Nightmares And Dreamscapes Part 32

'Who's that?' Mary asked Sissy.

'Some oldtime disc jockey who used to run a lot of these shows. His name is Alan Tweed or Alan Breed or something like that. We hardly ever see him except here. I think he drinks. He sleeps all day - that I do know.'

And as soon as the name was out of the girl's mouth, the coc.o.o.n which had sheltered Mary disappeared and the last of her disbelief melted away. She and Clark had stumbled into Rock and Roll Heaven, but it was actually Rock and Roll h.e.l.l. This had not happened because they were evil people; it had not happened because the old G.o.ds were punis.h.i.+ng them; it had happened because they had gotten lost in the woods, that was all, and getting lost in the woods was a thing that could happen to anybody.

'Got a great show for ya tonight!' the emcee was shouting enthusiastically into his mike. 'We got the Big Bopper . . . Freddie Mercury, just in from London-Town . . . Jim Croce . . . my main man Johnny Ace . . . '

Mary leaned toward the girl. 'How long have you been here, Sissy?'

'I don't know. It's easy to lose track of time. Six years at least. Or maybe it's eight. Or nine.'

' . . . Keith Moon of The Who . . . Brian Jones of the Stones . . . that cute li'l Florence Bollard of the Supremes . . . Mary Wells . . . '

Articulating her worst fear, Mary asked: 'How old were you when you came?'

'Ca.s.s Elliot . . . Janis Joplin . . . '

'Twenty-three.'

'King Curtis . . . Johnny b.u.mette . . . '

'And how old are you now?'

'Slim Harpo . . . Bob 'Bear' Hite . . . Stevie Ray Vaughan . . . '

'Twenty-three,' Sissy told her, and on stage Alan Freed went on screaming names at the almost empty town common as the stars came out, first a hundred stars, then a thousand, then too many to count, stars that had come out of the blue and now glittered everywhere in the black; he tolled the names of the drug OD's, the alcohol OD's, the plane crash victims and the shooting victims, the ones who had been found in alleys and the ones who had been found in swimming pools and the ones who had been found in roadside ditches with steering columns poking out of their chests and most of their heads torn off their shoulders; he chanted the names of the young ones and the old ones, but mostly they were the young ones, and as he spoke the names of Ronnie Van Zant and Steve Gaines, she heard the words of one of their songs tolling in her mind, the one that went Oooh, that smell, can't you smell that smell, and yes, you bet, she certainly could smell that smell; even out here, in the clear Oregon air, she could smell it, and when she took Clark's hand it was like taking the hand of a corpse.

'Awwwwwwlllll RIIIIIYYYYYGHT!' Alan Freed was screaming. Behind him, in the darkness, scores of shadows were trooping onto the stage, lit upon their way by roadies with Penlites. 'Are you ready to PAAAARTY?'

No answer from the scattered spectators on the common, but Freed was waving his hands and laughing as if some vast audience were going crazy with a.s.sent. There was just enough light left in the sky for Mary to see the old man reach up and turn off his hearing aid.

'Are you ready to BOOOOOGIE?'

This time he was answered - by a demonic shriek of saxophones from the shadows behind him.

'Then let's go . . . BECAUSE ROCK AND ROLL WILL NEVER DIE!'

As the show-lights came up and the band swung into the first song of that night's long, long concert - 'I'll Be Doggone,' with Marvin Gaye doing the vocal - Mary thought: That's what I'm afraid of. That's exactly what I'm afraid of.

Home Delivery.

Considering that it was probably the end of the world, Maddie Pace thought she was doing a good job. h.e.l.l of a good job. She thought, in fact, that she just might be coping with the End of Everything better than anyone else on earth. And she was positive she was coping better than any other pregnant woman on earth.

Coping.

Maddie Pace, of all people.

Maddie Pace, who sometimes couldn't sleep if, after a visit from Reverend Johnson, she spied a single speck of dust under the dining-room table. Maddie Pace, who, as Maddie Sullivan, used to drive her fiance, Jack, crazy when she froze over a menu, debating entrees sometimes for as long as half an hour.

'Maddie, why don't you just flip a coin?' he'd asked her once after she had managed to narrow it down to a choice between the braised veal and the lamb chops, and then could get no further. 'I've had five bottles of this G.o.ddam German beer already, and if you don't make up y'mind pretty d.a.m.n quick, there's gonna be a drunk lobsterman under the table before we ever get any food on it!'

So she had smiled nervously, ordered the braised veal, and spent most of the ride home wondering if the chops might not have been tastier, and therefore a better bargain despite their slightly higher price.

She'd had no trouble coping with Jack's proposal of marriage, however; she'd accepted it - and him - quickly, and with tremendous relief. Following the death of her father, Maddie and her mother had lived an aimless, cloudy sort of life on Little Tall Island, off the coast of Maine. 'If I wasn't around to tell them women where to squat and lean against the wheel,' George Sullivan had been fond of saying while in his cups and among his friends at Fudgy's Tavern or in the back room of Prout's Barber Shop, 'I don't know what'n h.e.l.l they'd do.'

When her father died of a ma.s.sive coronary, Maddie was nineteen and minding the town library weekday evenings at a salary of $41.50 a week. Her mother minded the house - or did, that was, when George reminded her (sometimes with a good hard shot to the ear) that she had a house which needed minding.

When the news of his death came, the two women had looked at each other with silent, panicky dismay, two pairs of eyes asking the same question: What do we do now?

Neither of them knew, but they both felt - felt strongly - that he had been right ir, his a.s.sessment of them: they needed him. They were just women, and they needed him to tell them not just what to do, but how to do it, as well. They didn't speak of it because it embarra.s.sed them, but there it was - they hadn't the slightest clue as to what came next, and the idea that they were prisoners of George Sullivan's narrow ideas and expectations did not so much as cross their minds. They were not stupid women, either of them, but they were island women.

Money wasn't the problem; George had believed pa.s.sionately in insurance, and when he dropped down dead during the tiebreaker frame of the League Bowl-Offs at Big Duke's Big Ten in Machias, his wife had come into better than a hundred thousand dollars. And island life was cheap, if you owned your place and kept your garden tended and knew how to put by your own vegetables come fall. The problem was having nothing to focus on. The problem was how the center seemed to have dropped out of their lives when George went facedown in his Island Amoco bowling s.h.i.+rt just over the foul line of lane nineteen (and G.o.ddam if he hadn't picked up the spare his team had needed to win, too). With George gone their lives had become an eerie sort of blur.

It's like being lost in a heavy fog, Maddie thought sometimes. Only instead of looking for the road, or a house, or the village, or just some landmark like that lightning-struck pine out on the point, I am looking for the wheel. If I can ever find it, maybe I can tell myself to squat and lean my shoulder to it.

At last she found her wheel: it turned out to be Jack Pace.

Women marry their fathers and men their mothers, some say, and while such a broad statement can hardly be true all of the time, it was close enough for government work in Maddie's case. Her father had been looked upon by his peers with fear and admiration - 'Don't fool with George Sullivan, dear,' they'd say. 'He'll knock the nose off your face if you so much as look at him wrong.'

It was true at home, too. He'd been domineering and sometimes physically abusive, but he'd also known things to want and work for, like the Ford pick-up, the chainsaw, or those two acres that bounded their place to the south. Pop Cook's land. George Sullivan had been known to refer to Pop Cook as one armpit-stinky old bastid, but the old man's aroma didn't change the fact that there was quite a lot of good hardwood left on those two acres. Pop didn't know it because he had gone to living across the reach in 1987, when his arthritis really went to town on him, and George let it be known on Little Tall that what that bastid Pop Cook didn't know wouldn't hurt him none, and furthermore, he would disjoint the man or woman that let light into the darkness of Pop's ignorance. No one did, and eventually the Sullivans got the land, and the hardwood on it. Of course the good wood was all logged off inside of three years, but George said that didn't matter a tinker's d.a.m.n; land always paid for itself in the end. That was what George said and they believed him, believed in him, and they worked, all three of them. He said: You got to put your shoulder to this wheel and push the b.i.t.c.h, you got to push ha'ad because she don't move easy. So that was what they did.

In those days Maddie's mother had kept a produce stand on the road from East Head, and there were always plenty of tourists who bought the vegetables she grew (which were the ones George told her to grow, of course), and even though they were never exactly what her mother called 'the Gotrocks family,' they made out. Even in years when lobstering was bad and they had to stretch their finances even further in order to keep paying off what they owed the bank on Pop Cook's two acres, they made out.

Jack Pace was a sweeter-tempered man than George Sullivan had ever thought of being, but his sweet temper only stretched so far, even so. Maddie suspected that he might get around to what was sometimes called home correction - the twisted arm when supper was cold, the occasional slap or downright paddling - in time; when the bloom was off the rose, so as to speak. There was even a part of her that seemed to expect and look forward to that.

The women's magazines said marriages where the man ruled the roost were a thing of the past, and that a man who put a hard hand on a woman should be arrested for a.s.sault, even if the man in question was the woman in question's lawful wedded husband. Maddie sometimes read articles of this sort down at the beauty shop, but doubted if the women who wrote them had the slightest idea that places like the outer islands even existed. Little Tall had produced one writer, as a matter of fact - Selena St. George - but she wrote mostly about politics and hadn't been back to the island, except for a single Thanksgiving dinner, in years.

'I'm not going to be a lobsterman all my life, Maddie,' Jack told her the week before they were married, and she believed him. A year before, when he had asked her out for the first time (she'd said yes almost before all the words could get out of his mouth, and she had blushed to the roots of her hair at the sound of her own naked eagerness), he would have said, 'I ain't going to be a lobsterman all my life.' A small change . . . but all the difference in the world. He had been going to night school three evenings a week, taking the old Island Princess over and back. He would be dog-tired after a day of pulling pots, but off he'd go just the same, pausing only long enough to shower off the powerful smells of lobster and brine and to gulp two No Doz with hot coffee. After a while, when she saw he really meant to stick to it, Maddie began putting up hot soup for him to drink on the ferry-ride over. Otherwise he would have had nothing but one of those nasty red hot-dogs they sold in the Princess's snack-bar.

She remembered agonizing over the canned soups in the store - there were so many! Would he want tomato? Some people didn't like tomato soup. In fact, some people hated tomato soup, even if you made it with milk instead of water. Vegetable soup? Turkey? Cream of chicken? Her helpless eyes roved the shelf display for nearly ten minutes before Charlene Nedeau asked if she could help her with something - only Charlene said it in a sarcastic way, and Maddie guessed she would tell all her friends at high school tomorrow, and they would giggle about it in the girls' room, knowing exactly what was wrong with her - poor mousy little Maddie Sullivan, unable to make up her mind over so simple a thing as a can of soup. How she had ever been able to decide to accept Jack Pace's proposal was a wonder and a marvel to all of them . . . but of course they didn't know about the wheel you had to find, and about how, once you found it, you had to have someone to tell you when to stoop and where exactly to push the d.a.m.ned thing.

Maddie had left the store with no soup and a throbbing headache.

When she worked up nerve enough to ask Jack what his favorite soup was, he had said: 'Chicken noodle. Kind that comes in the can.'

Were there any others he specially liked?

The answer was no, just chicken noodle - the kind that came in the can. That was all the soup Jack Pace needed in his life, and all the answer (on that particular subject, at least) that Maddie needed in hers. Light of step and cheerful of heart, Maddie climbed the warped wooden steps of the store the next day and bought the four cans of chicken noodle soup that were on the shelf. When she asked Bob Nedeau if he had any more, he said he had a whole d.a.m.n case of the stuff out back.

She bought the entire case and left him so flabbergasted that he actually carried the carton out to the truck for her and forgot all about asking why she wanted so much - a lapse for which his long-nosed wife and daughter took him sharply to task that evening.

'You just better believe it and never forget,' Jack had said that time not long before they tied the knot (she had believed it, and had never forgotten). 'More than a lobsterman. My dad says I'm full of s.h.i.+t. He says if draggin pots was good enough for his old man, and his old man's old man and all the way back to the friggin Garden of Eden to hear him tell it, it ought to be good enough for me. But it ain't - isn't, I mean - and I'm going to do better.' His eye fell on her, and it was a stern eye, full of resolve, but it was a loving eye, full of hope and confidence, too. ' 'More than a lobsterman is what I mean to be, and more than a lobster-man's wife is what I intend for you to be. You're going to have a house on the mainland.'

'Yes, Jack.'

'And I'm not going to have any friggin Chevrolet.' He drew in a deep breath and took her hands in his. 'I'm going to have an Oldsmobile.'

He looked her dead in the eye, as if daring her to scoff at this wildly upscale ambition. She did no such thing, of course; she said yes, Jack, for the third or fourth time that evening. She had said it to him thousands of times over the year they had spent courting, and she confidently expected to say it a million times before death ended their marriage by taking one of them - or, better, both of them together. Yes, Jack; had there ever in the history of the world been two words, which made such beautiful music when laid side by side?

'More than a friggin lobsterman, no matter what my old man thinks or how much he laughs.' He p.r.o.nounced this last word in the deeply downeast way: loffs. 'I'm going to do it, and do you know who's going to help me?'

'Yes,' Maddie had responded calmly. 'I am.'

He had laughed and swept her into his arms. 'You're d.a.m.ned tooting, my little sweetheart,' he'd told her.

And so they were wed, as the fairytales usually put it, and for Maddie those first few months - months when they were greeted almost everywhere with jovial cries of 'Here's the newly-weds!' - were a fairytale. She had Jack to lean on, Jack to help her make decisions, and that was the best of it. The most difficult household choice thrust upon her that first year was which curtains would look best in the living room - there were so many in the catalogue to choose from, and her mother was certainly no help. Maddie's mother had a hard time deciding between different brands of toilet paper.

Otherwise, that year consisted mostly of joy and security - the joy of loving Jack in their deep bed while the winter wind sc.r.a.ped over the island like the blade of a knife across a breadboard, the security of having Jack to tell her what it was they wanted, and how they were going to get it. The loving was good - so good that sometimes when she thought of him during the days her knees would feel weak and her stomach fluttery - but his way of knowing things and her growing trust in his instincts were even better. So for a while it was a fairytale, yes.

Then Jack died and things started getting weird. Not just for Maddie, either.

For everybody.

Just before the world slid into its incomprehensible nightmare, Maddie discovered she was what her mother had always called 'preg,' a curt word that was like the sound you made when you had to rasp up a throatful of snot (that, at least, was how it had always sounded to Maddie). By then she and Jack had moved next to the Pulsifers on Gennesault Island, which was known simply as Jenny by its residents and those of nearby Little Tall.

She'd had one of her agonizing interior debates when she missed her second period, and after four sleepless nights she made an appointment with Dr. McElwain on the mainland. Looking back, she was glad. If she'd waited to see if she was going to miss a third period, Jack would not have had even one month of joy and she would have missed the concerns and little kindnesses he had showered upon her.

Looking back - now that she was coping - her indecision seemed ludicrous, but her deeper heart knew that going to have the test had taken tremendous courage. She had wanted to be more convincingly sick in the mornings so she could be surer; she had longed for nausea to drag her from her dreams. She made the appointment when Jack was out at work, and she went while he was out, but there was no such thing as sneaking over to the mainland on the ferry; too many people from both islands saw you. Someone would mention casually to Jack that he or she had seen his wife on the Princess t'other day, and then Jack would want to know what it was all about, and if she'd made a mistake, he would look at her like she was a goose.

But it hadn't been a mistake; she was with child (and never mind that word that sounded like someone with a bad cold trying to clear his throat), and Jack Pace had had exactly twenty-seven days to look forward to his first child before a bad swell had caught him and knocked him over the side of My Lady-Love, the lobster boat he had inherited from his Uncle Mike. Jack could swim, and he had popped to the surface like a cork, Dave Eamons had told her miserably, but just as he did, another heavy swell came, slewing the boat directly into him, and although Dave would say no more, Maddie had been born and brought up an island girl, and she knew: could, in fact, hear the hollow thud as the boat with its treacherous name smashed its way into her husband's head, letting out blood and hair and bone and perhaps the part of his brain that had made him say her name over and over again in the dark of night, when he came into her.

Dressed in a heavy hooded parka and down-filled pants and boots, Jack Pace had sunk like a stone. They had buried an empty casket in the little cemetery at the north end of Jenny Island, and the Reverend Johnson (on Jenny and Little Tall you had your choice when it came to religion: you could be a Methodist, or if that didn't suit you, you could be a lapsed Methodist) had presided over this empty coffin as he had so many others. The service ended, and at the age of twenty-two Maddie had found herself a widow with a bun in the oven and no one to tell her where the wheel was, let alone when to put her shoulder to it or how far to push it.

She thought at first she'd go back to Little Tall, back to her mother, to wait her time, but a year with Jack had given her a little perspective and she knew her mother was as lost - maybe even more lost - than she was herself, and that made her wonder if going back would be the right thing to do.

'Maddie,' Jack told her again and again (he was dead in the world but not, it seemed, inside her head; inside her head he was as lively as any dead man could possibly get . . . or so she had thought then), 'the only thing you can ever decide on is not to decide.'

Nor was her mother any better. They talked on the phone and Maddie waited and hoped for her mother to just tell her to come back home, but Mrs. Sullivan could tell no one over the age of ten anything. 'Maybe you ought to come on back over here,' she had said once in a tentative way, and Maddie couldn't tell if that meant please come home or please don't take me up on an offer which was really just made for form's sake. She spent long, sleepless nights trying to decide which it had been and succeeded only in confusing herself more.

Then the weirdness started, and the greatest mercy was that there was only the one small graveyard on Jenny (and so many of the graves filled with those empty coffins - a thing which had once seemed pitiful to her now seemed another blessing, a grace). There were two on Little Tall, both fairly large, and so it began to seem so much safer to stay on Jenny and wait.

She would wait and see if the world lived or died.

If it lived, she would wait for the baby.

And now she was, after a life of pa.s.sive obedience and vague resolves that usually pa.s.sed like dreams an hour or two after she got out of bed, finally coping. She knew that part of this was nothing more than the effect of being slammed with one ma.s.sive shock after another, beginning with the death of her husband and ending with one of the last broadcasts the Pulsifers' high-tech satellite dish had picked up: a horrified young boy who had been pressed into service as a CNN reporter saying that it seemed certain that the President of the United States, the first lady, the Secretary of State, the honorable senior senator from Oregon, and the emir of Kuwait had been eaten alive in the White House East Room by zombies.

'I want to repeat this,' the accidental reporter had said, the firespots of his acne standing out on his forehead and chin like stigmata. His mouth and cheeks had begun to twitch; his hands shook spastically. 'I want to repeat that a bunch of corpses have just lunched up on the President and his wife and a whole lot of other political hotshots who were at the White House to eat poached salmon and cherries jubilee.' Then the kid had begun to laugh maniacally am} to scream Go, Yale! Boola-boola! at the top of his voice. At last he bolted out of the frame, leaving a CNN news-desk untenanted for the first time in Maddie's memory. She and the Pulsifers sat in dismayed silence as the news-desk disappeared and an ad for Boxcar Willie records - not available in any store, you could get this amazing collection only by dialing the 800 number currently appearing on the bottom of your screen - came on. One of little Cheyne Pulsifer's crayons was on the end table beside the chair Maddie was sitting in, and for some crazy reason she picked it up and wrote the number down on a sheet of sc.r.a.p paper before Mr. Pulsifer got up and turned off the TV without a single word.

Maddie told them good night and thanked them for sharing their TV and their Jiffy Pop.

'Are you sure you're all right, Maddie dear?' Candi Pulsifer asked her for the fifth time that night, and Maddie said she was fine for the fifth time that night, that she was coping, and Candi said she knew she was, but she was welcome to the upstairs bedroom that used to be Brian's anytime she wanted. Maddie hugged Candi, kissed her cheek, declined with the most graceful thanks she could find, and was at last allowed to escape. She had walked the windy half mile back to her own house and was in her own kitchen before she realized that she still had the sc.r.a.p of paper on which she had jotted the 800 number. She had dialed it, and there was nothing. No recorded voice telling her all circuits were currently busy or that the number was out of service; no wailing siren sound that indicated a line interruption; no boops or beeps or clicks or clacks. Just smooth silence. That was when Maddie knew for sure that the end had either come or was coming. When you could no longer call the 800 number and order the Boxcar Willie records that were not available in any store, when there were for the first time in her living memory no Operators Standing By, the end of the world was a foregone conclusion.

She felt her rounding stomach as she stood there by the phone on the wall in the kitchen and said it out loud for the first time, unaware that she had spoken: 'It will have to be a home delivery. But that's all right, as long as you get ready and stay ready, kiddo. You have to remember that there just isn't any other way. It has to be a home delivery.'

She waited for fear and none came.

'I can cope with this just fine,' she said, and this time she heard herself and was comforted by the sureness of her own words.

A baby.

When the baby came, the end of the world would itself end.

'Eden,' she said, and smiled. Her smile was sweet, the smile of a madonna. It didn't matter how many rotting dead people (maybe Boxcar Willie among them, for all she knew) were shambling around the face of the earth.

She would have a baby, she would accomplish her home delivery, and the possibility of Eden would remain.

The first reports came from an Australian hamlet on the edge of the outback, a place with the memorable name of Fiddle Dee. The name of the first American town where the walking dead were reported was perhaps even more memorable: Thumper, Florida. The first story appeared in America's favorite supermarket tabloid, Inside View.

DEAD COME TO LIFE IN SMALL FLORIDA TOWN! the headline screamed. The story began with a recap of a film called Night of the Living Dead, which Maddie had never seen, and went on to mention another - Mac.u.mba Love - which she had also never seen. The article was accompanied by three photos. One was a still from Night of the Living Dead, showing what appeared to be a bunch of escapees from a loonybin standing outside an isolated farmhouse at night. One was from Mac.u.mba Love, showing a blonde whose bikini top appeared to be holding b.r.e.a.s.t.s the size of prize-winning gourds. The blonde was holding up her hands and screaming in horror at what could have been a black man in a mask. The third purported to be a picture taken in Thumper, Florida. It was a blurred, grainy shot of a person of indeterminate s.e.x standing in front of a video arcade. The article described the figure as being 'wrapped in the cerements of the grave,' but it could have been someone in a dirty sheet.

No big deal. BIGFOOT RAPES CHOIR BOY last week, dead people coming back to life this week, the dwarf ma.s.s murderer next week.

No big deal, at least, until they started to come out in other places, as well. No big deal until the first news film ('You may want to ask your children to leave the room,' Tom Brokaw introduced gravely) showed up on network TV, decayed monsters with naked bone showing through their dried skin, traffic accident victims, the morticians' concealing make-up sloughed away so that the ripped faces and bashed-in skulls showed, women with their hair teased into dirt-clogged beehives where worms and beetles still squirmed and crawled, their faces alternately vacuous and informed with a kind of calculating, idiotic intelligence. No big deal until the first horrible stills in an issue of People magazine that had been sealed in shrink-wrap and sold with an orange sticker that read NOT FOR SALE TO MINORS!

Then it was a big deal.

When you saw a decaying man still dressed in the mud-streaked remnants of the Brooks Brothers suit in which he had been buried tearing at the throat of a screaming woman in a tee-s.h.i.+rt that read PROPERTY OF THE HOUSTON OILERS, you suddenly realized it might be a very big deal indeed.

That was when the accusations and saber rattling had started, and for three weeks the entire world had been diverted from the creatures escaping their graves like grotesque moths escaping diseased coc.o.o.ns by the spectacle of the two great nuclear powers on what appeared to be an indivertible collision course.

There were no zombies in the United States, Communist Chinese television commentators declared; this was a self-serving lie to camouflage an unforgivable act of chemical warfare against the People's Republic of China, a more horrible (and deliberate) version of what had happened in Bhopal, India. Reprisals would follow if the dead comrades coming out of their graves did not fall down decently dead within ten days. All US diplomatic people were expelled from the mother country and there were several incidents of American tourists being beaten to death.

The President (who would not long after become a Zombie Blue Plate Special himself) responded by becoming a pot (which he had come to resemble, having put on at least fifty pounds since his second-term election) calling a kettle black. The US government, he told the American people, had incontrovertible evidence that the only walking-dead people in China had been set loose deliberately, and while the Head Panda might stand there with his slanty-eyed face hanging out, claiming there were over eight thousand lively corpses striding around in search of the ultimate collectivism, we had definite proof that there were less than forty. It was the Chinese who had committed an act - a heinous act - of chemical warfare, bringing loyal Americans back to life with no urge to consume anything but other loyal Americans, and if these Americans - some of whom had been good Democrats - did not lie down decently dead within the next five days, Red China was going to be one large slag pit.

NORAD was at DEFCON-2 when a British astronomer named Humphrey Dagbolt spotted the satellite. Or the s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p. Or the creature. Or whatever in h.e.l.l's name it was. Dagbolt was not even a professional astronomer but only an amateur star-gazer from the west of England - no one in particular, you would have said - and yet he almost certainly saved the world from some sort of thermonuclear exchange, if not flat-out atomic war. All in all not a bad week's work for a man with a deviated septum and a bad case of psoriasis.

At first it seemed that the two nose-to-nose political systems did not want to believe in what Dagbolt had found, even after the Royal Observatory in London had p.r.o.nounced his photographs and data authentic. Finally, however, the missile silos closed and telescopes all over the world homed in, almost grudgingly, on Star Wormwood.

The joint American/Chinese s.p.a.ce mission to investigate the unwelcome newcomer lifted off from the Lanzhou Heights less than three weeks after the first photographs had appeared in the Guardian, and everyone's favorite amateur astronomer was aboard, deviated septum and all. In truth, it would have been hard to have kept Dagbolt off the mission - he had become a worldwide hero, the most renowned Briton since Winston Churchill. When asked by a reporter on the day before lift-off if he was frightened, Dagbolt had brayed his oddly endearing Robert Morley laugh, rubbed the side of his truly enormous nose, and exclaimed, 'Petrified, dear boy! Utterly pet-trifled!'

As it turned out, he had every reason to be petrified.

They all did.

The final sixty-one seconds of received transmission from the Xiaoping/Truman were considered too horrible for release by all three governments involved, and so no formal communique was ever issued. It didn't matter, of course; nearly twenty thousand ham operators had been monitoring the craft, and it seemed that at least nineteen thousand of them had been rolling tape when the craft had been - well, was there really any other word for it? - invaded.

Chinese voice: Worms! It appears to be a ma.s.sive ball of - American voice: Christ! Look out! It's coming for us!

Dagbolt: Some sort of extrusion is occurring. The portside window is - Chinese voice: Breach! Breach! To your suits, my friends!

(Indecipherable gabble.) American voice: - and appears to be eating its way in - Female Chinese voice (Ching-Ling Soong): Oh stop it stop the eyes - (Sound of an explosion.) Dagbolt: Explosive decompression has occurred. I see three - er, four - dead, and there are worms . . . everywhere there are worms - American voice: Faceplate! Faceplate! Faceplate!

(Screaming.) Chinese voice: Where is my mamma? Oh dear, where is my mamma?