Bobbi told you Anne went away.
He went back with this dangerous secret turning in his mind like a jewel.
Chapter 3
The Hatch
It happened two days later, as Haven lay sprawled and sunstruck under the August heat. Dog-days had come, except of course there were no dogs left in Haven -unless maybe there was one in Bobbi Anderson's shed.
Gard and Bobbi were at the bottom of a cut which was now a hundred and seventy feet deep-the hull of the ship formed one side of this excavation, and the other side, behind the silvery mesh crisscrossing it, showed a cutaway view of thin soil, clay, schist, granite, and spongy aquifer. A geologist would have loved it. They were wearing jeans and sweatshirts. It was stiflingly hot on the surface, but down here it was chilly-Gardener felt like a bug crawling on the side of a water cooler. On his head he wore a hard-hat with a flashlight attached to it by silver utility tape. Bobbi had cautioned him to use the light as sparingly as possible -batteries were in limited supply. Both of his ears were stuffed with cotton. He was using a pneumatic drill to shag up big chunks of rock. Bobbi was at the other end of the cut, doing the same thing.
Gardener had asked her that morning why they had to drill. “I liked the radio explosives better, Bobbi old kid,” he said. “Less pain and strain on the American brain, know what I mean?”
Bobbi didn't smile. Bobbi seemed to be losing her sense of humor along with her hair.
“We're too close now,” Bobbi said. “Using an explosive might damage something we don't want to damage.”
“The hatch?”
“The hatch.”
Gardener's shoulders were aching, and the plate in his head was aching as well -that was probably mental, steel couldn't ache, but it always seemed to when he was down here-and he hoped Bobbi would signal soon that it was time for them to knock off for lunch.
He let the drill chatter and bite its way toward the ship again, not bothering too much about grazing that dull silver surface. You had to be careful not to let the tip of the drill walk onto it too hard, he had discovered; it was apt to rebound and tear off your foot if you weren't careful. The ship itself was as invulnerable to the rough kiss of the drill as it had been to the explosives he and his parade of helpers had used. There was at least no danger of damaging the goods.
The drill touched the ship's surface-and suddenly its steady machine-gun thunder turned to a high-pitched squeal. He thought he saw smoke squirt from the pulsing blur of the drill's tip. There was a snap. Something flew past his head. All this happened in less than a second. He shut the drill off and saw the drill-bit was almost entirely gone. All that remained was a jagged stub.
Gardener turned around and saw the part that had gone winging past his face embedded in the rock of the cut. It had sheared a strand of the meshwork neatly in two. Delayed shock hit, making his knees want to come unlocked and spill him to the ground.
Missed me by a whore's hair. No more, no less. Mother!
He tried to pull it out of the rock, and thought at first it wasn't going to come. Then he began to wiggle it back and forth. Like pulling a tooth out of a gum, he thought, and a hysterical titter escaped him.
The chunk of drill-bit came free. It was the size of a. 45 slug, maybe a little bigger.
Suddenly he was on the verge of passing out. He put an arm on the mesh-covered wall of the cut and rested his head on it. He closed his eyes and waited for the world to either go away or come back. He was dimly aware that Bobbi's drill had also cut out.
The world began to come back… and Bobbi was shaking him.
“Gard? Gard, what's wrong?”
There was real concern in her voice. Hearing it made Gardener feel absurdly like weeping. Of course, he was very tired.
“I almost got shot in the head by a forty-five-caliber drill-bit,” Gardener said. “On second thought, make that a. 357 Magnum.”
“What are you talking about?”
Gardener handed her the fragment he had worked out of the wall. Bobbi looked at it and whistled. “Jesus!”
“I think He and I just missed connections. That's the second time I've almost gotten killed down in this shithole. The first time was when your friend Enders almost forgot to send down the sling after I'd set one of those radio explosives.”
“He's no friend of mine,” Bobbi said absently. “I think he's a dork… Gard, what did you hit? What made it happen?”
“What do you mean? A rock! What else is there down here to hit?”
“Were you near the ship?” All of a sudden Bobbi looked excited. No; more than that. Nearly feverish.
“Yes, but I've grazed the ship with the drill before. It just bounces b
But Bobbi wasn't listening anymore. She was at the ship, down on her knees, digging into the rubble with her fingers.
It looked like it was steaming, Gardener thought. It
It's here, Gard! Finally here!
He had joined her before he realized that she hadn't spoken the conclusion of her thoughts aloud; Gardener had heard her in his head.
Something, all right, Gardener thought.
Pulling aside the rock Gardener's drill had chunked up just before it exploded, Bobbi had revealed, finally, a line in the ship's surface-one single line in all of that huge, featureless expanse. Looking at it, Gardener understood Bobbi's excitement. He stretched out his hand to touch it.
“Better not,” she said sharply. “Remember what happened before.”
“Leave me alone,” Gardener said. He pushed Bobbi's hand aside and touched that groove. There was music in his head, but it was muffled and quickly faded. He thought he could feel his teeth vibrating rapidly in their sockets and suspected he would lose more of them tonight. Didn't matter. He wanted to touch it; he would touch it. This was the way in; this was the closest they had been to the Tommyknockers and their secrets, their first real sign that this ridiculous thing wasn't just solid through and through (the thought had occurred to him; what a cosmic joke that would have been). Touching it was like touching starlight made solid.
“It's the hatch,” Bobbi said. “I knew it was here!”
Gardener grinned at her. “We did it, Bobbi.”
“Yeah, we did it. Thank God you came back, Gard!”
Bobbi hugged him… and when Gardener felt the jellylike movement of her breasts and torso, he felt sick revulsion rise in him. Starlight? Maybe the stars were touching him, right now.
It was a thought he was quick to conceal, and he thought that he did conceal it, that Bobbi got none of it.
That's one for me, he thought. “How big do you think it is?”
“I'm not sure. I think we might be able to clear it today. It's best if we do. Time's gotten short, Gard.”
“How do you mean?”
“The air over Haven has changed. This did it.” Bobbi rapped her knuckles on the hull of the ship. There was a dim, bell-like note.
“I know.”
“It makes people sick to come in. You saw the way Anne was.”
“Yes.”
“She was protected to some degree by her dental work. I know that sounds crazy, but it's true. Still, she left in a hell of a hurry.”
Oh? Did she?
“If that was all-the air poisoning people who came into town-that would be bad enough. But we can't leave anymore, Gard.”
“Can't-?”
“No. I think you could. You might feel sickish for a few days, but you could leave. It would kill me, and very quickly. And something else: we've had a long siege of hot, still weather. If the weather changes-if the wind blows hard enough-it's going to blow our biosphere right out over the Atlantic Ocean. We'll be like a bunch of tropical fish just after someone pulled the plug on the tank and killed the rebreather. We'll die.”
Gard shook his head. “The weather changed the day you went to that woman's funeral, Bobbi. I remember. It was clear and breezy. That was what was so weird about you catching a sunstroke after all that hot and muggy.”
“Things have changed. The “becoming” has speeded up.”
Would they all die? Gardener wondered. ALL of them? Or just you and your special pals, Bobbi? The ones that have to wear makeup now?
“I hear doubt in your head, Gard,” Bobbi said. She sounded halfexasperated, half-amused.
“What I doubt is that any of this can be happening at all,” Gardener said. “Fuck it. Come on. Dig, babe.”
They took turns with a pick. One of them would use it for fifteen minutes or so, and then both would clear away the rubble. By three that afternoon Gard saw a circular groove that looked about six feet in diameter. Like a manhole cover. And here, at last, was a symbol. He looked at it, wonderingly, and at last he had to touch it. The blast of music in his head was louder this time, as if in weary protest, or in weary warning-a warning to get away from this thing before its protection lapsed entirely. But he needed to touch it, confirm it.
