DORIS LESSING, The Golden Notebook 7 page

Then he was sliding into the dimness of the trench and the dank mineral smell of wet rocks, the smooth surface of the ship rising up and up on his left, like the side of a skyscraper without windows.

Gard stepped off the sling. He and Bobbi stood shoulder to shoulder in front of the circular groove of the hatch, which had the shape of a large porthole. Gardener found it almost impossible to take his eyes from the symbol etched upon it. He found himself remembering something from earliest childhood.

There had been an outbreak of diphtheria in the Portland suburb where he'd been raised. Two kids had died, and the public-health officials had imposed a quarantine. He remembered walking to the library, his hand safely caught up in his mother's, and passing houses where signs had been stapled to the front doors, the same word in heavy black letters heading each. He had asked his mother what the word was, and she told him. He asked her what it meant, and she said it meant there was sickness in the house. It was a good word, she said, because it warned people not to go in. If they did, she said, they might catch the disease and spread it.

“Are you ready?” Bobbi asked, breaking in on his thoughts.

“What does that mean?” He pointed at the symbol on the hatch.

“Burma-Shave.” Bobbi was unsmiling. “Are you?”

“No... but I guess I'm as close as I'll ever get.”

He looked at the tank clipped to his belt and wondered again if he was going to draw some poison that would explode his lungs at the first breath. He didn't think so. This was supposed to be his reward. One visit inside the Holy Temple before he was erased, once and for all, from the equation.

“All right,” Bobbi said. “I'm going to open it—”

“You're going to think it open,” Gardener said, looking at the plug in Bobbi's ear.

“Yes,” Bobbi replied dismissively, as if to say What else? “It's going to iris open. There'll be an explosive outrush of bad air... and when I say bad, I mean really bad. How are your hands?”

“What do you mean?”

“Cuts?”

“Nothing that isn't scabbed over.” He held his hands out like a little boy submitting to his mother's pre-dinner inspection.

“Okay.” Bobbi took a pair of cotton work-gloves from her back pocket and drew them on. To Gard's inquiring look she said, “Hangnails on two fingers. It might not be enough—but it might. When you see the hatch start to iris open, Gard, close your eyes. Breathe from the tank. If you whiff on what comes out of the ship, it's going to kill you as quick as a Dran-O cocktail.”

“I,” Gardener said, “am convinced.” He slipped the snorkel mouthpiece into his mouth and used the nose-plugs. Bobbi did the same. Gardener could hear/ feel his pulse in his temples, moving very fast, like someone tapping rapidly on a muffled drum with one finger.

This is it... this is finally it.

“Ready?” Bobbi asked one last time. Muffled by the mouthpiece, it came out sounding like Elmer Fudd: Weady?

Gardener nodded.

“Remember?” Wememboo?

Gardener nodded again.

for Christ's sake, Bobbi, let's go!

Bobbi nodded.

Okay. Be ready

Before he could ask her for what, that symbol suddenly broke apart in curves, and Gardener realized with a deep, almost sickening excitement that the hatch was opening. There was a high thin screaming sound, as if something rusted shut for a long time was now moving again... but with great reluctance.

He saw Bobbi turn the valve on the tank clipped to her belt. He did the same, then closed his eyes. A moment later, a soft wind pushed against his face, shoving his shaggy hair back from his brow. Gardener thought: Death. That's death. Death rushing past me, filling this trench like chlorine gas. Every microbe on my skin is dying right now.

His heart was pounding much too fast, and he had actually begun to wonder if the outrush of gas (like the rush of gas out of a coffin, his skittish mind chattered) wasn't killing him somehow after all when he realized he had been holding his breath.

He pulled a breath in through the mouthpiece. He waited to see if it would kill him. It didn't. It had a dry, stale taste, but it was perfectly breathable.

Forty, maybe fifty minutes of air.

Slow down, Gard. Take it slow. Make it last. No panting.

He slowed down.

Tried, at least.

Then that high, screaming noise quit. The outrush of air grew softer against his face, then stopped entirely. Then Gardener spent an eternity in the dark, facing the open hatch with his eyes shut. The only sounds were the muffled drum of his heart and the sigh of air through the tank's demand regulator. His mouth already tasted of rubber, and his teeth were locked much too hard on the rubber pins inside the snorkel mouthpiece. He forced himself to get cool and ease up.

At last, eternity ended. Bobbi's clear thought filled his mind:

Okay... should be okay... you can open those baby blues, Gard.

Like a kid at a surprise party, Jim Gardener did just that.

He was looking along a corridor.

It was perfectly round except for a flat ledge of walkway halfway up one side. The position looked all wrong. For a wild moment he visualized the Tommyknockers as grisly intelligent flies crawling along that walkway with sticky feet. Then logic reasserted itself. The walkway was canted, everything was canted, because the ship was at an angle.

Soft light glowed out of the round, featureless walls.

No dead batteries here, Gardener thought. These are really long-life jobbies. He looked into the corridor beyond the hatch with a deep and profound sense of wonder. It is alive. Even after all these years. Still alive.

“I'm going in, Gard. Are you coming?

Gonna try, Bobbi.

She stepped in, ducking her head so as not to bump it on the upper curve of the hatch. Gardener hesitated a moment, biting down on the rubber pins inside the mask again, and followed.

There was a moment of transcendent agony—he felt rather than heard radio transmissions. fill his head. Not just one; it was as if every radio broadcast in the world momentarily shrieked inside his brain.

Then it was gone—simply gone. He thought of the way that radio transmissions faded when you went into a tunnel. He had entered the ship, and all outside transmissions had been damped down to nothing. Nor was it only outside transmissions, he discovered a moment later. Bobbi was looking at him, obviously sending a thought—Are you all right? was Gardener's best guess, but a guess was all it was. But he could no longer hear Bobbi in his head at all.

Curious, he sent back: I am fine, go on!

Bobbi's questioning expression didn't change—she was much better at this business than Gardener, but she wasn't getting anything, either. Gard gestured tor tier to go on. After a moment, she nodded and did.

They walked twenty paces up the corridor. Bobbi moved with no hesitation, nor did she hesitate when they came to a round interior hatch set into the surface of the flat walkway on their left. This hatch, about three feet in diameter, was open. Without looking back at Gardener, Bobbi climbed into it.

Gardener paused, looking back along the softly lit corridor. The hatchway to the outside was back there, a round porthole giving onto the darkness of the trench. Then he followed.

There was a ladder bolted to the new corridor, which was almost small enough in diameter to be a tunnel. Gardener and Bobbi did not need the ladder; the ship's position had rendered the corridor almost horizontal. They went on their hands and knees with the ladder sometimes scraping their backs.

The ladder made Gardener uneasy. The rungs were spaced almost four feet apart, that was one thing. A man—even a very long-legged one—would have had difficulty using it. The other thing about the rungs was more unsettling: a pronounced semi-circular dip, almost a notch, in the center of each.

So the Tommyknockers had really bad fallen arches, he thought, listening to the rasp of his own respiration. Big deal, Gard.

But the picture that came to him was not of flat feet or fallen arches; the picture which stole into his mind, softly and yet with a simple undeniable power, was of some not-quite-seen creature climbing that ladder, a creature with a single thick claw on each foot, a claw which fit neatly into each of those dips as it climbed...

Suddenly the round, dimly lit walls seemed to be pressing in on him, and he had to grapple with a terrible bout of claustrophobia. The Tommyknockers were here, all right, and still alive. At any moment he might feel a thick, inhuman hand close about his ankle...

Sweat ran into his eye, stinging.

He whipped his head around, looking back over one shoulder.

Nothing. Nothing, Gard. Get yourself under control!

But they were here. Perhaps dead—but somehow alive just the same. In Bobbi, for one thing. But...

But you have to see, Gard. Now GO!

He started crawling again. He was leaving faint sweaty handprints on the metal, he saw. Human handprints inside this thing which had come from God knew where.

Bobbi reached the mouth of the passage, turned on her stomach, and dropped out of sight. Gard followed, stopping at the mouth of the passageway to look out. Here was a large open space, hexagonal in shape, like a large chamber in a beehive. It was also canted at a crazy funhouse angle as a result of the crash. The walls glowed with soft colorless light. A thick cable came out of a gasket on the floor; this split into half a dozen thinner cords, and each ended in a set of things which looked like headphones with bulging centers.

Bobbi wasn't looking at these. She was looking into the corner. Gardener followed her gaze and felt his stomach gain weight. His head swam dizzily. his heart faltered.

They had been gathered around their telepathic steering wheel or whatever the hell it was, when the ship hit. They had perhaps been trying to pull out of their dive to the very last, but it hadn't worked. And here they were, two or three of them, at least, slung into a far corner. It was hard to tell what they looked like—they were too tangled together. The ship had hit, and they had been thrown to that end of this room. There they still lay.

Interstellar car crash, Gardener thought sickly. Is that all there is, Alfie?

Bobbi did not go toward those brown husks piled in the lowest angle of this strange, bare room. She only stared, her hands clenching and unclenching. Gardener tried to understand what she was thinking and feeling and could not. He turned and carefully lowered himself over the edge of the passageway. He joined her, walking carefully on the canted floor. Bobbi looked at him with her strange new eyes—What do I look like to her through those new eyes? Gard wondered—and then back toward the tangled remains in the corner. Her hands continued to open and snap closed.

Gardener started toward them. Bobbi clutched at his arm. Gardener shook her grip off without even thinking. He had to look at them. He felt like a child drawn toward an open grave, full of fear but compelled to go on anyway. He had to see.

Gardener, who had grown up in southern Maine, crossed what he believed to be -for all its starkness—the control room of an interstellar spacecraft. The floor under his feet looked as smooth as glass, but his sneakers held their grip easily He heard no sound but his own harsh breathing, smelled only dusty Haven air. He walked down the slanted floor to the bodies and looked at them.

These are the Tommyknockers, he thought. Bobbi and the others aren't going to look exactly like them when they're done “becoming,” maybe because of the environment or maybe because the original physiological makeup of the—what would you call it? target group?—results in a slightly different look each time this happens. But there's a kissin'-cousin resemblance, all right. Maybe these aren't the originals... but they're close enough. Ugly fuckers.

He felt awe... horror... and a revulsion that ran blood-deep.

Late last night and the night before, a wavering voice sang in his mind. Tommyknockers, Tommyknockers, knocking at the door.

At first he thought there were five, but there were only four—one was in two pieces. None of them looked as if he—she—it—had died easily, or with any serenity. Their faces were ugly and long-snouted. Their eyes were filmed over to the whiteness of cataracts. Their lips were drawn back in uniform snarls.

Their skins were scaly but transparent—he could see frozen muscles laid in crisscross patterns around jaws, temples and necks.

They had no teeth.

Bobbi joined him. Gard saw awe on her face—but no revulsion.

These are her gods now, and one is rarely if ever revolted by one's own gods, Gardener thought. These are her gods now, and why not? They made her what she is today.

He pointed to each one of them in turn, deliberately, like an instructor. They were naked, and their wounds were clear. Interstellar car crash, yes. But he didn't believe there had been any mechanical failure. Those weird, scaly bodies were slashed; scored with ragged cuts. One six-fingered hand was still wrapped around the haft of something that looked like a knife with a circular blade.

Look at them, Bobbi, he thought, even though he knew Bobbi couldn't read him in here even if he opened up all the way. He pointed here, to a grinning mouth buried in another creature's throat; there, to a wide wound gaping in a thick, inhuman chest; there, to a knife still clutched in one hand.

Look at them, Bobbi. You don't have to be Sherlock Holmes to see they were fighting. Having a good old knock-down-drag-out here in the old control room. None of this “Come-let-us-reason-together” shit for your gods. They were whipping some heavy numbers on each other. Maybe it started as an argument about whether or not to land here, or maybe it was about whether or not they should have hooked a left at Alpha Centauri. Anyway, the results are the same. Remember how we always assumed a technologically advanced race of beings would be, if one ever made contact with us? We thought they'd be smart like Mr Wizard and wise like Robert Young on Father Knows Best. Well, here's the truth, Bobbi. The ship crashed because they were having a fight. And where are the blasters? The phasers? The transporter room? I see one knife. The rest they must have done with mirrors... or their bare hands... or those big claws.

Bobbi looked away, frowning strenuously—a pupil who didn't want to learn the lesson, a pupil who was in fact determined not to learn it. She started to move off. Gardener caught her by the arm and pulled her back. Pointed at the feet.

If Bruce Lee had had afoot like that, he would have killed a thousand people a week, Bobbi.

The Tommyknockers” legs were grotesquely long—they made Gardener think of those guys who don stilts and Uncle Sam suits and march in Fourth of July parades. The muscles below the semi-transparent skins were long, ropy, gray. The feet were narrow, and not precisely toed. Instead, each foot sloped into that one thick, chitinous claw, like a bird's talon. Something like a giant vulture's.

Gardener thought of the dips in the ladder rungs. He shuddered.

Look, Bobbi. See how dark the claws are. That's blood, or whatever they had inside them. It's on the claws because they did most of the damage. This place sure as shit didn't look like the bridge of the starship Enterprise before it crashed. Just before it hit, it probably looked more like a free-for-all cockfight out behind some redneck's barn. This is progress, Bobbi? Next to these guys, Ted the Power Man looks like Gandhi.

Frowning, Bobbi pulled away. Leave me alone, her eyes said.

Bobbi, can't you see

Bobbi turned away. She wasn't into seeing.

Gardener stood by the desiccated bodies, watching her climb the deck like a woman climbing a steep smooth hill. She didn't slip at all. She turned toward a far wall where there was another round opening and boosted herself in. For a moment Gardener could see her legs and the dirty soles of her tennis shoes, and then she was gone.

Gard walked up the slope and stood for a moment near the center of the room, looking at the single thick cord coming out of the floor, at the earphones that split off from it. The similarity to the set-up in Bobbi's shed was perfectly clear. Otherwise...

He looked around. Hexagonal room. Barren. No chairs. No pictures of Niagara Fails—or Cygnus-B Falls, for that matter. No astrogation charts, no Mad Labs equipment. All the big-time science-fiction producers and special-effects men would have been disgusted by this emptiness, Gardener thought. Nothing but some earphones lying tangled on the floor, and the bodies, perfectly preserved but probably as light as autumn leaves by now. Earphones and remains like husks piled in that far corner, where gravity had tossed them. Nothing very interesting about it. Nothing very smart. That fit. Because the Havenites were doing lots of stuff, but none of it was very smart, when you got right down to where the short hairs grew.

It wasn't disappointment he felt so much as stupid correctness. Not rightness -God knew there was nothing right about this—but correctness, as if part of him had always known it would be this way when and if they got in. No Disneyland razzmatazz; only a dreary species of blankness. He found himself remembering W. H. Auden's poem about running away: sooner or later you always ended up in one room, under a naked light bulb, playing solitaire at three in the morning. Tomorrowland, it seemed, ended up being an empty place where people smart enough to capture the stars got mad and tore each other to shreds with the claws on their feet.

So much for Robert Heinlein, Gard thought, and followed Bobbi.

He trekked uphill, realizing he had entirely lost track of what his position was in relation to the world outside. It was easier not to think about it. He used the ladder to help himself along as he went. He came to a rectangular porthole and looked through it into something that might have been an engine room—big metal blocks, square on one end, rounded on the other, marched off in a double row. Pipes, thick and dull silver in color, protruded from the square ends of these blocks and moved off at strange, crooked angles.

Like straight-pipes coming out of a kid's jalopy, Gard thought. He became aware of liquid warmth on the skin above his mouth. It divided in two and ran down his chin. His nose was bleeding again... slowly, but as if it meant to keep it up for a while.

Is the light brighter in here now?

He stopped and looked around.

Yes. And could he hear a faint humming, or was that imagination?

He cocked his head. No; not imagination. Machinery. Something had started up.

It didn't just start, and you know it. We started it up. We're kicking it over.

He bit down hard on the mouthpiece. He wanted out of here. Wanted to get Bobbi out. The ship was alive; in a weird way he supposed it was the Ultimate Tommyknocker. It was a howl. It was also the most horrible thing of all. Sentient creature... What? Woke it up, of course. Gard wanted it asleep. All of a sudden he felt too much like Jack nosing around the castle while the giant slept. They had to get out. He began to crawl faster. Then a new thought struck him, stopping him dead.

What if it won't let you out?

He pushed the idea away and kept going.

The corridor branched into a Y, left arm continuing to angle up, the right turning steeply downward. He listened and heard Bobbi crawling to the left. He moved that way and came to another hatch. She was standing below it. She glanced briefly up at Gardener with eyes that were wide and frightened. Then she looked back again.

He got one leg over the lip of the hatch and paused. No way he was going in there.

The room was lozenge-shaped. It was full of hammocks suspended in metal frames—there were hundreds of them. All were canted drunkenly upward and to the left; the room looked like a snapshot of a sailing ship's bunkroom taken just as the ship rolled in the trough of a swell. All the hammocks were full, their occupants strapped in. Transparent skins, doglike snouts; milky, dead eyes.

A cable ran from each scaled, triangular head.

Not just strapped, Gardener thought. CHAINED. They were the ship's drive, weren't they, Bobbi? If this is the future, it's time to eat the gun. These are dead galley slaves.

They were snarling, but Gardener saw that some of the snarls were halfobliterated, because some of their heads seemed to have exploded—as if, when the ship crashed, there had been some gigantic backflow of energy that had literally blown their brains out.

All dead. Strapped forever in their hammocks, heads lolling, snouts frozen in eternal snarls. All dead in this tilted room.

Close by, another engine started up—chopping rustily at first, then smoothing out. A moment later fans whirred into life—he supposed the newly started engine was driving them. Air blew against his face—whether or not it was fresh was something he didn't intend to personally check on.

Maybe opening the outer hatch started this stuff up, but I don't believe it. It was us. What starts up next, Bobbi?

Suppose they started up next—the Tommyknockers themselves? Suppose their grayish-transparent six-fingered hands started to clench and unclench, as Bobbi's hands had been doing as she stared at the corpses in the barren control room? What if those taloned feet began to twitch? Or suppose those heads began to turn, and those milky eyes looked at them?

I want out. The ghosts here are very lively and I want out.

He touched Bobbi's shoulder. She jumped. Gardener glanced at his wrist, but there was no watch there—only a fading white shape on his otherwise tanned wrist. It had been a Timex, a tough old baby that had gone on a lot of toots with him and come out alive. But two days of working on the excavation had killed it. THERE'S one John Cameron Swayze never tried in those old TV ads, he thought.

Bobbi took the point. She pointed at the air-bottle clipped to her belt and raised her eyebrows at Gardener. How long has it been?

Gardener didn't know and didn't care. He wanted out before the whole damned ship woke up and did God-knew-what.

He pointed back down the passageway. Long enough. Let's bug out.

A thick, oily chuckling noise began in the wall next to Gardener. He shrank from it. Drops of blood from his slowly bleeding nose splattered the wall. His heart was beating madly.

Stop it, it's just some sort of pump

The oily noise began to smooth out... and then something went wrong. There was a screech of grinding metal and a quick, thudding series of explosions. Gardener felt the wall vibrate, and for a moment the light seemed to flicker and dim.

Could we find our way out of here in the dark if the lights went out? You make thee joke I theenk, senor.

The pump tried to start again. There was a long metallic scream that set Gardener's teeth biting at the rubber plugs in his mouthpiece. It died away at last. There was a long loud rattle, like a straw in an empty glass. Then nothing.

Not everything lasted all that time with no damage, Gardener thought, and found this idea actually relieving.

Bobbi was pointing: Go, Gard.

Before he did, he saw Bobbi pause and look back once at the ranks of the hammocked dead. That frightened look was back on her face.

Then Gard was crawling back the way he came, trying to keep an even, steady pace as the claustrophobia wrapped itself around him.

In the control room, one of the walls had turned into a gigantic picture-window fifty feet long and twenty feet high.

Gardener stood, gape-jawed, looking at the blue Maine sky and the fringe of pines and spruces and maples around the trench. In the lower right-hand corner he could see the rooftree of their equipment lean-to. He stared at this for several seconds—long enough to see big white summer clouds drifting across the blue sky -before realizing it couldn't be a window. They were somewhere toward the middle of the ship, and deep in the ground as well. A window in that wall should show only more ship. Even if they had been near the hull, which they weren't, it would have given on a vista of mesh-covered rock wall, with maybe a squib of blue sky at the very top.

It's a TV picture of some kind. Something like a TV picture, anyway.

But there were no lines. The illusion was perfect.

Forgetting, in this powerful new fascination, his claustrophobic need to get out, Gardener walked slowly toward the wall. The angle gave him a perverse sensation of flying—the effect was like slipping behind the controls of an airline trainer and pulling the mock controls into a steep climb. The sky was so bright he had to squint. He kept looking for the wall, the way you might expect to see a movie screen through the picture as you got closer to it, but the wall just didn't seem to be there. The pines were a true, clear green, and only the fact that he couldn't feel any breeze or smell the woods worked against the persuasive illusion of looking through an open window.

He walked closer, still looking for the wall.

It's a camera, got to be—mounted on the outer rim of the ship, maybe even the part Bobbi stumbled over. The angle confirms that. But, Jesus! It's so fucking real! If the people at Kodak or Polaroid saw this, they'd go out of their gou

His arm was grabbed—grabbed hard—and terror leaped up in him. He turned, expecting to see one of them, a grinning thing with a dog's head, holding a cable with a plug tip in one hand: Just bend down, Mr Gardener; this won't hurt a bit.

It was Bobbi. She pointed to the wall. Held out her hands and arms and jittered them rapidly in some kind of charade. Then pointed at the window-wall again. After a moment, Gardener got it. In a grisly way it was almost funny. Bobbi had been miming electrocution, telling him that touching the window-wall would probably be a lot like touching the third rail of a subway.

Gardener nodded, then pointed toward the wider companionway through which they had entered. Bobbi nodded back and led the way.

As Gardener boosted himself up, he thought he heard a leaf-dry rattle and turned back, feeling a child's dreamy terror tug at his mind. He felt that it must be them, those corpses in the corner; them, rising slowly to their taloned feet like zombies.

But they still lay in their tangled drift of strange arms and legs. The wide, clear view of the sky and the trees on the wall (or through the wall) was dimming, losing reality and definition.

Gardener turned away and crawled after Bobbi as fast as he could.

Chapter 7

The Scoop, Continued

You're crazy, you know, John Leandro told himself as he pulled into exactly the same parking slot Everett Hillman had used not three weeks ago. Leandro did not of course know this. That was probably just as well.

You're crazy, he told himself again. You bled like a stuck pig, there's two teeth less in your head, and you're planning to go back there. You're crazy!

Right, he thought, getting out of the old car. I'm twenty-four, unmarried, getting bulgy around the middle, and if I'm crazy it's because I found this, I did, me, I tripped over it. It's big, and it's mine. My story. No, use the other word. It's old-fashioned, but who gives a fuck—it's the right word. My scoop. I'm not going to let it kill me, but I am going to ride it until it bucks me off.

Leandro stood in the parking lot at a quarter past one on what was rapidly becoming the longest day of his life (it would also be the last, despite all his mental avowals to the contrary) and thought: Good for you. Gonna ride it till it bucks you off. Probably Robert Capa, Ernie Pyle, thought the same thing from time to time.

Sensible. Sarcastic, but sensible. That deeper part of his mind seemed to be beyond such sense, however. My story, it returned stubbornly. My scoop.

John Leandro, now clad in a T-shirt reading WHERE TH” HELL IS TROY, MAINE? (David Bright would probably have laughed himself into a hemorrhage over that one), crossed the small parking lot of Maine Med Supplies ('Specializing in Respiration Supplies and Respiration Therapy since 1946') and went inside.

“Thirty bucks is a stiff deposit for an air mask, don't you think?” Leandro asked the clerk, thumbing through his cash. He guessed he had the thirty, but it was going to leave him with about a buck and a half. “Wouldn't think they'd be a big black-market item.”

“We never used to require one at all,” the clerk said, “and we still don't if we know the individual or the organization, you know. But I lost one a couple, three weeks ago. Old man came in and told me he wanted some air. I figured he meant for diving, you know—he was old, but he looked tough enough for it—so I started telling him about Downeast ScubaDive in Bangor. But he said no, he was interested in ground portability. So I rented it to him. I never got it back. Brand-new Bell flat-pack. Two-hundred-dollar piece of equipment.”

Date: 2015-12-17; view: 541