They came. The Tommyknockers came. They came along the widening wings of that fiery lady's fan, and Dick Allison began to feel a kind of furious desperation, because they weren't going to catch him. Gardener had been able to use the path; that had made all the difference. Three minutes later-maybe even one-and Gardener really would have been cooked. Four of the Tommyknockers (Mrs Eileen Crenshaw and the Reverend Goohringer among them) tried to follow him that way and were burned alive. Two of the gigantic, flaming corn plants toppled onto the Crenshaw woman, who shrieked and let go of the dune-buggy's steering bar. The dune-buggy promptly drove itself into the depths of the flaming garden. Its tires exploded like bombs. Bare seconds later, fire choked the whole path.

Dick's frustration went deeper than the bone. The “becoming” had been thwarted and choked off before-not often, but it had happened-but always as the result of some natural intervention… as a whole generation of mosquito larvae breeding in a quiet, stagnant pond may be killed by a stroke of lightning from a summer storm. But this was no thunderstorm, no natural happening; this was one man, a man they had all regarded with the kind of wary contempt reserved for a stupid dog which may bite; this was one man who had spent most of his time with Bobbi in a drunken stupor, one man who had somehow tricked Bobbi and killed her and who refused to die no matter what they did.

We will not be stopped by one man, Dick thought frenziedly. We Will NOT! But was there any real way to stop just that from happening? The fire-front was now spreading too fast for them to catch him. Gardener had managed to shoot down the center of an alley of fire, but he would be the only one. Hank Buck had had a shot… but somehow the fucking son of a bitch had managed to shoot Hank dead.

Dick was in a perfect ecstasy of fury (Newt sensed it and kept his distance-Dick was twenty pounds heavier and ten years younger), but at the center of his rage was terror, like a cold curdle of rancid cream in the middle of a poisoned chocolate.

The Tommyknockers, Bobbi had told Gardener, were great sky travelers. This was true. But never, anywhere, had they met anyone quite like this one man, who kept going, even with his shattered ankle, his great loss of blood, and his ingestion of a drug that should have rendered him unconscious fifteen minutes ago, in spite of the great lot he had vomited up.

Impossible-but happening.

Somehow the fire that was supposed to keep Gardener from the ship had become Gardener's shield.

Now there were only the automated monitors-the gadgets.

“They'll get him,” Dick whispered. He and Newt were standing on a knoll to the right of the house like a pair of generals, watching people stream into the woods… but doing so on a pair of infuriatingly oblique angles. Dick's hands opened; snapped closed; opened; closed. Green blood beat in his neck. “They'll get him, they'll stop him, he's not going to get to the ship, he's not, he's not.”

Newt Berringer kept prudently silent.

The smoke-detector, very like a flying saucer itself, whickered silently through the woods with the red sensor light on its underside pulsing erratically. Hazel McCready was controlling this baby herself. She had caught Dick Allison's wave of anger, despair, and fear, and had determined to take care of Gardener herself-by remote control, as it were. First she had put Pauline Goudge, whom she felt most trustworthy, to work on one other matter, and then Hazel had gone down to her office, closed the door, and locked it.

From the bottom drawer of her filing cabinet she brought out a ghetto-blaster a little smaller than the late Hank Buck's disposal unit. She put it on her desk, turned it on, took an earphone from the Out basket of her desk-minder, and put the plug in her ear.

Now she sat with her eyes closed, but she could see trees rush past on either side of the smoke-detector as it whizzed through the woods about six feet above the ground. Gardener would have been forcibly reminded of the sequence in The Return of the Jedi, when the good guys chase the bad guys through a seemingly endless forest at brain-numbing speeds on what appear to be air motorcycles.

Hazel, however, had no time for metaphors-nor ever would, if they got out of this; Tommyknockers weren't much into metaphors, either.

Part of her-the smoke-detector part on the machine side of the cyborg interface she'd made-wanted to fulfill its original function and buzz, because the woods were full of smoke. It was similar to the feeling one has when a sneeze impends like a rainshower.

The smoke-detector banked easily from side to side, slaloming around trees, popping up over knolls and then zooming back down them like the world's smallest crop-duster.

Hazel sat bent forward at her desk, earplug pushed firmly into her ear, concentrating fiercely. She was pushing the little smoke-detector through the woods faster than was safe, but it had been at the Haven-Newport border, fully five miles from the ship. She had to get to Gardener, and time was short.

The smoke-detector flipped onto its side and missed a small pine tree by inches. A close call, that. But… there he was, and there was the ship, throwing back its echoes of light, tattooing its dancing sun-dapples on the trees.

The smoke-detector hovered motionless above the thick mat of fallen needles on the floor of the forest for a moment… and then it arrowed directly at Gardener. Hazel prepared to turn on the ultra-sound attachment that would turn Gardener's bones to smashed fragments in his body.

Hey, Gard! On your left!

The voice was unbelievable. It was also unmistakable. It was Bobbi Anderson's voice. The old, unimproved Bobbi. Gardener had no time to think about that. He looked left and saw something slashing out of the woods at him. It was tan. There was a red light flashing on its underside. That was all he had time to see.

He brought the Sonic Space Blaster up, wondering how he could ever in the world hope to hit that thing, and at the same moment a wild thin shriek, like every mosquito in the world whining in perfect harmony, filled his ears… his head… his body. Yes, it was inside him; everything inside him was beginning to vibrate.

Then it felt as if hands seized his wrist-first seized it, then turned it. He fired. Green fire shot across the daylight. The smoke-detector exploded. Several jagged chunks of plastic flew near Gardener's head, barely missing him.

Hazel screamed and bolted upright in her old swivel chair. A tremendous backflow of energy surged through the earplug. She clawed at it-and missed. The plug was in her left ear. From her right one came a sudden squirt of greenish, soupy liquid. It looked like radioactive oatmeal. For a moment her brains continued to hose out of her head through her ear, and then the pressure became too great. The right side of her skull pushed open like a strange flower and her brains hit her Currier amp; Ives wall calendar with a liquid smack.

Hazel fell forward limply onto her desk, her hands outstretched, her glazing eyes staring unbelievingly at nothing.

The ghetto-blaster radio buzzed for a while and then stopped.

Bobbi? Gardener thought, looking around wildly.

Fuck you, old hoss, an amused voice returned. That's all the help you get-after all, I'm dead, remember?