“Perhaps a little plain speaking of our own is in order.” He took off his glasses, began to wipe them on the sweaty front of his shirt (an action which Gardener thought would only leave them more smeared than before), and Gardener saw a dirty, furious gleam in his eyes. “You don't want to… to strike out like that, Jim. I advise you-we all advise you-never to do it
again. There are… uh… changes… yes, changes… going on in Haven-”
“No shit.”
“And some of these changes have made people… uh… short-tempered. So striking out like that could be… well, a bad mistake.”
“Do sudden noises bother you?” Gardener inquired.
Enders looked wary. “I don't understand your p-”
“Because if the timer in that radio is jake, you're about to hear one.”
He stepped behind the lean-to, not quite running, but by no means lingering. Enders threw a startled glance toward the ship, and then ran after him. He tripped over a shovel and went sprawling in the dirt, grabbing at his shin and grimacing. A moment later a loud, crumping roar shook the earth. There was a series of those dull yet penetrating cludding sounds as chunks of rock flew against the ship's hull. Others sprayed into the air, then fell onto the edge of the cut or rattled back into it. Gardener saw one rebound from the ship's hull and bounce an amazing distance.
“You small-minded, practical joking son of a bitch!” Enders shouted. He was still lying on the ground, still clutching his shin.
“Small-minded, hell,” Gardener said. “You left me down there.”
Enders glared at him.
Gardener stood where he was for a moment, then walked over to him and held out his hand. “Come on, Johnny. Time to let bygones be bygones. If Stalin and Roosevelt could cooperate long enough to fight Hitler, I guess we ought to be able to cooperate long enough to unglue this sucker from the ground. What do you say?”
Enders would say nothing, but after a moment he took Gardener's hand and got up. He brushed sullenly at his clothes, occasionally favoring Gardener with an almost catlike expression of dislike.
“Want to go see if we brought in our well yet?” Gardener asked. He felt better than he had in days-months, actually, maybe even years. Blowing up at Enders had done him a world of good.
“What do you mean?”
“Never mind,” Gardener said, and went over to the cut alone. He peered down, looking for water, listening for gurgles and splashes. He saw nothing, heard nothing. It seemed they had lucked out again.
It suddenly occurred to him that he was standing here with his hands planted on his upper thighs, bent over a forty-foot drop with a man somewhere behind him to whom he had just administered a punch in the mouth. If Enders wanted to, he could run up behind me and tumble me into this hole with one hard push, he thought, and heard Enders saying: Striking out like that could be a very bad mistake.
But he didn't look around, and that sense of well-being, absurdly out of place or not, held. He was in a fix, and strapping a rearview mirror onto his head so he could see who was coming up behind him wasn't going to get him out of it.
When he turned around at last, Enders was still standing by the lean-to, looking at him with that sulky kicked-cat expression. Gardener suspected he had been on the party-line again with his fellow mutations.
“What do you say?” Gardener called over to him. There was an edged pleasantness in his voice. “There's a lot of broken rock down there. Do we go back to work, or do we air a few more grievances?”
Enders went into the shed, grabbed the levitation-pack they used to move the bigger rocks, and started toward Gardener with it. He held it out. Gardener shouldered the pack. He started back toward the sling, then looked back at Enders.
“Don't forget to hoist me up when I yell.”
“I won't.” Enders's eyes-or perhaps that was only the lenses of his spectacles
were murky. Gardener discovered he didn't really care which. He put his foot into the rope sling and tightened it as Enders went back to the winch.
“Remember, Johnny. Consideration. That's the word for today.”
John Enders lowered him down without saying anything.
Sunday, July 31st:
Henry Buck, known to his friends as Hank, committed the last act of outright irrational craziness to take place in Haven at a quarter past eleven on that Sunday morning.
People in Haven are short-tempered, Enders had told Gard. Ruth McCausland had seen evidences of this short temper during the search for David Brown: hot words, scuffles, a thrown punch or two. Ironically, it had always been Ruth herself -Ruth and the clear moral imperative she had always represented in these people's lives-who had prevented the search from turning into a free-for-all.
Short-tempered? “Crazy” was probably a better word.
In the shock of the “becoming,” the entire town had been like a gas-filled room, waiting only for someone to light a match… or to do something even more accidental but just as deadly, as an explosion in a gas-filled room may be set off by an innocent delivery-boy pushing a doorbell and creating a spark.
That spark never came. Part of it was Ruth's doing. Part of it was Bobbi's doing. Then, after the visits to the shed, a group of half a dozen men and one woman began to work like the hippie LSD-trip-guides of the sixties, helping Haven through to the end of the first difficult stage of “becoming.”
It was well for the people of Haven that the big bang never did come, well for the people of Maine, New England, perhaps for the whole continent or the whole planet. I would not be the one to tell you there are no planets anywhere in the universe that are not large dead cinders floating in space because a war over who was or was not hogging too many dryers in the local Laundromat escalated into Doomsville. No one ever really knows where things will end-or if they will. And there had been a time in late June when the entire world might well have awakened to discover a terrible, world-ripping conflict was going on in an obscure Maine town-an exchange which had begun over something as deeply important as whose turn it had been to pick up the coffee-break check at the Haven Lunch.
Of course we may blow up our world someday with no outside help at all, for reasons which look every bit as trivial from a standpoint of light-years; from where we rotate far out on one spoke of the Milky Way in the Lesser Magellanic Cloud, whether or not the Russians invade the Iranian oilfields or whether NATO decides to install American-made Cruise missiles in West Germany may seem every bit as important as whose turn it is to pick up the tab for five coffees and a like number of Danish. Maybe it all comes down to the same thing, when viewed from a galactic perspective.
However that may be, the tense period in Haven really ended with the month of July-by this time, almost everyone in town had lost his teeth, and a number of other, stranger mutations had begun. Those seven people who had visited Bobbi's shed, communing with what waited in the green glow, had begun to experience these mutations some ten days earlier, but had kept them secret.
Considering the nature of the changes, that was probably wise.
Because Hank Buck's revenge on Albert “Pits” Barfield was really the last act of outrageous craziness in Haven, and in that light it probably deserves a brief mention.
Hank and Pits Barfield were part of the Thursday-night poker circle to which Joe Paulson had also belonged. By July 31st the poker games had ended, and not because that bitch “Becka Paulson had gone crazy and roasted her husband. They had stopped because you can't bluff at poker when all the players are telepaths.
Still, Hank held a grudge against Pits Barfield, and the more he thought about it, the more it grew in his mind. All these years, Pits had been bottom-dealing. Several of them suspected it-Hank could remember a night in the back room of Kyle Archinbourg's place, seven years ago it must have been, playing pool with Moss Harlingen, and Moss had said: “He's bottom-dealing just as sure as you're born, Hank. Six-ball in the side.” Whack! The six-ball shot into the side pocket as if on a string. “Thing is, bastid's good at it. If he was just a little slower, I could catch him at it.”
“If that's what you think, y'ought to get out'n the game.”
“Shit! Everyone else in that game is as honest as the day is long. And the truth is, I can outplay most of “em. Nine-ball. Corner.” Whap! “Suckardly little prick is fast, and he never overuses it-just does a little if he really starts to go in the hole. You notice how he comes out every Thursday night? “Bout even?”
Hank had. All the same, he had thought the whole thing was just a little buggyboo in Moss's head-Moss was a good poker player, and he resented anyone whose money he couldn't take. But others had voiced a similar suspicion over the intervening years, and more than a few of them-some of them damned nice fellows, too, fellows Hank had really enjoyed pulling a few beers and dealing a few hands with-had dropped out of the game. They did this quietly, with no fuss or bother, and the possibility that Pits Barfield might be responsible was never hinted at. It was that they had finally gotten into the Monday-night bowling league up to Bangor and their wives didn't want them out late two nights a week. It was that their work schedules had changed and they couldn't take that late night anymore. It was that winter was coming (even if it was only May) and they had to do a little work on their snowmobiles.
So they dropped out, leaving the little core of three or four that had -been there all along, and somehow that made it worse, knowing those outsiders had either picked it up or smelled it as clearly as you could smell the jungle-juice aroma which arose from Barfield's unwashed body most of the time. They got it. Him and Kyle and Joe Paulson had been snookered. All these years they had been snookered.
After the “becoming” got rolling really well, Hank discovered the truth once and for all. Not only had Pits been doing a little basement dealing, he had also, from time to time, indulged in a little discreet card-marking. He had picked these skills up in the long, monotonous hours of duty at a Berlin repple-depple in the months after the end of World War II. Some of those hot, muggy July nights Hank would lie awake in bed, head aching, and imagine Pits sitting in a nice warm farmhouse, shirt and shoes off, stinking to high heaven and grinning a great big shit-eating grin as he practiced cheating and dreamed of the suckers he would fleece when he got back home.
Hank endured these dreams and headaches for two weeks… and then, one night, the answer came. He would just send old Pits back to the repple-depple, that's what he would do. Some repple-depple, anyway. A repple-depple maybe fifty light-years away, or maybe five hundred, or five million. A repple-depple in the Phantom Zone. And Hank knew just how to do it. He sat bolt upright in bed, grinning a huge grin. His headache was gone at last.
“Just what the hell is a repple-depple, anyway?” he muttered, and then decided that was the least of his problems. He got out of bed and set to work right then, at three in the morning.
He caught up to Pits a week after the idea had struck him. Pits was sitting in front of Cooder's market, tipped back in a chair and looking at the pictures in a Gallery magazine. Looking at pictures of naked women, bottom-dealing, and stinking up repple-depples-these were the specialties of Pits Barfield, Hank decided.
It was Sunday, overcast and hot. People saw Hank walking toward where Albert “Pits” Barfield sat tipped back in his chair, workboots curled around the
