situation had become in the years since a man in a strappy T-shirt with Vitalis on his thinning hair and fried-chicken grease under his fingernails had blown out a President's brains as he sat in the back seat of a Cadillac rolling down the street of a Texas cow-town.
I'll tell Jim Gardener. When he gets back. Gard'll know what to do, how to handle it. He'll have some ideas, anyway.
Anne's voice: You're going to ask a certified loony for advice. Great.
He's not a loony. Just a little bit weird.
Yeah, arrested at the last Seabrook demonstration with a loaded .45 in his back-pack. That's weird, all right.
Anne, shut up.
She weeded. All that morning in the hot sun she weeded, the back of her T-shirt wet with sweat, last year's scarecrow wearing the hat she usually put on to keep the sun off.
After lunch she lay down to take a nap and couldn't sleep. Everything kept going through her mind, and that stranger's voice never shut up. Dig on it, Bobbi, it's okay, dig on it
Until at last she did get up, grabbed the crowbar, spade, and shovel, and set out for the woods. At the far end of her field she paused, forehead grooved in thought, and came back for her pickax. Peter was on the porch. He looked up briefly but made no move to come with Anderson.
Anderson was not really surprised.
3
So about twenty minutes later she stood above it, looking down the forested slope to the trench she had begun in the ground, freeing what she now believed was a very tiny section of an extraterrestrial spacecraft. Its gray hull was as solid as a wrench or a screwdriver, denying dreams and vapors and supposings; it was there. The dirt she had thrown to either side, moist and black and forest-secret, was now a dark brown - still damp from last night's rain.
Going down the slope, her foot crunched on something that sounded like newspaper. It wasn't newspaper; it was a dead sparrow. Twenty feet further down was a dead crow, feet pointed comically skyward like a dead bird in a cartoon. Anderson paused, looked around, and saw the bodies of three other birds - another crow, a bluejay, and a scarlet tanager. No marks. Just dead. And no flies around any of them.
She reached the trench and dropped her tools on the bank. The trench was muddy. She stepped in nevertheless, her workshoes squashing in the mud. She bent down and could see smooth gray metal going into the earth, a puddle standing on one side.
What are you?
She put her hand on it. That vibration sank into her skin and seemed for a moment to go all through her. Then it stopped.
Anderson turned and put her hand on her shovel, feeling its smooth wood, slightly warmed by the sun. She was vaguely aware that she could hear no forest noises, none at all ... no birds singing, no animals crashing through the undergrowth and away from the smell of a human being. She was more sharply aware of the smells: peaty earth, pine needles, bark and sap.
A voice inside her - very deep inside, not coming from the right of her brain but perhaps from the very root of her mind - screamed in terror.
Something's happening, Bobbi, something is happening right NOW. Get out of here dead chuck dead birds Bobbi please please PLEASE
Her hand tightened on the shovel's handle and she saw it again as she had sketched it - the gray leading edge of something titanic in the earth.
Her period had started again, but that was all right; she had put a pad in the crotch of her panties even before she went out to weed the garden. A Maxi. And there were half a dozen more in her pack, weren't there? Or was it more like a dozen?
She didn't know, and it didn't matter. Not even discovering some part of her had known she would end up here in spite of whatever foolish conceptions of free will the rest of her mind might possess disturbed her. A shining sort of peace had filled her. Dead animals ... periods that stopped and started again ... arriving prepared even after you had assured yourself the decision had not yet been taken ... these were small things, smaller than small, a whole lot of boolsheet. She would just dig for a while, dig on this sucker, see if there was anything but smooth metal skin to see. Because