The Tommyknockers

1

'You ready, Gard?'

Gardener was sitting on the front porch, looking out at Route 9. The voice came from behind him, and it was easy - too easy - for him not to flash on a hundred sleazy prison movies, where the warden arrives to escort the condemned man along the Last Mile. Such scenes always beginning, of course, with the warden growling, Are you ready, Rocky?

Ready for this? You got to be kidding.

He got up, turned around, saw the equipment in Bobbi's arms, then the little smile on Bobbi's face. There was something knowing in that smile that he didn't like.

'See something funny?' he asked.

'Heard it. Heard you, Gard. You were thinking about old prison movies,' Bobbi said. 'And then you thought, "Ready for this? You got to be kidding." I caught all of that one, and that's very rare ... unless you're deliberately sending. That's why I was smiling.'

'You were peeking.'

'Yes. And it's getting easier to do,' Bobbi said, still smiling.

From behind his decaying mental shield, Gardener thought: I have a gun now, Bobbi. It's under my bed. I got it in The First Reformed Church of the Tommyknockers. It was dangerous ... but it would be more dangerous not to know just how deep Bobbi's ability to 'peek' now went.

Bobbi's smile faltered a little. 'What was that one?' she asked.

'You tell me,' he said, and when her smile began to change to a look of narrow suspicion he added easily, 'Come on, Bobbi, I was just pulling your string a little. I was only wondering what you got there.'

Bobbi brought the equipment over. There were two rubber snorkel mouthpieces attached to tanks and homemade regulators.

'We wear these,' she said. 'When we go inside.'

Inside.

Just the word lit a hot spark in his belly and triggered all sorts of conflicting emotions - awe, terror, anticipation, curiosity, tension. Part of him felt like a superstitious native preparing to walk on taboo ground; the rest felt like a kid on Christmas morning.

'The air inside is different, then,' Gardener said.

'Not so different.' Bobbi had put her makeup on indifferently this morning, perhaps having decided there was no longer any need to hide the accelerating physical changes from Gardener. Gard realized he could see Bobbi's tongue moving inside her head as she spoke ... only it didn't look precisely like a tongue anymore. And the pupils of Bobbi's eyes looked bigger, but somehow uneven and wavering, as if they were peering up at him from under water. Water with a slight greenish tinge. He felt his stomach turn over.

'Not so different,' she said. 'Just ... rotten.'

'Rotten?'

'The ship's been sealed for over twenty-five thousand centuries,' Bobbi said patiently. 'Totally sealed. We'd be killed by the outrush of bad air as soon as we opened the hatch. So we wear these.'

'What's in them?'

'Nothing but good old Haven air. The tanks are small - forty, maybe fifty minutes of air. You clip it to your belt like this, see?'

'Yes.'

Bobbi offered him one of the rigs. Gard attached the tank to his belt. He had to raise his T-shirt to do it, and he was very glad he'd decided to leave the .45 under the bed for now.

'Start using the canned air just before I open it up,' Bobbi said. 'Almost forgot. Here. Just in case you forget.' She handed Gardener a pair of noseplugs. Gard stuffed them into a jeans pocket.

'Well!' Bobbi said briskly. 'Are you ready, then?'

'We're really going in there?'

'We really are,' Bobbi said almost tenderly.

Gardener laughed shakily. His hands and feet were cold. 'I'm pretty f**king excited,' he said.

Bobbi smiled. 'I am, too.'

'Also, I'm scared.'

In that same tender voice, Bobbi said, 'No need to be, Gard. Everything will be all right.'

Something in that tone made Gardener feel more scared than ever.

2

They took the Tomcat and cruised silently through the dead woods, the only sound the minute hum of batteries. Neither of them talked.

Bobbi parked the Tomcat by the lean-to and they stood for a moment looking at the silver dish rising out of the trench. The morning sun shone on it in a pure, widening wedge of light.

Inside, Gardener thought again.

'Are you ready?' Bobbie asked again. Come on, Rocky - just one big jolt, you'll never feel a thing.

'Yeah, fine,' Gardener said. His voice was a trifle hoarse.

Bobbi was looking at him inscrutably with her changing eyes - those floating, widening pupils. Gardener seemed to feel mental fingers fluttering over his thoughts, trying to pull them open.

'Going in there could kill you, you know,' Bobbi said at last. 'Not the air - we've got that licked.' She smiled. 'It's funny, you know. Five minutes on one of those mouthpieces would knock someone from the outside unconscious, and half an hour of it would kill him. But it'll keep us alive. Does that tickle you, Gard?'

'Yes,' Gard said, looking at the ship and wondering the things he always wondered: Where did you come from? And how long did you have to cruise the night to get here? 'It tickles me.'

'I think you'll be okay, but you know - ' Bobbi shrugged. 'Your head ... that steel plate interacts somehow with the

'I know the risk.'

'As long as you do.'

Bobbi turned and walked toward the trench. Gardener stood where he was for a moment, watching her go.

I know the risk from the plate. What I'm less clear on is the risk from you, Bobbi. Is it Haven air I'm going to get when I have to use that mask, or something like Raid?

But it didn't matter, did it? He had thrown the dice. And nothing was going to keep him from seeing inside that ship, if he could - not David Brown, not the whole world.

Bobbi reached the trench. She turned and looked back, her made-up face a dull mask in the morning light angling through the old pines and spruces which surrounded this place. 'Coming?'

'Yeah,' Gardener said, and walked over to the ship.

3

Getting down proved to be unexpectedly tricky. Ironically, getting up was the easy part. The button at the bottom was right there, in fact no more than the 0 on a remote telephone handset. At the top, the button was a conventional electrical switch set on one of the posts which supported the lean-to. This was fifty feet from the edge of the trench. For the first time Gardener realized how all those car recalls could happen; until now, neither of them had bothered with the fact that their arms were somewhat less than fifty feet long.

They had been using the sling to go up and down for a long time now, long enough to take it for granted. Standing at the edge of the trench, they realized that they had never both gone down together. What both also realized but neither said was that they could have gone down one at a time; with someone to run the buttons at the bottom, all would have been well. Neither said it because it was understood between them that this time, and only this time, they must go down together, perfectly together, both with one foot in the single stirrup, arms around each other's waists, like lovers in a descending swing. It was stupid; just stupid, just stupid enough to be the only way.

They looked at each other without saying a word - but two thoughts flew, and crossed in the air.

(here we are a couple of college graduates)

(Bobbi where'd I leave my left-handed monkeywrench)

Bobbi's strange new mouth quivered. She turned around and snorted. Gardener felt a moment of the old warmth touch his heart then. It was the last time he really ever saw the old and unimproved Bobbi Anderson.

'Well, can you rig a portable unit to run the sling?'

'I can, but it's not worth taking the time. I've got another idea.' Her eyes touched Gardener's face for a moment, thoughtful and calculating. It was a look Gardener could not quite interpret. Then Bobbi walked away to the lean-to.

Gardener followed her partway and saw Bobbi swing open a large green metal box that had been mounted on a pole. She pawed through the tools and general junk inside, then came back with a transistor radio. It was smaller than the ones his helpers had turned into New and Improved satchel charges while Bobbi was recuperating. Gard had never seen this particular radio before. It was very small.

One of them brought it out last night, he thought.

Bobbi pulled up its stubby antenna, inserted a jack in its plastic case and the plug in her ear. Gard was instantly reminded of Freeman Moss, moving the pumping equipment like an elephant trainer moving the big guys around the center ring.

'This won't take long.' Bobbi pointed the antenna back toward the farm. Gardener seemed to hear a heavy, powerful hum - not on the air but inside the air, somehow. For just a moment his mind muttered with music and there was a headachy pain in the middle of his forehead, as if he had drunk too much cold water too fast.

'Now what?'

'We wait,' Bobbi said, and repeated: 'It won't take long.'

Her speculative gaze passed over Gardener's face again, and this time Gardener thought he understood that look. It's something she wants me to see. And this chance came up to show me.

He sat down near the trench and discovered a very old pack of cigarettes in his breast pocket. Two were left. One was broken, the other bent but whole. He lit it and smoked reflectively, not really sorry about this delay. It gave him a chance to go over his plans again. Of course, if he dropped dead as soon as he went through that round hatch, it would put something of a crimp in those plans.

'Ah, here we go!' Bobbi said, getting up.

Gard also got up. He looked around, but at first saw nothing.

'Over there, Gard. The path.' Bobbi spoke with the pride of a kid showing off her first soapbox racer. Gardener finally saw it, and began to laugh. He didn't really want to laugh, but he couldn't help it. He kept thinking he was getting used to the brave new world of Haven's jury-rigged superscience, and then some odd new combination would tumble him right back down the rabbit-hole. Like now.

Bobbi was smiling, but faintly, vaguely, as if Gardener's laughter meant nothing one way or the other.

'It does look a little strange, but it will do the trick. Take my word for

It was the Electrolux he had seen in the shed. It was not running on the ground but just above it, its little white wheels turning. Its shadow ran placidly off to one side, like a dachshund on a leash. From the back, where the vacuum-hose attachments would have gone in a sane world, two filament-thin wires protruded in a V shape. Its antenna, Gardener thought.

Now it landed, if you could call a touchdown from three inches a landing, and trundled over the beaten earth of the excavation area to the lean-to, leaving narrow tracks behind it. It stopped below the switchbox which controlled the sling.

'Watch this,' Bobbi said in that same pleased showing-off-my-soapbox-racer voice.

There was a click. A hum. Now a thin black rope began to rise out of the vacuum cleaner's side, like a rope rising out of a wicker basket in the Indian rope trick. Only it wasn't a rope, Gardener saw; it was a length of coaxial cable.

It rose in the air ... up ... up ... up. It touched the side of the switchbox and slid around to the front. Gardener felt a crawl of revulsion. It was like watching something like a bat - a blind thing which had some sort of radar. A blind thing that could ... could seek.

The end of the cable found the buttons - the black one which started the sling going down or up, the red one which stopped it. The end of the cable touched the black one - and suddenly went rigid. The black button popped neatly in. The motor behind the lean-to started up, and the sling started to slip into the trench.

The tension went out of the cable. It slipped down to the red stop button, stiffened, pushed it. When the motor had died - leaning over, Gardener could see the sling dangling against the side of the cut about twelve feet down - the cable rose and pushed the black button again. The motor started once more. The sling came back up. When it reached the top of the trench, the motor died automatically.

Bobbi turned to him. She was smiling, but her eyes were watchful. 'There,' she said. 'Works fine.'

'It's incredible,' Gardener said. His eyes had moved steadily back and forth between Bobbi and the Electrolux as the cable ran the buttons. Bobbi had not been gesturing with the radio, as Freeman Moss had with his walkie-talkie, but Gardener had seen the little frown of concentration, and the way her eyes had dropped just an instant before the coaxial cable slipped down from the black button to the red one.

It looks like a mechanical dachshund, something out of one of those terminally cute Kelly Freas SF paintings. That's what it looks like, but it's not a robot, not really. It has no brain. Bobbi's its brain ... and she wants me to know it.

And there had been a lot of those customized appliances in the shed, lined up against the wall. The one his mind kept trying to fix on was the washing machine with the boomerang antenna mounted on it.

The shed. That raised a hell of an interesting question. Gard opened his mouth to ask it ... then closed it again, trying at the same time to thicken the shield over his thoughts as much as he could. He felt like a man who has nearly strolled over the lip of a chasm a thousand feet deep while looking at the pretty sunset.

No one back home - at least that I know of - and the shed's padlocked on the outside. So just how did Fido the Vacuum Cleaner get out?

He had really been only an instant from asking that question when he realized Bobbi hadn't mentioned where the Electrolux had come from. Gard could suddenly smell his own sweat, sour and evil.

He looked at Bobbi and saw Bobbi looking at him with that small, irritated smile that meant she knew Gardener was thinking ... but not what.

'Where did that thing come from, anyway?' Gardener asked.

'Oh ... it was around.' Bobbi waved her hand vaguely. 'The important thing is that it works. So much for the unexpected delay. Want to get going?'

'Fine. I just hope that thing's batteries don't go flat while we're down there.'

'I'm its battery,' she said. 'As long as I'm all right, you'll get up again, Gard. Okay?'

Your insurance policy. Yes, I think I get it.

'Okay,' he said.

They went to the trench. Bobbi rode the sling down first while the cable rising from the side of the Electrolux ran the buttons. The sling came back up and Gardener stepped into it, holding the rope as it began to go down again.

He took a final look at the battered old Electrolux and thought again: How the hell did it get out?

Then he was sliding into the dimness of the trench and the dank mineral smell of wet rocks, the smooth surface of the ship rising up and up on his left, like the side of a skyscraper without windows.