that some huge piece of brickwork had taken off like a rocket, and some of those New and Improved Explosives had been involved. There had been a time, he remembered, when he had actually wasted time speculating on whether or not the super brain-food Bobbi's artifact was putting into the air could produce weapons. That time now seemed incredibly distant, that Jim Gardener incredibly naive.
'Can you make it, Johnny?' he asked the school principal.
Enders got up, wincing, putting his hands in the small of his back. He looked desperately tired, but he managed a small smile just the same. Looking at the ship seemed to refresh him. Blood was trickling from the corner of one eye, however - a single red tear. Something in there had ruptured. It's being this close to the ship, Gard thought. On the first of the two days Bobby Tremain had spent 'helping' him, he had spit out his last few teeth like machinegun bullets almost as soon as they got here.
He thought of telling Enders that something behind his right eye was leaking, then decided to let him discover it on his own. The guy would be all right. Probably. Even if he wasn't, Gardener wasn't sure he cared ... this more than anything else shocked him.
Why should it? Are you kidding yourself that these cats are human anymore? If you are, you better wise up, Gard ole Gard.
He headed down the slope, stopping at the last stump before rocky soil gave way to chipped and runnelled bedrock. He picked up a cheap transistor radio made of yellow high-impact plastic. It looked like Snoopy. Attached to it was the board from a Sharp calculator. And, of course, batteries.
Humming, Gardener made his way down to the edge of the trench. There the music dried up and he was quiet, only staring at the titanic gray flank of the ship. The view did not refresh him, but it did inspire a deep awe which had overtones of steadily darkening fear.
But you still hope, too. You'd be a liar if you said you didn't. The key could still be here ... somewhere.
As the fear darkened, however, that hope did too. Soon he thought it would be gone.
The hillside excavation now made the ship's flank too far away to touch - not that he wanted to; he didn't enjoy the sensation of having his head turning into a very large speaker. It hurt. He rarely bled now when he did touch it (and touching it was sometimes inevitable), but the blast of radio always came, and on occasion his nose or ears could still spray a hell of a lot more blood than he cared to look at. Gardener wondered briefly just how much borrowed time he was now living on, but that question was also moot. From the morning he had awakened on that New Hampshire breakwater, it had all been borrowed time. He was a sick man and he knew it, but not too sick to appreciate the irony of the situation in which he found himself: after busting his hump to dig this fucker up with a variety of tools which looked as if they might have come out of The Hugo Gernsback Whole Universe Catalogue, after doing what the rest of them probably couldn't have done without working themselves to death in a kind of hypnotic trance, he might not be able to go inside when and if they came to the hatch Bobbi believed was there. But he meant to try. You could bet your watch and chain on that.
Now he set his boot into a rope stirrup, slid the knot tight, and put the Snoopy radio in his shirt. 'Let me down easy, Johnny.'
Enders began to turn a windlass and Gardener began to slide downward. Beside him the smooth gray hull slid up and up and up.
If they wanted to get rid of him, this would be as easy a way as any, he supposed. Just send a telepathic order to Enders: Let go of the wheel, John. We're through with him. And down he would plunge, forty feet to the solid bedrock at the bottom, slack rope trailing up behind him. Crunch.
But of course he was at their mercy anyhow ... and he supposed they recognized his usefulness, however reluctantly. The Tremain kid was young, strong as a bull, but he had fagged out in two days. Enders was going to last out today - maybe -but Gardener would have bet