The Tommyknockers

'It's probably like taking ether . . . but it might be painful. Agony, even. Either way, the devil you know is always better than the devil you don't.'

Gardener suddenly burst into tears.

'Bobbi, you could have saved me yea grief if you'd reminded me of that sooner.'

'Take the pills, Gard. Deal with the devil you know. The way you are now, two hundred milligrams of Valium will take you off very quickly. Don't make me mail you like a letter addressed to nowhere.'

'Tell me some more about the Tommyknockers,' Gardener said, wiping at his face with his hands.

Bobbi smiled. 'The pills, Gard. If you start taking the pills, I'll tell you anything you want to know. If you don't - ' She raised the photon pistol.

Gardener unscrewed the top of the Valium bottle, shook out half a dozen of the blue pills with the heart-shape in the middle (Valentines from the Valley of Torpor, he thought), tossed them into his mouth, cracked the beer, and swallowed them. There went sixty milligrams down the old chute. He could have hidden one under his tongue, maybe, but six? Come on, folks, be real. Not much time now. I vomited my belly empty, I've lost a lot of blood, I haven't been taking this shit and so have no tolerance to it, I'm some thirty pounds lighter than I was when I picked up the first mandatory prescription. If I don't get rid of this shit quick, they'll hit me like a highballing semi.

'Tell me about the Tommyknockers,' he invited again. One hand dropped into his lap below the table and touched the butt

(shield-shield-shield-shield)

of the gun. How long before the stuff started to work? Twenty minutes? He couldn't remember. And nobody had ever told him about OD'ing on Valium.

Bobbi moved the gun a bit toward the pills. 'Take some more, Gard. As Jacqueline Susann may have once said, six is not enough.'

He shook out four more but left them on the oilcloth.

'You were scared shitless out there, weren't you?' Gardener asked. 'I saw the way you looked, Bobbi. You looked like you thought they were all going to get up and walk. Day of the Dead.'

Bobbi's New and Improved eyes flickered ... but her voice remained soft. 'But we are walking and talking, Gard. We are back.'

Gard picked up the four Valiums, bounced them in his palm. 'I want you to tell me just one thing, and then I'll take these.' Yes. Just that one thing would in some fashion answer all the other questions - the ones he was never going to get a chance to ask. Maybe that was why he hadn't tried Bobbi with the gun yet. Because this was what he really needed to know. This one thing.

'I want to know what you are,' Gardener said. 'Tell me what you are.'

4

'I'll answer your question, or at least try to,' Bobbi said, 'if you'll take those pills you're bouncing in your hand right now. Otherwise, you're going bye-bye, Gard. There's something in your mind. I can't quite read it - it's like seeing a shape through gauze. But it makes me extremely nervous.'

Gardener put the pills in his mouth and swallowed them.

'More.'

Gardener shook out another four and took them. All the way up to 140 milligrams now. Shooting the moon. Bobbi seemed to relax.

'I said Thomas Edison was closer than Albert Einstein, and that's as good a way to put it as any,' Bobbi said. 'There are things here in Haven that would have made Albert boggle, I suppose, but Einstein knew what E=mc2 meant. He understood relativity. He knew things. We ... we make things. Fix things. We don't theorize. We build. We're handymen.'

'You improve things,' Gardener said. He swallowed. When Valium took hold of him, his throat began to feel dry. He remembered that much. When it started to happen, he would have to act. He thought maybe he had already taken a lethal dose, and there were at least a dozen pills left in the bottle.

Bobbi had brightened a little.

'Improve! That's right! That's what we do. The way they - we - improved Haven. You saw the potential as soon as you got back. No more having to suck the corporate tit! Eventually, it's possible to convert totally to ... uh ... organic-storage-battery sources. They're renewable and long-lasting.

'You're talking about people.'

'Not just people, although higher species do seem to produce longer-lasting power than the lower ones - it may be a function of spirituality rather than intelligence. The Latin word for it, esse, is probably the best. But even Peter has lasted a remarkably long time, produced a great deal of power, and he's only a dog.'

'Maybe because of his spirit,' Gardener said. 'Maybe because he loved you.' He took the pistol out of his belt. He held it

(shield-shield-shield-shield)

against his inner left thigh.

'That's beside the point,' Bobbi said, waving the subject of Peter's love or spirituality away. 'You have decided for some reason that the morality of what we're doing is unacceptable - but then, the spectrum of what you think of as morally acceptable behavior is very narrow. It doesn't matter; you'll be going to sleep soon.

'We have no history, written or oral. When you say the ship crashed here because those in charge were, in effect, fighting over the steering wheel, I feel there's an element of truth in that ... but I also feel that perhaps it was meant, fated to happen. Telepaths are at least to some degree precognitives, Gard, and precognitives are more apt to let themselves be guided by the currents, both large and small, that run through the universe. "God" is the name some people give those currents, but God's only a word, like Tommyknockers or Altair-4.

'What I mean is, we would almost certainly be long extinct if we hadn't trusted those currents, because we've always been short-tempered, ready to fight. But "fight" is too general a word. We ... we . . .'Bobbi's eyes suddenly glowed a deep, frightful green. Her lips spread in a toothless grin. Gardener's right hand clutched the gun with a sweaty palm.

'We squabble!' Bobbi said. 'Le mot juste, Gard!'

'Good for you,' Gardener said, and swallowed. He heard a click. That dryness hadn't just sneaked up - all at once it was just there.

'Yes, we squabble, we've always squabbled. Like kids, you could say.' Bobbi smiled. 'We're very childlike. That's our good side.'

'Is it now?' A monstrous image suddenly filled Gardener's head: grammarschool kids heading off to school armed with books and Uzis and Smurfs lunch-boxes and M-16s and apples for the teachers they liked and fragmentation grenades for those they didn't. And, oh Christ, every one of the girls looked like Patricia McCardle and every one of the boys looked like Ted the Power Man. Ted the Power Man with greeny-glowing eyes that explained the whole sorry f**king mess, from Crusades and crossbow to Reagan's missile-tipped satellites.

We squabble. Every now and then we even tussle a bit. We're grownups - I guess -but we still have bad tempers, like kids do, and we also still like to have fun, like kids do, so we satisfied both wants by building all these nifty nuclear slingshots, and every now and then we leave a few around for people to pick UP, and do you know what? They always do. People like Ted, who are perfectly willing to kill so no woman in Braintree with the wherewithal to buy one shall want for electricity to run her hair-dryer. People like you, Gard, who see only minimal drawbacks to the idea of killing for peace.

It would be such a dull world without guns and squabbles, wouldn't it?

Gardener realized he was getting sleepy.

'Childlike,' she repeated. 'We fight ... but we can also be very generous. As we have here.'

'Yes, you've been very generous to Haven,' Gardener said, and his jaws abruptly cracked open in a huge, tendon-stretching yawn.

Bobbi smiled.

'Anyway, we might have crashed because it was "crash-time," according to those currents I mentioned. The ship wasn't hurt, of course. And when I started to uncover it, we ... came back.'

'Are there more of you out there?'

Bobbi shrugged. 'I don't know.' And don't care, the shrug said. We're here, There are improvements to be made. That is enough.

'That's really all you are?' He wanted to make sure; make sure there was no more to it. He was terribly afraid he was taking too long, much too long ... but he had to know. 'That's all?'

'What do you mean, all? Is it so little, what we are?'

'Frankly, yes,' Gard said. 'You see, I've been looking for the devil outside my life all my life because the one inside was so f**king hard to catch. It's hard to spend such a long time thinking you're ... Homer . . .' He yawned again, hugely. His eyelids had bricks on them. and discover you were ... Captain Ahab all the time.'

And finally, for the last time, with a kind of desperation he asked her:

'Is that all you are? Just people who fix things up?'

'I guess so,' she said. 'I'm sorry it's such a let-down for y

Gardener lifted the pistol under the table, and at the same moment felt the drug finally betray him: the shield slipped.

Bobbi's eyes glowed - no, this time they glared. Her voice, a mental scream, blasted through Gardener's head like a meat-cleaver

(GUN HE'S GOT A GUN HES GOT A)

chopping through the rising fog.

She tried to move. At the same time she tried to bring the photon pistol to bear on him. Gardener aimed the .45 at Bobbi under the table and pulled the trigger. There was only a dry click. The old slug had misfired.
Chapter 9. The Scoop, Concluded

1

John Leandro died. The scoop did not.

David Bright had promised to give Leandro until four, and that was a promise he had intended to keep - because it was honorable, of course, but also because he was not sure this was anything he wanted to stick his hand into. It might turn out to be a threshing machine instead of a news story. Nonetheless, he never doubted Johnny Leandro had been telling the truth, or his perception of it, crazed as his story sounded. Johnny was a twerp, Johnny sometimes didn't just jump to conclusions but broad-jumped them completely, but he wasn't a liar (even if he had been, Bright didn't believe he was smart enough to fabricate something this woolly).

Around two-thirty that afternoon, Bright suddenly began to think of another Johnny - poor, damned Johnny Smith, who had sometimes touched objects and gotten 'feelings' about them. That had been crazy, too, but Bright had believed Johnny Smith, had believed in what Smith said he could do. It was impossible to look into the man's haunted eyes and not believe. Bright was not touching anything which belonged to John Leandro, but he could see his desk across the room, the hood pulled neatly over his word-processor terminal, and he began to get a feeling ... a very dismal one. He felt that Johnny Leandro might be dead.

He called himself an old woman, but the feeling didn't go away. He thought of Leandro's voice, desperate and cracking with excitement. This is my story, and I'm not going to give it up just like that. Thought of Johnny Smith's dark eyes, his trick of constantly rubbing at the left side of his forehead. Bright's eyes were drawn again and again to Leandro's hooded word-cruncher.

He held out until three o'clock. By then the feeling had become sickening assurance. Leandro was dead. There was just no maybe in it. He might not ever have another genuine premonition in his life, but he was having one now. Not crazy, not wounded, not one of the missing. Dead.

Bright picked up the phone, and although the number he dialed had a Cleaves Mills exchange, both Bobbi and Gard would have known it was really long-distance: fifty-five days after Bobbi Anderson's stumble in the woods, someone was finally calling the Dallas Police.

2

The man Bright talked to at the Cleaves Mills state-police barracks was Andy Torgeson. Bright had known him since college, and he could talk to him without feeling that he had the words NEWS SNOOP tattooed on his forehead in bright red letters. Torgeson listened patiently, saying little, as Bright told him everything, beginning with Leandro's assignment to the story of the missing cops.

'His nose bled, his teeth fell out, he got vomiting, and he was convinced that all of this was coming out of the air?'

'Yes,' Bright said.

'Also, this whatever-it-is in the air improved the shit out of his radio reception.'

'Right.'

'And you think he might be in a lot of trouble.'

'Right again.'

'I think he might be in a lot of trouble, too, Dave - it sounds like he's gone section-eight.'

'I know how it sounds. I just don't think that's the way it is.'

'David,' Torgeson said in a tone of great patience, 'it might be possible - at least in a movie - to take over a little town and poison it somehow. But there's a highway that runs through that little town. There's people in that little town. And phones. Do you think someone could poison a whole town, or shut it off from the outside world, with no one the wiser?'

'Old Derry Road isn't really a highway,' Bright pointed out. 'Not since they finished the stretch of I-95 between Bangor and Newport thirty years ago. Since then, the Old Derry Road has been more like this big deserted landing strip with a yellow line running down the middle of it.'

'You're not trying to tell me nobody's tried to use it lately, are you?'

'No. I'm not trying to tell you much of anything . . . but Johnny did say he'd found some people who hadn't seen their relatives in Haven for a couple of months. And some people who tried to go in to check on them got sick and had to leave in a hurry. Most of them chalked it up to food poisoning or something. He also mentioned a store in Troy where this old crock is doing a booming business in T-shirts because people have been coming out of Haven with bloody noses ... and that it's been going on for weeks.'

'Pipe dreams,' Torgeson said. Looking across the barracks ready-room, he saw the dispatcher sit up abruptly and switch the telephone he was holding to his left hand, so he could write. Something had happened somewhere, and from the goosed look on the dispatcher's face, it wasn't a fender-bender or purse-snatching. Of course, people being what they were, something always did happen. And, as little as he liked to admit it, something might be happening in Haven, as well. The whole thing sounded as mad as the tea party in Alice, but David had never impressed him as a member of the fruit-and-nuts brigade. At least not a card-carrying one, he amended.

'Maybe they are,' Bright was saying, 'but their essential pipe-dreaminess can be proved or disproved by a quick trip out to Haven by one of your guys.' He paused. 'I'm asking as a friend. I'm not one of Johnny's biggest fans, but I'm worried about him.'

Torgeson was still looking into the dispatcher's office, where Smokey Dawson was now ratchet-jawing away a mile a minute. Smokey looked up, saw Torgeson looking, and held up one hand, all the fingers splayed. Wait, the gesture said. Something big.

'I'll see that someone takes a ride out there before the end of the day,' Torgeson said. 'I'll go myself if I can, but - '

'If I was to come over to Derry, could you pick me up?'

'I'll have to call you,' Torgeson said. 'Something's happening here. Dawson looks like he's having a heart attack.'

'I'll be here,' Bright said. 'I'm seriously worried, Andy.'

'I know,' Torgeson said - there had not even been a flicker of interest from Bright when Torgeson mentioned something big was apparently up, and that wasn't like him at all. 'I'll call you.'

Dawson came out of the dispatcher's office. It was high summer, and, except for Torgeson, who was catching, the entire complement of troopers on duty was out on the roads. The two of them had the barracks to themselves.

'Jesus, Andy,' Dawson said. 'I dunno what to make of this.'

'Of what?' He felt the old tight excitement building in the center of his chest -Torgeson had his own intuitions from time to time, and they were accurate within the narrow band of his chosen profession. Something big, all right. Dawson looked as if someone had hit him with a brick. That old, tight excitement - most of him hated it, but part of him was a junkie for it. And now that part of him made a sudden, exhilarating connection - it was irrational but it was also irrefutable. This had something to do with what Bright had just called about. Somebody get the Dormouse and the Mad Hatter, plop the Dormouse into the pot, he thought. I think the tea party's getting under way.

'There's a forest fire in Haven,' Dawson said. 'Must be a forest fire. The report says it's probably in Big Injun Woods.'

'Probably? What's this probably shit?'

'The report came from a fire-watch station in China Lakes,' Dawson said. 'They logged smoke over an hour ago. Around two o'clock. They called Derry Fire Alert and Ranger Station Three in Newport. Engines were sent from Newport, Unity, China, Woolwich -'

'Troy? Albion? What about them? Christ, they border the town!'

'Troy and Albion didn't report.'

'Haven itself?'

'The phones are dead.'

'Come on, Smokey, don't break my balls. Which phones?'

'All of them.' He looked at Torgeson and swallowed. 'Of course, I haven't verified that for myself. But that isn't the nuttiest part. I mean, it's pretty crazy, but - '

'Go on and spill it.'

Dawson did. By the time he finished, Torgeson's mouth was dry.

Ranger Station Three was in charge of fire control in Penobscot County, at least as long as a fire in the woods didn't develop a really broad front. The first task was surveillance; the second was spotting; the third was locating. It sounded easy. It wasn't. In this case, the situation was even worse than usual, because the fire had been reported from twenty miles away. Station Three called for conventional fire engines because it was still technically possible that they might be of some use: they hadn't been able to reach anyone from Haven who could tell them one way or the other. As far as the fire wardens at Three knew, the fire could be in Frank Spruce's east pasture or a mile into the woods. They also sent out three two-man crews of their own in four-wheel-drive vehicles, armed with topographical maps, and a spotterplane. Dawson had called them Big Injun Woods, but Chief Wahwayvokah was long gone, and today the new, non-racist name on the topographical maps seemed more apt: Burning Woods.

The Unity fire engines arrived first . . . unfortunately for them. Three or four miles from the Haven town line, with the growing pall of smoke still at least eight miles distant, the men on the pumper began to feel ill. Not just one or two; the whole seven-man crew. The driver pressed on . . . until he suddenly lost consciousness behind the wheel. The pumper ran off Unity's Old Schoolhouse Road and crashed into the woods, still a mile and a half shy of Haven. Three men were killed in the crash; two bled to death. The two survivors had literally crawled out of the area on hands and knees, puking as they went.

'They said it was like being gassed,' Dawson said.

'That was them on the phone?'

Christ, no. The two still alive are on their way to Derry Home in an amb'lance. That was Station Three. They're trying to get things together, but right now it looks like there's a hell of a lot more going on in Haven than a forest fire. But that's spreading out of control, the Weather Service says there's going to be an easterly wind by nightfall, and it don't seem like no one can get in there to put it out!'

'What else do they know?'

Jack Shit!' Smokey Dawson exclaimed, as if personally offended. 'People who get close to Haven get sick. Closer you get, the sicker you are. That's all anyone knows, besides something's burning.'

Not a single fire unit had gotten into Haven. Those from China and Woolwich had gotten closest. Torgeson went to the anemometer on the wall and thought he saw why. They'd been coming from upwind. If the air in and around Haven was poisoned, the wind was blowing it the other way.