Downstream”, The Rainmakers 15 page

Up to you, Gard-ole-Gard. Just you. He sighed. It was like a sob. Ring those funky changes, white boy... sure. But first ask yourself who wants the world to change? The unfed, the unwell, the unhomed, right? The parents of those kids in Africa with the big bellies and the dying eyes. The blacks in South Africa. The PLO. Does Ted the Power Man want a big helping of funky changes? Bite your tongue! Not Ted, not the Russian Politburo, not the Knesset, not the President of the United States, not the Seven Sisters, not Xerox, not Barry Manilow.

Oh no, not the big boys, not the ones with the real power, the ones who drove the Status Quo Machine. Their motto was “Get the funk outta my face.”

There was a time when he would not have hesitated for a moment, and that time was not so long past. Bobbi wouldn't have needed any arguments; Gard himself would have been the guy flogging the horse until its heart burst... only he would have been right there in harness too, pulling alongside. Here, at last, was a source of clean power, so abundant and easy to produce it might as well be free. Within six months, every nuclear reactor in the United States could be brought to a cold stop. Within a year, every reactor in the world. Cheap power. Cheap transport. Travel to other planets, even other starsystems seemed possible—after all, Bobbi's ship had not gotten to Haven, Maine, on the good ship Lollypop. It was, in fact—give us a drumroll, please, maestro—THE ANSWER TO EVERYTHING.

Are there weapons on board that ship, do you think?

He had started to ask Bobbi that and something had stopped his mouth. Weapons? Maybe. And if Bobbi could receive enough of that residual “force” to create a telepathic typewriter, could she also create something that would look like a Flash Gordon stun-gun but which might actually work? Or a disintegrator? A tractor-beam? Something which would, instead of just going Brummmmm or Wacka-Wacka-Wacka would actually turn people into piles of smoldering ash? Possibly. And if not, wouldn't some of Bobbi's hypothetical scientists adapt things like the water-heater gadget or the customized Tomcat motor to something that would put a radical hurt on people?

Sure. After all, long before toasters and hair dryers and baseboard heaters were ever thought of, the State of New York was using electricity to fry murderers at Sing-Sing.

What scared Gardener was that the idea of weapons held a certain attractiveness. Part of it, he supposed, was just self-interest. If the order came down to put a sport-coat over the mess, then surely he and Bobbi would be part of what was to be covered. But beyond that were other possibilities. One of them, wild but not unattractive, was the idea that he and Bobbi might be able to kick a lot of asses that deserved kicking. The idea of sending happy-time folks like the Ayatollah into the Phantom Zone was so delightful that it almost made Gardener chuckle. Why wait for the Israelis and the Arabs to sort out their problems? And terrorists of all stripes... goodbye, fellas. Catch you on the flip-flop.

Wonderful, Gard! I love it! We'll put it on network TV! It'll be better than Miami Vice! Instead of two fearless drug-busters, we got Gard and Bobbi, cruising the planet in their flying saucer! Gimme the phone, someone! I got to call CBS!

You're not funny, Gardener thought.

Who's laughing? Isn't that what you're talking about? You and Bobbi playing the Lone Ranger and Tonto?

So what if it is? How long does it take before that option starts looking good? How many suitcase bombs? How many women shot in embassy toilets? How many dead kids? How long do we let it all go on?

Love it, Gard. “Okay, everyone on Planet Earth, sing along with Gard and Bobbi—just follow the bouncing ball: “The aaanswer, my friend, is blooowin” in the wind.. . “”

You're disgusting.

And you're starting to sound downright dangerous. You remember how scared you were when that state trooper found the pistol in your pack? How scared you were because you didn't even remember putting it in there? This is it all over again. The only difference is that now you're talking about a bigger caliber. Dear Christ, are you ever.

As a younger man, these questions never would have occurred to him... and if they had, he would simply have brushed them aside. Apparently Bobbi already had. She was. after all, the one who had mentioned the man on horseback.

What do you mean, a man on horseback?

I mean us, Gard. But I think... I think I mostly mean you.

Bobbi, when I was twenty-five I burned all the time. When I was thirty, I burned some of the time. But the oxygen in here must be getting thin, because now I only burn when I'm drunk. I'm scared to climb up on that horse, Bobbi. If history ever taught me anything, it taught me that horses like to bolt.

He shifted on the stump again, and the shotgun followed him. Anderson sat in the kitchen on a stool, the barrels swivelling a bit on the window-sill with every move Gardener made. She was getting very little of his thoughts; it was frustrating, maddening. But she was getting enough to know that Gardener was approaching a decision... and when he made it, Anderson thought she would know what it was.

If it was the wrong one, she was going to blow off the back of his head and bury the body in the soft soil at the foot of the garden. She would hate to do that, but if she had to, she would.

Anderson waited calmly for the moment, her mind tuned to the faint run of Gardener's thoughts, making the tenuous connection.

It would not be long now.

What really scares you is the chance to deal from a position of strength for the first time in your miserable, confused life.

He sat up straighter, an expression of dismay on his face. It wasn't true, was it? Surely it wasn't.

Oh, but Gard, it is. You even root for baseball teams that are cataclysmic underdogs. That way you never have to worry about being depressed if one of them blows it in the World Series. It's the same with the candidates and the causes you support, isn't it? Because if your politics never get the chance to be tried out, you never have to worry about finding out that the new boss is the same as the old boss, do you?

I'm not scared. Not of that.

The fuck you're not. A man on horseback? You? Man, that's a laugh. You'd have a heart attack if someone asked you to be a man on a tricycle. Your own personal life has been nothing but a constant effort to destroy every power-base you have. Take marriage. Nora was tough, you finally had to shoot her to get rid of her, but when the chips were down, you didn't stick at it, did you? You're a man who manages to rise to every occasion, I'll give you that. You got yourself fired from your teaching job, thus eliminating another power-base. You've spent twelve years pouring enough booze onto the little spark of talent God gave you to put it out. Now this. You better run, Gard.

That's not fair! Honest to God, it's not!

No? Isn't there enough truth in it to make a comeuppance?

Maybe. Maybe so. Either way, he discovered that the decision had already been made. He would stick with Bobbi, at least for a while, do it her way.

Bobbi's blithe assurances that everything was just ducky didn't jibe very well with her exhaustion and weight-loss. What the ship in the earth could do to Bobbi it would probably do to him. What had happened—or failed to happen—today proved nothing; he would not have expected all the changes to come at once. Yet the ship—and whatever force emanated from it—had a great capacity to do good. That was the main thing, and... well, fuck the Tommyknocker man.

Gardener got up and walked toward the house. The sun had gone down, and the twilight was turning ashy. His back was stiff. He stretched, standing on his toes, and grimaced as his spine crackled. He looked past the dark, silent shape of the Tomcat to the shed door with its new padlock. He thought of going to it, trying to look through one of the dirt-grimed windows... and decided not to. Perhaps he was afraid a white face would pop up inside the dark window, its grin showing a mouthful of filed cannibal teeth in a deadly ring. Hello, Gard, you want to meet some genuine Tommyknockers? Come on in! There's lots of us in here!

Gardener shivered—he could almost hear thin, evil fingers scrabbling on the panes. Too much had happened today and yesterday. His imagination had gotten out. Tonight it would walk and talk. He didn't know if he should hope for sleep or for it to stay away.

Once he was back inside, his uneasiness began to fade. With it went some of his craving for drink. He took off his shirt and then peered into Anderson's room. Bobbi lay just as she had lain before, blankets caught between her dreadfully thin legs, one hand thrown out, snoring.

Hasn't even moved. Christ, she must be tired.

He took a long shower, turning the water up as hot as he dared (with Bobbi Anderson's new water heater, that meant barely jogging the knob five degrees west of dead cold). When his skin began to turn red. he stepped out into a bathroom as steamy as London in the grip of a Sherlockian fog. He towelled, brushed his teeth with a finger—got to do something about getting some supplies here, he thought -and went to bed.

Drifting off, he found himself thinking again about the last thing Bobbi had said during their discussion. She believed the ship in the earth had begun to affect the townspeople. When he asked for specifics, she grew vague, then changed the subject. Gardener supposed anything was possible in this crazy business. Although the old Frank Garrick place was in the boonies, it was almost exactly in the geographic center of the township itself. There was a Haven Village, but that was five miles further north.

“You make it sound as if it was throwing off poison gas,” he had said, hoping he didn't sound as uneasy as he felt. “Paraquat from Space. They Came from Agent Orange.”

“Poison gas?” Bobbi repeated. She had gone off by herself again. Her face, so thin now, was closed and distant. “No, not poison gas. Call it fumes if you want to call it anything. But it's more than just the vibration when a person touches it.”

Gardener said nothing, not wanting to break her mood.

“Fumes? Not that, either. But like fumes. If EPA came in here with sniffers, I don't think they'd find any pollutants at all. If there's any actual, physical residue from the ship in the air, it's nothing but the tiniest trace.”

“Do you think that's possible, Bobbi?” Gardener asked quietly.

“Yes. I'm not telling you I know that's what's happening, because I don't. I have no inside information. But I think that a very thin layer of the ship's hull—and I mean thin, maybe no more than a single molecule or two in depth—could be oxidizing as I uncover it and the air hits it. That means I'd get the first, heaviest dose... and then it would go with the wind, like fallout. The people in town would get most of it... but “most” would really mean—damn little” in this case.”

Bobbi shifted in her rocker and reached down with her right 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.

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 them, a rich, electric smell like ozone and blood.

And... the weird liquid sloshing sounds. He could hear those even over the music in his head. It sounded like an old-fashioned washing machine, except that sound wasn't water, and that sound was wrong, wrong, wrong.

As he stood on his tiptoes to look into the shed, his face as green as the face of a corpse pulled out of quicksand, George Thorogood started to play that slide blues guitar, and Gardener began screaming with pain—and that was when his head exploded and he woke sitting bolt upright in the old double bed in the guestroom, his chest covered with sweat, his hands trembling.

He lay down again, thinking: God! If you're going to have nightmares about it, take a look in tomorrow. Get your mind easy.

He had expected nightmares in the wake of his decision; he lay back down again, thinking that this was only the first. But there were no more dreams. That night. The next day he joined Bobbi on the dig.

BOOK II

TALES OF HAVEN

The terrorist got bombed! The President got hit! Security was tight! The Secret Service got lit! And everybody's drunk, Everybody's wasted, Everybody's stoned, And there's nothin” gonna change it, Cause everybody's drunk, Everybody's wasted, Everybody's drinkin” on the job.

Date: 2015-12-17; view: 565