the lean-to, looking at him with that sulky kicked-cat expression. Gardener suspected he had been on the party-line again with his fellow mutations.
'What do you say?' Gardener called over to him. There was an edged pleasantness in his voice. 'There's a lot of broken rock down there. Do we go back to work, or do we air a few more grievances?'
Enders went into the shed, grabbed the levitation-pack they used to move the bigger rocks, and started toward Gardener with it. He held it out. Gardener shouldered the pack. He started back toward the sling, then looked back at Enders.
'Don't forget to hoist me up when I yell.'
'I won't.' Enders's eyes - or perhaps that was only the lenses of his spectacles
were murky. Gardener discovered he didn't really care which. He put his foot into the rope sling and tightened it as Enders went back to the winch.
'Remember, Johnny. Consideration. That's the word for today.'
John Enders lowered him down without saying anything.
4
Sunday, July 31st:
Henry Buck, known to his friends as Hank, committed the last act of outright irrational craziness to take place in Haven at a quarter past eleven on that Sunday morning.
People in Haven are short-tempered, Enders had told Gard. Ruth McCausland had seen evidences of this short temper during the search for David Brown: hot words, scuffles, a thrown punch or two. Ironically, it had always been Ruth herself -Ruth and the clear moral imperative she had always represented in these people's lives - who had prevented the search from turning into a free-for-all.
Short-tempered? 'Crazy' was probably a better word.
In the shock of the 'becoming,' the entire town had been like a gas-filled room, waiting only for someone to light a match ... or to do something even more accidental but just as deadly, as an explosion in a gas-filled room may be set off by an innocent delivery-boy pushing a doorbell and creating a spark.
That spark never came. Part of it was Ruth's doing. Part of it was Bobbi's doing. Then, after the visits to the shed, a group of half a dozen men and one woman began to work like the hippie LSD-trip-guides of the sixties, helping Haven through to the end of the first difficult stage of 'becoming.'
It was well for the people of Haven that the big bang never did come, well for the people of Maine, New England, perhaps for the whole continent or the whole planet. I would not be the one to tell you there are no planets anywhere in the universe that are not large dead cinders floating in space because a war over who was or was not hogging too many dryers in the local Laundromat escalated into Doomsville. No one ever really knows where things will end - or if they will. And there had been a time in late June when the entire world might well have awakened to discover a terrible, world-ripping conflict was going on in an obscure Maine town - an exchange which had begun over something as deeply important as whose turn it had been to pick up the coffee-break check at the Haven Lunch.
Of course we may blow up our world someday with no outside help at all, for reasons which look every bit as trivial from a standpoint of light-years; from where we rotate far out on one spoke of the Milky Way in the Lesser Magellanic Cloud, whether or not the Russians invade the Iranian oilfields or whether NATO decides to install American-made Cruise missiles in West Germany may seem every bit as important as whose turn it is to pick up the tab for five coffees and a like number of Danish. Maybe it all comes down to the same thing, when viewed from a galactic perspective.
However that may be, the tense period in Haven really ended with the month of July - by this time, almost everyone in town had lost his teeth, and a number of other, stranger mutations had begun. Those seven people who had visited Bobbi's shed, communing with what waited in the green glow, had begun to experience these mutations some ten days earlier, but had kept them secret.
Considering the nature of the changes, that was probably wise.
Because Hank Buck's revenge on Albert 'Pits' Barfield was really the last act of outrageous craziness in Haven, and in that light it probably deserves a brief mention.
Hank and Pits Barfield were part of the Thursday-night poker circle to which Joe Paulson had also belonged. By July