Hank Baccus's “Send” device

Hank Baccus’s “Send” device is a jury-rigged radio-and-cassette player whose taped-over Play button turns a local act of coercion into a breach between worlds. When Hank activates it against Pits Barfield, Pits fades and is sucked through an opening in reality; a cry from beyond then reveals that David Brown is on Altair-4. The device’s terrible importance lies in that contrast: it can remove a person from Haven, but the destination and the condition in which its passengers arrive remain uncertain.

Construction and Operation

The device is built around a large radio that can receive AM and FM stations and play cassette tapes. Hank brings out a small pair of Borg earphones, plugs them into the radio, and makes Pits put them on. The cassette Play button has been taped over, with the single ominous word Send written on the tape. Hank holds his service pistol on Pits as he bends over the machine and presses the button.

This is no ordinary transmission. The button initiates a transformation in both Pits and the space around him. His screams fade, and his physical presence seems to diminish with them: his mouth continues moving without sound, his skin turns milk-pale, and he fades like a photograph. A roughly Dutch-door-sized piece of reality opens behind him, exposing an eerie purple-black landscape. The device thus makes sending literal: it does not merely convey a message but appears to remove its target from Haven’s reality and transfer him elsewhere.

Pits Barfield’s Disappearance

Hank uses the device as a threat against Pits, who is made to choose between obeying and facing Hank’s pistol. Once Pits puts on the earphones, Hank starts the cassette mechanism. The breach draws air and loose objects toward it: candy wrappers, flattened cigarette packages, and potato-chip bags rush across the pavement, while Hank’s hair and collar flutter in the current. Some litter passes between Pits’s legs, and some seems to pass through him, emphasizing how tenuous his physical presence has become.

Pits is then vacuumed into the opening, followed by his Gallery magazine. His chair topples and lodges half inside and half outside the breach. Hank reaches for the Stop button, but just before he presses it, he hears a high, thin cry from the other place. The cry is not Pits’s: a voice calls out “. . . hilly . . .” The sound shifts the scene’s meaning from a grotesque act of punishment to evidence that someone else is already on the other side.

Altair-4 and the Device’s Consequences

The people discussing the incident later accept that the voice was David Brown’s. David is on Altair-4, a place whose precise location and nature are unknown to them. They understand it as a kind of cosmic warehouse where many things are stored; the name itself comes from an old movie, just as the name Tommyknockers comes from an old rhyme. The label is less important than the fact that the radio has opened access to a reality beyond Haven.

Pits’s fate remains distinct from David’s. Hank apparently put Pits through a crude disintegration process before sending him to Altair-4, whereas David was not sent there in the same way. The device therefore does not establish a safe or consistent mode of travel: its use on Pits involved a process that the group believed had not occurred in David’s case. Although the others debate whether Hank’s punishment was excessive, their attention soon turns to the voice and the missing boy rather than to Pits’s fate.

A Dangerous Tool in a Changing Town

The town has little practical means to contain Hank. Its single jail cell, in the basement of the town hall, is so inadequate that a strong fourteen-year-old could break out; sending him to county jail would also make little sense given the extraordinary nature of the charge. The people who can examine Hank’s mind conclude that his anger and confusion are subsiding and that he is unlikely to act radically again. They take away his converted radio, ask him not to make another, and move on to the more urgent question of David’s voice.

The removal of the device does not undo what it has revealed. Around Haven, people are changing, dangerous inventions are being made, and the town’s boundary itself is suspected of functioning like a barrier. Elsewhere, Ruth experiences air that turns springy and pushes her back as though an invisible membrane blocks the road; the excavators uncover an immense metal ship; and inside that ship Gardener finds a round corridor whose walkway is canted with the vessel. Against these larger signs of altered space, Hank’s radio is an improvised, hand-held breach: an ordinary consumer object repurposed into a means of crossing—or forcibly displacing someone across—the limits of the familiar world. Its crudity does not diminish its danger; it makes the cosmic breach possible with a cassette button, earphones, and a radio.

Narrative Significance

The device’s name promises a simple action, but its operation exposes a deep uncertainty about what sending means. Pits disappears in a storm of air and debris, while the only evidence of the destination is a strange landscape and a voice calling for Hilly. The scene leaves the mechanism and outcome unresolved even as it confirms that Haven’s crisis reaches beyond the town. A radio normally carries sound into a room; Hank’s machine makes the other place audible, then physically opens a way into it. David’s cry turns that impossible opening into a concrete lead, connecting a violent experiment with the ongoing search for the missing boy.