The Tommyknockers

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Book: Read The Tommyknockers for Free Online
Authors: Stephen King
fan letters (she could no more throw out an unanswered fan letter than a dead battery), and recipes jotted on file-cards. At the very bottom of the drawer was a litter of small tools, and among them she found what she was looking for—a compass with a yellow stub of pencil sleeved into the armature.
    Sitting in the rocker again, Anderson turned to a fresh sheet and drew the leading edge of the thing in the earth for the third time. She tried to keep it in scale, but drew it a little bigger this time, not bothering with the surrounding trees and only suggesting the trench for the sake of perspective.
    â€œOkay, guesswork,” she said, and dug the point of the compass into the yellow legal pad below the curved edge. She adjusted the compass’s arc so it traced that edge fairly accurately—and then she swept the compass around in a complete circle. She looked at it, then wiped her mouth with the heel of her hand. Her lips suddenly felt too loose and too wet.
    â€œBoolsheet,” she whispered.
    But it wasn’t boolsheet. Unless her estimate of the edge’s curvature and of midpoint were both wildly off the beam, she had unearthed the edge of an object which was at least three hundred yards in circumference.
    Anderson dropped the compass and the pad on the floor and looked out the window. Her heart was beating too hard.
5
    As the sun went down, Anderson sat on her back porch staring across her garden toward the woods, and listened to the voices in her head.
    In her junior year at college she had taken a Psychology Department seminar on creativity. She had been amazed—and a little relieved—to discover that she was not concealing some private neurosis; almost all imaginative people heard voices. Not just thoughts but actual voices inside their heads, different personae, each as clearly defined as voices on an old-time radio show. They came from the right side of the brain, the teacher explained—the side which is most commonly associated with visions and telepathy and that striking human ability to create images by drawing comparisons and making metaphors.
    There are no such things as flying saucers.
    Oh yeah? Who says so?
    The Air Force, for one. They closed the books on flying saucers twenty years ago. They were able to explain all but three percent of all verified sightings, and they said those last three were almost certainly caused by ephemeral atmospheric conditions—stuff like sun-dogs, clear-air turbulence, pockets of clear-air electricity. Hell, the Lubbock Lights were front-page news, and all they turned out to be was . . . well, there were these traveling packs of moths, see? And the Lubbock streetlights hit their wings and reflected big light-colored moving shapes onto thelow cloud masses that a stagnant weather pattern kept over the town for a week. Most of the country spent that week thinking someone dressed like Michael Rennie in The Day the Earth Stood Still was going to come walking up Lubbock’s main drag with his pet robot Gort clanking along beside him, demanding to be taken to our leader. And they were moths. Do you like it? Don’t you have to like it?
    This voice was so clear it was amusing—it was that of Dr. Klingerman, who had taught the seminar. It lectured her with good old Klingy’s unfailing—if rather shrill—enthusiasm. Anderson smiled and lit a cigarette. Smoking a little too much tonight, but the damned things were going stale anyway.
    In 1947 an Air Force captain named Mantell flew too high while he was chasing a flying saucer — what he thought was a flying saucer. He blacked out. His plane crashed. Mantell was killed. He died chasing a reflection of Venus on a high scud of clouds—a sun-dog, in other words. So there are reflections of moths, reflections of Venus, and probably reflections in a golden eye as well, Bobbi, but there are no flying saucers .
    Then what is that in the ground?
    The voice of the lecturer

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