The Tommyknockers

'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.

4

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 front rungs, checking out all those Girls Next Door; they felt-heard the one thought beating steadily

(reppledepplereppledepplereppledepple)

in Hank's mind, they saw the great big ghetto-blaster radio he was carrying

by the handle, saw the pistol jammed into the front of his pants, and they stepped away quickly.

Pits was deeply absorbed in the Gallery gatefold. It showed a great deal of a girl named Candi (whose hobbies, the magazine said, included 'sailing and men with hands both strong and gentle'), and he looked up far too late to do anything constructive on his own behalf. Considering the size of the pistol Hank was carrying, people opined (usually without even opening their mouths, except to shovel in more food) over supper that night, it had probably been too late for poor old Pits when he got up that Sunday morning.

Pits's chair came down with a bang.

'Hey, Hank! What -'

Hank pulled the gun - it was a souvenir of his own Army service. He had done his time in Korea, and not in any repple-depple, either.

'You just want to sit right there,' Hank said, 'or they're gonna be washing your guts off that store window, you cheating son of a bitch.'

'Hank ... Hank ... what ...

Hank reached inside his shirt and brought out a small pair of Borg earphones. He jacked them into the big radio, turned it on, and tossed the phones toward Pits.

'Put em on, Pits. Let's see you deal your way out of this one.'

'Hank ... please . . .'

'I ain't going to treat with you on this, Pits,' Hank said with great sincerity. 'I'll give you a five-count to put on those earphones, and then I'm gonna give you a sinus operation.'

'Christ, Hank, it was a f**king quarter-limit poker game!' Pits screamed. Sweat poured down his face, stained his khaki shirt. The smell of him was large, vinegary, and amazingly repugnant.

'One ... two . . .'

Pits looked around wildly. There was no one there. The street had cleared magically. There wasn't so much as a car to be seen moving on Main Street, although there were plenty slant-parked in front of the market. Complete silence had fallen. In it, both he and Hank could hear the music coming from the earphones -Los Lobos wondering if the wolf would survive.

'It was a lousy three-raise quarter-limit poker game and I hardly ever did it anyway!' Pits shrieked. 'Somebody for Chrissake put a halter over this guy!'

'. . . three . . .'

And with a final, ludicrous defiance, Pits screamed: 'And he's a sore f**king loser!'

'Four,' Hank said, and raised his service pistol.

Pits, his entire shirt now stained nearly black with sweat, his eyes rolling, smelling like a manure pile which had just been napalmed, gave in. 'Okay! Okay! Okay!' He screamed, and picked up the earphones. 'I'm doin' it, see? I'm doin' it!'

He put the phones on. Still holding the pistol on him, Hank bent over the ghetto-blaster, which could play cassette tapes as well as receive AM and FM stations. The Play button below the cassette holder had been taped over. Written on the tape was this one rather ominous word: Send.

Hank pushed it.

Pits started to scream. Then the screams began to fade, as if someone inside were turning down his volume. At the same time someone seemed to be turning down his vividness, his physical coherence ... his there-ness. Pits Barfield faded like a photograph. Now his mouth was moving soundlessly, his skin was milk.

A little piece of reality - a piece of reality roughly the size of a Dutch door's lower half - seemed to open behind him. There was a feeling that reality - Haven reality -had rotated on some unknowable axis, like a trick bookcase in a haunted-house spoof. Behind Pits now was an eerie purple-black landscape.

Hank's hair began to flutter about his ears; his collar stuttered with a sound like a silenced automatic weapon; the litter on the asphalt - candy wrappers, flattened cigarette packages, a couple of Humpty Dumpty potato chip bags - zoomed across the pavement and into that hole. They were drawn on the river of air which flowed into that nearly airless other place. Some of that litter went between Pits's legs. And some, Hank thought, seemed to pass right through them.

Then, suddenly, as if he himself had become as light as the litter which had been on the market's paved apron, Pits was vacuumed into that hole. His Gallery magazine went after him, pages flapping like batwings. Good for you, f**kface, Hank thought, now you got something to read in the repple-depple. Pits's chair toppled over, scraped across the asphalt, and lodged half-in, half-out of that opening. A wind-tunnel of air was now rushing around Hank. He bent over his radio, finger coming to rest on the Stop button.

Just before he pushed it, he heard a high, thin cry coming from that other place. He looked up, thinking: That ain't Pits.

It came again.

'. . . hilly . . .'

Hank frowned. It was a kid's voice. A kid's voice, and there was something familiar about it. Something

'. . . over yet? I want to come ho-oome .

There was a bright, toneless jingle as the window in Cooder's market, which had blown inward in the town-hall explosion the previous Sunday, was now sucked outward. A glass-storm flew all around Hank, leaving him miraculously untouched.

'. . . please, it's hard to breeeeeeathe .

Now the B&M Beans on special which had been pyramided in the market's front window began to fly around Hank as they were sucked through the doorway in reality he had somehow opened. Five-pound bags of lawn food and ten-pound bags of charcoal slithered across the pavement with dry, papery sounds.

Gotta shut the sucker up, Hank thought, and as if to confirm this judgement, a can of beans slammed into the back of his head, bounced high in the air, then zoomed into that purple-black bruise.

'Hilleeeeee -'

Hank hit the Stop button. The doorway disappeared at once. There was a woody crunch as the chair lodged in the opening was cut in two, on an almost perfect diagonal. Half of the chair lay on the asphalt. The other half was nowhere to be seen.

Randy Kroger, the German who had owned Cooder's since the late fifties, grabbed Hank and turned him around. 'You're payin for that display window, Buck,' he said.

'Sure, Randy, whatever you say,' Hank agreed, dazedly rubbing the lump that was rising on the back of his head.

Kroger pointed at the strange, slanting half-chair lying on the asphalt. 'You're paying for the chair, too,' he announced, and strode back inside.

That was how July ended.

5

Monday, August 1st:

John Leandro finished talking, knocked back the rest of his beer, and asked David Bright: 'So what do you think he'll say?'

Bright thought for a moment. He and Leandro were in the Bounty Tavern, a wildly overdecorated Bangor pub with only two real marks in its favor - it was almost directly across the street from the editorial offices of the Bangor Daily News, and on Mondays you could get Heineken for a buck and a quarter a bottle.

'I think he'll start by telling you to hurry over to Derry and finish getting the rest of the Community Calendar,' Bright said. 'Then I think he might ask you if you've thought about psychiatric help.'

Leandro looked absurdly crushed. He was only twenty-four, and the last two stories he had covered - the disappearance (read: presumed murder) of the two state troopers, and the suicide of a third - had whetted his appetite for the high-voltage stuff. When stacked up against being in on a grim midnight hunt for the bodies of two state troopers, reporting on the Derry Amvets' covered-dish supper wasn't much. He didn't want the heavy stuff to end. Bright felt almost sorry for the little twerp - trouble was, that was what Leandro was. Being a twerp at twenty-four was acceptable. He was pretty sure, however, that Johnny Leandro was still going to be a twerp at forty-four ... sixty-four ... at eighty-four, if he lived that long.

A twerp of eighty-four was a slightly awesome and wholly frightening idea. Bright decided to order another beer after all.

'I was just joking,' Bright said.

'Then you think he will let me follow it up?'

'No.'

'But you just said

'I was joking about the psychiatric-help part,' Bright said patiently. 'That's what I was joking about.'

'He' was Peter Reynault, the city editor. Bright had learned a good many years ago that city editors had one thing in common with God Himself, and he suspected that Johnny Leandro was about to learn it himself very soon now. Reporters might propose, but it was city editors like Peter Reynault who eventually disposed.

'But - '

'You have nothing to follow up,' Bright said.

If Haven's inner circle - those who had made the trip into Bobbi Anderson's shed -could have heard what Leandro said next, his life expectancy might well have sunk to days ... maybe mere hours.

'I've got Haven to follow up,' was what he said, and quaffed the rest of his Heineken Dark in three long swallows. 'Everything starts there. The kid disappears in Haven, the woman dies in Haven, Rhodes and Gabbons are coming back from Haven. Dugan commits suicide. Why? Because he loved the McCausland woman, he says. The McCausland woman from Haven.'

'Don't forget lovable old Gramps,' Bright said. 'He's running around saying his grandson's disappearance was a conspiracy. I kept expecting him to start whispering about Fu Manchu and white slavery.'

'So what is it?' Leandro asked dramatically. 'What's going on in Haven?'

'It is the insidious doctor,' Bright said. His beer arrived. He no longer wanted it. He only wanted to get out of here. Bringing up loveable old Gramps had been a mistake. Thinking about loveable old Gramps made him feel a trifle uneasy. Gramps was obviously off his rocker, but there had been something about his eyes ...

'What?'

Dr Fu Manchu. If you see Nayland Smith hanging around, I think you've got the story of the century.' Bright leaned forward and whispered hoarsely: 'White slavery. Remember who you heard it from when you get the call from the New York Times.'

'I don't think that's very funny, David.'

An eighty-four-year-old twerp, Bright thought again. Imagine it.

'Or, here's one,' Bright said. 'Little green men. The invasion of earth is already underway, see, only no one knows it. And - TA-DA! No One Will Believe This Heroic Young News-Hawk! Robert Redford Stars as John Leandro in This Nail-Biting Saga of - '

The bartender wandered down and said, 'You want to turn it down?'

Leandro got up, his face stiff. He dropped three dollar bills on the bar. 'Your sense of humor is adolescent, David.'

'Or try this,' Bright said dreamily. 'It's both Fu Manchu and green men from space. An alliance formed in hell. And no one knows but you, Johnny. Klaatu barada nictu!'

'Well, I don't care if Reynault lets me follow it up or not,' Leandro said, and Bright saw that he might have twanged Johnny's strings just a little too hard; the twerp was furious. 'My vacation starts next Friday. I may just go down to Haven. Follow it up on my own time.'

'Sure,' Bright said, excited. He knew he should let up- pretty soon Leandro was probably going to try to punch him in the mouth - but the guy just kept giving him openings. 'Sure, that's gotta be part of it! Redford wouldn't take the part unless he could go it alone. The Lone Wolf! Klaatu barada nictu! Wow! Just remember to wear your special watch when you go down there.'

'What watch?' Leandro asked, his face still angry. Oh, he was pissed, all right, but he kept leading with his chin just the same.

'You know, the one that sends out an ultrasonic signal that only Superman can hear when you pull out the stem,' Bright said, demonstrating with his own watch (and spilling a fair amount of beer into his crotch). 'It goes zeeeeeeeee - '

'I don't care what Peter Reynault thinks, and I don't care how many stupid jokes you make,' Leandro said. 'You both just might get a big surprise.'

He started out, then turned back.

'And for the record, I think you're a cynical shithead with no imagination.'

Having delivered this valedictory, Johnny Leandro turned on his heel and stalked grandly out.

Bright lifted his glass and tipped it toward the bartender. 'Let's drink to the cynical shitheads of the world,' he said. 'We have no imagination, but we're remarkably resistant to twerpism.'

'Whatever you say,' the bartender said. He believed he had seen it all before ... but then, he had never tended bar in Haven.

6

Tuesday, August 2nd:

There were six of them who met late that afternoon in Newt Berringer's office. It was going on five P.m., but the clock in the tower - a tower that looked real but which a bird could easily have flown through, if there had been any birds left in Haven Village - still read five past three. All six had spent some time in Bobbi's shed; Adley McKeen was the most recent addition to their number. The others included Newt, Dick Allison, Kyle, Hazel, and Frank Spruce.

They discussed the few things they had to discuss without talking aloud.

Frank Spruce asked how Bobbi was.

Still alive, Newt responded; no one knew any more. She might come out of the shed again. More likely she would not. Either way, they would know when it happened.

Discussion turned briefly to what Hank Buck had done the day before, and what Hank said he'd heard coming from that other world. None of them was much concerned with the late and not so great Pits Barfield. Perhaps the punishment had suited the crime; perhaps it had been a little too extreme. It didn't matter. It was over. Nothing had happened to Hank as a result of what he had done; he had given Randy Kroger a personal check for the broken display window and the goods that had been sucked through the hole Hank had spiked into reality. Kroger called Northern National in Bangor to verify the check. He found it was good, and that was all he cared about.

There was little they could have done about Hank even if they'd had a mind to; the town's one jail cell was in the town hall's basement, a converted storeroom where Ruth had jugged a few weekend drunks, and it might hold Hank Buck for all of ten minutes. A strong fourteen-year-old could, have broken out of it. And they couldn't very well have sent Hank up to county jail. The charge would have looked pretty odd. The alternatives available to them were simple - let him alone or pack him off to Altair-4. Luckily, they were able to look closely into Hank's mind and motivations. They saw that his anger and confusion were subsiding, as they were all over town. He was not apt to do anything radical again, so they took away his converted radio, asked him not to make another, and moved on to what concerned them a bit more ... the voice he claimed to have heard.

It was David Brown, all right, Frank Spruce said now. Anybody doubt it?

No one did.

David Brown was on Altair-4.

No one knew exactly where Altair-4 was, or what it was, and they didn't much care. The words themselves came from some old movie and meant no more than the name Tommyknockers, which came from some old rhyme. What mattered (and even this didn't, much) was that Altair-4 was a kind of cosmic warehouse, a place where all sorts of things were stored. Hank had sent Pits there, but first he had put the smelly old son of a bitch through some half-assed sort of disintegration process.

This had apparently not been the case with David Brown.

Hazel asked if they could get him back.

Long, thoughtful silence.

(yes probably yes)

Ike

This last was not ascribable to any one person; it was group-think, hive. and complete in itself.

(but why why bother)

They looked at each other with no emotion. They could feel emotion, but not over such a minor matter as this.

Bring him back, Hazel said indifferently. It'll please Bryant and Marie. And Ruth. She would have wanted it. And we all did love her, you know. Her thought had the tone of a woman suggesting that a friend buy her son a soft drink as a treat for being good.

No, Adley said, and they all looked toward him. It was the first time he had entered their conversation. He looked embarrassed but pushed on anyway. Every paper and TV station in the state'd be down here to get a story on the 'miracle return.' They think he must be dead, only four and gone over two weeks now. If he shows up, it'll make too much whoop-de-doo.

They were nodding now.

And what would he say? Newt put in. When they asked him where he'd been, what would he say?

We could blank his memories, Hazel said. That would be no problem at all, and the press people would accept amnesia as perfectly natural. Under the circumstances.

(yes but that's not the problem)

It was the many voices again, as one voice. They came together in a strange combination of words and images. The problem was that things had now gone too far to allow anyone in town except for the most transient through-travelers ... and even most of them could be discouraged with fake road construction and detour signs. The last people they wanted in Haven was a bunch of reporters and TV camera crews. And the clock tower wouldn't show up on film; it was a mind-slide, really no more than a hallucination. No, David Brown was best left alone, all things considered. He would be all right for yet a while. They knew little about Altair-4, but they did know that time ran at a different speed there - on Altair-4, less than a year had passed since earth had been flung out of the sun. So David Brown had in fact just gotten there. Of course he still might die; strange microbes might invade his system, some strange Altair-4 warehouse-rat might gobble him up, or he might die of simple shock. But he probably wouldn't, and if he did, it really wasn't very important.

I've a feeling the boy might come in handy, Kyle said.

(how)

As a diversion.

(what do you mean)