stream, thoughts coming from the heads of her fellow townspeople but not human thoughts, and in her nightmarish sleep, that part of Ruth McCausland which clung stubbornly to sanity knew the truth: these were not the rising voices of the people she had lived with all these years but those of outsiders. They were the voices of the Tommyknockers.

Ruth understood by Thursday noon that the change in the weather hadn't solved anything.

The state police came, but they did not institute a widespread search; Ruth's report, detailed and complete as always, made it clear that David Brown, four, could hardly have wandered outside their search area unless he'd been abducted -a possibility they would now have to consider. Her report was accompanied by topographical maps. These were annotated in her careful, no-nonsense handwriting, and made it clear she had conducted the search thoroughly.

“Careful and thorough you were, Ruthie,” Monster Dugan told her that evening. His brow was furrowed in a frown so huge each line looked like an earthquake fissure. “You always have been. But I never knew you to pull a John Wayne stunt like this before.”

“Butch, I'm sorry

“Yeah, well…” He shrugged. “Done is done, huh?”

“Yes,” she said, and smiled wanly. lt had been one of Ralph's favorite sayings.

Butch asked a lot of questions, but not the one she needed to answerRuth, what's wrong in Haven? The high winds had cleansed the town's atmosphere; none of the outsiders sensed anything was wrong.