and pushed the phone into his ear.
“What's in the pack?” Gardener asked.
“Batt'ries. Let's go.”
Moss had switched the gadget on, seemed to listen, nodded, then pointed the curved antenna at the first motor. It rose in the air an hung there. Holding the controller in one hand and the customized metal-detector in the other, Moss walked toward the motor. For every step he took, the motor retreated a similar distance. Gard brought up the rear.
Moss walked the motor between the house and the shed, urging it around the Tomcat, and then ahead of him through Bobbi's garden. A wide path had been worn through this, but on both sides of it the plants continued to grow in rampant splendor. Some of the sunflowers were now twelve feet high. They reminded Gardener of a science-fiction novel called The Day of the Triffids he had read as a boy. One night about a week ago he had awakened from a terrible nightmare. In it, the sunflowers in the garden had uprooted themselves and begun to walk, eldritch light shining from their centers and onto the ground like the beams of flashlights with green lenses.
There were summer squashes in the garden as big as U-boat torpedoes. Tomatoes the size of basketballs. Some of the corn was nearly as high as the sunflowers. Curious, Gardener had picked one of the ears; it was easily two feet long. A single ear, had it been good, would have fed two hungry men. But Gard had spat out the single mouthful of butter-and-sugar kernels he had bitten off, grimacing and wiping his mouth. The taste had been meaty and hideous. Bobbi was growing a garden full of huge plants, but the vegetables were inedible… perhaps even poisonous.
The motor had cruised serenely ahead of them along the path, cornstalks rustling and bending on either side as it pushed its way through. Gardener saw smears and swatches of grease and engine oil on some of the militantly green, swordlike leaves. On the far side of the garden, the motor began to sag. Moss had lowered the antenna, and the motor settled to the earth with a gentle thump.
“What's up?” Gardener had asked.
Moss only grunted and produced a dime. He stuck it in the base of his controller, twisted it, and pulled six double-A Duracells out of the battery compartment. Tossed them indifferently on the ground. “Gimme some more,” he said.
Gardener unshouldered the knapsack, undid the straps, opened the flap, and saw what looked at first glance like a billion double-A's; it was as if someone had hit the Grand Jackpot at Atlantic City and the machine had paid off in batteries instead of bucks.
“Jesus!”
“I ain't Him,” Moss said. “Gimme half a dozen of those suckers.”
For once Gardener didn't seem to have a wisecrack left in him. He handed six batteries over and watched Moss fit them into the compartment. Then Moss replaced the battery hatch, turned it on, refitted the earplug in his ear, and said, “Let's go.”
Forty yards into the woods there was another battery change; sixty yards after that, another. Floating the motor sucked less juice when it was going downhill, but by the time Moss had finally settled the big motor-block on the edge of the trench, they had gone through forty-two batteries.
Back and forth, back and forth; one by one they brought the pieces of pumping machinery from Freeman Moss's truck to the edge of the trench. The knapsack on Gardener's back grew steadily lighter.
On the fourth trip, Gard had asked Moss if he could try it. A large industrial pump, whose raison d'etre before this odd little side-trip had probably been pumping sewage from clogged septic tanks, was sitting on a tilted angle about a hundred yards from the trench. Moss was once more changing batteries. Dead double-A's lay all along the path now, reminding Gard with odd poignance of the kid on the beach at Arcadia Beach. The kid with the firecrackers. The kid whose mother had given up drinking… and everything else. The kid who had known about the Tommyknockers.
“Well, you can give her a try.” Moss handed over the gadget. “I could use a smidge of help, and I don't mind sayin” so. Wears a man out, liftin” all that.” He saw Gardener's look and said: “Oh, ayuh, I'm doin” part of it m'self; that's what the plug's for. You can try it, but I don't think you'll have much luck. You ain't like us.”
“I noticed. I'm the one that isn't going to have to buy a set of teeth from Sears and Roebuck when all this is over.”
Moss looked at him sourly and said nothing.
Gard used his handkerchief to wipe off the brown coating of wax Moss had left on the earplug, then stuck it in his ear. He heard a distant sound like the one you heard when you held a conch shell to your ear. He pointed the antenna at the pump as he had seen Moss do, then cautiously flickered the antenna upward. The quality of the dim seashore rumble in his ear changed. The pump moved the tiniest bit-he was sure it wasn't just his imagination. But a instant later, two other things happened. He felt warm blood coursing down his face from his nose, and his head was filled with a blaring voice. I CARPET YOUR DEN OR YOUR WHOLE HOME FOR LESS!” screamed some radio announcer, who was suddenly sitting right in the middle of Gardener's head and apparently yelling into an electric bullhorn. “AND YES WE DO HAVE A NEW SHIPMENT OF THROW-RUGS! THE LAST SHIPMENT SOLD OUT FAST, SO BE SURE-”
“Oww, Jesus, shut up!” Gardener had cried. He dropped the handset and reached for his head. The earphone was dragged out of his ear, and the blaring announcer cut out. He had been left with a nosebleed and a head that was ringing like a bell.
Freeman Moss, startled out of his taciturnity, stared at Gardener with wide eyes. “What in Christ's name was that?” he asked.
“That,” Gardener said weakly, “was WZON, Where It's Only Rock and Roll
Because That's the Way You Like lt. You mind if I sit down for a minute, Moss? Think I just pissed myself.”
“Your nose is bleedin”, too.”
“No shit, Sherlock,” Gardener said.
“Think maybe you better let me use the lifter after this.” Gard had been more than happy to abide by that. It took them the rest of the day to get all the equipment out to the trench, and Moss was so tired when the last piece arrived that Gardener had to practically carry the man back to his truck.
“Feel like I just chopped two cord of wood and shit m'brains out while I was doin” it,” the older man gasped.
After that, Gardener hadn't really expected the man to come back. But Moss had shown up promptly at seven the next day. He had been driving a beat-up split-grille Pontiac instead of his truck. He got out of the Pontiac banging a dinner bucket against his leg.
“Come on. Let's get to it.”
Gardener respected Moss more than the other three “helpers” put together… in fact, he liked him.
Moss glanced at him as they walked out to the ship with the morning dew of that Friday morning wetting down the cuffs of their pants. “Caught that one,” he grunted. “You're okay too, I guess.”
That was about all Mr Freeman Moss had to say to him that day.
They sunk a nest of hoses into the trench and rigged more hoses-outflow hoses, this time-to direct the water they pumped out downhill, on a slope that ran a bit southeast of Bobbi's place. These “dumper hoses,” as Moss called them, were big, wide-bore rolls of canvas that Gardener supposed had been scavenged from the VFD.
“Ayuh, got a few there, got a few other places,” Moss said, and would offer no more on that subject.
Before starting the pumps, he had Gardener pound a number of U-shaped clamps over the dumper hoses. “Else they'll go whippin” around, sprayin” water everywhere. If you've ever seen a fireman's hose outta control, you know someone c'n get hurt. And we ain't got enough men to stand around holdin” a bunch of pissin” hoses all day.”
“Not that there'd be any volunteers standing in line. Right?”
Freeman Moss had looked at him silently, saying nothing for a moment. Then he grunted: “Pound those clamps in good. We'll still have to stop pretty often to pound “em back in. They'll loosen up.”
“Can't you control the outflow so you don't have to bother with all this clamping shit?” Gardener asked.
Moss rolled his eyes impatiently at his ignorance. “Sure,” he said, “but there's one fuck of a lot of water down in that hole, and I'd like to get it out before doomsday, if it's all the same to you.”
Gardener held out his hands, half-laughing. “Hey, I was just asking,” he said. “Peace.”
The man had only grunted in his inimitable Freeman Moss style.
By nine-thirty, water was pouring downhill and away from the ship at a great rate. It was cold and clear and as sweet as water can be-which is sweet indeed, as anyone with a good well could attest. By noon they had created a brand-new stream. It was six feet wide, shallow, but brawling right along, carrying pine needles, loamy black topsoil, and small shrubs away. There was not much for the men to do but to sit around and make sure none of the plump, straining dumper hoses came free and started to fly around, spraying water like bombed-out fire hydrants. Moss shut the pumps down regularly, in sequence, so that they could pound in loose clamps or switch them to a new place along the hose if the ground was getting loose where they had been.
By three o'clock, the stream was rolling larger bushes downstream, and just before five o'clock, Gardener heard the rending rumble of a biggish tree going over. He got up and craned his neck, but it had happened too far down the new stream's course to see.
“Sounded like a pine,” Moss said.
It was Gardener's turn to look at Moss and say nothing.
“Might have been a spruce,” Moss said, and although the man's face remained perfectly straight, Gardener believed Moss might just have made a joke. A very small one, but a joke, just the same.
“Is this water reaching the road, do you think?”
“Oh, ayuh, I sh'd suspect.”
“It'll wash it out, won't it?”
“Nope. Town crew's already putting in a new culve't. Large bore. S'pose they'll have to detour traffic for a couple of days while they tear up the tarvy, but there ain't's much traffic out this way as there used to be, anyway.”
“I noticed,” Gardener said.
“Damn good thing, if you ask me. Summer people're always a pain in the ass. Looka here, Gardener-I'm gonna cut the outflow on these pumps way down, but they'll still pump fifteen, maybe seventeen gallons a minute overnight. With four pumps workin”, that's thirty-eight hundred gallons an hour, all night long. Not bad for runnin” on automatic. Come on, let's go. Yon ship's lovely, but it makes my blood pressure jumpy. I'll drink one of your beers before I head home to the missus, if you'll let it be so.”
Moss had shown up again yesterday, Saturday, in his old Pontiac, and had promptly run the pumps up to capacity-thirty-five gallons per minute each, eighty-four hundred gallons an hour.
This morning, no Freeman Moss. He had finally played out like the others, leaving Gardener to consider the same old options.
First option: Business as usual.
Second option: Run like hell. He had already come to the conclusion that if Bobbi died, he would suffer a fatal accident soon afterward. It might take as long as half an hour for him to have it. If he decided to run, would they know in advance? Gardener didn't think so. He and the rest of Haven still played poker the old-fashioned way: with all the cards dealt face down. Oh, and by the way, gang-how far would he have to run to get out of the reach of them and their Buck Rogers gadgetry?
