There was a screech of grinding metal and a quick, thudding series of explosions. Gardener felt the wall vibrate, and for a moment the light seemed to flicker and dim.
Could we find our way out of here in the dark if the lights went out? You make thee joke I theenk, senor.
The pump tried to start again. There was a long metallic scream that set Gardener's teeth biting at the rubber plugs in his mouthpiece. It died away at last. There was a long loud rattle, like a straw in an empty glass. Then nothing.
Not everything lasted all that time with no damage, Gardener thought, and found this idea actually relieving.
Bobbi was pointing: Go, Gard.
Before he did, he saw Bobbi pause and look back once at the ranks of the hammocked dead. That frightened look was back on her face.
Then Gard was crawling back the way he came, trying to keep an even, steady pace as the claustrophobia wrapped itself around him.
11
In the control room, one of the walls had turned into a gigantic picture-window fifty feet long and twenty feet high.
Gardener stood, gape-jawed, looking at the blue Maine sky and the fringe of pines and spruces and maples around the trench. In the lower right-hand corner he could see the rooftree of their equipment lean-to. He stared at this for several seconds - long enough to see big white summer clouds drifting across the blue sky -before realizing it couldn't be a window. They were somewhere toward the middle of the ship, and deep in the ground as well. A window in that wall should show only more ship. Even if they had been near the hull, which they weren't, it would have given on a vista of mesh-covered rock wall, with maybe a squib of blue sky at the very top.
It's a TV picture of some kind. Something like a TV picture, anyway.
But there were no lines. The illusion was perfect.
Forgetting, in this powerful new fascination, his claustrophobic need to get out, Gardener walked slowly toward the wall. The angle gave him a perverse sensation of flying - the effect was like slipping behind the controls of an airline trainer and pulling the mock controls into a steep climb. The sky was so bright he had to squint. He kept looking for the wall, the way you might expect to see a movie screen through the picture as you got closer to it, but the wall just didn't seem to be there. The pines were a true, clear green, and only the fact that he couldn't feel any breeze or smell the woods worked against the persuasive illusion of looking through an open window.
He walked closer, still looking for the wall.
It's a camera, got to be - mounted on the outer rim of the ship, maybe even the part Bobbi stumbled over. The angle confirms that. But, Jesus! It's so fucking real! If the people at Kodak or Polaroid saw this, they'd go out of their gou
His arm was grabbed - grabbed hard - and terror leaped up in him. He turned, expecting to see one of them, a grinning thing with a dog's head, holding a cable with a plug tip in one hand: Just bend down, Mr Gardener; this won't hurt a bit.
It was Bobbi. She pointed to the wall. Held out her hands and arms and jittered them rapidly in some kind of charade. Then pointed at the window-wall again. After a moment, Gardener got it. In a grisly way it was almost funny. Bobbi had been miming electrocution, telling him that touching the window-wall would probably be a lot like touching the third rail of a subway.
Gardener nodded, then pointed toward the wider companionway through which they had entered. Bobbi nodded back and led the way.
As Gardener boosted himself up, he thought he heard a leaf-dry rattle and turned back, feeling a child's dreamy terror tug at his mind. He felt that it must be them, those corpses in the corner; them, rising slowly to their taloned feet like zombies.
But they still lay in their tangled drift of strange arms and legs. The wide, clear view of the sky and the trees on the wall (or through the wall) was dimming, losing reality and definition.
Gardener turned away and crawled after Bobbi as fast as he could.
BOOK III. THE TOMMYKNOCKERS Chapter 7. The Scoop, Continued
1
You're crazy, you know, John Leandro told himself as he pulled into exactly the same parking slot Everett Hillman had used