around the corner of the shed like oil. At the exact moment he did, the men and women who had gone out to the ship emerged into the dooryard, moving in single file.
Gardener reached up to hang the key on the nail where he had found it. For one nightmare moment he thought he was going to drop it again and have to hunt for it in the high weeds growing on this side of the shed. When it slipped onto the nail he let out his breath in a shuddering sigh.
Part of him wanted not to move, to just freeze here. Then he decided he'd better not take the risk. After all, he didn't know that Bobbi had her key.
He continued slipping along the side of the shed. His left ankle struck the haft of an old harrow that had been left to rust in the weeds, and he had to clamp his teeth over a cry of pain. He stepped over it and slipped around another corner. Now he was behind the shed.
That sudsing sound was maddeningly loud back here.
I'm right behind those goddam showers, he thought. They're floating inches from me ... literally inches.
A rustle of weeds. A minute scrape of metal. Gardener felt simultaneously like laughing and screeching. They hadn't had Bobbi's key. Someone had just come around to the side of the shed and taken the key Gardener had hung up again only seconds before - probably Bobbi herself.
Still warm from my hand, Bobbi, did you notice?
He stood in back of the shed, pressed against the rough wood, arms slightly spread, palms tight on the boards.
Did you notice? And do you hear me? Do any of you hear me? Is someone -Allison or Archinbourg or Berringer - going to suddenly pop his head around here and yell out 'Peek-a-boo, Gard, we seeee you?' Is the shield still working?
He stood there and waited for them to take him.
They didn't. On an ordinary summer night he probably would not have been able to hear the metallic rattle as the door was unlocked - it would have been masked by the loud ree-ree-ree of the crickets. But now there were no crickets. He beard the unlocking; heard the creak of the hinges as the door was opened; heard the hinges creak again as the door was pushed shut. They were inside.
Almost at once the pulses of light failing through the cracks began to speed up and become brighter, and his mind was split by an agonized scream:
Hurts! It hurrrrr
He moved away from the shed and went back to the house.
9
He lay awake a long time, waiting for them to come out again, waiting to see if he had been discovered.
All right, I can try to put a stop to the 'becoming,' he thought. But it won't work unless I actually can go inside the ship. Can I do that?
He didn't know. Bobbi seemed to have no worries, but Bobbi and the others were different now. Oh, he himself was also 'becoming'; the lost teeth proved that, the ability to hear thoughts did, too. He had changed the words on the computer screen just by thinking them. But there was no use kidding himself: he was far behind the competition. If Bobbi survived the entry into the ship and her old buddy Gard dropped dead, would any of them, even Bobbi herself, spare a tear? He didn't think so.
Maybe that's what they all want. Bobbi included. For you to go into the ship and just fall over with your brains exploding in one big harmonic radio transmission. It would save Bobbi the moral pain of taking care of you herself, for one thing. Murder without tears.
That they intended to get rid of him, he no longer doubted. But he thought maybe that Bobbi - the old Bobbi - would let him live long enough to see the interior of the strange thing they had worked so long to dig up. That at least felt right. And in the end, it didn't matter. If murder was what Bobbi was planning, there was no real defense, was there? He had to go into the ship. Unless he did that, his idea, crazy as it undoubtedly was, had no chance to work at all.
Have to try, Gard.
He had intended to try as soon as they were inside, and that would probably be tomorrow morning. Now he thought that maybe he ought to press his luck a little further. If he went according