and bacon, and Bobbi didn't waste time - she went to them like a woman who hasn't eaten well for a long time. Watching her eat, Gardener remembered a biography of Thomas Edison he had read when he was quite young - no more than ten or eleven. Edison had gone on wild work-jags in which idea had followed idea, invention had followed invention. During these spurts, he had ignored wife, children, baths, even food. If his wife hadn't brought him his meals on a tray, the man might literally have starved to death between the light bulb and the phonograph. There had been a picture of him, hands plunged into hair that was wildly awry - as if it had been actually trying to get at the brain beneath hair and skull, the brain which would not let him rest - and Gardener remembered thinking that the man looked quite insane.
And, he thought, touching the left side of his forehead, Edison had been subject to migraines. Migraines and deep depressions.
He saw no sign of depression in Bobbi, however. She gobbled eggs, ate seven or eight slices of bacon wrapped in a slice of toast slathered with oleo, and swallowed two large glasses of orange juice. When she had finished, she uttered a resounding belch.
'Gross, Bobbi.'
'In Portugal, a good belch is considered a compliment to the cook.'
'What do they do after a good lay? Fart?'
Anderson threw her head back and roared with laughter. The towel fell off her hair, and all at once Gard wanted to take her to bed, bag of bones or not.
Smiling a little, Gardener said: 'Okay, it was good. Thanks. Some Sunday I'll make you some swell eggs Benedict. Now give.'
Anderson reached behind him and brought down a half-full package of Camels. She lit one and pushed the pack toward Gardener.
'No thanks. It's the only bad habit I ever succeeded in mostly giving up.'
But before Bobbi was done, Gardener had smoked four of them.
6
'You looked around,' Anderson said. 'I remember telling you to do that - just barely -and I know you did. You look like I felt after I found the thing in the woods.'
'What thing?'
'If I told you now you'd think I was crazy. Later on I'll show you, but right now I think we'd better just talk. Tell me what you saw around the place. What changes.'
So Gardener ticked them off: the cellar improvements, the litter of projects, the weird little sun in the water heater. The strange job of customizing on the Tomcat's engine. He hesitated for a moment, thinking of the addition to the shifting diagram, and let that go. He supposed Bobbi knew he had seen it, anyway.
'And somewhere in the middle of all that,' he said, 'you found time to write another book. A long one. I read the first thirty or forty pages while I was waiting for you to wake up, and I think it's good as well as long. The best novel you've ever written, probably . . . and you've written some good ones.'
Anderson was nodding, pleased. 'Thank you. I think it is, too.' She pointed to the last slice of bacon on the platter. 'You want that?'
'No. I
'Sure?'
'Yes.'
She took it and made it gone.
'How long did it take you to write it?'
'I'm not completely sure,' Anderson said. 'Maybe three days. No more than a week, anyway. Did most of it in my sleep.'
Gard smiled.
'I'm not joking, you know,' Anderson said.
Gardener stopped smiling.
'My time sense is pretty fucked up,' she admitted. 'I do know I wasn't working on it the 27th. That's the last day when time - sequential time - seemed completely clear to me. You got here last night, July 4th, and it was done. So ... a week, max. But I really don't think it was more than three days.'
Gardener gaped. Anderson looked back calmly, wiping her fingers on a napkin. 'Bobbi, that's impossible,' Gardener said finally.
'If you think so, you missed my typewriter.'
Gardener had glanced at Bobbi's old machine when he sat down, but that was all -his attention had been riveted immediately by the manuscript. He had seen the old black Underwood thousands of times. The manuscript, on the other hand, was new.
'If you'd looked closely, you would have seen the roll of computer paper on the wall behind it and another of those gadgets behind it. Egg crate, heavy-duty batteries, and all. What? These?'
She pushed the cigarettes across to Gardener, who took one.