his head like half-congealed chunks of moldy jelly, he knew no more. Then, or ever.
43
Little help, God, we got a deal?
He sat in the middle of the canted hexagonal room, his twisted, broken leg stuck out in front of him (croggled, that word wouldn't go away, his leg had been croggled), near where the thick mastercable came out of the gasket in the floor.
Little help for the kid. I know I'm not much, shot my wife, good fucking deal, shot my best friend, another good fucking deal, a New and Improved Good Fucking Deal, you might say, but please, God, I need an assist right now.
That was no exaggeration, either. He needed more than just a little. The thick cable split off into eight thinner ones, each ending not in an earplug but in a set of headphones. If he had been playing Russian roulette back in Bobbi's shed, this was like sticking his head into a cannon and asking someone to pull the lanyard.
But it had to be done.
He picked up one set of phones, noticing again how the centers bulged inward, and then looked toward the tangle of brown, sere bodies in the far corner of the room.
Tommyknockers? Hey-nonny-nonny nonsense name or not, it was still too good for them. Cavemen from space, that was all they had been. Long claws operating machinery they made but didn't even try to understand. Toes like the spurs on fighting cocks. This thing was a malignant tumor that needed quick removal.
Please God, let my little idea be right.
Could he tap all of them? That was really the $64,000 question, wasn't it? If the 'becoming' was a closed system - something on the skin of the ship simply biodegrading into the atmosphere - the answer was probably no. But Gardener had come to think - or perhaps only to hope - that it was more, that it was an open system where the ship fed the humans. causing them to 'become,' and the humans fed the ship so it could ... what? Come again, of course. Could one use the word resurrection? Sorry, no. Too noble. If he was right, this was a kind of freak-show parthenogenesis whose proper place was under tawdry carnival lights and in cheap tabloids, not in undying myths or religious creeds. An open system ... a slave system ... quite literally a go-fuck-yourself system.
Please, God. Little help right now.
Gardener donned the headphones.
It happened instantaneously. No sensation of pain this time, only a great white radiance. The lights in the control room flashed up to full bright. One of the walls turned into a window again, showing the smoky sky and the fringe of trees. And then another of the room's eight walls went transparent ... another ... another. In a space of seconds Gard seemed to be sitting in an open space with the sky above him and the trench with its silvery netting on either side. The ship seemed to have disappeared. He had a 360-degree view.
Motors kicked in one by one and cycled up to full running pitch.
A bell was ringing somewhere. Huge thudding relays kicked over one by one, making the metal deck shiver under him.
The feeling of power was incredible; he felt as though the Mississippi was running through his head at flood level. He sensed it was killing him, but that was okay.
I've tapped them all, Gardener thought faintly. Oh God, thank you God I've tapped them all! It worked!
The ship began to tremble. To vibrate. The vibration became spasms of racking shudders. The time had come.
Baring the last few of his teeth, Gardener prepared to reach down and grasp his own bootstraps.
44
He had tapped all of them, but it was Dick Allison, because of his greater evolution, and Hazel's forty or so border-watchers back in town who bore the brunt of the ship's powering-up process - these latter were all tied together neatly in one unified web, and the ship simply reached out for it.
They slumped over, blood trickling from their eyes and noses, and died as the ship sucked their brains up.
The ship drew from the Tommyknockers in the woods as well, and several of the older ones died; most, however, felt only an excruciating pain in their heads as they either knelt or lay, half-fainting, around the perimeter of the clearing. A few understood that the fire was very close now. As the wind freshened, that burning lady's fan spread ... and spread. Smoke ran across the clearing in