The fate of the world may now depend on whether a man can lock a shed door on the first try, he thought dazedly. Modem life is so challenging.
For a moment he didn't think he was even going to be able to slot the key in the lock. It chattered all the way around the slit without going in, a prisoner of his shaking hand. Then, when he thought it really was all over, it slid home. He turned it. The lock opened. He closed the door, slipped the arm of the padlock through the hasp, and then clicked it shut. He pulled the key out and folded it into his sweating hand. He slid around the corner of the shed like oil. At the exact moment he did, the men and women who had gone out to the ship emerged into the dooryard, moving in single file.
Gardener reached up to hang the key on the nail where he had found it. For one nightmare moment he thought he was going to drop it again and have to hunt for it in the high weeds growing on this side of the shed. When it slipped onto the nail he let out his breath in a shuddering sigh.
Part of him wanted not to move, to just freeze here. Then he decided he'd better not take the risk. After all, he didn't know that Bobbi had her key.
He continued slipping along the side of the shed. His left ankle struck the haft of an old harrow that had been left to rust in the weeds, and he had to clamp his teeth over a cry of pain. He stepped over it and slipped around another corner. Now he was behind the shed.
That sudsing sound was maddeningly loud back here.
I'm right behind those goddam showers, he thought. They're floating inches from me… literally inches.
A rustle of weeds. A minute scrape of metal. Gardener felt simultaneously like laughing and screeching. They hadn't had Bobbi's key. Someone had just come around to the side of the shed and taken the key Gardener had hung up again only seconds before-probably Bobbi herself.
Still warm from my hand, Bobbi, did you notice?
He stood in back of the shed, pressed against the rough wood, arms slightly spread, palms tight on the boards.
Did you notice? And do you hear me? Do any of you hear me? Is someone -Allison or Archinbourg or Berringer-going to suddenly pop his head around here and yell out “Peek-a-boo, Gard, we seeee you?” Is the shield still working?
He stood there and waited for them to take him.
They didn't. On an ordinary summer night he probably would not have been able to hear the metallic rattle as the door was unlocked-it would have been masked by the loud ree-ree-ree of the crickets. But now there were no crickets. He beard the unlocking; heard the creak of the hinges as the door was opened; heard the hinges creak again as the door was pushed shut. They were inside.
Almost at once the pulses of light failing through the cracks began to speed up and become brighter, and his mind was split by an agonized scream:
Hurts! It hurrrrr
He moved away from the shed and went back to the house.
He lay awake a long time, waiting for them to come out again, waiting to see if he had been discovered.
All right, I can try to put a stop to the “becoming,” he thought. But it won't work unless I actually can go inside the ship. Can I do that?
He didn't know. Bobbi seemed to have no worries, but Bobbi and the others were different now. Oh, he himself was also “becoming'; the lost teeth proved that, the ability to hear thoughts did, too. He had changed the words on the computer screen just by thinking them. But there was no use kidding himself: he was far behind the competition. If Bobbi survived the entry into the ship and her old buddy Gard dropped dead, would any of them, even Bobbi herself, spare a tear? He didn't think so.
Maybe that's what they all want. Bobbi included. For you to go into the ship and just fall over with your brains exploding in one big harmonic radio transmission. It would save Bobbi the moral pain of taking care of you herself, for one thing. Murder without tears.
That they intended to get rid of him, he no longer doubted. But he thought maybe that Bobbi-the old Bobbi-would let him live long enough to see the interior of the strange thing they had worked so long to dig up. That at least felt right. And in the end, it didn't matter. If murder was what Bobbi was planning, there was no real defense, was there? He had to go into the ship. Unless he did that, his idea, crazy as it undoubtedly was, had no chance to work at all.
Have to try, Gard.
He had intended to try as soon as they were inside, and that would probably be tomorrow morning. Now he thought that maybe he ought to press his luck a little further. If he went according to the rag and a bone he supposed he had to call his “original plan,” there would be no way he could do anything about that little boy. The kid would have to come first.
Gard, he's probably dead anyway.
Maybe. But the old man didn't think so; the old man thought there was still a little boy left to save.
One kid doesn't matter-not in the face of all this. You know it, too-Haven is like a great big nuclear reactor that's ready to go red-line. The containment is melting. To coin a phrase.
It was logical, but it was a croupier's logic. Ultimately, killer logic. Ted the Power Man Logic. If he wanted to play the game that way, why even bother?
The kid matters or nothing matters.
And maybe this way he could even save Bobbi. He didn't think so; he thought Bobbi had gone too far for salvation. But he could try.
Long odds, Gard ole Gard.
Sure. The clock's at a minute to midnight… we're down to counting seconds.
Thinking that, he slipped into the blankness of sleep. This was followed by nightmares where he floated in a clear green bath, tethered by thick coaxial cables. He was trying to scream but he couldn't, because the cables were coming out of his mouth.
Chapter 5
The Scoop
Entombed in the overdecorated confines of the Bounty Tavern, drinking buck-a-bottle Heinekens and laughed at by David Bright, who had sunk to vulgar depths of humor-who had even ended up comparing John Leandro to Superman's pal Jimmy Olson, Leandro had wavered. No use telling himself otherwise. He had, indeed, wavered. But men of vision have always had to endure barbs of ridicule, and not a few have been burned or crucified or had their height artificially extended by five or six inches on the Inquisitorial rack of pain for their visions. Having David Bright ask him over beers in the Bounty if his Secret Wristwatch was in good working order was hardly the worst thing that could have befallen him.
But oh shit it hurt.
John Leandro determined that David Bright, and anyone else to whom Bright had related Crazy Johnny's ideas that Something Big Was Going on in Haven, would end up laughing on the other side of his or her face. Because something big was going on there. He felt it in every bone in his body. There were days, when the wind was blowing from the southeast, that he almost imagined he could smell it.
His vacation had begun the previous Friday. He had hoped to go down to Haven that very day. But he lived with his widowed mother, and she had been counting so on him running her up to Nova Scotia to see her sister, she said, but if John had commitments, why, she understood; after all, she was old and probably not much fun anymore; just someone to cook his meals and wash his underwear, and that was fine, you go on, Johnny, go on and hunt up your scoop, I'll just call Megan on the telephone, maybe in a week or two your cousin Alfie will bring her down here to see me, Alfie's so good to his mother, et cetera, et cetera, ibid., ibid., ad infinitum, ad infinitum.
On Friday, Leandro took his mother to Nova Scotia. Of course they stayed over, and by the time they got back to Bangor, Saturday was shot. Sunday was a bad day to begin anything, what with his Sunday-school class of first-and-second graders at nine, full worship services at ten, and Young Men for Christ in the Methodist rectory at five P. m. At the YMC meeting, a special speaker gave them a slide-show on Armageddon. As he explained to them how unrepenting sinners would be inflicted with boils and running sores and ailments of the bowels and the intestines, Georgina Leandro and the other members of the Ladies” Aid passed out paper cups of Za-Rex and oatmeal cookies. And during the evening there was always a songfest for Christ in the church basement.
Sundays always left him feeling exalted. And exhausted.
So it was Monday, the 15th of August before Leandro finally tossed his yellow legal pads, his Sony tape recorder, his Nikon and a gadget-bag filled with film and various lenses, into the front seat of his used Dodge and prepared to set out for Haven… and what he hoped would be journalistic glory. He would not have been appalled if he had known he was approaching ground-zero of what was shortly to become the biggest story since the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.
The day was calm and blue and mellow-very warm but not so savagely hot and humid as the last few days had been. It was a day everyone on earth would mark forever in his memory. Johnny Leandro had wanted a story, but he had never heard the old proverb that goes, “God says take what you want… and pay for it.”
He only knew that he had stumbled onto the edge of something, and when he tried to wiggle it, it remained firm… which meant it was maybe bigger than one might at first think. There was no way he was going to walk away from this; he intended to excavate. All the David Brights in the world with their smart cracks about Jimmy Olson wristwatches and Fu Manchu could not stop him.
He put the Dodge in drive and began to roll away from the curb.
“Don't forget your lunch, Johnny!” his mother called. She came puffing down the walk with a brown-paper sack in one hand. Large grease spots were already forming on the brown paper; since grade school, Leandro's favorite sandwich had been bologna, slices of Bermuda onion, and Wesson Oil.
“Thanks, Mom,” he said, leaning over to take the bag and put it down on the floor. “You didn't have to do that, though. I could have picked up a hamburger-”
“If I've told you once I've told you a thousand times,” she said, “you have no business going into those roadside luncheonettes, Johnny. You never know if the kitchen's dirty or clean.
“Microbes,” she said ominously, leaning forward.
