He forced an answering smile. 'I hadn't noticed,' he said.
'Do you feel any different?'
'No,' Gard said truthfully. 'Not yet, anyway. What do you say, you want to do some work?'
'I'll do what I can,' Bobbi said. 'With this arm
'You can check the hoses and tell me if any of them are starting to come loose. And talk to me.' He looked at Bobbi with an awkward smile. 'None of those other guys knew how to talk, man. I mean, they were sincere, but . . .' He shrugged. 'You know?'
Bobbi smiled back, and Gardener saw another brilliant, unalloyed flash of the old Bobbi, the woman he had loved. He remembered the safe dark harbor of her neck and that screw in his heart turned again. 'I think I do,' she said, 'and I'll talk your ear off, if that's what you want. I've been lonely, too.'
They stood together, smiling at each other, and it was almost the old way, but the woods were silent with no birdsong to fill them up.
The love's over, he thought. Now it's the same old poker game, except the Tooth Fairy came last night and I guess the bastard will be back tonight. Probably along with his cousin and his brother-in-law. And when they start seeing my cards, maybe exposing that glimmer of an idea like an ace in the hole, it'll be all over. In a way, it's funny. We always assumed the aliens would have to at least be alive to invade. Not even H. G. Wells expected an invasion of ghosts.
'I want to have a look into the trench,' Bobbi said.
'Okay. You'll like the way it's draining, I think.'
Together they walked into the shadow cast by the ship.
13
Monday, August 8th:
The heat was back.
The temperature outside of Newt Berringer's kitchen window was seventynine at a quarter past seven that Monday morning, but Newt wasn't in the kitchen to read it; he was standing in the bathroom in his pajama bottoms, inexpertly applying his late wife's makeup to his face and cursing the way the sweat made the Pan-Cake clump up. He had always thought makeup a lot of harmless ladies' foofraw, but now, trying to use it according to its original purpose - not to accent the good but to conceal the bad (or, at least, the startling) - he was discovering that putting on makeup was like giving someone a haircut. It was a fuck of a lot harder than it looked.
He was trying to cover up the fact that, over the last week or so, the skin of his cheeks and forehead had begun to fade. He knew, of course, that it had something to do with the trips he and the others had made into Bobbi's shed - trips he could not remember afterwards; only that they had been frightening but even more exhilarating, and that he had come out all three times feeling ten feet tall and ready to have sex in the mud with a platoon of lady wrestlers. He knew enough to associate what was happening with the shed, but at first he had thought it was simply a matter of losing his usual summer tan. In the years before an icy winter afternoon and a skidding bread truck had taken her, his wife Elinor liked to joke that all you needed to do was to put Newt under one ray of sun after the first of May and he turned as brown as an Indian.
By last Friday afternoon, however, he was no longer able to fool himself about what was going on. He could see the veins, arteries, and capillaries in his cheeks, exactly as you could see them in that model he'd gotten his nephew Michael two Christmases ago - The Amazing Visible Man, it was called. It was damned unsettling. It wasn't just being able to see into himself, either; when he pressed his fingers against his cheeks, the cheekbones felt definitely squashy. It was as if they were ... well . . . dissolving.
I can't go out like this, he thought. Jesus, no.
But on Saturday, when he had looked in the mirror and realized after some thought and a lot of squinting that the gray shadow he was seeing through the side of his face was his own tongue, he had almost flown over to Dick Allison's.
Dick answered the door looking so normal that for a few terrible moments Newt believed this was happening to him and him alone. Then