wagon from above the front seat on back, turning it into a half-assed truck.
'Lookit that, Gard-old-Gard,' Bobbi Anderson had proclaimed solemnly, staring at the remains of the wagon. 'We done made ourselves an honest-to-God fiel'-bomber.' Then she leaned over and threw up. Gardener had picked her up and carried her onto the porch (Peter twining anxiously around his feet the whole way). By the time he got her there, she had passed out. He put her down carefully, and then passed out himself.
The half-assed truck had been a tough old Detroit rod-bucket, but it had finally gone toes-up. Anderson had put it on blocks at one end of the garden, claiming no one would want to buy it even for parts. Gardener thought she just felt sentimental.
Now the truck had been resurrected - although it hardly looked like the same vehicle, except for the blue paint and the remains of fake wood siding that had been one of the Country Squire's trademarks. The driver's door and most of the front end were gone entirely. The latter had been replaced with a weird conglomeration of digging and earth-moving equipment. To Gardener's disturbed eye, Anderson's truck now looked like a deranged child's bulldozer. Something which looked like a giant screwdriver blade protruded from the place where the grille had been. The engine looked like something which had been yanked whole from an old D-9 Caterpillar.
Bobbi, where did you get that engine? How did you move it from where it was then to where it is now? Good Jesus!
Yet all this, remarkable as it was, could hold his eye for only a moment or two. He walked across the ripped earth to where Bobbi was standing, hands in her pockets, looking down into the slash in the earth.
'What do you think, Gard?'
He didn't know what he thought, and was speechless anyway.
The excavation went down to a really surprising depth: thirty or forty feet, he guessed. If the angle of the sun hadn't been exactly right, he wouldn't have been able to see the bottom of the trench at all. There was a space of about three feet between the side of the excavation and the smooth hull of the ship. That hull was utterly unbroken. There were no numbers, symbols, pictures, or hieroglyphs on it.
At the bottom of the cut, the thing disappeared into the earth. Gardener shook his head. Opened his mouth, found he still had no words, and shut it again.
The part of the hull Anderson had first tripped over and then tried to wriggle with her hand - thinking it might be a tin can left over from a loggers' weekend - was now directly in front of Gardener's nose. He could easily have reached across the three-foot space and grasped it as Anderson herself had just two weeks ago ... with this difference: when Anderson first grasped the edge of the ship in the earth, she had been on her knees. Gardener was standing. He had vaguely noted the going-over this slope had taken - rough, muddy terrain, trees that had been cut and moved aside, stumps that had been pulled like rotten teeth - but beyond that momentary observation, he had dismissed it. He would have taken a closer look if Anderson had told him how much of the slope she had simply cut away. The hill had made the thing harder to get out ... so she had simply removed half the hillside to make it easier.
Flying saucer, Gardener thought faintly, and then: I did jump. This is a death-fantasy. Any second now I'll come to and find myself trying to breathe salt water. Any second now. Just any old second.
Except nothing of the sort did or would happen, because all this was real. It was a flying saucer.
And that, somehow, was the worst. Not a spaceship, or an alien craft, or an extraterrestrial vehicle. It was a flying saucer. They had been debunked by the Air Force, by thinking scientists, by psychologists. No self-respecting science-fiction writer would put one in his story, and if he did, no self-respecting editor would touch it with a ten-foot pole. Flying saucers had gone out of vogue in the genre at roughly the same time as Edgar Rice Burroughs and Otis Adelbert Kline. It was the oldest wheeze in the book. Flying saucers were more than passe; the idea itself was a joke, given mental house-room these days only by crackpots, religious eccentrics, and, of course, the tabloid newspapers, where