In Washington, the NRC had issued a list of ninety nuclear facilities in thirty-seven states with safety problems ranging from 'moderate to serious.'
Moderate to serious, great, Gardener thought, feeling the old impotent rage stir and twist, biting into him like acid. If we lose Topeka, that's moderate. If we lose New York, that's serious.
He became aware that Bobby was looking at him a little sadly. 'The beat goes on, right?' she said.
'Right.'
When the news was over, Anderson told Gardener she was going to bed.
'At seven-thirty?'
'I'm still bushed.' And she looked it.
'Okay. I'll sack out myself pretty soon. I'm tired, too. It's been a crazy couple of days, but I'm not completely sure I'd sleep, the way the stuff is whizzing around in my head.'
'You want a Valium?'
He smiled. 'I saw they were still there. I'll pass. You were the one who could have used a trank or two, last couple of weeks.'
The State of Maine's price for going along with Nora's decision not to press charges was that Gardener should go into a counseling program. The program had lasted six months; the Valium was apparently going to go on forever. Gardener hadn't actually taken any in almost three years, but every now and then - usually when he was going traveling - he filled the prescription. Otherwise, some computer might burp out his name and a psychologist picking up a few extra bucks courtesy of the State of Maine might drop by to make sure his head was staying shrunk to a suitable size.
After she was in bed, Gardener had turned off the TV and sat a while in Bobbi's rocker, reading The Buffalo Soldiers. In a short time, he heard her snoring away. Gardener supposed Bobbi's snores would also be part of a conspiracy to keep him awake, but he didn't really mind - Bobbi had always snored, the price of a deviated septum, and that had always annoyed Gardener, but he had discovered last night that some things were worse. The ghastly silence in which she had slept on the couch, for instance. That was much worse.
Gardener had poked his head in for a moment, had seen Bobbi in a much more typical Bobbi Anderson sleeping posture, naked except pajama bottoms, small breasts bare, blankets kicked into disarray between her legs, one hand curled under her cheek, the other by her face, her thumb almost in her mouth. Bobbi was okay.
So Gardener had come out here to make his decision.
Bobbi's patch of garden was going great guns - the corn was taller than any Gardener had seen on his way north from Arcadia Beach, and her tomatoes were going to be blue ribbon winners. Some of them would have come to the knees of a man walking down the row. In the middle of it all was a cluster of giant sunflowers, ominous as triffids, nodding in the slight breeze.
When Bobbi asked him if he'd ever heard of the so-called 'gasoline pill,' Gardener had smiled and nodded. More twentieth-century fairy tales, all right. She'd then asked him if he believed it. Gardener, still smiling, said no. Bobbi reminded him about Hangar 18.
'Are you saying you do believe there's such a pill? Or was? Something you'd just drop into your gas tank and run on all day?'
'No,' Bobbi said quietly. 'Nothing I've ever read suggests the possibility of such a pill.' She leaned forward, forearms on her thighs. 'But I'll tell you what I do believe: if there was, it wouldn't be on the market. Some big cartel, or maybe the government itself, would buy it ... or steal it.'
'Yeah,' Gard said. He had thought more than once about the crazy ironies inherent in every status quo: open the U.S. borders and put all those customs people out of work? Legalize dope and destroy the DEA. You might as well try to shoot the man in the moon with a BB.
Gard burst out laughing.
Bobbi looked at him, puzzled but also smiling a little. 'So? Share.'
'I was just thinking that if there was a pill like that, the Dallas Police would shoot the guy who invented it and then put it next to the green guys in Hangar 18.'
'Not to mention his whole family,' Bobbi agreed.
Gard didn't laugh this time. This time it didn't seem quite so hilarious.
'In that light,' Anderson had said, 'look at what I've done here. I'm not even a good handyman, let alone anyone's scientist, and so the