He looked at the coaxial cable coming out of the woman's forehead, the old man's eye. He watched Peter's legs moving in those big dreamy strides and wondered just how Bobbi had gotten the dog hairs on her dress - had she been giving Peter the equivalent of an interstellar oil-change? Had she been perhaps overcome by a simple human emotion? Love? Remorse? Guilt? Had she perhaps hugged her dog before filling that cabinet up with liquid again?
There are the batteries. Organic Delcos and Ever Readies, you might say. They're sucking them dry. Sucking them like vampires.
A new emotion crept through his fear and bewilderment and revulsion. It was fury, and Gardener welcomed it.
They make it hurrrt ... make it hurrrt ... make it hurrrrrr
Her voice cut off abruptly. The dull hum of the transformer changed pitch; cycled down even lower. The light coming out of the crate faded a little. He thought she had fallen unconscious, thereby lowering the machine's total output by x number of ... what? Volts? Dynes? Ohms? Who the f**k knew?
End it, son. Save my grandson and then end it.
For a moment the old man's voice filled his head, perfectly clear and perfectly lucid. Then it was gone. The old man's eye slipped closed.
The green light from the machine grew paler yet.
They woke up when I came in, he thought feverishly. The anger still pounded and drilled at his mind. He spat out a tooth almost without realizing he had done so. Even Peter woke up a little. Now they've gone back to whatever state they were in ... before. Sleeping? No. Not sleeping. Something else. Organic cold storage.
Do batteries dream of electric sheep? he thought, and uttered a cracked cackle.
He moved backward, away from the transformer,
(what exactly is it transforming how why)
away from the shower stalls, the cables. His eyes turned toward the array of gadgets ranged against the far wall. The wringer washer had something mounted on top of it, something that looked like the boomerang TV antennas you sometimes saw on the back of big limos. Behind the washer and to its left was an old-fashioned treadle sewing machine with a glass funnel mounted on its sidewheel. Kerosene drums with hoses and steel arms ... a butcher-knife, he saw had been welded to the end of one of those arms.
Christ, what is all this? What is it for?
A voice whispered: Maybe it's protection, Gard. In case the Dallas Police show up early. It's the Tommyknocker Yard-Sale Army - old washing machines with cellular antennas, Electrolux vacuums, chainsaws on wheels. Name it and claim it, baby.
He felt his sanity tottering. His eyes were drawn relentlessly back to Peter, Peter with most of his skull peeled away, Peter with a bunch of wires plugged into what remained of his head. His brain looked like a pallid veal roast with a bunch of temperature probes stuck into it.
Peter with his legs racing dreamily through that liquid, as if running away.
Bobbi, he thought in despair and fury, how could you do it to Peter? Christ! The people were bad, awful - but Peter was somehow worse. It was a curse piled on top of an obscenity. Peter, his legs loping and loping, as if running away in his dreams.
Batteries. Living batteries.
He backed into something. There was a dull metallic thump. He turned around and saw another shower cabinet, little blossoms of rust on its sides, its front door gone. Holes had been punched in the back. Wires had been threaded through these; they now hung limply down, large-bore steel plugs at their tips.
For you, Gard! his brain yammered. This plug's for you, like the beer commercials say! They'll open up the back of your skull, maybe short out your motor-control centers first so you can't move, and then they'll drill - drill for the place where they get their power. This plug's for you, for all you do ... all ready and waiting! Wow! Neato-keeno!
He snatched for his thoughts, which were tightening into a hysterical spiral, and brought them under control. Not for him; at least, not originally. This had already been used. There was that faint smell, bland and sudsy. Streaks of dried gunk on the inner walls - the last traces of that thick green liquid. It looks like the Wizard of Oz's se**n, he thought.
Do you mean Bobbi's got her sister floating in a big sperm bank?
That weird cackle escaped him again. He pressed the heel of his hand against his mouth, pressed hard, to stifle it.
He looked down and saw a pair of tan shoes tossed beside the shower cabinet. He picked one up, saw splashes of dried blood on it.
Bobbi's. Her one pair of good shoes. Her 'going-out' shoes. She was wearing them when she left for the funeral that day.
The other shoe was also bloody.
Gard looked behind the shower cabinet and saw the rest of the clothing Bobbi had been wearing that day.
The blood, all that blood.
He didn't want to touch the blouse, but the shape under it was too clear. He pinched as small a piece of it as he could between his fingers and peeled it up from Bobbi's good charcoal-coloured skirt.
Underneath the shirt was a gun. It was the biggest, oldest-looking gun Gardener had ever seen except for pictures in a book. After a moment he picked the gun up and rolled the cylinder. There were still four rounds in it.
Two gone. Gardener was willing to bet that one of those rounds had gone into Bobbi.
He pushed the cylinder back into place and stuck it in his belt. At once a voice spoke up in his mind. Shot your wife ... good f**king deal.
Never mind. The gun might come in handy.
When they see it's gone, it's you they'll come looking for, Gard. I thought you already came to that conclusion.
No; that was one thing he didn't think he had to worry about. They would have noticed the changed words on the computer screen, but these clothes hadn't been touched since Bobbi took them off (or since they took them off her, which was probably more likely).
They must be too exalted when they get in here to bother much about housekeeping, he thought. Damn good thing there's no flies.
He touched the gun again. This time the voice in his head was silent. It had decided, perhaps, that there were no wives here to worry about.
If you have to shoot Bobbi, will you be able to?
That was a question he couldn't answer.
Slisshhh-slisshhh-slisshhh.
How long had Bobbi and her company been gone? He didn't know; hadn't the slightest idea. Time had no meaning in here; the old man was right. This was hell. And did Peter still respond to his strange mistress's caress when she came in here?
His stomach was on the edge of revolt.
He had to get out - get out right now. He felt like a creature in a fairy tale, Bluebeard's wife in the secret room, Jack grubbing in the giant's pile of gold. He felt ripe for discovery. But he held the stiff, bloody garment in front of him as if frozen. Not as if; he was frozen.
Where's Bobbi?
She had a sunstroke.
Hell of a strange sunstroke that had soaked her blouse with blood. Gardener had retained a morbid, sickish interest in guns and the damage they could do to the human body. If she had been shot with the big old gun now in his own belt, he guessed Bobbi had no right to be alive - even if she had been taken quickly to a hospital which specialized in the emergency treatment of gunshot wounds, she probably would have died.
They brought me in here when I was blown apart, but the Tommyknockers fixed me up right smart.
Not for him. The old shower stall was not for him. Gardener had a feeling that he would be put out of the way with more finality. The shower stall had been for Bobbi.
They had brought her in here, and ... what?
Why, hooked her up to their batteries, of course. Not Anne, she had not been here then. But to Peter ... and Hillman.
He dropped the blouse ... then forced himself to pick it up again and put it back on top of the skirt. He didn't know how much of the real world they noticed when they got in here (not much, he guessed) but he didn't want to take any extra chances.
He looked at the holes in the back of the cabinet, the dangling cords with the steel plugs at their tips.
The green light had begun to pulse brighter and more rapidly again. He turned around. Anne's eyes were open again. Her short hair floated around her head. He could still see that unending hate in her eyes, now mixed with horror and growing strangeness.
Now there were bubbles.
They floated up from her mouth in a brief, thick stream.
Thought/sound exploded in his head.
She was screaming.
Gardener fled.
7
Real terror is the most physically debilitating of all emotions. It saps the endocrines, dumps muscle-tightening organic drugs into the bloodstream, races the heart, exhausts the mind. Jim Gardener staggered away from Bobbi Anderson's shed on rubber legs, his eyes bugging, his mouth hanging stupidly open (the tongue lolled in one corner like a dead thing), his bowels hot and full, his stomach cramped.
It was hard to think beyond the crude, powerful images which stuttered on and off in his mind like bar-room neon: those bodies hung up on hooks, impaled like bugs impaled on pins by cruel, bored children; Peter's relentlessly moving legs; the bloody blouse with the bullet-hole in it; the plugs; the old-fashioned washing machine topped with the boomerang antenna. Strongest of all was the image of that short, thick stream of bubbles emerging from Anne Anderson's mouth as she screamed inside his head.
He got into the house, rushed into the bathroom and knelt in front of the toilet bowl only to discover he couldn't puke. He wanted to puke. He thought of maggoty hot-dogs, moldy pizza, pink lemonade with hairballs floating in it; finally he rammed two fingers down his throat. He was able to trip a simple gag reaction by this last, but no more. He couldn't sick it up. Simple as that.
If I can't, I'll go crazy.
Fine, go crazy if you have to. But first do what you have to do. Keep it together that long. And just by the way, Gard, do you have any more questions about what you should do?
Not anymore he didn't. Peter's relentlessly moving legs had convinced him. That stream of bubbles had convinced him. He wondered how he could have hesitated so long in the face of a power that was so obviously corrupting, so obviously dark.
Because you were mad, he answered himself. Gard nodded. That was it. No more explanation was needed. He had been mad - and not just for the last month or so. It was late to wake up, oh yes, very late, but late was better than never.
The sound. Slisshhh-slisshhh-slisshhh.
The smell. Bland yet meaty. A smell his mind insisted on associating with raw veal slowly spoiling in milk.
His stomach lurched. A burning, acidic burp scorched his throat. Gardener moaned.
The idea - that glimmer - returned to him, and he clutched at it. It might be possible either to abort all of this . or to at least put it on hold for a long, long time. It just might.
You got to let the world go to hell in its own way, Gard, two minutes to midnight or not.
He thought of Ted the Power Man again, thought of mad military organizations trading ever more sophisticated weapons with each other, and that angry, inarticulate, obsessed part of his mind tried to shout down sanity one final time.
Shut up, Gardener told it.
He went into the guest bedroom and pulled off his shirt. He looked out the window and now he could see sparks of light coming out of the woods. Dark had come. They were returning. They would go into the shed and maybe have a little seance. A meeting of minds around the shower cabinets. Fellowship in the homey green glow of raped minds.
Enjoy it, Gardener thought. He put the .45 under the foot of the mattress, then unbuckled his belt. It may be the last time, so
He looked down at his shirt. Sticking out of the pocket was a bow of metal. It was the padlock, of course. The padlock which belonged on the shed door.
8
For a moment which probably seemed much longer than it actually was, Gardener was unable to move at all. That feeling of unreal fairy-tale terror stole back into his tired heart. He was reduced to a horrified spectator watching those lights move steadily along the path. Soon they would reach the overgrown garden. They would cut through. They would cross the dooryard. They would reach the shed. They would see the missing padlock. Then they would come into the house and either kill Jim Gardener or send his discorporated atoms to Altair-4, wherever that was.
His first coherent thought was simple panic yelling at the top of its voice: Run! Get out of here!
His second thought was the shaky resurfacing of reason. Guard your thoughts. If you ever guarded them before, guard them now.
He stood with his shirt off, his unbuckled and unzipped jeans sagging around his hips, staring at the padlock in his shirt pocket.
Get out there right now and put it back. Right NOW!
No ... no time ... Christ, there's no time. They're at the garden.
There might be. There might be just enough if you quit playing pocket-pool and get moving!
He broke the paralysis with a final harsh effort of will, bent, snatched up the lock with the key still sticking out of the bottom, and ran, zipping his pants as he went. He slipped out the back door, paused for just a moment as the last two flashlights slipped into the garden and disappeared, then ran for the shed.
Faintly, vaguely, he could hear their voices in his mind - full of awe, wonder, jubilation.
He closed them out.
Green light fanning out from the shed door, which stood ajar.
Christ, Gard, how could you have been so stupid? his cornered mind raved, but he knew how. It was easy to forget such mundane things as relocking doors when you had seen a couple of people hung up on posts with coaxial cables coming out of their heads.
He could hear them in the garden now - could hear the rustle of the useless giant cornstalks.
As he reached toward the hasp, lock in hand, he remembered closing it before dropping it into his pocket. His hand jerked at the thought and he dropped the goddam thing. It thumped to the ground. He looked for it, and at first couldn't see it at all.
No ... there it was, there just beyond the narrow fan of pulsing green light. There was the lock, yes, but the key wasn't in it anymore. The key had fallen out when the lock thumped to the ground.
God my God my God, his mind sobbed. His body was now covered with oozing sweat. His hair hung in his eyes. He thought he must smell like a rancid monkey.
He could hear cornstalks and leaves rustling louder. Someone laughed quietly -the sound was shockingly near. They would be out of the garden in seconds - he could feel those seconds bustling by, like. self-important businessmen with pot bellies and attache cases. He went down on his knees, snatched up the lock, and began to sweep his hand back and forth in the dirt, trying to find the key.
Oh you bastard where are you? Oh you bastard where are you? Oh you bastard! Where are you?
Aware that even now, in this panic, he had thrown a screen around his thoughts. Was it working? He didn't know. And if he couldn't find the key, it didn't matter, did it?
Oh you bastard where are you?
He saw a dull glint of silver beyond where he was sweeping his hand - the key had gone much further than he would have believed. His seeing it was only dumb luck ... like Bobbi stumbling over that little rim of protruding metal in the earth two months before, he supposed.
Gardener snatched it and bolted to his feet. He would be hidden from them by the angle of the house for just a moment longer, but that was all he had left. One more screw-up - even a little one - would finish him, and there might not be enough time left even if he performed each of the mundane little operations involved in padlocking a door perfectly.
The fate of the world may now depend on whether a man can lock a shed door on the first try, he thought dazedly. Modem life is so challenging.
For a moment he didn't think he was even going to be able to slot the key in the lock. It chattered all the way around the slit without going in, a prisoner of his shaking hand. Then, when he thought it really was all over, it slid home. He turned it. The lock opened. He closed the door, slipped the arm of the padlock through the hasp, and then clicked it shut. He pulled the key out and folded it into his sweating hand. He slid around the corner of the shed like oil. At the exact moment he did, the men and women who had gone out to the ship emerged into the dooryard, moving in single file.
Gardener reached up to hang the key on the nail where he had found it. For one nightmare moment he thought he was going to drop it again and have to hunt for it in the high weeds growing on this side of the shed. When it slipped onto the nail he let out his breath in a shuddering sigh.
Part of him wanted not to move, to just freeze here. Then he decided he'd better not take the risk. After all, he didn't know that Bobbi had her key.
He continued slipping along the side of the shed. His left ankle struck the haft of an old harrow that had been left to rust in the weeds, and he had to clamp his teeth over a cry of pain. He stepped over it and slipped around another corner. Now he was behind the shed.
That sudsing sound was maddeningly loud back here.
I'm right behind those goddam showers, he thought. They're floating inches from me ... literally inches.
A rustle of weeds. A minute scrape of metal. Gardener felt simultaneously like laughing and screeching. They hadn't had Bobbi's key. Someone had just come around to the side of the shed and taken the key Gardener had hung up again only seconds before - probably Bobbi herself.
Still warm from my hand, Bobbi, did you notice?
He stood in back of the shed, pressed against the rough wood, arms slightly spread, palms tight on the boards.
Did you notice? And do you hear me? Do any of you hear me? Is someone -Allison or Archinbourg or Berringer - going to suddenly pop his head around here and yell out 'Peek-a-boo, Gard, we seeee you?' Is the shield still working?
He stood there and waited for them to take him.
They didn't. On an ordinary summer night he probably would not have been able to hear the metallic rattle as the door was unlocked - it would have been masked by the loud ree-ree-ree of the crickets. But now there were no crickets. He beard the unlocking; heard the creak of the hinges as the door was opened; heard the hinges creak again as the door was pushed shut. They were inside.
Almost at once the pulses of light failing through the cracks began to speed up and become brighter, and his mind was split by an agonized scream:
Hurts! It hurrrrr
He moved away from the shed and went back to the house.