of good daylight left, Ruth wasted no time. She gathered Bryant, Ev Hillman, John Golden from just down the road, and Henry Applegate, Barney's father, in the Browns' back yard. Marie wanted to join the search party, but Ruth insisted she stay with Hilly. In her current frame of mind, Marie would be more hindrance than help. They had already searched, of course, but they had gone at it in a distracted, half-assed way. Eventually, as the boy's parents became convinced that David must have wandered across the road and into the woods, they had really ceased to search at all, although they had continued to move aimlessly around.
Ruth got some from what they said; some from the oddly distracted, oddly frightened way they looked; most from their minds.
Their two minds: the human one and the alien one. Always there came a point where the becoming might degenerate into madness - the madness of schizophrenia as the target minds tried to fight the alien group mind slowly welding them together ... and then eclipsing them. This was the time of necessary acceptance. Thus, it was the time of the dance of untruth.
Mabel Noyes might have set it going, but she was not loved enough to make people dance. The Hillmans and the Browns were. They went far back in Haven's history, were well-loved and well-respected.
And, of course, David Brown was only a little boy.
The human net-mind, its 'Ruth-mind,' one might say, thought: He could have wandered into the high grass of the Browns' back field and fallen asleep. More likely than Marie's idea that he went into the woods - he'd have to cross the road to do that, and he was well-behaved. Marie and Bryant both say so. More important, so do the others. He'd been told again and again and again that he was never to cross the road without a grownup, so the woods don't seem likely.
'We're going to cover the lawn and back field section by section,' Ruth said. 'And we're not just going to walk around; we're going to look.'
'But if we don't find him?' Bryant's eyes were scared and pleading. 'If we don't find him, Ruth?'
She didn't really have to tell him; she only had to think it at him. If they didn't find David quickly, she would begin making calls. There would be a much larger search party - men with lights and bullhorns moving through the woods. If David wasn't found by morning, she would call Orval Davidson up in Unity and have him bring his bloodhounds. This was a familiar enough procedure to most of them. They knew about search parties, and most had been on them before; they were common enough during hunting season, when the woods filled up with out-of-staters carrying their heavy-caliber weapons and wearing their new orange flannel duds from L. L. Bean's. Usually these lost were found alive, suffering from nothing but mild exposure and severe embarrassment.
But sometimes they found them dead.
And sometimes they never found them at all.
They would not find David Brown, and they knew it long before the search began. Their minds had netted together as soon as Ruth arrived. This was an act of instinct as involuntary as a blink. They linked minds and searched for
David's. Their mental voices united in a chorus so strong that if David had been in a radius of seventy miles, he would have clapped his hands to his head and screamed in pain. He would have heard and known they were looking for him at fives times that distance.
No, David Brown was not lost. He was just ... not-there.
But because it was the Tommyknocker-mind which knew this, and because they still thought of themselves as 'human beings,' they would begin the dance of untruth.
The becoming would demand many lies.
This one, the one they told themselves, the one that insisted they were really the same as ever, was the most important lie of all.
They all knew that, too. Even Ruth McCausland.
3
By eight-thirty, with dusk growing too thick to be much different from night, the five searchers had grown to a dozen. The news traveled quickly - a little too quickly to be normal. They covered all the yards and fields on the Browns' side, beginning at Hilly's stage (Ruth herself had crawled under there with a powerful flashlight, thinking that if David Brown was anywhere close by it should be here, fast asleep -but there was only flattened grass and a queer electrical smell that made her