View Quote Her distrust in the way the authorities handled things had begun at the age of thirteen, in Utica. She had been sitting on the sofa in their living room with Anne on one side and her mother on the other. She had been eating a hamburger and watching the Dallas police escort Lee Harvey Oswald across an underground parking garage. There were lots of Dallas police. So many, in fact, that the TV announcer was telling the country that someone had shot Oswald before all those police — all those people in authority — seemed to have the slightest inkling something had gone wrong, let alone what it was.

View Quote No, of course victims of high-gamma radiation didn't turn transparent, like Claude Rains in The Invisible Man. They didn't start to lose inches as their bodies twisted and thickened. But yes, they were apt to lose teeth, their hair was apt to fall out - in other words, there was a kind of physical 'becoming' in both cases. He thought again: Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.

View Quote Real terror is the most physically debilitating of emotions. It saps the endocrines, dumps muscle-tightening organic drugs into the bloodstream, races the heart, exhausts the mind.

View Quote Tomorrowland, it seemed, ended up being an empty place where people smart enough to capture the stars got mad and tore each other to shreds with the claws on their feet.

View Quote "There really isn't an Altair-4, just as there aren't really any Tommyknockers. There aren't any nouns for some things - they just are. Somebody pastes one name on those things in one place, somebody pastes on another someplace else. It's never a very good name, but it doesn't matter. You came back from New Hampshire talking about Tommyknockers, so here that's what we are. We've been called other things in other places. Altair-4 has, too. It's just a place where things get stored. Usually not live things. Attics can be cold, dark places."

View Quote "We have no history, written or oral. When you say the ship crashed here because those in charge were, in effect, fighting over the steering wheel, I feel there's an element of truth in that... but I also feel that perhaps it was meant, fated to happen. Telepaths are at least to some degree precognitives, Gard, and precognitives are more apt to let themselves be guided by the currents, both large and small, that run through the universe. "God" is the name some people give these currents, but God's only a word, like Tommyknockers or Altair-4."

View Quote The FBI was on the scene at 6:00 P.M., the CIA at 7:15 P.M. By 8:00 o’clock, they were yelling about jurisdiction. At 9:15 P.M. a frightened, infuriated CIA agent named Spacklin shot an FBI agent named Richardson. The incident was hushed up, but both Gardener and Bobbi Anderson would have understood perfectly — the Dallas Police were on the scene and in complete control of the situation.

View Quote More than a dozen were shot down on the first day of the invasion by scared, trigger-happy soldiers, kids, most of them, who pursued the Tommyknockers from house to house. After a while, some of the invaders' fear began to rub off. By afternoon they were actually having fun—they were like men driving rabbits through wheat. Two dozen more were killed before the Army doctors and Pentagon brain-trusters realized that the air outside of Haven was lethal to these freak-show mutations who had once been American tax payers. The fact that the invaders could not breathe the air inside Haven would have seemed to have made the converse self-evident, but in all the excitement, no one was really thinking very well (Gard wouldn't have found this very surprising).