15
Dick Allison and Newt Berringer were still two miles from Bobbi's place when Freeman Moss's mental shrieks began. Moments before, they had swerved past Elt Barker. Now Dick looked up into the rearview mirror and saw Elt's Harley swerve across the road and go leaping through the air. For a moment Elt looked like Evel Knievel, white hair or no. Then he separated from the bike and landed in the scrub.
Newt hit the brakes with both feet and his truck screamed to a stop in the middle of the road. He looked at Dick with large eyes that were both frightened and furious.
Son of a bitch has got a gadget!
Yeah. Fire. Some kind of
Abruptly Dick raised his mental voice to a shout. Newt picked it up, amplified it. From Kyle Archinbourg's Cadillac, Kyle and Hazel McCready joined in.
(BACK OFF BACK OFF HOLD ON ALL OF YOU)
They stopped, holding their positions. They were not great takers of orders as a rule, these Tommyknockers, but Moss's hideous screams, fading now, were great persuaders. All stopped, that was, except for a blue Oldsmobile Delta 88 with a bumper-sticker on the back reading REALTORS SELL IT BY THE ACRE.
When the command came to back off and hold position, Andy Bozeman was already in sight of the Anderson place. His hate had grown exponentially - Gardener lying bleeding and dead was all he could think of. He came slewing into Bobbi's driveway in a wild power turn. The Olds's rear end broke free when Bozeman stamped the brake; the big car nearly tipped over.
I'll whitewash your fence, you f**king ass**le - I'll give you a dead rat and a string to swing it on, oh you bastard.
His wife pulled the molecule-exciter out of her purse. It looked like a Buck Rogers blaster which had been created by a fairly bright lunatic. Its frame had once been part of a garden tool marketed under the trade name of Weed Eater. She leaned out the car window and pulled the trigger utterly at random. The east end of Bobbi's farmhouse exploded into a caldron of fire. Ida Bozeman grinned a cheerful, reptilian grin.
As the Bozemans began to get out of the Olds, the whirligig started to spin. A moment later the green parasol of flame began to form. Ida Bozeman tried to aim what she called her 'molecule disco' at it, but too late. If her first shot had hit the whirligig instead of the house, everything might have been different ... but it didn't.
The two of them went up like firetrees. A moment later the Olds exploded with three payments still due on it.
16
Now, with the screams of Freeman Moss just beginning to fade from their minds, the screams of Andy and Ida Bozeman took their place. Newt and Dick waited them out, grimacing.
At last they faded.
Ahead, Dick Allison could see other vehicles parked on both sides of Route 9, and in the middle. Frank Spruce was leaning out of the cab of his big tanker truck, looking toward Newt and Dick urgently. He/they sensed the others - all the others -on this road, on other roads; some were standing in the fields they had been cutting across. All of them waiting for something - some decision.
Dick turned toward Newt.
Fire.
Yes. Fire.
Can we put it out?
There was a short mental silence as Newt thought about it; Dick could sense him wanting to simply push it aside and go on to where Gardener was. What Dick wanted wasn't complicated: he wanted to rip out Jim Gardener's gizzard. But that wasn't the answer and they both knew it - all the Shed People, even Adley, knew it. The stakes were higher now. And Dick was confident Jim Gardener was going to lose his gizzard anyway, in one fashion or another.
Crossing the Tommyknockers was a bad idea. It made them mad. This was a truth many races on other worlds had found out long before today's festivities in Haven.
He and Newt both looked out toward the tree-bordered field where Elt Barker had crashed. The grasses and the plumes of the trees were blowing - not hard, but clearly blowing in a wind which blew from east to west. Not even enough breeze to qualify as a cap o'wind. but Dick thought it showed signs of brisking.
Yes we can put out the fire, Newt replied at last.
Stop the fire and the drunk too? Can we be sure of that?
Another long, thinking pause, and then Newt came to the answer that Dick had already suspected.
I don't know if we can do both. I know one or the other but I don't know if we can do both.
Then we'll let the fire burn for now we'll let it burn yes all right
The ship will be all right the ship will not be hurt and the wind the way the wind's blowing
They looked at each other, grinning, as their thoughts came together in a moment of utter, chiming harmony - one voice, one mind.
The fire will be between him and the ship. He won't be able to get to the ship!
On the roads and in the fields, the people listening in on this party-line all relaxed slightly. He won't be able to get to the ship.
Is he still in the shed?
Yes.
Newt turned his puzzled, troubled face to Dick.
What the f**k's he doing in there? Does he have something making something? Something to hurt the ship?
There was a pause; and then Dick's voice, not just to Newt Berringer but to all the Shed People, clear and imperative:
NET YOUR MINDS. NET YOUR MINDS WITH OURS. ALL WHO CAN NET YOUR MINDS WITH OURS AND LISTEN. LISTEN FOR GARDENER. LISTEN.
They listened. In the hot summer silence of the early afternoon, they listened. Two or three ridges over, the first smudges of smoke rose into the sky.
17
Gardener felt them listening. There was a horrid crawling sensation over the surfaces of his brain. It was ridiculous, but it was happening. He thought: Now I know how a streetlight must feel with a lot of moths fluttering around it.
The old man moved in his tank, trying to catch Gardener's eye. He missed his eye but caught his mind. Gardener looked up.
Never mind, son - they want to know what you're up to, but forget them. Won't hurt if they find out. Might even help. Slow 'em down. Relieve their minds. They don't care about David, only about their goddam ship. Go on, son! Go on!
Gardener was standing by the transformer and holding one of the earplugs in his hand. He didn't want to put it in. He felt like a man who's gotten a hefty shock from one particular switch-plate who is compelled to touch that same switch-plate again.
Do I really have to wear this f**ker? I changed the screen just by thinking before.
Yes and that's all you can do. You got to wear it, son. I'm sorry.
Incredibly, Gardener's eyelids were growing heavy again. He had to force them up.
I'm afraid it will kill me, he thought at the old man, and then waited, hoping the old man would contradict him. But there was nothing - only the pained eye looking at him, and the dim slisshh-slisshhh-slisshhh of the equipment.
Yeah, it may kill me, and he knows it, too.
Outside, dimly, he could hear the crackle of fire.
The fluttering feeling along the surfaces of his mind stopped. The moths had flown away.
Reluctantly Gardener put the plug in his ear.
18
Kyle and Hazel relaxed. They looked at each other. There was an identical - and very human - expression in their eyes. The expression of people discovering something just too good to be true.
David Brown? Kyle thought unbelievingly at Hazel. Is that what you
pick up yes he's trying to save the kid, to
to bring him back
back from Altair-4
Then, for a moment overriding the net, came Dick Allison's voice excited and full of sour triumph:
Hot DAMN! I KNEW that kid would come in handy!
19
For a moment Gardener felt nothing at all. He began to relax, on the edge of a doze again. Then pain hit him in a single awful crunch, a destructive battering ram that would tear his head apart.
'No!' he screamed. His hands went to his temples; beat against them. 'No, God no, it hurts too much, Jesus, no!'
Ride with it, son, try to ride with it!
'I can't I can't OH CHRIST MAKE IT STOP!'
This made his shattered ankle feel like a mosquito bite. He was dimly aware that his nose was bleeding and that his mouth was filled with blood.
RIDE WITH IT, SON!
The pain backed off a little. It was replaced with another feeling. This new sensation was horrible, horrible and terrifying.
Once, while in college, he had participated in something called The Great McDonald's Eat-Out. Five frats had fielded 'champion eaters.' Gard had been Delta Tau Delta's 'champ.' He had been on his sixth Big Mac - not even close to the contest winner's eventual total - and had become suddenly aware that he was very close to total physical overload. He had never felt anything like it in his life. In a gross way it was almost interesting. His midsection felt thundery with food. He did not feel like vomiting; nausea did not exactly describe what it had been like. He saw his stomach as a huge still dirigible lying bloated in still air at his center. He thought he could sense red lights going on in some mental Mission Control Center as various systems tried to deal with this insane load of meat, bread and sauce. He didn't vomit. He walked it off. Very slowly, he walked it off. For hours he had felt like those drawings of Tweedledum and Tweedledee, his stomach stretched and smooth and terribly close to bursting.
Now it was his mind that felt like that, and Jim Gardener understood as coldly and rationally as a trapeze performer who works with no net that he was on the knife-edge of death. But there was another sensation, one which was unrelatable to anything, and for the first time he understood what the Tommyknockers were all about - what moved them; what propelled them onward.
In spite of the pain, which had only retreated, not left, and in spite of that dreadful smooth feeling of being as stuffed as a python which has swallowed a kid, part of him was enjoying this. It was like a drug - an incredibly powerful drug. His brain felt like the engine in the biggest f**king Chrysler ever built, idling on fat gas, waiting for him to drop the car into gear and peel out.
Peel out to where?
Anywhere.
The stars, if he wanted.
Son I'm losing you
That was the old man, sounding more exhausted than ever, and Gardener pulled himself back to the job at hand - the next piece of furniture he had to hop to. Oh, this feeling was drunkenly wonderful, but it was stolen. He forced himself to think again of those leaf-brown shapes locked in all those hammocks. Galley slaves. The old man was powering him; he was drinking the old man like a vampire drinking blood. How long until he was a vampire himself? Like them?
He thought at Hillman: I am with you, old horse.
Ev Hillman closed his one good eye in silent relief. Gard turned to the monitor screen, absently holding the plug in his ear like a newsman on a live remote listening to a question from the anchor back in the studio.
In the closed space of Bobbi's shed, the light began to cycle up again.