his mind, and this time the pain was thick and fibrous and sickening.
Meltdown, he thought dimly, this is what meltdown feels like.
There was a sensation of tremendous speed. A hand knocked him sprawling to the deck, although there was no sensation of multi-g force; the Tommyknockers had apparently found a way to beat that.
The ship didn't tilt; it simply rose straight up into the air.
Instead of blotting out the whole sky, it blotted out only three-quarters, then half. It grew indistinct in the smoke, its hard-edged metal-alloy reality growing fuzzy, and thus dreamy.
Then it was gone in the smoke, leaving only the dazed, drained Tommyknockers to try and find their feet before the fire could overtake them. It left the Tommyknockers, and the clearing, the lean-to . . . and the trench, like a black socket from which some poisonous fang had been drawn.
47
Gard lay on the floor of the control room, staring upward. As he watched, the smoky, chromed look of the sky disappeared. It became blue again - the brightest, clearest blue he had ever seen.
Gorgeous, he tried to say, but no word came out - not even a croak. He swallowed blood and coughed, his eyes never leaving that brilliant sky.
Its blue deepened to indigo ... then to purple.
Please don't let it stop now, please
Purple to black.
And now in that blackness he saw the first hard chips of stars.
The Klaxon blared again. He felt fresh pain as the ship drew from him, and there was a sensation of increasing speed as it slipped into a higher gear.
Where are we going? Gardener thought incoherently, and then the blackness overtook him as the ship fled up and out, escaping the envelope of the earth's atmosphere as easily as it had escaped the ground which had held it for so long. Where are we - ?
Up and up, out and out - the ship rose and Jim Gardener, born in Portland, Maine, went with it.
He drifted down through black levels of unconsciousness, and shortly before the final vomiting began - a vomiting of which he was never even aware - he had a dream. A dream so real that he smiled as he lay in the middle of blackness, surrounded by space and with the earth below him like a giant blue-gray croaker marble.
He had gotten through it - somehow gotten through it. Patricia McCardle had tried to break him, but she had never quite been able to do it. Now he was back in Haven, and there was Bobbi coming down the porch steps and across the dooryard to meet him, and Peter was barking and wagging his tail, and Gard grabbed Bobbi and hugged her, because it was good to be with your friends, good to be where you belonged ... good to have some safe haven to come to.
Lying on the transparent floor of the control room, already better than seventy thousand miles out in space, Jim Gardener lay in a widening pool of his own blood ... and smiled.
BOOK III. THE TOMMYKNOCKERS EPILOGUE
Curl up, baby! Curl up tight! Curl up, baby! Keep it all outta sight! Undercover Keep it all outta sight, Under cover of the night.
-The Rolling Stones, 'Undercover'
0 every night and every day A little piece of you is falling away ... Toe your line and play their game Let the anaesthetic cover it all Till one day they call your name: You're only waiting for the hammer to fall.
-Queen, 'Hammer to Fall'
1
Most of them died in the fire.
Not all; a hundred or more never reached the clearing at all before the ship pulled itself out of the ground and disappeared into the sky. Some, like Elt Barker, who had gone flying off his motorcycle, did not reach it because they had been wounded or killed on the way ... fortunes of war. Others, like Ashley Ruvall and old Miss Timms, who was the town librarian on Tuesdays and Thursdays, were simply too late or too slow.
Nor were all of those who did reach the clearing killed. The ship had gone into the sky and the awful, draining power which had seized them dwindled away to nothing before the fire reached the clearing (although by then sparks were drifting down and many of the smaller trees at the eastern edge were blazing). Some of them managed to stumble and limp further into the woods ahead of that spreading, fiery fan. Of course, going straight west was no good to these few (Rosalie Skehan was