(Bobbi where'd I leave my left-handed monkeywrench)
Bobbi's strange new mouth quivered. She turned around and snorted. Gardener felt a moment of the old warmth touch his heart then. It was the last time he really ever saw the old and unimproved Bobbi Anderson.
'Well, can you rig a portable unit to run the sling?'
'I can, but it's not worth taking the time. I've got another idea.' Her eyes touched Gardener's face for a moment, thoughtful and calculating. It was a look Gardener could not quite interpret. Then Bobbi walked away to the lean-to.
Gardener followed her partway and saw Bobbi swing open a large green metal box that had been mounted on a pole. She pawed through the tools and general junk inside, then came back with a transistor radio. It was smaller than the ones his helpers had turned into New and Improved satchel charges while Bobbi was recuperating. Gard had never seen this particular radio before. It was very small.
One of them brought it out last night, he thought.
Bobbi pulled up its stubby antenna, inserted a jack in its plastic case and the plug in her ear. Gard was instantly reminded of Freeman Moss, moving the pumping equipment like an elephant trainer moving the big guys around the center ring.
'This won't take long.' Bobbi pointed the antenna back toward the farm. Gardener seemed to hear a heavy, powerful hum - not on the air but inside the air, somehow. For just a moment his mind muttered with music and there was a headachy pain in the middle of his forehead, as if he had drunk too much cold water too fast.
'Now what?'
'We wait,' Bobbi said, and repeated: 'It won't take long.'
Her speculative gaze passed over Gardener's face again, and this time Gardener thought he understood that look. It's something she wants me to see. And this chance came up to show me.
He sat down near the trench and discovered a very old pack of cigarettes in his breast pocket. Two were left. One was broken, the other bent but whole. He lit it and smoked reflectively, not really sorry about this delay. It gave him a chance to go over his plans again. Of course, if he dropped dead as soon as he went through that round hatch, it would put something of a crimp in those plans.
'Ah, here we go!' Bobbi said, getting up.
Gard also got up. He looked around, but at first saw nothing.
'Over there, Gard. The path.' Bobbi spoke with the pride of a kid showing off her first soapbox racer. Gardener finally saw it, and began to laugh. He didn't really want to laugh, but he couldn't help it. He kept thinking he was getting used to the brave new world of Haven's jury-rigged superscience, and then some odd new combination would tumble him right back down the rabbit-hole. Like now.
Bobbi was smiling, but faintly, vaguely, as if Gardener's laughter meant nothing one way or the other.
'It does look a little strange, but it will do the trick. Take my word for
It was the Electrolux he had seen in the shed. It was not running on the ground but just above it, its little white wheels turning. Its shadow ran placidly off to one side, like a dachshund on a leash. From the back, where the vacuum-hose attachments would have gone in a sane world, two filament-thin wires protruded in a V shape. Its antenna, Gardener thought.
Now it landed, if you could call a touchdown from three inches a landing, and trundled over the beaten earth of the excavation area to the lean-to, leaving narrow tracks behind it. It stopped below the switchbox which controlled the sling.
'Watch this,' Bobbi said in that same pleased showing-off-my-soapbox-racer voice.
There was a click. A hum. Now a thin black rope began to rise out of the vacuum cleaner's side, like a rope rising out of a wicker basket in the Indian rope trick. Only it wasn't a rope, Gardener saw; it was a length of coaxial cable.
It rose in the air ... up ... up ... up. It touched the side of the switchbox and slid around to the front. Gardener felt a crawl of revulsion. It was like watching something like a bat - a blind thing which had some sort of radar. A blind thing that could ... could seek.
The end of the cable found the buttons - the black one which