wide, body thrumming slightly, like a man on lowgrade speed.
What is this?
Foolish to speculate when the answer lay no more than six miles up ahead ... always assuming he could uncover it, of course.
Oh, I think you'll uncover it. You may not like it when you do, but yeah, I think you'll uncover it with no trouble at all.
Leandro looked around. The hay in the field on his right was long and shaggy. Too long and shaggy for August. There hadn't been any first cutting in early July. Somehow he didn't think there was going to be any August cutting, either. He looked left and saw a tumbledown barn surrounded by rusty auto parts. The corpse of a '57 Studebaker was decaying in the barn's maw. The windows seemed to stare at Leandro. There were no people to stare, at least not that he could see.
A very quiet, very polite little voice spoke up inside him, the voice of a well-mannered child at a tea party that has become decidedly scary:
I would like to go home, please.
Yes. Home to Mother. Home in time to watch the afternoon soaps with her. She would be glad to see him back with his scoop, maybe even more glad to see him back without it. They'd sit and eat cookies and drink coffee. They would talk. She would talk, rather, and he would listen. That was how it always was, and it really wasn't that bad. She could be an irritating thing sometimes, but she was ...
Safe.
Safe, yeah. That was it. Safe. And whatever was going on south of Troy on this dozy summer afternoon, it wasn't at all safe.
I would like to go home, please.
Right. There had probably been times when Woodward and Bernstein felt that way when Nixon's boys were really putting the squeeze on. Bernard Fall had probably felt that way when he got off the plane in Saigon for the last time. When you saw the TV news correspondents in trouble-spots like Lebanon and Tehran, they only looked cool, calm, and collected. Viewers never had a chance to inspect their shorts.
The story is out there, and I'm going to get it, and when I collect my Pulitzer Prize, I can say I owe it all to David Bright ... and my secret Superman wristwatch.
He put the Dodge in gear again and drove on toward Haven.
6
He hadn't gone a mile before he began to feel a bit ill. He thought this must be a physical symptom of his fear and ignored it. Then, when he began to feel worse, he asked himself (as one is apt to do when he realizes that the nausea sitting in his stomach like a small dark cloud is not going away) what he had eaten. There was no blame to be laid in that direction. He hadn't been afraid when he got up that morning, but he had been feeling a lot of anticipation and high-spirited tension; as a result he had refused the usual bacon and scrambled eggs and settled for tea and dry toast. That was all.
I would like to go home! The voice was now more shrill.
Leandro pushed on, teeth clamped grimly together. The scoop was in Haven. If he couldn't get into Haven, there would be no scoop. You couldn't hit 'em if you couldn't see 'em. QED.
Less than a mile from the town line - the day was eerily, utterly dead - a series of beeping, booping, and buzzing noises began to come from the back seat, startling him so badly that he cried out and pulled over to the side of the road again.
He looked in back and at first was unable to credit what he was seeing. It had to be, he thought, a hallucination brought on by his increasing nausea.
When he and his mother had been in Halifax this past weekend, he had taken his nephew Tony out for a Dairy Queen. Tony (whom Leandro privately thought was an ill-mannered little snot) had sat in the back playing with a plastic toy that looked a bit like the handset of a Princess phone. This toy was called Merlin, and it ran on a computer chip. It played four or five simple games which called for simple feats of memory or the ability to identify a simple mathematical series. Leandro remembered it had also played tic-tac-toe.
Anyway, Tony must have forgotten it, and now it was going crazy in the back seat, its red lights flashing on and off