9
He trekked uphill, realizing he had entirely lost track of what his position was in relation to the world outside. It was easier not to think about it. He used the ladder to help himself along as he went. He came to a rectangular porthole and looked through it into something that might have been an engine room - big metal blocks, square on one end, rounded on the other, marched off in a double row. Pipes, thick and dull silver in color, protruded from the square ends of these blocks and moved off at strange, crooked angles.
Like straight-pipes coming out of a kid's jalopy, Gard thought. He became aware of liquid warmth on the skin above his mouth. It divided in two and ran down his chin. His nose was bleeding again ... slowly, but as if it meant to keep it up for a while.
Is the light brighter in here now?
He stopped and looked around.
Yes. And could he hear a faint humming, or was that imagination?
He cocked his head. No; not imagination. Machinery. Something had started up.
It didn't just start, and you know it. We started it up. We're kicking it over.
He bit down hard on the mouthpiece. He wanted out of here. Wanted to get Bobbi out. The ship was alive; in a weird way he supposed it was the Ultimate Tommyknocker. It was a howl. It was also the most horrible thing of all. Sentient creature ... What? Woke it up, of course. Gard wanted it asleep. All of a sudden he felt too much like Jack nosing around the castle while the giant slept. They had to get out. He began to crawl faster. Then a new thought struck him, stopping him dead.
What if it won't let you out?
He pushed the idea away and kept going.
10
The corridor branched into a Y, left arm continuing to angle up, the right turning steeply downward. He listened and heard Bobbi crawling to the left. He moved that way and came to another hatch. She was standing below it. She glanced briefly up at Gardener with eyes that were wide and frightened. Then she looked back again.
He got one leg over the lip of the hatch and paused. No way he was going in there.
The room was lozenge-shaped. It was full of hammocks suspended in metal frames - there were hundreds of them. All were canted drunkenly upward and to the left; the room looked like a snapshot of a sailing ship's bunkroom taken just as the ship rolled in the trough of a swell. All the hammocks were full, their occupants strapped in. Transparent skins, doglike snouts; milky, dead eyes.
A cable ran from each scaled, triangular head.
Not just strapped, Gardener thought. CHAINED. They were the ship's drive, weren't they, Bobbi? If this is the future, it's time to eat the gun. These are dead galley slaves.
They were snarling, but Gardener saw that some of the snarls were halfobliterated, because some of their heads seemed to have exploded - as if, when the ship crashed, there had been some gigantic backflow of energy that had literally blown their brains out.
All dead. Strapped forever in their hammocks, heads lolling, snouts frozen in eternal snarls. All dead in this tilted room.
Close by, another engine started up - chopping rustily at first, then smoothing out. A moment later fans whirred into life - he supposed the newly started engine was driving them. Air blew against his face - whether or not it was fresh was something he didn't intend to personally check on.
Maybe opening the outer hatch started this stuff up, but I don't believe it. It was us. What starts up next, Bobbi?
Suppose they started up next - the Tommyknockers themselves? Suppose their grayish-transparent six-fingered hands started to clench and unclench, as Bobbi's hands had been doing as she stared at the corpses in the barren control room? What if those taloned feet began to twitch? Or suppose those heads began to turn, and those milky eyes looked at them?
I want out. The ghosts here are very lively and I want out.
He touched Bobbi's shoulder. She jumped. Gardener glanced at his wrist, but there was no watch there - only a fading white shape on his otherwise tanned wrist. It had been a Timex, a tough old baby that had gone on a lot of toots with him and come out alive. But two days of working on the excavation had killed it. THERE'S one John Cameron Swayze never tried in those old TV ads, he thought.
Bobbi took the point. She pointed at the air-bottle clipped to her belt and raised her eyebrows at Gardener. How long has it been?
Gardener didn't know and didn't care. He wanted out before the whole damned ship woke up and did God-knew-what.
He pointed back down the passageway. Long enough. Let's bug out.
A thick, oily chuckling noise began in the wall next to Gardener. He shrank from it. Drops of blood from his slowly bleeding nose splattered the wall. His heart was beating madly.
Stop it, it's just some sort of pump
The oily noise began to smooth out ... and then something went wrong. There was a screech of grinding metal and a quick, thudding series of explosions. Gardener felt the wall vibrate, and for a moment the light seemed to flicker and dim.
Could we find our way out of here in the dark if the lights went out? You make thee joke I theenk, senor.
The pump tried to start again. There was a long metallic scream that set Gardener's teeth biting at the rubber plugs in his mouthpiece. It died away at last. There was a long loud rattle, like a straw in an empty glass. Then nothing.
Not everything lasted all that time with no damage, Gardener thought, and found this idea actually relieving.
Bobbi was pointing: Go, Gard.
Before he did, he saw Bobbi pause and look back once at the ranks of the hammocked dead. That frightened look was back on her face.
Then Gard was crawling back the way he came, trying to keep an even, steady pace as the claustrophobia wrapped itself around him.
11
In the control room, one of the walls had turned into a gigantic picture-window fifty feet long and twenty feet high.
Gardener stood, gape-jawed, looking at the blue Maine sky and the fringe of pines and spruces and maples around the trench. In the lower right-hand corner he could see the rooftree of their equipment lean-to. He stared at this for several seconds - long enough to see big white summer clouds drifting across the blue sky -before realizing it couldn't be a window. They were somewhere toward the middle of the ship, and deep in the ground as well. A window in that wall should show only more ship. Even if they had been near the hull, which they weren't, it would have given on a vista of mesh-covered rock wall, with maybe a squib of blue sky at the very top.
It's a TV picture of some kind. Something like a TV picture, anyway.
But there were no lines. The illusion was perfect.
Forgetting, in this powerful new fascination, his claustrophobic need to get out, Gardener walked slowly toward the wall. The angle gave him a perverse sensation of flying - the effect was like slipping behind the controls of an airline trainer and pulling the mock controls into a steep climb. The sky was so bright he had to squint. He kept looking for the wall, the way you might expect to see a movie screen through the picture as you got closer to it, but the wall just didn't seem to be there. The pines were a true, clear green, and only the fact that he couldn't feel any breeze or smell the woods worked against the persuasive illusion of looking through an open window.
He walked closer, still looking for the wall.
It's a camera, got to be - mounted on the outer rim of the ship, maybe even the part Bobbi stumbled over. The angle confirms that. But, Jesus! It's so f**king real! If the people at Kodak or Polaroid saw this, they'd go out of their gou
His arm was grabbed - grabbed hard - and terror leaped up in him. He turned, expecting to see one of them, a grinning thing with a dog's head, holding a cable with a plug tip in one hand: Just bend down, Mr Gardener; this won't hurt a bit.
It was Bobbi. She pointed to the wall. Held out her hands and arms and jittered them rapidly in some kind of charade. Then pointed at the window-wall again. After a moment, Gardener got it. In a grisly way it was almost funny. Bobbi had been miming electrocution, telling him that touching the window-wall would probably be a lot like touching the third rail of a subway.
Gardener nodded, then pointed toward the wider companionway through which they had entered. Bobbi nodded back and led the way.
As Gardener boosted himself up, he thought he heard a leaf-dry rattle and turned back, feeling a child's dreamy terror tug at his mind. He felt that it must be them, those corpses in the corner; them, rising slowly to their taloned feet like zombies.
But they still lay in their tangled drift of strange arms and legs. The wide, clear view of the sky and the trees on the wall (or through the wall) was dimming, losing reality and definition.
Gardener turned away and crawled after Bobbi as fast as he could.
Chapter 7. The Scoop, Continued
1
You're crazy, you know, John Leandro told himself as he pulled into exactly the same parking slot Everett Hillman had used not three weeks ago. Leandro did not of course know this. That was probably just as well.
You're crazy, he told himself again. You bled like a stuck pig, there's two teeth less in your head, and you're planning to go back there. You're crazy!
Right, he thought, getting out of the old car. I'm twenty-four, unmarried, getting bulgy around the middle, and if I'm crazy it's because I found this, I did, me, I tripped over it. It's big, and it's mine. My story. No, use the other word. It's old-fashioned, but who gives a f**k - it's the right word. My scoop. I'm not going to let it kill me, but I am going to ride it until it bucks me off.
Leandro stood in the parking lot at a quarter past one on what was rapidly becoming the longest day of his life (it would also be the last, despite all his mental avowals to the contrary) and thought: Good for you. Gonna ride it till it bucks you off. Probably Robert Capa, Ernie Pyle, thought the same thing from time to time.
Sensible. Sarcastic, but sensible. That deeper part of his mind seemed to be beyond such sense, however. My story, it returned stubbornly. My scoop.
John Leandro, now clad in a T-shirt reading WHERE TH' HELL IS TROY, MAINE? (David Bright would probably have laughed himself into a hemorrhage over that one), crossed the small parking lot of Maine Med Supplies ('Specializing in Respiration Supplies and Respiration Therapy since 1946') and went inside.
2
'Thirty bucks is a stiff deposit for an air mask, don't you think?' Leandro asked the clerk, thumbing through his cash. He guessed he had the thirty, but it was going to leave him with about a buck and a half. 'Wouldn't think they'd be a big black-market item.'
'We never used to require one at all,' the clerk said, 'and we still don't if we know the individual or the organization, you know. But I lost one a couple, three weeks ago. Old man came in and told me he wanted some air. I figured he meant for diving, you know - he was old, but he looked tough enough for it - so I started telling him about Downeast ScubaDive in Bangor. But he said no, he was interested in ground portability. So I rented it to him. I never got it back. Brand-new Bell flat-pack. Two-hundred-dollar piece of equipment.'
Leandro looked at the clerk, almost sick with excitement. He felt like a man following arrows deeper and deeper into a frightening but fabulous and totally unexplored cavern.
You rented this mask? Personally?'
Well, it was a flat-pack, actually, but yes. My dad and I run the place. He was delivering oxy bottles down to Augusta. I caught hell from him. I don't know if he'll like me renting another Bell, even, but with the deposit I guess it's okay.'
'Can you describe the man?'
'Mister, do you feel okay? You look a little white around the
'I'm fine. Can you describe the man who rented the flat-pack?'
'Old. Had a tan. He was mostly bald. He was skinny ... stringy, I guess you'd say. Like I say, he looked tough.' The clerk thought. 'He was driving a Valiant.'
'Could you check the day he rented the flat-pack?'
'You a cop?'
Reporter. Bangor Daily News.' Leandro showed the clerk his press card. Now the clerk also began to look excited.
'He do Somethin' else? Besides rip off our flat-pack, I mean?'
'Could you look up the name and date for me?'
'Sure.'
The clerk flipped back through his rental book. He found the entry and turned the book so Leandro could read it. The date was July 26th. The name was scrawled but still legible. Everett Hillman.
'You never reported the loss of the equipment to the police,' Leandro said. It was not a question. If a complaint of theft had been lodged against the old geezer to complement his landlady's understandable unhappiness at being stiffed for two weeks' rent, the cops might have taken more interest in how or why Hillman had disappeared ... or where he had disappeared to.
'No, Dad said not to bother. Our insurance doesn't cover the theft of rented equipment, see, and ... well, that's why.'
The clerk shrugged and smiled, but the shrug was slightly embarrassed, the smile slightly uneasy, and taken together they told Leandro a lot. He might be a terminal twerp, as David Bright feared, but he was not a stupid one. If they had reported the theft or disappearance of the flat-pack, the insurance company wouldn't cover the loss. But this fellow's father knew some other way they could stick it to the insurance company. But for now all that was very much a secondary consideration.
'Well, thank you for all your help,' Leandro said, turning the book back around. 'Now if we could finish up here - '
'Sure, of course.' The clerk was obviously happy to leave the subject of insurance behind. 'And you won't put any of this in the paper until you check with my father, will you?'
'Absolutely not,' Leandro said with a warm sincerity that P. T. Barnum himself would have admired. 'Now, if I could just sign the agreement - '
'Right. I'll have to see some ID first, though. I didn't ask the old guy, and I also heard from Dad about that, I can tell you.'
'I just showed you my press card.'
'I know, but maybe I ought to see some real identification.'
Sighing, Leandro pushed his driver's license across the counter.