memories ended the day before, on June 27th, with her standing above, that titanic thing buried in the earth, gripping the handle of the shovel. They ended with her whispering “Everything's fine,” and then beginning to dig. There was more to the tale, all right, all kinds of more, but she couldn't remember it sequentially and what she could remember would have to be edited… carefully edited. For instance, she couldn't really tell Gard about Peter. Not yet. They had told her she couldn't, but on that one she didn't need any telling.
They had also told her Jim Gardener would have to be watched very, very closely. Not for long, of course-soon Gard would be
(part of us)
on the team. Yes. And it would be great to have him on the team, because if there was anyone in the world Anderson loved, it was Jim Gardener.
Bobbi, who are “they”?
The Tommyknockers. That word, which had risen out of the queer opaqueness in Gard's mind like a silvery bubble, was as good a name as any, wasn't it? Sure. Better than some.
“So what now?” Gardener asked, lighting her last cigarette. He looked both dazed and wary. “I'm not saying I can swallow all this…” He laughed a bit wildly. “Or maybe it's just that my throat's not big enough for it all to go down at once.”
“I understand,” Anderson said. “I think the main reason I remember so little about the last week or so is because it's all so… weird. It's like having your mind strapped to a rocket-sled.”
She didn't like lying to Gard; it made her uneasy. But all the lying would be done soon enough. Gard would be… would be…
Well… persuaded.
When he saw the ship. When he felt the ship.
“No matter how much I do or don't believe, I'm forced to believe most of it, I guess.”
When you remove the impossible, whatever remains is the truth, no matter how improbable. -
“You got that too, did you?”
“The shape of it. I might not have even known what it was if I hadn't heard you say it once or twice.”
Gardener nodded. “Well, I guess it fits the situation we have here. If I don't believe the evidence of my senses, I have to believe I'm crazy. Although God knows there are enough people in the world who would be more than happy to testify that's just what I am.”
“You're not crazy, Gard,” Anderson said quietly, and put her hand over his. He turned his own over and squeezed it.
“Well… you know, a man who shot his wife… there are people who'd say that's pretty persuasive evidence of insanity. You know?”
“Gard, that was eight years ago.”
“Sure. And that guy I elbowed in the tit, that was eight days ago. I also chased a guy down Arberg's hall and across his dining room, with an umbrella, did I tell you that? My behavior over the last few years has been increasingly self-destructive-”
“Hi, folks, and welcome once more to The National Self-Pity Hour!” Bobbi Anderson chirruped brightly. “Tonight's guest is-”
“I was going to kill myself yesterday morning,” Gardener said quietly. “If I hadn't gotten these vibrations-really strong ones-that you were in trouble, I'd be fishfood now.”
Anderson looked at him closely. Her hand slowly tightened down on his until it was hurting. “You mean it, don't you? Christ!”
“Sure. You want to know how bad it's gotten? It seemed like the sanest thing I could do under the circumstances.”
“Come off it.”
“I'm serious. Then this idea came. The idea you were in trouble. So I put it off long enough to call you. But you weren't here.”
“I was probably in the woods,” Anderson said. “And you came running.” She lifted his hand to her mouth and kissed it gently. “If this whole crazy business doesn't mean anything else, at least it means you're still alive, you asshole.”
“As always, I'm impressed by the almost Gallic range of your compliments, Bobbi.”
“If you ever do do it, I'll see it's written on your tombstone, Gard. ASSHOLE in letters carved deep enough so they won't wear off for at least a century.”
“Well, thanks,” Gardener said, “but you don't have to worry about it for a while. Because I still got it.”
“What?”
“That feeling that you're in trouble.”
She tried to look away, tried to take her hand away.
“Look at me, Bobbi, goddammit.”
At last, reluctantly, she did, her lower lip slightly pushed out in that stubborn expression he knew so well-but didn't she also look just the tiniest bit uneasy? He thought so.
“All of this seems so wonderful-house-power from D-cells, books that write themselves, God knows what else-so why should I feel that you're in trouble?”
“I don't know,” she said softly, and got up to do the dishes.
“Of course I worked until I damn near dropped, that's one thing,” Anderson said. Her back was to him now, and he had a feeling she liked it that way fine. Dishes rattled in hot, soapy water. “And I didn't just say “Aliens from space, ho-hum, cheap clean electric power and mental telepathy, big deal,” you know. My mailman's cheating on his wife, I know about it-I don't want to know about it, hell, I'm no snoop, but it was just there, Gard, right there in the front of his head. Not seeing it would be like not seeing a neon sign a hundred feet high. Christ, I've been rocking and reeling.”
“I see,” he said, and thought: She's not telling the truth, at least not all of it, and I don't think she even knows it. “The question remains: what do we do now?”
“I don't know.” She glanced around, saw Gardener's raised eyebrows, and said, “Did you think I was going to give you the answer in a neat little essay, five hundred words or less? I can't. I've got some ideas, but that's all. Maybe not even very good ones. I suppose the first thing is to take you out so you can
(be persuaded)
have a look at it. Afterward well.
Gardener looked at her for a long time. Bobbi did not drop her eyes this time; they were open and guileless. But things were wrong here, off-note and off- key. Things like that note of fake schmaltz in Bobbi's voice when she spoke of Peter. Maybe the tears had been real, but that tone it had been all wrong.
“All right. Let's go take a look at your ship in the earth.”
“But let's have lunch first,” Anderson said placidly.
“You're hungry again?”
“Sure. Aren't you?”
“Christ, no!”
“Then I'll eat for both of us,” Anderson said, and she did.
Chapter 10
Gardener Decides
“Good God.” Gardener sat down heavily on a fresh stump. It felt like a case of sit down or fall down. Like being punched hard in the stomach. No; it was stranger and more radical than that. It was more like someone had slammed the hose of an industrial vacuum cleaner into his mouth and turned it on, sucking all the wind out of his lungs in a second's time. “Good God,” he repeated in a tiny breathless voice. It seemed to be all of which he was capable.
“It's something, isn't it?”
They were halfway down the slope, not far from where Anderson had found the dead chuck. Before, the slope had been pretty heavily wooded. Now a lane had been cut through the trees to admit a strange vehicle which Gardener almost recognized. It stood at the edge of Anderson's dig, and it was dwarfed both by the excavation and the thing which was being unearthed.
The trench was now two hundred feet long and twenty feet wide at either end. The cut bulged to thirty feet or so in width for perhaps forty feet of the slit's total length-that bulge made a shape like a woman's hips seen in silhouette. The gray leading edge of the ship, its curvature now triumphantly revealed, rose out of this bulge like the edge of a giant steel tea saucer.
“Good God,” Gardener gasped again. “Look at that thing.”
“I have been,” Bobbi said, a distant little smile playing over her lips. “For over a week I've been looking at it. It's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen. And it's going to solve a lot of problems, Gard. “There came a man on horseback, riding and riding-””
That cut through the fog. Gardener looked around at Anderson, who might have been drifting in the dark places from which that incredible thing had come. The look on her face chilled Gardener. Bobbi's eyes were not just far-off. They were vacant windows.
“What do you mean?”
“Hmmm?” Anderson looked around as if coming out of a deep daze.
“What do you mean, a man on horseback?”
“I mean you, Gard. I mean me. But I think… I think I mostly mean you. Come on down here and take a look.”
Anderson started down the slope quickly, with the casual grace of previous experience. She got maybe twenty feet before she realized Gardener wasn't with
