The Tommyknockers

Attend, Watson, the voice of Sherlock Holmes suddenly spoke up in the quick, almost urgent speech rhythms of Basil Rathbone. The eye glows. No… not the eye; the cataract glows. But Anderson does not observe it, although she should. Etheridge does not observe it, and he definitely should. May we say that the animals at the veterinary clinic do not become upset until Peter's cataract begins to glow… until, we might further theorize, the healing process has resumed? Possibly. That the glow is seen only when being seen is safe? Ah” Watson, that is an assumption as frightening as it is unwarranted. Because that would indicate some sort of

–some sort of intelligence.

Anderson didn't like where this was leading and tried to choke it off with the old reliable advice: Let it go.

This time it worked.

For a while.

Anderson wanted to go out and dig some more.

Her forebrain didn't like that idea at all.

Her forebrain thought that idea sucked.

Leave it alone, Bobbi. It's dangerous.

Right.

And by the way, what's it doing to you?

Nothing she could see. But you couldn't see what cigarette smoke did to your lungs, either; that's why people went on smoking. It could be that her liver was rotting, that the chambers of her heart were silting up with cholesterol, or that she had rendered herself barren. For all she knew her bone marrow might be producing outlaw white cells like mad right this minute. Why settle for an early period when you could have something really interesting like leukemia, Bobbi?

But she wanted to dig it up just the same.

This urge, simple and elemental, had nothing to do with her forebrain. It came baking up from someplace deeper inside. It had all the earmarks of some physical craving-for salt, for some coke or heroin or cigarettes or coffee. Her forebrain supplied logic; this other part supplied an almost incoherent imperative: Dig on it, Bobbi, it's okay, dig on it, dig on it, shit, why not dig on it a while more, you know you want to know what it is, so dig on it till you see what it is, dig dig dig

She was able to turn the voice off by conscious effort and would then realize fifteen minutes later she had been listening to it again, as if to a Delphic oracle.

You've got to tell somebody what you've found.

Who? The police? Huh-uh. No way. Or -

Or who?

She was in her garden, madly weeding… a junkie in withdrawal.

–or anyone in authority, her mind finished.

Her right-brain supplied A

So far as she could tell, the Dallas police had done such a good job protecting John F. Ke

I'll tell Jim Gardener. When he gets back. Gard'll know what to do, how to handle it. He'll have some ideas, anyway.

A

He's not a loony. Just a little bit weird.

Yeah, arrested at the last Seabrook demonstration with a loaded. 45 in his back-pack. That's weird, all right.

A

She weeded. All that morning in the hot sun she weeded, the back of her T-shirt wet with sweat, last year's scarecrow wearing the hat she usually put on to keep the sun off.

After lunch she lay down to take a nap and couldn't sleep. Everything kept going through her mind, and that stranger's voice never shut up. Dig on it, Bobbi, it's okay, dig on it

Until at last she did get up, grabbed the crowbar, spade, and shovel, and set out for the woods. At the far end of her field she paused, forehead grooved in thought, and came back for her pickax. Peter was on the porch. He looked up briefly but made no move to come with Anderson.

Anderson was not really surprised.

So about twenty minutes later she stood above it, looking down the forested slope to the trench she had begun in the ground, freeing what she now believed was a very tiny section of an extraterrestrial spacecraft. Its gray hull was as solid as a wrench or a screwdriver, denying dreams and vapors and supposings; it was there. The dirt she had thrown to either side, moist and black and forest-secret, was now a dark brown-still damp from last night's rain.

Going down the slope, her foot crunched on something that sounded like newspaper. It wasn't newspaper; it was a dead sparrow. Twenty feet further down was a dead crow, feet pointed comically skyward like a dead bird in a cartoon. Anderson paused, looked around, and saw the bodies of three other birds-another crow, a bluejay, and a scarlet tanager. No marks. Just dead. And no flies around any of them.

She reached the trench and dropped her tools on the bank. The trench was muddy. She stepped in nevertheless, her workshoes squashing in the mud. She bent down and could see smooth gray metal going into the earth, a puddle standing on one side.

What are you?

She put her hand on it. That vibration sank into her skin and seemed for a moment to go all through her. Then it stopped.

Anderson turned and put her hand on her shovel, feeling its smooth wood, slightly warmed by the sun. She was vaguely aware that she could hear no forest noises, none at all… no birds singing, no animals crashing through the undergrowth and away from the smell of a human being. She was more sharply aware of the smells: peaty earth, pine needles, bark and sap.

A voice inside her-very deep inside, not coming from the right of her brain but perhaps from the very root of her mind-screamed in terror.

Something's happening, Bobbi, something is happening right NOW. Get out of here dead chuck dead birds Bobbi please please PLEASE

Her hand tightened on the shovel's handle and she saw it again as she had sketched it-the gray leading edge of something titanic in the earth.

Her period had started again, but that was all right; she had put a pad in the crotch of her panties even before she went out to weed the garden. A Maxi. And there were half a dozen more in her pack, weren't there? Or was it more like a dozen?