above, his physical body and his physical (if there was such a thing) mind. He could see his mother, oh yes - five mothers, a dozen, a hundred mothers, some short, some tall, some fat, some scrawny. At the same time he saw five, a dozen, a hundred Gards. Sometimes he'd see one of his reflections join one of hers and he would reach out, almost absently, expecting to touch her slacks. Instead, there was only empty air ... or another mirror.
He had wandered for a long time, and he supposed he had panicked, but it hadn't felt like panic, and so far as he could remember, no one had acted like he had been in a panic when he finally floundered his way out - this only after fifteen minutes of twisting, turning, doubling back, and running into barriers of clear glass. His mother's brow had furrowed slightly for a moment, then cleared. That was all. But he had felt panic, just as he was feeling it now: that sensation of feeling your mind coming unbolted from itself, like a piece of machinery falling apart in zero-g.
It comes ... but it goes. Wait, Gard. Just wait for it to be over.
So he squatted on his hunkers, looking into the open hatch at the base of Anderson's water tank, and waited for it to be over, as he had once waited for his feet to lead him down the correct passage and out of that terrible Mirror Maze at the Fryeburg Fair.
The removal of the gas ring had left a round hollow area at the base of the tank. This area had been filled with a wild tangle of wires - red, green, blue, yellow. In the center of the tangle was a cardboard egg carton. HILLCREST FARMS, the blue printing read. GRADE A JUMBO. Sitting in each of the egg cradles was an EverReady alkaline D-cell battery, + terminals up. A tiny funnel-shaped gadget capped the terminals, and all of the wires seemed to either start - or end - in these caps. As he looked longer, in a state that did not precisely feel like panic, Gardener saw that his original impression - that the wires were in a wild jumble - was no more true than his original impression that the stuff on Bobbi's worktable was in a litter. No, there was order in the way the wires came out of or went into those twelve funnel-shaped caps - as few as two wires coming in or going out of some, as many as six coming in or going out of others. There was even order in the shape they made - it was a small arch. Some of the wires bent back into the funnels capped over other batteries, but most went to circuit boards propped against the sides of the water tank's heating compartment. They were from electronic toys made in Korea, Gardener surmised -too much cheap, silvery solder on corrugated fiberboard. A weird Gyro Gearloose conglomeration if ever there had been one ... but this weird conglomeration of components was doing something. Oh yes. It was heating water fast enough to raise blisters, for one thing.
In the center of the compartment, directly over the egg carton, in the arch formed by the wires, glowed a bright ball of light, no larger than a quarter but seemingly as bright as the sun.
Gardener had automatically put his fist up to block out that savage glow, which shone out of the hatch in a solid white bar of light that cast his shadow long behind him on the dirt floor. He could look at it only by wincing his eyes down to the barest slits and then opening his fingers a little.
As bright as the sun.
Yes - only instead of yellow, it was a dazzling bluish-white, like a sapphire. Its glow pulsated and shifted slightly, then remained constant, then pulsated and shifted again: it was cycling.
But where is the heat? Gardener thought, and that began to bring him back to himself. Where is the heat?
He reached one hand up and laid it on the smooth, enameled side of the tank again - but only for a second. He snatched it away, thinking of the way the water had smoked coming out of the tap in the bathroom. There was hot water in the tank, all right, and plenty of it - by all rights it should boil away to steam and blow Bobbi Anderson's tank all over