The Tommyknockers

3

Gardener had raised his mental shield as soon as he was out of the ship. The question now was how much of it still remained.

He walked slowly across the room and sat at the table. He felt the .45 digging into his stomach and groin; he also felt it digging into his mind, lying heavy against whatever was left of that shield.

'Are those for me?' he asked, pointing at the pills.

'I thought we'd have a beer or two together,' Bobbi said evenly, 'the way friends do? And you could take a few of those at a time while we talk. I thought it would be the kindest way.'

'Kind,' Gardener mused. He felt the first faint tug of anger. Won't get fooled again, the song said, but the habit must be awfully hard to break. He himself had been fooled plenty. But then, he thought, maybe you're an exception to the rule, Gard ole Gard.

'I get the pills and Peter got that weird seaquarium in the shed. Bobbi, your definition of kindness has undergone one f**k of a radical change since the days when you'd cry if Peter brought home a dead bird. Remember those days? We lived here together, we stood your sister off when she came, and never had to stick her in a shower stall to do it. We just kicked her ass the hell out.' He looked at her somberly. 'Remember, Bobbi? That was when we were lovers as well as friends. I thought you might have forgotten. I would have died for you, kiddo. And I would have died without you. Remember? Remember us?'

Bobbi looked down at her hands. Did he see tears in those strange eyes? Probably all he saw was wishful thinking.

'When were you in the shed?'

'Last night.'

'What did you touch?'

'I used to touch you,' Gardener mused. 'And you me. And neither of us minded. Remember?'

'What did you touch?' she screamed shrilly at him, and when she looked back up he didn't see Bobbi but only a furious monster.

'Nothing,' Gardener said. 'I touched nothing.' The contempt on his face must have been more convincing than any protest would have been, because Bobbi settled back. She sipped delicately at her beer.

'Doesn't matter. You couldn't have done anything out there anyway.'

'How could you do it to Peter? That's how it keeps coming at me. The old man I didn't know, and Anne barged in. But I knew Peter. He would have died for you, too. How could you do it? God's name!'

'He kept me alive when you weren't here,' Bobbi said. There was just the faintest uneasy, defensive note in her voice. 'When I was working around the clock. He was the only reason there was anything left for you to save when you got here.'

'You f**king vampire!'

She looked at him, then away.

'Jesus Christ, you did something like that and I went along with it. Do you know how that hurts? I went along! I saw what was happening to you ... to a lesser degree I saw what was happening to the others, but I still went along with it. Because I was crazy. But of course you knew that, didn't you? You used me the same way you used Peter, but I wasn't even as smart as an old beagle dog, I guess, because you didn't even have to put me in the shed and stick one of those filthy stinking rotten cables in my head to do it. You just kept me oiled. You handed me a shovel and said, "Here you go, Gard, let's dig this baby up and stop the Dallas Police." Except you're the Dallas Police. And I went along with it.'

'Drink your beer,' Bobbi said. Her face was cold again.

'And if I don't?'

'Then I'm going to turn on this radio,' Bobbi said, 'and open a hole in reality, and send you ... somewhere.'

'To Altair-4?' Gardener asked. He kept his voice casual and tightened his mental grip

(shield-shield-shield-shield)

on that barrier in his mind. A slight frown creased Bobbi's forehead again, and Gardener felt those mental fingers probing again, digging, trying to find out what he knew, how much ... and how.

'You've been snooping a lot, haven't you?' Bobbi asked.

'Not until I realized how much you were lying to me.' And suddenly knew. He had gotten it in the shed without even knowing it.

'Most of the lies you told to yourself, Gard.'

'Oh? What about the kid that died? Or the one that's blind?'

'How do you kn -'

'The shed. That's where you go to get smart, isn't it?'

She said nothing.

'You sent them to get batteries. You killed one and blinded the other to get batteries. Jesus, Bobbi, how stupid could you get?'

'We're more intelligent than you could ever hope to -'

'Who's talking about intelligence?' he cried furiously. 'I'm talking about smarts! Common-fucking-sense! The CMP power lines run right behind your house! Why didn't you tap them?'

'Sure.' Bobbi smiled with her weird mouth. 'A really intelligent - pardon me, smart -idea. And the first, time some tech at the Augusta substation saw the power drain on his dials - '

'You're running almost everything on C, D, and double-A batteries,' Gard said. 'That's a trickle. A guy using house current to run a big band-saw would bang those needles harder.'

She looked momentarily confused. Seemed to listen - not to anyone else, but to her own interior voice. 'Batteries run on direct current, Gard. AC power lines wouldn't do us any g - '

He struck his temples with his fists and screamed: 'Haven't you ever seen a goddam DC converter? You can get them at Radio Shack for three bucks! Are you seriously trying to tell me you couldn't have made a simple DC converter when you can make your tractor fly and your typewriter run on telepathy? Are you - '

'Nobody thought of it!' she screamed suddenly.

There was a moment of silence. She looked stunned, as if at the sound of her own voice.

'Nobody thought of it,' he said. 'Right. So you sent those two kids, all ready to do or die for good old Haven, and now one them is dead and the other one's blind. It's shit, Bobbi. I don't care who or what has taken you over - part of you has to be inside someplace. Part of you has to realize that you people haven't been doing anything creative at all. Quite the opposite. You've been taking dumb-pills and congratulating each other on how wonderful it all is. I was the crazy one. I kept telling myself it would be okay even after I knew better. But it's the same old shit it always was. You can disintegrate people, you can teleport them to someplace for safekeeping, or burial, or whatever, but you're as dumb as a baby with a loaded Pistol.'

'I think you better shut up now, Gard.'

'You didn't think of it,' he said softly. Jesus, Bobbi! How can you even look at yourself in the mirror? Any of you?'

'I said I think -'

'Idiot savant, you said once. It's worse. It's like watching a bunch of kids getting ready to blow up the world with Soapbox Derby plans. You guys aren't even evil. Dumb, but not evil.'

'Gard -'

'You're just a bunch of dumbbells with screwdrivers.' He laughed.

'Shut up!' she shrieked.

'Jesus,' Card said. 'Did I really think Sissy was dead? Did I?'

She was trembling.

He nodded toward the photon gun. 'So if I don't drink the beer and take the pills, you pack me off to Altair-4, right? I get to babysit David Brown until we both drop dead of asphyxiation or starvation or cosmic-ray poisoning.'

She was viciously cold now, and it hurt - more than he ever would have believed -but at least she wasn't trying to read him. In her anger, she had forgotten.

The way they had forgotten how simple it was to plug a battery-driven tape recorder into a wall socket with a DC converter between the instrument and the power source.

'There really isn't an Altair-4, just as there aren't really any Tommyknockers. There aren't any nouns for some things - they just are. Somebody pastes one name on those things in one place, somebody pastes on another someplace else. lt's never a very good name, but it doesn't matter. You came back from New Hampshire talking about Tommyknockers, so here that's what we are. We've been called other things in other places. Altair-4 has, too. It's just a place where things get stored. Usually not live things. Attics can be cold, dark places.'

'Is that where you're from? Your people?'

Bobbi - or whatever this was that looked a bit like her - laughed almost gently. 'We're not a "People," Gard. Not a "race." Not a "species" Klaatu is not going to appear and say "Take us to your leader." No, we're not from Altair-4.'

She looked at him, still smiling faintly. She had recovered most of her equanimity and seemed to have forgotten the pills for the time being.

'If you know about Altair-4, I wonder if you've found the existence of the ship a little strange. '

Gardener only looked at her.

'I don't suppose you've had time enough to wonder why a race with access to teleportation technology' - Bobbi wiggled the plastic gun slightly -'would even bother zipping around in a physical ship.'

Gardener raised his eyebrows. No, he hadn't considered that, but now that Bobbi brought it up, he remembered a college acquaintance once wondering aloud why Kirk, Spock, and company bothered with the Starship Enterprise when it would have been so much simpler to just beam around the universe.

'More dumb-pills,' he said.

'Not at all. It's like radio. There are wavelengths. But beyond that, we don't understand it very well. Which is true of us about most things, Gard. We re builders, not understanders.

'Anyway, we've isolated something like ninety thousand clear - wave lengths - that is, pro-linear settings which do two things: avoid the binomial paradox that prevents the reintegration of living tissue and unfixed matter, and actually seem to go somewhere. But in almost all cases, it isn't anywhere anyone would want to go.'

'Like winning an all-expenses-paid trip to Utica, huh?'

'Much worse. There's a place which seems to be very much like the surface of Jupiter. If you open a door on that place, the difference in pressure is so extreme it starts a tornado in the doorway which quickly assumes an extremely high electrical charge which blows the door open wider and wider like tearing a wound open. The gravity is so much higher that it starts sucking out the earth of the incursive world the way a corkscrew pulls a cork. If left on that particular "station" for long, it would cause a gravonic fault in the planet's orbit, assuming the mass was similar to earth's. Or, depending on the planet's composition, it might just rip it to pieces.'

'Did anything like that come close to happening here?' Gard's lips were numb. Such a possibility made Chernobyl seem as important as a fart in a phone-booth. And you went along with it, Gard! his mind screamed at him. You helped dig it up!

'No, although some people had to be dissuaded from doing too much tinkering along transmitter/transmatter lines.' She smiled. 'It happened somewhere else we visited, though.'

'What happened?'

'They got the door shut before Shatterday, but a lot of people cooked when the orbit changed.' She sounded bored with the subject.

'All of them?' Gardener whispered.

'Nope. There are still nine or ten thousand of them alive at one of the poles,' Bobbi said. 'I think.'

'Jesus. Oh my Jesus, Bobbi.'

'There are other channels which open on rock. Just rock. The inside of some place. Most open in deep space. We've never been able to chart a single one of those locations using our star-charts. Think of it, Gard! Every place has been a strange place to us ... even to us, and we are great sky-travelers.'

She leaned forward and sipped a little more beer. The toy pistol which was no longer a toy did not waver from Gardener's chest.

'So that's teleportation. Some big deal, huh? A few rocks, a lot of holes, one cosmic attic. Maybe someday someone will open a wavelength into the heart of a sun and flash-fry a whole planet.'

Bobbi laughed, as if this would be a particularly fine jest. The gun didn't waver from Gard's chest, however.

Growing serious again, Bobbi said: 'But that's not all, Gard. When you turn on a radio, you think of tuning a station. But a band - megaherz, kiloherz, shortwave, whatever - isn't just stations. It's also all the blank space between stations. In fact, that's what some bands are mostly made up of. Do you follow?'

'Yes.'

'This is my roundabout way of trying to convince you to take the pills. I won't send you to the place you call Altair-4, Gard - there I know you'd die slowly and unpleasantly.'

'The way David Brown is dying?'

'I had nothing to do with that,' she said quickly. 'It was his brother's doing entirely.'

'It's like Nuremberg, isn't it, Bobbi? Nothing was really anyone's fault

'You idiot,.' Bobbi said. 'Don't you realize that sometimes that's the truth? Are you so gutless you can't accept the idea of random occurrence?'

'I can accept it. But I also believe in the ability of the individual to reverse irrational behavior,' he said.

'Really? You never could.'

Shot your wife, he heard the booger-picking deputy say. Good f**king deal, uh?

Maybe sometimes people start the old Atonement Boogie a little late, he thought, looking down at his hands.

Bobbi's eyes flicked sharply at his face. She had caught some of that. He tried to reinforce the shield - a tangled chain of disconnected thoughts like white noise.

'What are you thinking about, Gard?'

'Nothing I want you to know,' he said, and smiled thinly. 'Think of it as ... well, let's say a padlock on a shed door.'

Her lips drew back from her teeth for a moment ... then relaxed into that strange gentle smile again. 'It doesn't matter,' she said. 'I might not understand anyway. As I say, we've never been very good understanders. We're not a race of super-Einsteins. Thomas Edison in Space would be closer, I think. Never mind. I won't send you to a place where you'll die a slow, miserable death. I still love you in my way, Gard, and if I have to send you somewhere, I'll send you to ... nowhere.'

She shrugged.