“Have a care. It's loaded.”
Up ahead, the land suddenly sloped downward. Through the trees came a giant reflection: sunshine bouncing off a huge metal object.
Ev stamped on the brake, suddenly terrified to the depths of his heart.
“What the hell?” he heard Dugan mutter beside him.
Ev opened the door and got out. As his feet touched the ground, he became aware that the earth was crisscrossed with small dusty cracks and that it was vibrating very rapidly. At the next moment music so loud that it was deafening blew through his head at gale force. It went on for perhaps thirty seconds, but the pain was excruciating and it seemed forever. At last, it simply winked out.
He saw Dugan standing in front of the Cherokee, the cup now hooked under his chin. He held the flat-pack by the strap in one hand, the. 45 in the other. He was looking at Ev apprehensively.
“I'm all right,” Ev said.
“Yeah? Your nose is bleeding. Just like that guy back at the farm we passed.”
Ev wiped his nose with his finger and looked at the smear of blood. He wiped his finger on his pants and nodded toward Dugan. “Remember to put the mask back on when you start to feel woozy.”
“Oh, don't worry.”
Ev leaned back into the Cherokee and rummaged in his bag of tricks again. He brought out a Kodak disc camera and something that looked like a cross between a pistol and a blow-dryer.
“Your flare-gun?” Dugan asked, smiling a little.
“Ayuh. Get on the gas again, Trooper. You're losin y'color.”
Dugan pulled it up, and the two men started toward that glittering thing in the woods. Fifty feet from the Cherokee, Ev stopped. It was more than huge; it was titanic, a thing that would perhaps be large enough to dwarf an ocean liner when completely uncovered.
“Gimme your hand,” he said roughly to Dugan.
Dugan did as Ev asked, but wanted to know why.
“Because I'm scared shitless,” Ev said. Dugan squeezed his hand. Ev's arthritis flared, but he squeezed back anyway. After a moment, the two men started forward again.
Bobbi and Jud got the guns from the hardware store and put them in the back of the pickup. The side trip hadn't taken long but Dick and the others had gotten a good start and Bobbi pushed the pickup as fast as she dared to catch up. The truck's shadow, shortening as the day approached noon, ran beside them.
Bobbi suddenly stiffened a little behind the wheel.
“Did you hear it?”
“Heard something,” Jud said. “It was your friend, wasn't it?”
Bobbi nodded. “Gard saw them. He's yelling for help.”
“How many?”
“Two. In a Jeep. They were headed out to where the ship is.”
Jud brought a fist down on one leg. “The fuckers! The dirty snooping fuckers!”
“We'll catch them,” Bobbi said. “Don't worry.”
They were at the farm fifteen minutes later. Bobbi pulled her truck in behind Allison's Nova and Archinbourg's Cadillac. She looked at the group of men and thought how much like the nights they had met out here this was… the ones who were to be made
(to “become” first)
especially strong. But Hazel wasn't here and Beach was; Joe Summerfield and Adley McKeen had never been inside the shed either.
“Get the guns,” she told Jud. “Joe, you help. Remember-no shooting unless you have to, and don't shoot the cop, no matter what.”
She looked toward the porch and saw Gard lying there on his back. Gard's mouth was open and he was breathing in slow, rusty snores. Bobbi's eyes softened. There were plenty of people in Haven-Dick Allison and Newt Berringer probably chief among them-who thought she should long since have gotten rid of Gard. Nothing had been said out loud, but in Haven you no longer had to say things out loud. Bobbi knew if she put a bullet through Gard's head, there would be a whole platoon of willing workers out here an hour later to help bury him. They didn't like Gard because the plate in his head made him immune to the “becoming.” And it made him hard to read. But he was her brake. And even that was crap. The truth was simpler yet: she still loved him. She was still human enough for that.
And they would all have to admit that, drunk or not, when they had needed a warning, Gard had given it.
Jud and Joe Summerfield came back with the rifles. There were six of them, varied calibers. Bobbi saw that five went to people she could trust completely. She gave the sixth, a. 22, to Beach, who would complain if he didn't get a shooting iron.
Occupied with the ritual of guns, none of them saw that Gardener had half-opened his bloodshot eyes and was looking at them. No one heard his thoughts; he had learned how to seal them off.
“Let's go,” Bobbi said. “And remember: I want that cop.”
They moved out in a group.
Ev and Butch stood well back from the edge of what was now a ragged slash running better than three hundred yards from right to left and yawning sixty feet across at its widest point. Anderson's old mongrel of a truck stood off to one side, looking tired and used. Next to it was the souped-up payloader with its giant screwdriver snout. There were other tools in a lean-to of peeled logs. Ev saw a chainfall on one side, a chipper on the other. There was a big pile of sodden sawdust below the mouth of the chipper's exhaust-vent. There were cans of gasoline in the lean-to, and a black drum labeled DIESEL. When Ev had first heard those noises in the woods, he had thought New England Paper must be doing some logging, but this was no logging operation. This was an excavation.
That dish. That monstrous dish glittering in the sun.
The eye could not stay away; it was drawn back again and again. Gardener and Bobbi had removed a lot more hillside. Ninety feet of polished silver-gray metal now jutted out of the earth and into the green-gold sunlight. If they had looked into the slash, they would have seen another forty feet or better.
Neither of them went close enough to look.
“Holy Jesus,” Dugan said hoarsely. The gold cup bobbed on his face, and above its rim his blue eyes bulged wildly. “Holy Jesus, it's a spaceship. Is it ours or is it Russian, do you think? Holy Jesus Christ, it's as big as the Queen Mary, that ain't Russian, that ain't… ain't…”
He fell silent again. In spite of the oxygen, his headache was coming back.
Ev raised the disc camera and clicked off seven shots as fast as his finger could push the camera's button. Then he moved twenty feet to the left and took another five, standing by the chipper.
“Move to the right!” he said to Dugan.
“Huh?”
“Your right! I want you in these last three, for perspective.”
“Forget it, Pop!” Even muffled by the cup, there was a shrill note of hysteria in Dugan's voice.
“Four steps will do it.”
Dugan moved four very small steps to the right. Ev raised the disc camera again -a Father's Day present from Bryant and Marie-and clicked off the final three shots. Dugan was a very big man, but that ship in the earth reduced him to the size of a pygmy.
“Okay,” Ev said, and Dugan stepped quickly back to where he had been. He walked with mincing, tentative steps, looking at the great round object as he went.
Ev wondered if the pictures would turn out. His hands had been shaking. And the ship-for it certainly was some sort of spaceship-might be putting out radiation that would fog the film.
Even if it does come out, who's gonna believe it? Who, in a world where kids go off to the movies every damn Saturday and see things like Star Wars?
“I want to get out of here,” Dugan said.
Ev looked at the ship a moment longer, wondering if David was in there, imprisoned, wandering through unknowable corridors or passing through doorways cut for no human shape, starving in the darkness. No… if he was in there, he would have starved a long time ago. Starved, or died of thirst.
Then he slipped the small camera in his pants pocket, walked back to Dugan, and picked up the flare gun. “Ayuh, I guess-”
He broke off, looking in the direction of the Cherokee. There was a line of men -and one woman-standing in the trees, some armed. Ev recognized all of them… and none of them.
Bobbi started down the slope toward the two men. The others followed.
“Hello, Ev,” Bobbi said pleasantly enough.
Dugan raised the. 45, wishing bitterly for the familiar feel of his service. 357. “Stop,” he said. He didn't like the way the gold cup muffled the word, robbed it of authority. He pulled the air mask down. “All of you. Those of you with rifles, put them down. You're all under arrest.”
“You're outgunned, Butch,” Newt Berringer said pleasantly.
“Damned tooting!” Beach growled. Dick Allison frowned at him.
“You better put y'mask on again, Butch,” Adley McKeen said with a lazy, mocking smile. “I think you're losing it.”
