He had agreed with Anderson that the cataract was shrinking… but hadn't mentioned any glow, green or otherwise.
Maybe he saw it and decided to unsee it. The way he saw Peter was looking younger and decided he didn't see that. Because he didn't want to see that.
There was a part of her that didn't like the new vet a whole hell of a lot; she supposed it was because she had liked old Doc Daggett so much and had made that foolish (but apparently unavoidable) assumption that Daggett would be around as long as she and Peter were. But it was a silly reason to feel hostility toward the old man's replacement, and even if Etheridge had failed (or refused) to see Peter's apparent age regression, that didn't change the fact that he seemed a perfectly competent vet.
A cataract that glowed green… she didn't think he would have ignored something like that.
Which led her to the conclusion that the green glow hadn't been there for Etheridge to see.
At least, not right away.
There hadn't been any big hooraw right away, either, had there? Not when they came in. Not during the exam. Only when they were getting ready to go out.
Had Peter's eye started to glow then?
Anderson poured Gravy Train into Peter's dish and stood with her left hand under the tap, waiting for the water to come in warm so she could wet it down. The wait kept getting longer and longer. Her water heater was slow, balky, sadly out of date. Anderson had been meaning to have it replaced-would certainly have to do so before the cold weather- but the only plumber in either Haven or the rural towns to Haven's immediate north and south was a rather unpleasant fellow named Delbert Chiles, who always looked at her as if he knew exactly what she would look like with her clothes off (not much, his eyes said, but I guess it'd do in a pinch) and always wanted to know if Anderson was “writing any new books lately.” Chiles liked to tell her he could have been a damned good writer himself, but he had too much energy and,not enough glue on the seat of my pants, get me?” The last time she'd been forced to call him had been when the pipes burst in the minus-twenties cold snap, winter before last. After he set things to rights, he had asked her if she would like “to go steppin” sometime. Anderson declined politely, and Chiles tipped her a wink that aspired to worldly wisdom and made it almost to informed vacuity. “You don't know what you're missin”, sweetie,” he said. I'm pretty sure I do, which is why I said no had come to her lips, but she said nothing-as little as she liked him, she had known she might need Chiles again sometime. Why was it the really good zingers only came immediately to mind in real life when you didn't dare use them?
You could do something about that hot-water heater, Bobbi, a voice in her mind spoke up, one that she couldn't identify. A stranger's voice in her head? Oh golly, should she call the cops? But you could, the voice insisted. All you'd need to do would be
But then the water started to come in warm-tepid, anyway-and she forgot about the water heater. She stirred the Gravy Train, then set it down and watched Peter eat. He was showing a much better appetite these days.
Ought to check his teeth, she thought, maybe you can go back to Gaines Meal. A penny saved is a penny earned, and the American reading public is not exactly beating a path to your door, babe. And
And exactly when had the uproar in the clinic started?
Anderson thought about this carefully. She couldn't be completely sure, but the more she thought about it the more it seemed that it might have been-not for sure but might have been-right after Dr Etheridge finished examining Peter's cataract and put down the ophthalmoscope.
Attend, Watson, the voice of Sherlock Holmes suddenly spoke up in the quick, almost urgent speech rhythms of Basil Rathbone. The eye glows. No… not the eye; the cataract glows. But Anderson does not observe it, although she should. Etheridge does not observe it, and he definitely should. May we say that the animals at the veterinary clinic do not become upset until Peter's cataract begins to glow… until, we might further theorize, the healing process has resumed? Possibly. That the glow is seen only when being seen is safe? Ah” Watson, that is an assumption as frightening as it is unwarranted. Because that would indicate some sort of
–some sort of intelligence.
Anderson didn't like where this was leading and tried to choke it off with the old reliable advice: Let it go.
This time it worked.
For a while.
Anderson wanted to go out and dig some more.
Her forebrain didn't like that idea at all.
Her forebrain thought that idea sucked.
Leave it alone, Bobbi. It's dangerous.
Right.
And by the way, what's it doing to you?
Nothing she could see. But you couldn't see what cigarette smoke did to your lungs, either; that's why people went on smoking. It could be that her liver was rotting, that the chambers of her heart were silting up with cholesterol, or that she had rendered herself barren. For all she knew her bone marrow might be producing outlaw white cells like mad right this minute. Why settle for an early period when you could have something really interesting like leukemia, Bobbi?
But she wanted to dig it up just the same.
This urge, simple and elemental, had nothing to do with her forebrain. It came baking up from someplace deeper inside. It had all the earmarks of some physical craving-for salt, for some coke or heroin or cigarettes or coffee. Her forebrain supplied logic; this other part supplied an almost incoherent imperative: Dig on it, Bobbi, it's okay, dig on it, dig on it, shit, why not dig on it a while more, you know you want to know what it is, so dig on it till you see what it is, dig dig dig
She was able to turn the voice off by conscious effort and would then realize fifteen minutes later she had been listening to it again, as if to a Delphic oracle.
You've got to tell somebody what you've found.
Who? The police? Huh-uh. No way. Or -
Or who?
She was in her garden, madly weeding… a junkie in withdrawal.
–or anyone in authority, her mind finished.
Her right-brain supplied Anne's sarcastic laughter, as she had known it would… but the laughter didn't have as much force as she had feared. Like a good many of her generation, Anderson didn't put a great deal of stock in “let the authorities handle it.” Her distrust in the way the authorities handled things had begun at the age of twelve, in Utica. She had been sitting on the sofa in their living room with Anne on one side and her mother on the other. She had been eating a hamburger and watching the Dallas police escort Lee Harvey Oswald across an underground parking garage. There were lots of Dallas police. So many, in fact, that the TV announcer was telling the country that someone had shot Oswald before all those police-all those people in authority-seemed to have the slightest inkling something had gone wrong. let alone what it was.
So far as she could tell, the Dallas police had done such a good job protecting John F. Kennedy and Lee Harvey Oswald that they had been put in charge of the summer race-riots two years later, and then the war in Vietnam. Other assignments followed: handling the oil embargo ten years after the Kennedy assassination, the negotiations to secure the release of the American hostages at the embassy in Tehran, and, when it became clear that the wogs were not going to listen to the voice of reason and authority, Jimmy Carter had sent the Dallas police in to rescue those pore fellers-after all, authorities who had handled that Kent State business with such cool-headed aplomb could surely be counted upon to perform the sort of job those Mission: Impossible guys did every week. Well, the old Dallas police had had a spot of tough luck on that one, but by and large, they had the situation under control. All you had to do was look at how damned orderly the world situation had become in the years since a man in a strappy T-shirt with Vitalis on his thinning hair and fried-chicken grease under his fingernails had blown out a President's brains as he sat in the back seat of a Cadillac rolling down the street of a Texas cow-town.
I'll tell Jim Gardener. When he gets back. Gard'll know what to do, how to handle it. He'll have some ideas, anyway.
Anne's voice: You're going to ask a certified loony for advice. Great.
He's not a loony. Just a little bit weird.
Yeah, arrested at the last Seabrook demonstration with a loaded. 45 in his back-pack. That's weird, all right.
Anne, shut up.
She weeded. All that morning in the hot sun she weeded, the back of her T-shirt wet with sweat, last year's scarecrow wearing the hat she usually put on to keep the sun off.
After lunch she lay down to take a nap and couldn't sleep. Everything kept going through her mind, and that stranger's voice never shut up. Dig on it, Bobbi, it's okay, dig on it
Until at last she did get up, grabbed the crowbar, spade, and shovel, and set out for the woods. At the far end of her field she paused, forehead grooved in thought, and came back for her pickax. Peter was on the porch. He looked up briefly but made no move to come with Anderson.
Anderson was not really surprised.
So about twenty minutes later she stood above it, looking down the forested slope to the trench she had begun in the ground, freeing what she now believed was a very tiny section of an extraterrestrial spacecraft. Its gray hull was as solid as a wrench or a screwdriver, denying dreams and vapors and supposings; it was there. The dirt she had thrown to either side, moist and black and forest-secret, was now a dark brown-still damp from last night's rain.
Going down the slope, her foot crunched on something that sounded like newspaper. It wasn't newspaper; it was a dead sparrow. Twenty feet further down was a dead crow, feet pointed comically skyward like a dead bird in a cartoon. Anderson paused, looked around, and saw the bodies of three other birds-another crow, a bluejay, and a scarlet tanager. No marks. Just dead. And no flies around any of them.
She reached the trench and dropped her tools on the bank. The trench was muddy. She stepped in nevertheless, her workshoes squashing in the mud. She bent down and could see smooth gray metal going into the earth, a puddle standing on one side.
What are you?
She put her hand on it. That vibration sank into her skin and seemed for a moment to go all through her. Then it stopped.
Anderson turned and put her hand on her shovel, feeling its smooth wood, slightly warmed by the sun. She was vaguely aware that she could hear no forest
