had been flung out of the sun. So David Brown had in fact just gotten there. Of course he still might die; strange microbes might invade his system, some strange Altair-4 warehouse-rat might gobble him up, or he might die of simple shock. But he probably wouldn't, and if he did, it really wasn't very important.
I've a feeling the boy might come in handy, Kyle said.
(how)
As a diversion.
(what do you mean)
Kyle didn't know exactly what he meant. It was only a feeling that if a spotlight were to be trained on Haven again - the way Ruth had tried to train one on the town with her damned exploding dolls, which had worked ever so much better than they were supposed to work - perhaps they could bring David Brown back and set him down somewhere else. If that was done in the right way, they might gain a little more time here. Time was always a problem. Time to 'become.'
Kyle expressed these ideas in no coherent way, but the others nodded at the drift of his thoughts. It would be well to keep David Brown waiting in the wings, so to speak, a while longer.
(don't let Marie know - she hasn't gone far enough in the 'becoming' - you must hide this from Marie yet a while)
All six looked around, eyes widening. That voice, weak but clear, belonged to none of them. It had come from Bobbi Anderson.
Bobbi! Hazel cried, half-rising from her seat. Bobbi, are you all right? How you doing?
No answer.
Bobbi was gone - there was not even a feel of her left in the air. They looked at each other cautiously, testing each other's impression of that
thought, confirming that it had been Bobbi. Each knew that if he or she had been alone, with no confirmation available, he or she would have dismissed it as an incredibly powerful hallucination.
How are we going to keep it from Marie? Dick Allison asked, almost angrily. We can't hide nothing from anybody else!
Yes, Newt returned. We can. Not good enough yet, maybe, but we can dim out our thoughts a little. Make them hard to see. Because
(because we've been)
(been out there)
(been in the shed)
(Bobbi's shed)
(we wore the headphones in Bobbi's shed)
(and ate ate to 'become')
(take ye eat do this in remembrance of me)
A sigh ran gently through them.
We'll have to go back, Adley McKeen said. Won't we?
'Yes,' Kyle said. 'We will.' It was the only time anyone spoke aloud during the entire meeting, and it marked its end.
7
Wednesday, August 3rd:
Andy Bozeman, who had been Haven's only realtor up until three weeks ago, when he simply closed his office, had discovered that mind-reading was something a fellow got used to very quickly. He didn't realize how quickly, or how much he had come to depend on it, until it was his turn to go on out to Bobbi's place to help and to keep an eye on the drunk.
Part of his problem - he knew it was going to be a problem after talking to Enders and the Tremain lad - was being this close to the ship. It was like standing next to the biggest power generator in the world; constant eddies and flows of its weird force ran over his skin like skirling sand-devils in the desert. Sometimes large ideas would float dreamily into his mind, making it impossible to concentrate on what he was doing. Sometimes the exact opposite would occur: thought would break up completely, like a microwave transmission interrupted by a burst of ultraviolet rays. But most of it was just the physical fact of the ship, looming there like something out of a dream. It was exhilarating, awe-inspiring, frightening, wonderful. Bozeman thought he now understood how the Israelites must have felt carrying the Ark of the Covenant through the desert. In one of his sermons, the Rev. Goohringer said that some fellow had ventured to stick his head in there, just to see what all the shouting was about, and he had dropped dead on the spot.
Because it had been God in there.
There might be a kind of God in that ship, too, Andy thought. And even if that God had fled, It had left some residue ... some of Itself ... and thinking about all that made it hard to keep your mind on the business at hand.
Then there was Gardener's unsettling blankness. You kept running into it like a closed door that should have been open. You'd yell at him to hand you