the basement. It wasn't doing that, obviously, and that was a mystery ... but it was a minor mystery compared to the fact that he wasn't feeling any heat coming out of the hatch - none at all. He should have burned his fingers on the little knob you pulled to open the hatch, and when it was open, that coin-sized sun should have burned the skin right off his face. So ... ?
Slowly, hesitantly, Gardener reached toward the opening with his left hand, keeping his right fisted before his eyes to block out the worst of the glow. His mouth was pulled down in a wince as he anticipated a burn.
His splayed fingers slipped into the hatchway . . . and then struck something yielding. He thought later it was a little like pushing your fingers into a stretched nylon stocking - only this gave just so much and then stopped. Your fingers never punched through, as they would have punched through a nylon stocking.
But there was no barrier. None, at least, that he could see.
He stopped pressing and the invisible membrane gently pushed his fingers back out of the hatchway. He looked at his fingers and saw they were shaking.
It's a force-field, that's why I'm not getting burned. Some sort of a force-field that damps heat. Dear God, I've walked into a science-fiction story from Startling Stories. Right around 1947, I'd guess. I wonder if I made the cover? If I did, who drew me? Virgil Finlay? Hannes Bok?
His hand was beginning to shake harder. He groped for the little door, missed it, found it again, and slammed it shut, cutting out that dazzling flood of white light. He lowered his right hand slowly but he could still see an afterimage of that tiny sun, the way one can see a flashbulb after it has gone off in one's face. Only what Gardener saw was a large green fist floating in the air, with bright, ectoplasmic blue between the fingers.
The afterimage faded. The shakes didn't.
Gardener had never wanted a drink so badly in his life.
7
He got one in Anderson's kitchen.
Bobbi didn't drink much, but she kept what she called 'the staples' in a cabinet behind the pots and pans: bottle of gin, bottle of Scotch, bottle of bourbon, bottle of vodka. Gardener pulled out the bourbon - some cut-rate brand, but beggars couldn't be choosers - poured an inch into a plastic tumbler, and downed it.
Better watch your step, Gard. You're tempting fate.
Except he wasn't. Right now he almost would have welcomed a jag, but the cyclone had gone somewhere else to blow ... at least for the time being. He poured another two inches of bourbon into the glass, contemplated it for a moment, then poured most of it down the sink. He put the bottle back, and added water and ice cubes, converting what had been liquid dynamite into a civilized drink.
He thought the kid on the beach would have approved.
He supposed the dreamlike calm that had surrounded him when he came out of the Mirror Maze, and felt again now, was a defense against just lying down on the floor and screaming until he lost consciousness. The calm was all right. What scared him was how fast his mind had gone to work trying to convince him that none of it was true - that he had hallucinated the whole thing. Incredibly, his mind was suggesting that what he had seen when he opened the hatch in the heater's base was a very bright light bulb - two hundred watts, say.
It wasn't a light bulb and it wasn't hallucination. It was something like a sun, very small and hot and bright, floating in an arch of wires, over an egg carton filled with D-cells. Now you can go crazy if you want, or get Jesus, or get drunk but you saw what you saw and leave us not gild the lily, all right? All right.
He checked on Anderson and saw she was still sleeping like a stone. Gardener had decided to wake Bobbi up by ten-thirty if she hadn't awakened on her own; he looked at his watch now, and was astonished to see it was only twenty minutes past nine. He had been in the cellar much less time than he had thought.
Thinking of the cellar called up the surreal vision of that miniature sun hanging suspended in its arch of wires, glowing like a superhot tennis ball . . . and thinking about