hand. It was a gesture Gardener had seen her make many times before, and his heart went out to his friend when he saw the look of sorrow cross Bobbi's face. Bobbi put her hand back into her lap.
'But I'm not sure that's what's going on at all, you know. There's a novel by a man named Peter Straub called Floating Dragon - have you read it?'
Gardener had shaken his head.
'Well, it postulates something similar to your Agent Orange from Space or Paraquat of the Gods or whatever you called it.'
Gardener smiled.
'In the story, an experimental chemical is sucked out into the atmosphere and falls on a piece of suburban Connecticut. This stuff really is poison - a kind of insanity gas. People get in fights for no reason, some fellow decides to paint his whole house - including the windows - bright pink, a woman jogs until she drops dead of a massive coronary and so on.
'There's another novel - this one is called Brain Wave, and it was written by . . .' Anderson wrinkled her brow, thinking. Her hand stole down to the right of the rocker again, then came back. 'Same name as mine, Anderson. Poul Anderson. In that one, the earth passes through the tail of a comet and some of the fallout makes animals smarter. The book starts with a rabbit literally reasoning its way out of a trap.'
'Smarter,' Gardener echoed.
'Yes. If you had an IQ of 120 before the earth went through the comet, you'd end up with an IQ of 180. Get it?'
'Well-rounded intelligence?'
'Yes.'
'But the term you used before was idiot savant. That's the exact opposite of well-rounded intelligence, isn't it? It's a kind of ... of bump.'
Anderson waved this aside. 'Doesn't matter,' she said.
Now, lying here in bed, drifting off to sleep, Gardener wondered.
13
That night he had the dream. It was simple enough. He was standing in darkness outside of the shed between the farmhouse and the garden. To his left, the Tomcat was a dark shape. He was thinking exactly what he had been
thinking tonight - that he would go over and look in one of the windows. And what would he see? Why, the Tommyknockers, of course. But he wasn't afraid. Instead of fear he felt delighted, relieved joy. Because the Tommyknockers weren't monsters or cannibals; they were like the elves in that story about the good shoemaker. He would look in through the dirty shed window like a delighted child looking out a bedroom window in an illustration from 'The Night Before Christmas' (and what was Santa Claus, that right jolly old elf, but a great big old Tommyknocker in a red suit?), and he would see them, laughing and chattering as they sat at a long table, cobbling together power generators and levitating skateboards and televisions which showed mindmovies instead of regular ones.
He drifted toward the shed, and suddenly it was lighted by the same glare he had seen coming out of Bobbi's modified typewriter - it was as if the shed had turned into some weird jack-o'-lantern, only this light was not a warm yellow but an awful, rotten green. It spilled out between the boards; it spilled rays through knotholes and tattooed evil cats' eyes on the ground, it filled the windows. And now he was afraid, because no friendly little aliens from space had made that light; if cancer had a color, it would be the one that spilled from every chink and crack and knothole and window of Bobbi Anderson's shed.
But he drew closer, because in dreams you can't always help yourself. He drew closer, no longer wanting to see, no more than a kid would want to look out his bedroom window on Christmas Eve and see Santa Claus striding along the snow-covered slope of roof across the way with a severed head in each gloved hand, the blood from the ragged necks steaming in the cold.
Please no, please no
But he drew closer and as he entered that haze of green, rock music spilled into his head in a paralyzing, mind-splitting flood. It was George Thorogood and the Destroyers, and he knew that when George started to play that slide guitar, his skull would vibrate for a moment with killing harmonics and then simply explode like the water glasses in the house he had once told Bobbi about.
None of it mattered. The fear mattered, that was all - the fear of the Tommyknockers in Bobbi's shed. He sensed them, could almost smell