Roberta Anderson-A Character in The Tommyknockers | Readify Wiki: A Better Way to Explore Books

Roberta Anderson, known as Bobbi, is the Maine farmer whose discovery of a buried spacecraft turns her home, her inventions, and eventually her body into parts of an alien transformation. Through Jim Gardener’s visits and return, the narrative sets the apparent steadiness of her farm against the evidence that Bobbi is being remade: first a gaunt, frightened woman among ordinary domestic objects, then a failing partner who insists the work must continue, and finally a human shape giving way to something visibly nonhuman.

Identity and the Farm

When Jim Gardener reaches Bobbi’s home at the old Garrick place at seven-thirty, he finds a scene of unremarkable rural order: a slightly open Rural Free Delivery box, Bobbi’s blue pickup under a tarp, and a light in the east window where she reads and rocks. Peter, once quick to bark at strangers, has grown old. The familiar details persuade Gard that the farm belongs to a sane, relatively content woman, a place of peace and rootedness rather than a site of danger. That impression matters because it is so nearly the opposite of what he is about to see.

Bobbi emerges from the porch smiling and plainly glad to welcome Gard, but her body contradicts the greeting. Her clothes hang loose and flutter around her; her face is gaunt, her eyes sunk deep, and her pale, taut skin makes her forehead look too wide. Her hair is uncombed, her shirt buttoned incorrectly, and her jeans partly unfastened. She appears dirty and sweaty, and Gard fears she has lost far more weight than she can afford. The shock is not simply that Bobbi is ill: the woman who seems delighted by his arrival looks, to him, as though life has nearly left her already.

Invention and Discovery

Bobbi’s work transforms ordinary things into instruments of startling capability. In the heating compartment beneath a water tank, Gard finds an arrangement built from twelve Eveready D-cell batteries seated in a Hillcrest Farms egg carton, with funnel-shaped caps, colored wires, and circuit boards apparently taken from inexpensive Korean electronic toys. The components form an ordered arch, not the jumble they first seem to be. At its center a bright ball of light, no bigger than a quarter, burns with an intensity compared to the sun; the contraption heats water fast enough to raise blisters. Bobbi’s discoveries are therefore not confined to the buried vessel: the alien encounter has become entangled with ingenious work assembled out of household materials.

Bobbi also tells Gard that she wrote a work in perhaps three days, or no more than a week, doing most of it in her sleep. When Gard smiles, she makes clear she is not joking; he stops smiling. The exchange makes her altered relationship to ordinary consciousness concrete. Creative production that would normally belong to deliberate waking effort has entered her sleep, just as the work around the spacecraft has crossed the boundary between familiar tools and an unfamiliar power.

When Gard questions the reach of the implications she has been showing him, Bobbi states the inference he has been trying to face: the Tommyknockers came from space. Her explanation gives the strange inventions and the buried discovery a shared origin, while Gard’s dry mouth and frozen hands register the fear the information produces. He asks whether they are nearby, unable to turn around because he imagines an alien creature emerging from the pantry. Bobbi’s disclosure makes the threat immediate even before Gard can see what the excavation has uncovered.

The Excavation and Its Growing Cost

By the time Gard sees the dig again, Bobbi has cut a lane through the trees to admit a vehicle, and the scale of the excavation has become unmistakable. The trench measures about two hundred feet long and twenty feet wide at either end, swelling to around thirty feet wide for a stretch of roughly forty feet. Its outline suggests a woman’s hips; from the bulge rises the curved gray leading edge of the spacecraft, compared to the rim of a giant steel tea saucer. The dimensions turn Bobbi’s discovery from a private puzzle into a vast physical undertaking, with a buried object whose scale dwarfs both the vehicle and the people working beside it.

After Gard and Bobbi have spent about a month working in the shadow of the object, he discovers that he has lost an incisor. He had assumed that proximity would not affect him, but the gap in his teeth proves otherwise: he recognizes that the process has begun and that he is becoming New and Improved. The change extends the danger beyond Bobbi. Whatever is happening at the excavation can act upon those who remain near it, making their labor at once a means of uncovering the ship and an exposure to its influence.

Return and Recognition

When Gard returns to the cut one morning, he has been there only until eight-thirty and already wants a drink. Turning from the excavation, he finds Bobbi standing behind him. She has lost much of her hair; the pale skin of her forehead reaches back nearly to the middle of her skull, and her right arm is in a sling. Heavy Pan-Cake makeup seems meant to cover the visible consequences of illness, but it cannot make her look well. Gard’s tears come when he understands how frightened and lonely he has been. Bobbi answers his disbelief with the old, sweet smile he loves, and he embraces her, laying his tired face against her neck. Their reunion briefly restores the intimacy of their earlier bond, without making the physical damage or the danger disappear.

The Final Push and the Cost of Staying

When Gard urges Bobbi to rest, she refuses: the work is almost complete, she says, and she and Gard began it together. He corrects her, insisting that she started it when she stumbled over the buried object, back when Peter was alive. The reminder visibly pains Bobbi, though she quickly shrugs off the hurt. Her insistence on continuing makes the excavation more than a shared project: it has become a demand that overrides both her worsening condition and the losses already attached to it.

The ship’s influence has reached Gard, too. After a month working in its shadow, he finds a gap where one of his incisors had been the day before. He had foolishly supposed himself immune; now the missing tooth tells him that his own transformation has begun, and he forces himself to smile as if he had not noticed. The change gives Bobbi’s determination a threatening context: the closer they come to finishing, the less either worker can assume that the person doing the work will remain unchanged.

Bodily Transformation and Alien Power

The later glimpses of Bobbi make the gap between disguise and bodily change impossible to sustain. When Anne sees her after a shower has washed away the makeup, Bobbi’s head and neck are transparent and jellylike. Her breasts have swollen into a single, nippleless mass; dim organs visible in her abdomen look wholly unlike human organs, and green fluid circulates within them. Behind her forehead, Anne can see a quivering sac of mind. Bobbi grins without teeth. What had seemed an illness concealed beneath cosmetics is thus revealed as a transformation of her anatomy, not merely a weakening of her human body.

Gard’s discovery in the shed makes the transformation’s machinery visible in another form. In its rear corner, Ev Hillman, Anne, and Peter are suspended on posts inside two old galvanized-steel shower cabinets with their doors removed. They are still alive, but arranged like meat hanging on hooks. A thick black cable runs from Anne’s forehead and another from Ev’s right eye; dozens of smaller cords extend from Peter’s exposed, pulsing brain. Peter’s eyes, clear of cataracts, turn toward Gard, and he whines. The sight joins Bobbi’s altered body to a system that uses living beings as part of its apparatus, turning the shed’s ordinary fixtures into a scene of intimate violation.

The contrast with Bobbi’s earlier homemade devices is stark. The egg carton, batteries, colored wires, and toy circuit boards had already shown how familiar materials could be reorganized into a working power source; the light above them seemed almost impossibly potent. In the shed, the same unsettling crossing of ordinary matter and alien function takes human bodies as its material. Bobbi is no longer simply the inventive farmer investigating a buried spacecraft: her own body has become evidence of the force at work, while the people and animal closest to her are physically wired into its consequences.