on the mail was never going to be one of her favorite things. The catalogue was from Radio Shack-they wanted to sell her a word processor. The bill was from Central Maine Power. That made her think briefly of Jim Gardener again. She tossed both on the table in the hall, went back to her chair, sat down again, flipped to a fresh page, and quickly copied her original sketch.
She frowned at the mild arc, which was probably a bit of extrapolation-as if she had dug down maybe twelve or fourteen feet instead of just four. Well, so what? A little extrapolation didn't bother her; hell, that was part of a fiction writer's business, and people who thought it belonged solely to science-fiction or fantasy writers had never looked through the other end of the telescope, had never been faced with the problem of filling in white spaces that no history could provide-things, for example, like what had happened to the people who had colonized Roanoke Island, off the North Carolina coast, and then simply disappeared, leaving no mark but the inexplicable word CROATOAN carved on a tree, or the Easter Island monoliths, or why the citizens of a little town in Utah called Blessing had all suddenly gone crazy-or so it seemed-on the same day in the summer of 1884. If you didn't know for sure, it was okay to imagine-until and unless you found out different.
There was a formula by which circumference could be determined from an arc, she was quite sure of it. She had forgotten what the damned thing was, that was the only problem. But she could maybe get a rough idea-always assuming her impression of just how much the thing's edge curved was accurate-by estimating the thing's center point…
Bobbi went back to the hall table and opened its middle drawer, which was a sort of catch-all. She rooted past untidy bundles of canceled checks, dead C, D, and 9-volt batteries (for some reason she had never been able to shitcan old batteries what you did with old batteries was throw them in a drawer, God knew why, it was just the Battery Graveyard instead of the one the elephants were supposed to have), bunches of rubber bands and wide red canning-rubbers, unanswered fan letters (she could no more throw out an unanswered fan letter than a dead battery), and recipes jotted on file-cards. At the very bottom of the drawer was a litter of small tools, and among them she found what she was looking for-a compass with a yellow stub of pencil sleeved into the armature.
Sitting in the rocker again, Anderson turned to a fresh sheet and drew the leading edge of the thing in the earth for the third time. She tried to keep it in scale, but drew it a little bigger this time, not bothering with the surrounding trees and only suggesting the trench for the sake of perspective.
“Okay, guesswork,” she said, and dug the point of the compass into the yellow legal pad below the curved edge. She adjusted the compass's arc so it traced that edge fairly accurately-and then she swept the compass around in a complete circle. She looked at it, then wiped her mouth with the heel of her hand. Her lips suddenly felt too loose and too wet.
“Boolsheet,” she whispered.
But it wasn't boolsheet. Unless her estimate of the edge's curvature and of midpoint were both wildly off the beam, she had unearthed the edge of an object which was at least three hundred yards in circumference.
Anderson dropped the compass and the pad on the floor and looked out the window. Her heart was beating too hard.
As the sun went down, Anderson sat on her back porch, staring across her garden toward the woods, and listened to the voices in her head.
In her junior year at college she had taken a Psychology Department seminar on creativity. She had been amazed-and a little relieved-to discover that she was not concealing some private neurosis; almost all imaginative people heard voices. Not just thoughts but actual voices inside their heads, different personae, each as clearly defined as voices on an old-time radio show. They came from the right side of the brain, the teacher explained-the side which is most commonly associated with visions and telepathy and that striking human ability to make images by drawing comparisons and making metaphors.
There are no such things as flying saucers.
Oh yeah? Who says so?
The Air Force, for one. They closed the books on flying saucers twenty years ago. The), were able to explain all but three per cent of all verified sightings, and they said those last three were almost certainly caused by ephemeral atmospheric conditions-stuff like sun-dogs, clear-air turbulence, pockets of clear-air electricity. Hell, the Lubbock Lights were front-page news, and all they turned out to be was… well, there were these packs of traveling packs of moths, see? And the Lubbock streetlights hit their wings and reflected big light-colored moving shapes onto the low cloud masses that a stagnant weather pattern kept over the town for a week. Most of the country spent that week thinking someone dressed like Michael Rennie in The Day the Earth Stood Still was going to come walking up Lubbock's main drag with his pet robot Gort clanking along beside him, demanding to be taken to our leader. And they were moths. Do you like it? Don't you have to like it?
This voice was so clear it was amusing-it was that of Dr Klingerman, who had taught the seminar. It lectured her with good old Klingy's unfailing-if rather shrill enthusiasm. Anderson smiled and lit a cigarette. Smoking a little too much tonight, but the damned things were going stale, anyway.
In 1947 an Air Force captain named Mantell flew too high while he was chasing a flying saucer-what he thought was a flying saucer. He blacked out.
His plane crashed. Mantell was killed. He died chasing a reflection of Venus on a high scud of clouds-a sun-dog, in other words. So there are reflections of moths, reflections of Venus, and probably reflections in a golden eye as well, Bobbi, but there are no flying saucers.
Then what is that in the ground?
The voice of the lecturer fell still. It didn't know. So in its place came Anne's voice, saying the same thing for the third time, telling her she was getting funny in the head, getting weird like Uncle Frank, telling her they would be measuring her for one of those canvas coats you wear backwards soon enough; they would cart her up to the asylum in Bangor or the one in Juniper Hill, and she could rave about flying saucers buried in the woods while she wove baskets. It was Sissy's voice, all right; she could call her on the phone right now, tell her what had happened, and get that scripture by chapter and by verse. She knew it.
But was it right?
No. It wasn't. Anne would equate her sister's mostly solitary life with madness no matter what Anderson did or said. And yes, the idea that the thing in the earth was some sort of spaceship certainly was mad… but was playing with the possibility, at least until it was disproven, mad? Anne would think so, but Anderson did not. Nothing wrong with keeping an open mind.
Yet the speed with which the possibility had occurred to her…
She got up and went inside. Last time she had fooled with that thing in the woods, she had slept for twelve hours. She wondered if she could expect a similar sleep-marathon tonight. She felt almost tired enough to sleep twelve hours, God knew.
Leave it alone, Bobbi. It's dangerous.
But she wouldn't, she thought, pulling off her OPUS FOR PRESIDENT T-shirt. Not just yet.
The trouble with living alone, she had discovered-and the reason why most people she knew didn't like to be alone even for a little while-was those voices from the right side of the brain. The longer you lived alone, the louder and more clearly they spoke. As the yardsticks of rationality began to shrink in the silence, those right-brain voices did not Just request attention but demanded it. It was easy to become frightened of them, to think they meant madness after all.
Anne would sure think they did, Bobbi thought, climbing into bed. The lamp cast a clean and comforting circle of light on the counterpane, but she left the thesis she'd been reading on the floor. She kept expecting the doleful cramps that usually accompanied her occasional early and heavy menstrual flow to begin, but so far they hadn't. Not that she was anxious for them to put in an appearance, you should understand.
She crossed her hands behind her head and looked at the ceiling.
No, you're not crazy at all, Bobbi, she thought. You think Gard's getting wiggy but you're perfectly all right-isn't that also a sign that you're wobbling?
There's even a name for it… denial and substitution. “I'm all right, it's the world that's crazy.”
All true. But she still felt firmly in control of herself, and sure of one thing: she was saner in Haven than she had been in Cleaves Mills, and much saner than she had been in Utica. A few more years in Utica, a few more years around sister Anne, and she would have been as mad as a hatter. Anderson believed Anne actually saw driving her close relatives crazy as part of her-her job? No, nothing so mundane. As part of her sacred mission in life.
She knew what was really troubling her, and it wasn't the speed with which the possibility of what the thing might be had occurred to her. It was the feeling of certainty. She would keep an open mind, but the struggle would be to keep it open in favor of what Anne would call “sanity.” Because she knew what she had found, and it filled her with fear and awe and a restless, moving excitement.
See, Anne, ole Bobbi didn't move up to Sticksville and go crazy; ole Bobbi moved up here and went sane. Insanity is limiting possibilities, Anne, can you dig it? Insanity is refusing to go down certain paths of speculation even though the logic is there… like a token for the turnstile. See what I mean? No? Of course you don't. You don't and you never did. Then go away, Anne. Stay in Utica and grind your teeth in your sleep until there's nothing left of them, make whoever is mad enough to stay within range of your voice crazy, be my guest, but stay out of my head.
The thing in the earth was a ship from space.
There. It was out. No more bullshit. Never mind Anne, never mind the Lubbock Lights or how the Air Force had closed its file on flying saucers. Never mind the chariots of the gods, or the Bermuda Triangle, or how Elijah was drawn up to heaven in a wheel of fire. Never mind any of it-her heart knew what her heart knew. It was a ship, and it had either landed or crash-landed a long time ago maybe millions of years ago.
God!
She lay in bed, hands behind her head. She was calm enough, but her heart was beating fast, fast, fast.
Then another voice, and this was the voice of her dead grandfather, repeating something Anne's voice had said earlier.
Leave it alone, Bobbi. It's dangerous.
That momentary vibration. Her earlier premonition, suffocating and positive, that she had found the edge of some weird steel coffin. Peter's reaction. Starting her period early, only spotting here at the farm but bleeding like a stuck pig when she was close to it. Losing track of time, sleeping the clock all the way around. And don't forget ole Chuck the Woodchuck. Chuck had smelled gassy and decomposed, but there were no flies. No flies on Chuck, you might say.
None of that shit adds up to Shinola. I'll buy the possibility of a ship in the earth because no matter how crazy it sounds at first, the logic's still there. But there's no logic to the rest of this stuff. they're loose beads rolling around on
the table. Thread them onto a string and maybe I'll buy it-I'll think about it, anyway. Okay?
Her grandfather's voice again, that slow, authoritative voice, the only one in the house that had always been able to strike Anne silent as a kid.
Those things all happened after you found it, Bobbi. That's your string.
No. Not enough.
Easy enough to talk back to her grandfather now; the man was sixteen years in his grave. But it was her grandfather's voice that followed her down to sleep, nevertheless.
Leave it alone, Bobbi. It's dangerous.
–and you know that, too.
