Gardener thought by then Haven would be done worrying about outside interference, one way or another, for good.
So who had the car been hidden from?
From you, Gard. They hid it from you. They still don't want you to know what they're capable of when it comes to protecting themselves. They hid it and Bobbi told you Anne went away.
He went back with this dangerous secret turning in his mind like a jewel.
BOOK III. THE TOMMYKNOCKERS Chapter 3. The Hatch
1
It happened two days later, as Haven lay sprawled and sunstruck under the August heat. Dog-days had come, except of course there were no dogs left in Haven -unless maybe there was one in Bobbi Anderson's shed.
Gard and Bobbi were at the bottom of a cut which was now a hundred and seventy feet deep - the hull of the ship formed one side of this excavation, and the other side, behind the silvery mesh crisscrossing it, showed a cutaway view of thin soil, clay, schist, granite, and spongy aquifer. A geologist would have loved it. They were wearing jeans and sweatshirts. It was stiflingly hot on the surface, but down here it was chilly - Gardener felt like a bug crawling on the side of a water cooler. On his head he wore a hard-hat with a flashlight attached to it by silver utility tape. Bobbi had cautioned him to use the light as sparingly as possible -batteries were in limited supply. Both of his ears were stuffed with cotton. He was using a pneumatic drill to shag up big chunks of rock. Bobbi was at the other end of the cut, doing the same thing.
Gardener had asked her that morning why they had to drill. 'I liked the radio explosives better, Bobbi old kid,' he said. 'Less pain and strain on the American brain, know what I mean?'
Bobbi didn't smile. Bobbi seemed to be losing her sense of humor along with her hair.
'We're too close now,' Bobbi said. 'Using an explosive might damage something we don't want to damage.'
'The hatch?'
'The hatch.'
Gardener's shoulders were aching, and the plate in his head was aching as well -that was probably mental, steel couldn't ache, but it always seemed to when he was down here - and he hoped Bobbi would signal soon that it was time for them to knock off for lunch.
He let the drill chatter and bite its way toward the ship again, not bothering too much about grazing that dull silver surface. You had to be careful not to let the tip of the drill walk onto it too hard, he had discovered; it was apt to rebound and tear off your foot if you weren't careful. The ship itself was as invulnerable to the rough kiss of the drill as it had been to the explosives he and his parade of helpers had used. There was at least no danger of damaging the goods.
The drill touched the ship's surface - and suddenly its steady machine-gun thunder turned to a high-pitched squeal. He thought he saw smoke squirt from the pulsing blur of the drill's tip. There was a snap. Something flew past his head. All this happened in less than a second. He shut the drill off and saw the drill-bit was almost entirely gone. All that remained was a jagged stub.
Gardener turned around and saw the part that had gone winging past his face embedded in the rock of the cut. It had sheared a strand of the meshwork neatly in two. Delayed shock hit, making his knees want to come unlocked and spill him to the ground.
Missed me by a whore's hair. No more, no less. Mother!
He tried to pull it out of the rock, and thought at first it wasn't going to come. Then he began to wiggle it back and forth. Like pulling a tooth out of a gum, he thought, and a hysterical titter escaped him.
The chunk of drill-bit came free. It was the size of a .45 slug, maybe a little bigger.
Suddenly he was on the verge of passing out. He put an arm on the mesh-covered wall of the cut and rested his head on it. He closed his eyes and waited for the world to either go away or come back. He was dimly aware that Bobbi's drill had also cut out.
The world began to come back ... and Bobbi was shaking him.
'Gard? Gard, what's wrong?'
There was real concern in her voice. Hearing it made Gardener feel absurdly like weeping. Of