Gardener walked into the cluttered corner of the living room that served as Bobbi's writing quarters. It was handy enough to the bookshelf so she could simply rock back on the legs of her chair and grab almost anything she wanted. It's too good to be a trunk novel.
He knew what the immortal Holmes would say about that, too: he would agree that The Buffalo Soldiers being a trunk novel was improbable; he would argue, however, that writing a novel in three days - and not at the typewriter but while taking cat-naps between repeated frenzies of activity - was imfucking-possible.
Except that novel hadn't come out of any trunk. Gardener knew it, because he knew Bobbi. Bobbi would have been just as incapable of sticking a novel that good in her trunk as Gard was of remaining rational in a discussion on the subject of nuclear power.
Fuck you, Sherlock, and the hansom cab you and Dr W. rode in on. Christ I want a drink.
The urge - the need - to drink had come back in full, frightening force.
'You there, Gard?' Anderson called.
This time he consciously saw the roll of computer paper. It hung down loosely. He looked behind the typewriter and did indeed see another of Bobbi's 'gadgets.' This one was smaller - half an egg carton with the last two egg-cradles standing empty. D-cells stood in the other four, each neatly capped with one of those little funnels (looking at them more closely, Gard decided they were scraps of tin can carefully cut to shape with tin-snips), each with a wire coming out of the funnel over the + post ... one red, one blue, one yellow, one green. These went to another circuit board. This one, which looked as if it might have come from a radio, was held vertical by two short, flat pieces of wood that had been glued to the desk with the board sandwiched in between. Those pieces of wood, each looking a little like the chalk gutter at the foot of a blackboard, were so absurdly familiar to Gardener that for a moment he was unable to identify them. Then it came. They were the tile-holders you put your letters on when you were playing Scrabble.
One single wire, almost as thick as an AC cord, ran from the circuit board into the typewriter.
'Put in some paper!' Anderson called. She laughed. 'That was the part I almost forgot, isn't that stupid? They were no help there and I almost went crazy before I saw the answer. I was sitting on the jakes one day, wishing I'd gotten one of those damned word-crunchers after all, and when I reached for the toilet paper ... eureka! Boy, did I feel dumb! Just roll it in, Gard!'
No. I'm getting out of here right now, and then I'm going to hitch a ride up to the Purple Cow in Hampden and get so f**king drunk I'll never remember this stuff. I don't ever want to know who 'they' are.
Instead, he pulled on the roll, slipped the perforated end of the first sheet
under the roller, and turned the knob on the side of the old machine until he could snap the bar down. His heart was beating hard and fast. 'Okay!' he called. 'Do you want me to ... uh, turn something on?' He didn't see any switch, and even if he had, he wouldn't have wanted to touch it.
'Don't need to!' she called back, and Gardener heard a click. It was followed by a hum - the sound of a kid's electric train transformer.
Green light began to spill out of Anderson's typewriter.
Gardener took an involuntary, shambling step backward on legs that felt like stilts. That light rayed out between the keys in weird, diverging strokes. There were glass panels set into the Underwood's sides and now they glowed like the walls of an aquarium.
Suddenly the keys of the typewriter began to depress themselves, moving up and down like the keys of a player piano. The carriage moved rapidly and letters spilled across the page:
Full fathom five my father lies
Ding! Bang!
The carriage returned.
No, I'm not seeing this. I don't believe I'm seeing this.
Those are pearls that were his eyes.
Sickly green light spilling up through the keyboard and over the words like radium.
Ding! Bang!
My beer is Rhinegold the dry beer
The line appeared in the space of a second, it seemed. The keys were a hammering blur of speed. It was like watching a news ticker.
Think of Rhinegold whenever you buy beer!
Dear God, is she really doing this? Or is it a trick?
With his mind tottering again in the face of this new wonder, he found himself grasping eagerly for Sherlock Holmes - a trick, of course it was a trick, all a part of poor old Bobbi's nervous breakdown ... her very creative nervous breakdown.
Ding! Bang! The carriage shot back.
No trick, Gard.
The carriage returned, and the hammering keys typed this before his wide, staring eyes.
You were right the first time. I'm doing it from the kitchen. The gadget behind the typewriter is thought-sensitive, the way a photoelectric cell is light-sensitive. This thing seems to pick up my thoughts clearly up to a distance of five miles. If I'm further away than that, things start to get garbled. Beyond ten or so, it doesn't work at all.
Ding! Bang! The big silver lever to the left of the carriage worked itself twice, cranking the paper - which now held three perfectly typed messages - up a few lines. Then it resumed.
So you see I didn't have to be sitting at the typewriter to work on my novel -look, ma, no hands! This poor old Underwood ran like a bastard for those two or three days, Gard, and all the time it was running I was in the woods, working around the place, or down cellar. But as I say, mostly I was sleeping. It's funny ... even if someone could have convinced me such a gadget existed, I wouldn't have believed it would work for me, because I've always been lousy at dictating. I have to write my own letters, I always said, because I have to see the words on paper. It was impossible for me to imagine how someone could dictate a whole novel into a tape recorder, for instance, although some writers apparently do just that. But this isn't like dictating, Gard - it's like a direct tap into the subconscious, more like dreaming than writing ... but what comes out is unlike dreams, which are often surreal and disconnected. This really isn't a typewriter at all anymore. It's a dream machine. One that dreams rationally. There's something cosmically funny about them giving it to me, so I could write The Buffalo Soldiers. You're right, it really is the best thing I've ever written, but it's still your basic oat opera. It's like inventing a perpetual-motion machine so your little kid won't pester you any more about changing the batteries in his toy car! But can you imagine what the results might have been if F. Scott Fitzgerald had had one of these gadgets? Or Hemingway? Faulkner? Salinger?
After each question-mark the typewriter fell momentarily silent and then burst out with another name. After Salinger's, it stopped completely. Gardener had read the material as it came out, but in a mechanical, almost uncomprehending way. His eyes went back to the beginning of the passage. I was thinking that it was a trick, that she might have hooked the typewriter up somehow to write those two little snatches of verse. And it wrote
It had written: No trick, Gard.
He thought suddenly: Can you read my mind, Bobbi?
Ding! Bang! The carriage returned suddenly, making him jump and almost cry out.
Yes. But only a little.
What did we do on the 4th July the year I quit teaching?
Drove up to Derry. You said you knew a guy who'd sell us some cherry bombs. He sold us the cherry bombs but they were all duds. You were pretty drunk. You wanted to go back and knock his block off. I couldn't talk you out of it, so we went back, and damned if his house wasn't on fire. He had a lot of real stuff in the basement, and he'd dropped a cigarette butt into a box of it. You saw the fire and the fire-trucks and got laughing so hard you fell down in the street.
That feeling of unreality had never been as strong as it was now. He fought it, keeping it at arm's length while his eyes searched through the previous passage for something else. After a second or two he found it: There's something almost cosmically funny about them giving it to me, you know ...
And earlier Bobbi had said: The batteries kept falling over and they were wild, just wild ...
His cheeks felt hotly flushed, as if with fever, but his forehead felt as cold as an icepack - even the steady pulse of pain from above his left eye seemed cold ... shallow stabs hitting with metronomelike regularity.
Looking at the typewriter, which was filled with that somehow ghastly green light, Gardener thought: Bobbi, who are 'they'?
Ding! Bang!
The keys rattled off a burst, letters forming words, the words forming a child's couplet:
Late last night and the night before
Tommyknockers, Tommyknockers, knocking at the door.
Jim Gardener screamed.
7
At last his hands stopped shaking - enough so he could get the hot coffee to his mouth without slopping it all over himself, thus finishing the morning's lunatic festivities with a few more burns.
Anderson kept watching him from the other side of the kitchen table with concerned eyes. She kept a bottle of very good brandy in the darkest depths of the pantry, far away from the 'alcoholic staples,' and she had offered to spike Gard's coffee with a wallop of it. He had declined, not just with regret but with real pain. He needed that brandy - it would dull the ache in his head, maybe kill it entirely. More important, it would bring his mind back into focus. It would get rid of that I-just-sailed-off-the-edge-of-the-world feeling.
Only problem was, he'd finally gotten to 'that' point, hadn't he? Correct. That point where it wouldn't stop with a single wallop of brandy in his coffee. There had been entirely too much input since he had opened the hatch at the bottom of Bobbi's water heater and then gone upstairs for a belt of whiskey.
It had been safe then; now the air was the unsteady sort that spawned tornadoes.
So: no more drinks. Not so much as an Irish sweetener in his coffee, until he understood what was happening here. Including what was happening to Bobbi. That, most of all.
'I'm sorry that last bit happened,' Anderson said, 'but I'm not sure I could have stopped it. I told you it was a dream machine; it's also a subconscious machine. I'm really not getting much of your thoughts at all, Gard - I've tried this with other people, and in most cases it's as easy as sinking your thumb into fresh dough. You can core all the way down to what I guess you'd call the id ... although it's awful down there, full of the most monstrous ... you can't even call them ideas ... images, I guess you'd say. Simple as a child's scrawl, but they're alive. Like those fish they find down deep in the ocean, the ones that explode if you bring them up.' Bobbi suddenly shuddered. 'They're alive,' she repeated.
For a second there was no sound but the birds singing outside.
'Anyway, all I get from you is surface stuff, and most of that is all broken up and garbled. If you were like anyone else, I'd know what's been going on with you, and why you look so crappy - '
'Thanks, Bobbi. I knew there was a reason I keep coming here, and since it's not the cooking, it must be the flattery.' He grinned, but it was a nervous grin, and he lit another cigarette.
'As it is,' Bobbi went on as if he hadn't spoken, 'I can make some educated guesses on the basis of what's happened to you before, but you'll have to tell me the details ... I couldn't snoop even if I wanted to. I'm not sure I could get it clear even if you shoved it all up to the front of your mind and put out a Welcome mat. But when you asked who "they" were, that little rhyme about the Tommyknockers came up like a big bubble. And it ran itself off on the typewriter.'
'All right,' Gardener said, although it wasn't all right ... nothing was all right. 'But who are they besides the Tommyknockers? Are they pixies? Leprechauns? Grem - '
'I asked you to look around because I wanted you to get an idea of how big all of this is,' Anderson said. 'How far-reaching the implications could be.'
'I realize that, all right,' Gardener said, and a smile ghosted around the corners of his mouth. 'A few more far-reaching implications and I'll be ready for a strait-waistcoat.'
'Your Tommyknockers came from space,' Anderson said, 'as I think you must have deduced by now.'
Gardener supposed the thought had done more than cross his mind - but his mouth was dry, his hands froze around the coffee cup.
'Are they around?' he asked, and his voice seemed to come from far, far away. He was suddenly afraid to turn around, afraid he might see some gnarled thing with three eyes and a horn where its mouth should have been come waltzing out of the pantry, something that belonged only on a movie-screen, maybe in a Star Wars epic.
'I think they - the actual physical they - have been dead for a long time,' Anderson said calmly. 'They probably died long before men existed on earth. But then ... Caruso's dead, but he's still singing on a hell of a lot of records, isn't he?'
'Bobbi,' Gardener said, 'tell me what happened. I want you to begin at the beginning and end by saying, "Then you came up the road just in time to grab me when I passed out." Can you do that?'
'Not entirely,' she said, and grinned. 'But I'll do my best.'
8
Anderson talked for a long time. When she finished, it was past noon. Gard sat across the kitchen table, smoking, excusing himself only once to go into the bathroom, where he took three more aspirins.
Anderson began with her stumble, told of coming back and digging out more of the ship - enough to realize she had found something utterly unique - and then going back a third time. She did not tell Gardener about Chuck the Woodchuck, who had been dead but not flyblown; nor about Peter's shrinking cataract; nor about the visit to Etheridge, the vet. She passed over those things smoothly, saying only that when she came back from her first whole day of work on the thing, she had found Peter dead on the front porch.
'It was as if he'd gone to sleep,' Anderson said, and there was a note of schmaltz in her voice so unlike the Bobbi he knew that Gardener looked up sharply ... and then looked down at his hands quickly. Anderson was crying a little.
After a few moments Gardener asked: 'What then?'
'Then you came up the road just in time to grab me when I passed out,' Anderson said, smiling.
'I don't understand what you mean.'
'Peter died on the 28th of June,' Anderson said. She had never had much practice as a liar, but thought this one came out sounding smooth and natural. 'That's the last day I remember clearly and sequentially. Until you showed up last night, that is.' She smiled openly and guilelessly at Gardener, but this was also a lie - her clear, sequential, unjumbled memories ended the day before, on June 27th, with her standing above, that titanic thing buried in the earth, gripping the handle of the shovel. They ended with her whispering 'Everything's fine,' and then beginning to dig. There was more to the tale, all right, all kinds of more, but she couldn't remember it sequentially and what she could remember would have to be edited . . . carefully edited. For instance, she couldn't really tell Gard about Peter. Not yet. They had told her she couldn't, but on that one she didn't need any telling.
They had also told her Jim Gardener would have to be watched very, very closely. Not for long, of course - soon Gard would be
(part of us)
on the team. Yes. And it would be great to have him on the team, because if there was anyone in the world Anderson loved, it was Jim Gardener.
Bobbi, who are 'they'?
The Tommyknockers. That word, which had risen out of the queer opaqueness in Gard's mind like a silvery bubble, was as good a name as any, wasn't it? Sure. Better than some.
'So what now?' Gardener asked, lighting her last cigarette. He looked both dazed and wary. 'I'm not saying I can swallow all this . . .' He laughed a bit wildly. 'Or maybe it's just that my throat's not big enough for it all to go down at once.'
'I understand,' Anderson said. 'I think the main reason I remember so little about the last week or so is because it's all so ... weird. It's like having your mind strapped to a rocket-sled.'
She didn't like lying to Gard; it made her uneasy. But all the lying would be done soon enough. Gard would be ... would be ...
Well ... persuaded.
When he saw the ship. When he felt the ship.
'No matter how much I do or don't believe, I'm forced to believe most of it, I guess.'
When you remove the impossible, whatever remains is the truth, no matter how improbable.-
'You got that too, did you?'
'The shape of it. I might not have even known what it was if I hadn't heard you say it once or twice.'
Gardener nodded. 'Well, I guess it fits the situation we have here. If I don't believe the evidence of my senses, I have to believe I'm crazy. Although God knows there are enough people in the world who would be more than happy to testify that's just what I am.'
'You're not crazy, Gard,' Anderson said quietly, and put her hand over his. He turned his own over and squeezed it.
'Well ... you know, a man who shot his wife ... there are people who'd say that's pretty persuasive evidence of insanity. You know?'
'Gard, that was eight years ago.'
'Sure. And that guy I elbowed in the tit, that was eight days ago. I also chased a guy down Arberg's hall and across his dining room, with an umbrella, did I tell you that? My behavior over the last few years has been increasingly self-destructive - '
'Hi, folks, and welcome once more to The National Self-Pity Hour!' Bobbi Anderson chirruped brightly. 'Tonight's guest is - '
'I was going to kill myself yesterday morning,' Gardener said quietly. 'If I hadn't gotten these vibrations - really strong ones - that you were in trouble, I'd be fishfood now.'
Anderson looked at him closely. Her hand slowly tightened down on his until it was hurting. 'You mean it, don't you? Christ!'
'Sure. You want to know how bad it's gotten? It seemed like the sanest thing I could do under the circumstances.'
'Come off it.'
'I'm serious. Then this idea came. The idea you were in trouble. So I put it off long enough to call you. But you weren't here.'
'I was probably in the woods,' Anderson said. 'And you came running.' She lifted his hand to her mouth and kissed it gently. 'If this whole crazy business doesn't mean anything else, at least it means you're still alive, you ass**le.'
'As always, I'm impressed by the almost Gallic range of your compliments, Bobbi.'
'If you ever do do it, I'll see it's written on your tombstone, Gard. ASSHOLE in letters carved deep enough so they won't wear off for at least a century.'
'Well, thanks,' Gardener said, 'but you don't have to worry about it for a while. Because I still got it.'
'What?'
'That feeling that you're in trouble.'
She tried to look away, tried to take her hand away.
'Look at me, Bobbi, goddammit.'
At last, reluctantly, she did, her lower lip slightly pushed out in that stubborn expression he knew so well - but didn't she also look just the tiniest bit uneasy? He thought so.
'All of this seems so wonderful - house-power from D-cells, books that write themselves, God knows what else - so why should I feel that you're in trouble?'
'I don't know,' she said softly, and got up to do the dishes.
9
'Of course I worked until I damn near dropped, that's one thing,' Anderson said. Her back was to him now, and he had a feeling she liked it that way fine. Dishes rattled in hot, soapy water. 'And I didn't just say "Aliens from space, ho-hum, cheap clean electric power and mental telepathy, big deal," you know. My mailman's cheating on his wife, I know about it - I don't want to know about it, hell, I'm no snoop, but it was just there, Gard, right there in the front of his head. Not seeing it would be like not seeing a neon sign a hundred feet high. Christ, I've been rocking and reeling.'
'I see,' he said, and thought: She's not telling the truth, at least not all of it, and I don't think she even knows it. 'The question remains: what do we do now?'
'I don't know.' She glanced around, saw Gardener's raised eyebrows, and said, 'Did you think I was going to give you the answer in a neat little essay, five hundred words or less? I can't. I've got some ideas, but that's all. Maybe not even very good ones. I suppose the first thing is to take you out so you can
(be persuaded)
have a look at it. Afterward well .
Gardener looked at her for a long time. Bobbi did not drop her eyes this time; they were open and guileless. But things were wrong here, off-note and off-key. Things like that note of fake schmaltz in Bobbi's voice when she spoke of Peter. Maybe the tears had been real, but that tone it had been all wrong.
'All right. Let's go take a look at your ship in the earth.'
'But let's have lunch first,' Anderson said placidly.
'You're hungry again?'
'Sure. Aren't you?'
'Christ, no!'
'Then I'll eat for both of us,' Anderson said, and she did.
Chapter 10. Gardener Decides
1
,Good God.' Gardener sat down heavily on a fresh stump. It felt like a case of sit down or fall down. Like being punched hard in the stomach. No; it was stranger and more radical than that. It was more like someone had slammed the hose of an industrial vacuum cleaner into his mouth and turned it on, sucking all the wind out of his lungs in a second's time. 'Good God,' he repeated in a tiny breathless voice. It seemed to be all of which he was capable.
'It's something, isn't it?'
They were halfway down the slope, not far from where Anderson had found the dead chuck. Before, the slope had been pretty heavily wooded. Now a lane had been cut through the trees to admit a strange vehicle which Gardener almost recognized. It stood at the edge of Anderson's dig, and it was dwarfed both by the excavation and the thing which was being unearthed.
The trench was now two hundred feet long and twenty feet wide at either end. The cut bulged to thirty feet or so in width for perhaps forty feet of the slit's total length - that bulge made a shape like a woman's hips seen in silhouette. The gray leading edge of the ship, its curvature now triumphantly revealed, rose out of this bulge like the edge of a giant steel tea saucer.
'Good God,' Gardener gasped again. 'Look at that thing.'
'I have been,' Bobbi said, a distant little smile playing over her lips. 'For over a week I've been looking at it. It's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen. And it's going to solve a lot of problems, Gard. "There came a man on horseback, riding and riding - "'
That cut through the fog. Gardener looked around at Anderson, who might have been drifting in the dark places from which that incredible thing had come. The look on her face chilled Gardener. Bobbi's eyes were not just far-off. They were vacant windows.
'What do you mean?'
'Hmmm?' Anderson looked around as if coming out of a deep daze.
'What do you mean, a man on horseback?'
'I mean you, Gard. I mean me. But I think ... I think I mostly mean you. Come on down here and take a look.'
Anderson started down the slope quickly, with the casual grace of previous experience. She got maybe twenty feet before she realized Gardener wasn't with her. She looked back. He had gotten up from the stump, but that was all.
'It won't bite you,' Anderson said.
'No? What will it do to me, Bobbi?'
'Nothing! They're dead, Gard! Your Tommyknockers were real enough, but they were mortal, and this ship has been here for at least fifty million years. The glacier broke around it! It covered it, but it couldn't move it. Not even all those tons of ice could move it! So the glacier broke around it. You can look into the cut and see it, like a frozen wave. Dr Borns from the university would go batshit over this ... but they're dead enough, Gard.'
'Have you been inside?' Gardener asked, not moving.
'No. The hatch - I think, I feel, there is one - is still buried. But that doesn't change what I know. They're dead, Gard. Dead.'
'They're dead, you haven't been in the ship, but you're inventing like Thomas Edison on a speed trip and you can read minds. So I repeat: what's it going to do to me?'
So she told the biggest lie of all - told it calmly, with no regret at all. She said: 'Nothing you don't want it to.' And started down again, without looking back to see if he was following.
Gardener hesitated, his head throbbing miserably, and then he started down after her.