He used the barrier to cover his first lie to Bobbi since he had thrown in with her on July 5th, almost three weeks ago.

“I don't know, exactly,” he said. “I dozed off in the chair. I heard an explosion and saw a big flash of light. Looked green. That's all.”

Bobbi's eyes searched his face, and then she nodded. “Well, I guess we better go into the village and see.”

Gardener relaxed slightly. He wasn't sure why he had lied, only that it seemed safer to do so… and she had believed him. Nor did he want to endanger that belief. “Would you mind going alone? I mean, if you want company-”

“No, that's fine,” she said almost eagerly, and went.

Walking back to the porch after seeing the truck down the road, he kicked over his glass. The drinking was getting out of hand, and it was time to stop. Because something really weird was happening here. lt would bear watching, and when you got drunk you went blind.

It was a pledge he had made before. Sometimes it even took for a while. This time it didn't. Gardener was sitting drunk and asleep on the porch that night when Bobbi returned.

Ruth's signal had been received, nevertheless. The receiver was troubled in mind, committed to Bobbi's project, yet uneasy enough about it to be boozing more and more. But it had been received, and at least partially understood: Gardener's lie was an indication of that, if nothing else. But Ruth would perhaps have been happier with her other accomplishment.

Voices or no voices, the lady died sane.

Chapter 7

Beach Jernigan and Dick Allison

No one in Haven was more delighted about the “becoming” than Beach Jernigan. If Gard's Tommyknockers had appeared to Beach in person, carrying nuclear weapons and proposing that he plant one in each of the world's seven largest cities, Beach would have immediately started phoning for plane tickets. Even in Haven, where quiet zealotry was becoming a way of life, Beach's partisanship was extreme. If he had had any idea at all about Gardener's growing doubts, he would have removed him. Permanently. And at once, if not sooner.

There was a good reason for Beach's feelings. In May-not long after Hilly Brown's birthday, in fact-Beach developed a hacking cough that wouldn't go away. lt was worrisome because he didn't have a fever or the sniffles to go with it. lt became more worrisome when he began to cough up a little blood. When you run a restaurant, you don't want to be coughing at all. The customers don't like it. lt makes them nervous. Sooner or later someone tells the Board of Health and maybe they shut you up for a week or so while they wait to see how your tine test comes out. The Haven Lunch was a marginally profitable business at best (Beach put in twelve hours a day short-ordering in order to clear sixty-five dollars a week-if the place hadn't been his free and clear, he would have starved), and Beach couldn't afford to be shut up for a week in the summer. Summer wasn't here yet, but it was coming on apace. So he went to see old Doc Warwick, and Doc Warwick sent him up to Derry Home for a chest X-ray, and when the X-ray came back Doc Warwick studied it for all of twenty seconds and then called Beach and when Beach got there, Doc Warwick said: “I've got hard news for you, Beach. Sit down.”

Beach sat down. He felt that if there hadn't been a chair he would have fallen on the floor. All the strength had run out of his legs. There was no telepathy going on in Haven back in May-no more than the ordinary kind that people use all the time, anyway-but that ordinary kind was all Beach needed. He knew what Doc Warwick was going to say before he said it. Not TB; big C. Lung cancer.

But that was in May. Now, in July, Beach was fit as a fiddle. Doc Warwick had told him he could expect to be in the hospital by July 15th, but here he was, eating like a horse, randy as a bear most of the time, and feeling like he could outrun Bobby Tremain in a footrace. He hadn't been back to the hospital for another chest X-ray. He didn't need one to know the large dark stain on his left lung had disappeared. Far as that went, if he had wanted an X-ray, he would have taken the afternoon off and built an X-ray machine himself. He knew just how it could be done.

But now, in the wake of the explosion, there were other things to be built, other things to do… and quickly.

They had a meeting. Everyone in town. Not that they gathered, as at a town meeting; that was quite unnecessary. Beach went on frying hamburgers in the Haven Lunch, Nancy Voss went on sorting stamps at the post office (now that Joe was dead, it was at least a place to come to, Sunday or not), Bobby Tremain stayed under his Challenger, putting on a backflow rebreather that would allow him to get roughly seventy miles to the gallon. Not Anderson's gasoline pill-not quite -but close. Newt Berringer, who knew goddamned well there was no time to waste, was driving out to the Applegate place as fast as he dared. But no matter what they were doing or where they were, they were together, a network of silent voices-the voices that had frightened Ruth so badly.

Less than forty-five minutes after the explosion, some seventy people had gathered at Henry Applegate's. Henry had the largest, best-equipped workshop in town now that the Shell station had mostly gone out of the engine-repair and tune-up business. Christina Lindley, who was only seventeen but had still taken second prize in the Fourteenth Annual State 0” Maine Photography Competition the year before, arrived back almost two hours later, scared, out of breath (and feeling rather sexy, if the truth was to be told) from riding in from town with Bobby Tremain at speeds which sometimes topped a hundred and ten. When Bobby made the Dodge walk and talk, it was nothing but a yellow streak.

She had been dispatched to take two photographs of the clock tower. This was delicate work, because, with the tower now reduced to scattered chunks of brick, masonry, and clockwork, it meant taking a photograph of a photograph.

Working fast, Christina had thumbed through a scrapbook of town photographs. Newt had told her mentally where to find this-in Ruth McCausland's own office. She rejected two shots because although both were quite good, both were also in black and white. The intention was to build an illusion-a clock tower that people could look at… but one you could fly a plane through, if it came to that.

In other words, they intended to project a gigantic magic-lantern slide in the sky.

A good trick.

Once upon a time, Hilly Brown would have envied it.

Just as Christina was beginning to lose hope, she found it: a gorgeous photo of the Haven Village town hall with the tower prominently displayed… and from an angle that clearly showed two sides. Great. That would give them the depth of field they would need. Ruth's careful notation beneath the photograph said it came from Yankee magazine, 5/87.

We gotta go, Chris, Bobby had said, speaking to her without bothering to use his mouth. He was shifting impatiently from foot to foot like a small boy in need of the bathroom.

Yes, all right. That will -

She broke off.

Oh, she said. Oh dear.

Bobby Tremain came forward quickly. What the hell's wrong?

She pointed at the photograph.

“Oh, SHIT!” Bobby Tremain yelled out loud, and Christina nodded.

By seven that evening, working fast and silently (except for the occasional ill-tempered snarl of someone who felt someone else was not working fast enough), they had constructed a device that looked like a huge slide-projector on top of an industrial vacuum cleaner.

They tested it, and a woman's face, huge and stony, appeared in Henry's field. The people who had gathered stared at this stereopticon of Henry Applegate's grandmother silently but approvingly. The machine worked. Now, as soon as the girl brought the photograph-photographs, actually, because a stereopticon image was of course exactly what they had to create-of the town hall, they could…