The Tommyknockers (88 page)

“Cuts?”

“Nothing that isn't scabbed over.” He held his hands out like a little boy submitting to his mother's predinner 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 noseplugs. 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 than Gardener, but she wasn't getting anything either. Gard gestured for her 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 called a tunnel. Gard 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 semicircular 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 a foot 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 semitransparent 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.