here, Gardener thought. These are really long-life jobbies. He looked into the corridor beyond the hatch with a deep and profound sense of wonder. It is alive. Even after all these years. Still alive.
'I'm going in, Gard. Are you coming?
Gonna try, Bobbi.
She stepped in, ducking her head so as not to bump it on the upper curve of the hatch. Gardener hesitated a moment, biting down on the rubber pins inside the mask again, and followed.
6
There was a moment of transcendent agony - he felt rather than heard radio transmissions. fill his head. Not just one; it was as if every radio broadcast in the world momentarily shrieked inside his brain.
Then it was gone - simply gone. He thought of the way that radio transmissions faded when you went into a tunnel. He had entered the ship, and all outside transmissions had been damped down to nothing. Nor was it only outside transmissions, he discovered a moment later. Bobbi was looking at him, obviously sending a thought - Are you all right? was Gardener's best guess, but a guess was all it was. But he could no longer hear Bobbi in his head at all.
Curious, he sent back: I am fine, go on!
Bobbi's questioning expression didn't change - she was much better at this business than Gardener, but she wasn't getting anything, either. Gard gestured tor tier to go on. After a moment, she nodded and did.
7
They walked twenty paces up the corridor. Bobbi moved with no hesitation, nor did she hesitate when they came to a round interior hatch set into the surface of the flat walkway on their left. This hatch, about three feet in diameter, was open. Without looking back at Gardener, Bobbi climbed into it.
Gardener paused, looking back along the softly lit corridor. The hatchway to the outside was back there, a round porthole giving onto the darkness of the trench. Then he followed.
There was a ladder bolted to the new corridor, which was almost small enough in diameter to be a tunnel. Gardener and Bobbi did not need the ladder; the ship's position had rendered the corridor almost horizontal. They went on their hands and knees with the ladder sometimes scraping their backs.
The ladder made Gardener uneasy. The rungs were spaced almost four feet apart, that was one thing. A man - even a very long-legged one - would have had difficulty using it. The other thing about the rungs was more unsettling: a pronounced semi-circular dip, almost a notch, in the center of each.
So the Tommyknockers had really bad fallen arches, he thought, listening to the rasp of his own respiration. Big deal, Gard.
But the picture that came to him was not of flat feet or fallen arches; the picture which stole into his mind, softly and yet with a simple undeniable power, was of some not-quite-seen creature climbing that ladder, a creature with a single thick claw on each foot, a claw which fit neatly into each of those dips as it climbed ...
Suddenly the round, dimly lit walls seemed to be pressing in on him, and he had to grapple with a terrible bout of claustrophobia. The Tommyknockers were here, all right, and still alive. At any moment he might feel a thick, inhuman hand close about his ankle ...
Sweat ran into his eye, stinging.
He whipped his head around, looking back over one shoulder.
Nothing. Nothing, Gard. Get yourself under control!
But they were here. Perhaps dead - but somehow alive just the same. In Bobbi, for one thing. But ...
But you have to see, Gard. Now GO!
He started crawling again. He was leaving faint sweaty handprints on the metal, he saw. Human handprints inside this thing which had come from God knew where.
Bobbi reached the mouth of the passage, turned on her stomach, and dropped out of sight. Gard followed, stopping at the mouth of the passageway to look out. Here was a large open space, hexagonal in shape, like a large chamber in a beehive. It was also canted at a crazy funhouse angle as a result of the crash. The walls glowed with soft colorless light. A thick cable came out of a gasket on the floor; this split into half a dozen thinner cords, and each ended in a set of things which looked like headphones with bulging centers.
Bobbi wasn't looking at these. She was looking into the corner. Gardener followed her gaze and felt his stomach gain weight. His head swam dizzily. his heart faltered.