Bobbi smiled. 'We're very childlike. That's our good side.'
'Is it now?' A monstrous image suddenly filled Gardener's head: grammarschool kids heading off to school armed with books and Uzis and Smurfs lunch-boxes and M-16s and apples for the teachers they liked and fragmentation grenades for those they didn't. And, oh Christ, every one of the girls looked like Patricia McCardle and every one of the boys looked like Ted the Power Man. Ted the Power Man with greeny-glowing eyes that explained the whole sorry fucking mess, from Crusades and crossbow to Reagan's missile-tipped satellites.
We squabble. Every now and then we even tussle a bit. We're grownups - I guess -but we still have bad tempers, like kids do, and we also still like to have fun, like kids do, so we satisfied both wants by building all these nifty nuclear slingshots, and every now and then we leave a few around for people to pick UP, and do you know what? They always do. People like Ted, who are perfectly willing to kill so no woman in Braintree with the wherewithal to buy one shall want for electricity to run her hair-dryer. People like you, Gard, who see only minimal drawbacks to the idea of killing for peace.
It would be such a dull world without guns and squabbles, wouldn't it?
Gardener realized he was getting sleepy.
'Childlike,' she repeated. 'We fight ... but we can also be very generous. As we have here.'
'Yes, you've been very generous to Haven,' Gardener said, and his jaws abruptly cracked open in a huge, tendon-stretching yawn.
Bobbi smiled.
'Anyway, we might have crashed because it was "crash-time," according to those currents I mentioned. The ship wasn't hurt, of course. And when I started to uncover it, we ... came back.'
'Are there more of you out there?'
Bobbi shrugged. 'I don't know.' And don't care, the shrug said. We're here, There are improvements to be made. That is enough.
'That's really all you are?' He wanted to make sure; make sure there was no more to it. He was terribly afraid he was taking too long, much too long ... but he had to know. 'That's all?'
'What do you mean, all? Is it so little, what we are?'
'Frankly, yes,' Gard said. 'You see, I've been looking for the devil outside my life all my life because the one inside was so fucking hard to catch. It's hard to spend such a long time thinking you're ... Homer . . .' He yawned again, hugely. His eyelids had bricks on them. and discover you were ... Captain Ahab all the time.'
And finally, for the last time, with a kind of desperation he asked her:
'Is that all you are? Just people who fix things up?'
'I guess so,' she said. 'I'm sorry it's such a let-down for y
Gardener lifted the pistol under the table, and at the same moment felt the drug finally betray him: the shield slipped.
Bobbi's eyes glowed - no, this time they glared. Her voice, a mental scream, blasted through Gardener's head like a meat-cleaver
(GUN HE'S GOT A GUN HES GOT A)
chopping through the rising fog.
She tried to move. At the same time she tried to bring the photon pistol to bear on him. Gardener aimed the .45 at Bobbi under the table and pulled the trigger. There was only a dry click. The old slug had misfired.
BOOK III. THE TOMMYKNOCKERS Chapter 9. The Scoop, Concluded
1
John Leandro died. The scoop did not.
David Bright had promised to give Leandro until four, and that was a promise he had intended to keep - because it was honorable, of course, but also because he was not sure this was anything he wanted to stick his hand into. It might turn out to be a threshing machine instead of a news story. Nonetheless, he never doubted Johnny Leandro had been telling the truth, or his perception of it, crazed as his story sounded. Johnny was a twerp, Johnny sometimes didn't just jump to conclusions but broad-jumped them completely, but he wasn't a liar (even if he had been, Bright didn't believe he was smart enough to fabricate something this woolly).
Around two-thirty that afternoon, Bright suddenly began to think of another Johnny - poor, damned Johnny Smith, who had sometimes touched objects and gotten 'feelings' about them. That had been crazy, too, but Bright had believed Johnny Smith, had believed in what Smith said he could do. It was impossible to look into the man's haunted eyes and not believe. Bright was not touching anything which