The Tommyknockers

It moved with slow, ponderous elegance through the burning day, cutting a swath along the top of the trees like a clipper trimming a hedge. Then it hovered, as if waiting for something.

Now the floor below Gardener was also transparent; he seemed to be sitting in thin air, looking down at the billowing reefs of smoke coming from the edge of the woods and filling the air.

The ship was fully alive now-but he was fading fast.

His hands crept up to the earphones.

Scotty, he thought, gimme warp-speed. We're blowing this disco.

He bore down hard inside his mind, and this time the pain was thick and fibrous and sickening.

Meltdown, he thought dimly, this is what meltdown feels like.

There was a sensation of tremendous speed. A hand knocked him sprawling to the deck, although there was no sensation of multi-g force; the Tommyknockers had apparently found a way to beat that.

The ship didn't tilt; it simply rose straight up into the air.

Instead of blotting out the whole sky, it blotted out only three-quarters, then half. It grew indistinct in the smoke, its hard-edged metal-alloy reality growing fuzzy, and thus dreamy.

Then it was gone in the smoke, leaving only the dazed, drained Tommyknockers to try and find their feet before the fire could overtake them. It left the Tommyknockers, and the clearing, the lean-to… and the trench, like a black socket from which some poisonous fang had been drawn.

Gard lay on the floor of the control room, staring upward. As he watched, the smoky, chromed look of the sky disappeared. It became blue again-the brightest, clearest blue he had ever seen.

Gorgeous, he tried to say, but no word came out-not even a croak. He swallowed blood and coughed, his eyes never leaving that brilliant sky.

Its blue deepened to indigo… then to purple.

Please don't let it stop now, please

Purple to black.

And now in that blackness he saw the first hard chips of stars.

The Klaxon blared again. He felt fresh pain as the ship drew from him, and there was a sensation of increasing speed as it slipped into a higher gear.

Where are we going? Gardener thought incoherently, and then the blackness overtook him as the ship fled up and out, escaping the envelope of the earth's atmosphere as easily as it had escaped the ground which had held it for so long. Where are we-?

Up and up, out and out-the ship rose and Jim Gardener, born in Portland, Maine, went with it.

He drifted down through black levels of unconsciousness, and shortly before the final vomiting began-a vomiting of which he was never even aware-he had a dream. A dream so real that he smiled as he lay in the middle of blackness, surrounded by space and with the earth below him like a giant blue-gray croaker marble.

He had gotten through it-somehow gotten through it. Patricia McCardle had tried to break him, but she had never quite been able to do it. Now he was back in Haven, and there was Bobbi coming down the porch steps and across the dooryard to meet him, and Peter was barking and wagging his tail, and Gard grabbed Bobbi and hugged her, because it was good to be with your friends, good to be where you belonged… good to have some safe haven to come to.

Lying on the transparent floor of the control room, already better than seventy thousand miles out in space, Jim Gardener lay in a widening pool of his own blood… and smiled.

EPILOGUE

Curl up, baby!

Curl up tight!

Curl up, baby!

Keep it all outta sight!

Under cover

Keep it all outta sight,

Under cover of the night.

O every night and every day

A little piece of you is falling away…

Toe your line and play their game

Let the anaesthetic cover it all

Till one day they call your name:

You're only waiting for the hammer to fall.

Most of them died in the fire.

Not all; a hundred or more never reached the clearing at all before the ship pulled itself out of the ground and disappeared into the sky. Some, like Elt Barker, who had gone flying off his motorcycle, did not reach it because they had been wounded or killed on the way… fortunes of war. Others, like Ashley Ruvall and old Miss Timms, who was the town librarian on Tuesdays and Thursdays, were simply too late or too slow.

Nor were all of those who did reach the clearing killed. The ship had gone into the sky and the awful, draining power which had seized them dwindled away to nothing before the fire reached the clearing (although by then sparks were drifting down and many of the smaller trees at the eastern edge were blazing). Some of them managed to stumble and limp further into the woods ahead of that spreading, fiery fan. Of course, going straight west was no good to these few (Rosalie Skehan was among them, as were Frank Spruce and Rudy Barfield, brother of the late and mostly unlamented Pits), because eventually they would run out of breathable air, in spite of the prevailing winds. So it was necessary to first go west, and then turn either south or north in an effort to buttonhook around the fire-front… a desperation play where the penalty for failure was not losing the ball but being roasted to cinders in Big Injun Woods. A few-not all, but a few-actually did make it.

Most, however, died in the clearing where Bobbi Anderson and Jim Gardener had worked so long and hard-died within feet of that empty socket where something had been buried and then pulled.

They had been used roughly by a power which was much greater than the early, tentative state of their “becoming” could cope with. The ship had reached out to the net of their minds, seized it, and used it to obey the Controller's weak but unmistakable command, which had been expressed as WARP SPEED to the ship's organic-cybernetic circuits. The words WARP SPEED were not in the ship's vocabulary, but the concept was clear.

The living lay on the ground, most unconscious, some deeply dazed. A few sat up, holding their heads and moaning, oblivious of the sparks drifting down around them. Some, mindful of the danger coming from the east, tried to get up and fell back.

One of those who did not fall back was Chip McCausland, who lived on Dugout Road with his common-law wife and about ten kids; two months and a million years ago, Bobbi Anderson had gone to Chip for more egg cartons to hold her expanding collection of batteries. Chip shambled halfway across the clearing like an old drunk and fell into the empty trench. He tumbled, shrieking, all the way to the bottom, where he died of a broken neck and a shattered skull.

Others who understood the danger of the fire and who could possibly have gotten away elected not to do so. The “becoming” was at an end. It had ended with the departure of the ship. The purpose of their lives had been canceled. So they only sat and waited for the fire to take care of what remained of them.

By nightfall, there were less than two hundred people left alive in Haven. Most of the township's heavily wooded western half had burned or was burning flat. The wind grew stronger yet. The air began to change, and the remaining Tommyknockers, gasping and whey-faced, gathered in Hazel McCready's yard. Phil Golden and Bryant Brown got the big air-exchanger going. The survivors gathered around it as homesteaders might once have gathered around a stove on a bitter night. Their tortured breathing gradually ceased.