The Silicon Dagger

by Jack Williamson

  Three women burst into the office an hour later. A strange trio. One was lean as a skeleton, taller than I, robed and shawled in black. She was waving a brown manila folder. Another, cloaked in crimson and muscled like a wrestler, carried a heavy wooden cross that towered over her red-cowled head. Its long staff was carved into a blade and painted silver.

  The third was a slim pretty girl in her early teens. She wore a plain white gown, and her long bright hair fell over a sleeping baby cradled in one arm. Her free hand held a glass fruit jar that contained something red.

  Together, the three advanced on Pepperlake’s desk.

  “Martha!” With a startled smile, he rose to greet them. “Mrs. Watson. Lily Rose.”

  I recognized the names. They were three of our rural correspondents.

  “Welcome, ladies!” He blinked in puzzlement and started around his desk to meet them. “How can I help you?”

  “We come from God.” The one in black intoned the words in a sepulchral tone, and waved her folder. “We bring a you a sacred commandment.”

  He stared at them, a gold tooth gleaming in his open mouth. The girl with the baby stepped slowly forward and set the fruit jar very gently on his desk.

  CHAPTER SIX

  "WE COME FROM the Temple of the Sword, the fortress of God on earth." The woman in black spoke again in that hollow doomsday voice. e are sent by Father Joel Garron. high commander of His hosts on earth."

  Marching on to meet Pepperlake. she flourished the manila folder.

  ’’His message to you, Mr. Pepperlake."

  The afternoon before. I had ridden my bike out to the edge of town for a look at Garron’s temple. A sprawling building of red-striped stucco in the middle of a wide parking lot. it had a silver-painted steeple that tapered into a sword thrust into the sky.

  "Martha?" Pepperlake blinked at the fruit jar on his desk and back at her. his hands raised in baffled dismay. She was Martha Korn, who wrote her column from the strip-mined hills across the county line. ”What’s this all about?"

  "’Salvation." Her foghorn voice rolled again. ’’The salvation of the nation. The salvation of your own trembling soul."

  He turned to the others as if appealing for help. The girl with the baby was Lily Rose Mayfair, who had been mailing us a weekly column from the Henry Clay Middle School. With a look of sad reproach, she pushed the fruit jar with its red contents farther across his desk.

  “Mr. Pepperlake, we bring you a sign from God.** Her voice was sweet and high. “We bring you a body of a murdered baby.”

  “Why?” He shrank back from it. “Lily Rose, what do you mean.”

  “Mrs. Korn will tell you.”

  “We bring you a proclamation.** Martha Korn found a page in her folder. “It comes to you from Father Garron, who is the Lord’s anointed voice.*’ She waved the page and began to chant. “They that shed the blood of unborn infants shall die the death of the damned. So sayeth the Lord, and His will be done.

  “Whereas Dr. Stuben Ryke has maintained a notorious slaughterhouse for the unborn here in McAdam City, and whereas he has hardened his Satanic heart against God's warnings to cease and desist from the killing, and whereas he has appealed to the laws of the world for shelter from the servants of God:

  “Father Garron proclaims him to be an agent of Satan, lost beyond the laws of God and all hope of salvation. He is therefore expelled from the society of God-fearing men, who are hereby forbidden all contact and commerce with him on pain of eternal damnation.

  “Furthermore, Father Garron now announces that he has been guided to choose Colonel Stuart McAdam of the Kentucky Rifles as his candidate for city-county manager and mayor in the coming election. Colonel McAdam has pledged his righteous determination to end this abominable baby-killing and run Dr. Ryke out of the county.*’

  She waved the page high and laid it on the desk beside the fruit jar.

  ’’Read it,” she commanded him. “Take it to your heart. It is signed by Father Garron, and sealed with the blood of an unborn baby.”

  “Gretchen, I don’t understand.” Gretchen Watson’s sword had sunk as if its weight was tiring her arm, but he retreated from it. She was the correspondent whose husband had been arrested. “What has this to do with me?”

  “We want you to print it.” All three spoke in well-rehearsed unison. “In bold black type on the front page of tomorrow’s Freeman. ” “Ladies, please!” He spread his hand in protest. “You know we can’t do that.”

  “Find a way.” Watson looked at Martha Korn, who nodded support. “Or face the judgment of God.”

  “No way.” He looked into their stony faces and made a helpless shrug. “This week’s edition is already made up and gone to the printer. If the Reverend Garron wants to run a political ad next week, Jim Hobbs is the man to see.”

  “Next week is too late,” Martha Korn told him. “The Rifles are marching to a rally at the temple tomorrow. Colonel McAdam will be making his announcement on our infonet program, speaking to all the world. The election is just two weeks from Tuesday.”

  She gestured, and they all turned to march away.

  “Ladies, wait!” Pepperlake followed them. “Don’t go off mad. I hope you’ll try to understand. What you ask is simply impossible. I want you to know how much we value your columns. Please keep them coming—”,

  The baby had begun to cry. Seeming uncomfortable with it, Lily Rose held it up toward Martha Korn. She scowled and turned away. The baby screamed louder. They filed out of the office and tried to slam the door behind them.

  “Phew!” Pepperlake sank into the chair behind his desk, with a rueful grin at me. “Quite a show! Old Joe Garron! I knew him before he found the faith. Failed farmer, failed actor, failed broker. Arrested once for posing as an MD, peddling his own miracle cure for asthma and the common cold.”

  He picked up the fruit jar to study the contents.

  “I grew up on a farm,” he said. “I don’t think this thing’s human. Clay, take it out to the college. Get somebody in biology to look at it.”

  “For a story?”

  “No story. Not for the Freeman. ”

  I asked why not.

  “Stuart.” He made a face. “A troubled kid who lost his early promise, gone rotten now and making bigger trouble every year. His militia’s full of hotheads, all gone dangerously crazy since he went to prison. The mayor refused to grant the permit for their march till Gottler and Finn told him to think again. Finn doesn’t care for any kind of confrontation in the middle of his own campaign.”

  “I wish we could cover it.”

  He looked uncomfortable.

  “We’re sitting on the fence, at least for now. Stuart knows I don’t trust him, but he is a McAdam. I knew his dad back in grade school. Rob Roy’s a friend of mine. You know his sister out at the college. Her students love her.”

  He stopped to wink at me.

  “A beautiful woman.” I hoped I hadn’t colored. “But not one for romance. Certainly not with me.”

  “I guess you think the Freeman ought to stand for something.” He was grave again. “It should, but we have to pick our issues. I’m holding what little fire we have till the dust begins to settle.”

  “And we do nothing on the militia march?”

  “We ran a little notice last week. That’s enough. Ride your bike out to the rally if you want to see the Garron show, but I’m lying low.”

  That afternoon I carried the jar out to Dr. Chatterji in the college biology lab. He peered at it, unscrewed the lid, recoiled from the odor, and screwed it hastily back.

  “Pig,” he said. “With no formaldehyde. Male, three weeks along. Might have made a prize boar.”

  Pepperlake and Cal Hazard, the part-time circulation manager, stood with me outside the Freeman office next morning to watch the

  Kentucky Rifles march down McAdam Avenue, around the courthouse, and out South Main toward Garron’s Temple of the Sword.

  A police car came ahead to clear th
e street. With a drummer in the lead, the Rifles came lustily singing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Neatly uniformed in white military hats, red shirts, and royal blue pants, the men in the front ranks carried shouldered rifles and marched with a well-drilled precision.

  Stuart McAdam led them, riding a bay Thoroughbred. He sat the horse well, bowing and waving to friends. Spatters of applause came from farmers and business people standing with us.

  “Rifles made for the Chinese Army,” Pepperlake nodded at the weapons. “Bought from Sam Katz before the new gun laws put a crimp in his business. Gun control!” A sardonic sniff. “That’s their hottest gripe. They want guns to fight the government.”

  Hazard was clapping vigorously.

  “Give ’em a hand,” he urged me. “They’re us. The army of the people, ready to defend us from the the whole damn Army if they have to. I’d join up myself, if I wasn’t so old.”

  The last ranks, most of them in overalls, carried hunting rifles, pump guns, double-barreled shotguns. A fat man in grimy yellow coveralls brought up the rear, holding a pitchfork at a jaunty tilt, bawling the song and grinning happily at us as he swaggered by.

  “Buzz Hamp.” Pepperlake grinned. “The town comic.”

  “See you.” Hazard turned to leave us. “I’m on my way to the rally.”

  “You see what troubles me.” Pepperlake shrugged unhappily when he was gone. “It troubled Alden Kirk. I remember a comment of Kirk’s about storm clouds rising. Decent men like Cal ready to believe Stuart McAdam when he calls our government the enemy.” “But still we’re lying low?”

  “The Freeman is. We’re only a weekly, remember. Anything we could run would be stale before we got it out. And think about it, Barstow. Feelings run high, and I have to live here.”

  I had to say I understood.

  “If you want a story, call Rob Roy McAdam about CyberSoft and his cryptophone, That’s all the controversy I want right now.”

  A second police car came after the column, and then a parade of private cars. I followed on my bike. The parking lot was almost full, but space enough was left in the sanctuary beneath the swordshaped steeple. Ben Coon met me at the door, trimly military in his Rifle red-white-and-blue. He grinned and grasped my hand.

  “Glad to see you here, Mr. Barstow. I’m sorry how the colonel brushed you off. He was out of sorts, but we need you in the Rifles. I can talk him around.” He ushered me in and sat with me.

  “Sister Korn! Sister Watson!”

  He murmured the greeting to the two women seated beside us, whom I had failed to recognize without their black and crimson robes. They smiled at him, nodded very stiffly at me, and turned back toward the tall wooden cross that towered over the pulpit, the shaft shaped into a silver-painted blade. Stuart McAdam sat on the bench behind it, beside a long-beaked rawboned man with black-dyed hair.

  “Father Garron,” Coon whispered. “A crazy windbag, but he does stand with the Rifles.”

  The hall was soon filled, people standing in the doorway. Silence fell when Garron walked into the pulpit and raised his hands. Half-chanting in the same slow and hollow tone that Martha Korn must have learned from him, he prayed God Almighty to slow the ruthless slaughter of the innocent unborn, to receive their souls with mercy, and visit His just vengeance upon their killers.

  “Sadly, my dear brethren, this unholy abomination has been allowed to flower here in our own home county. The Devil’s dirtiest work! It corrupts the morals of the young, destroys good families, consigns countless souls to everlasting Hell. It must be stopped. It can be stopped. By the infinite grace of God, we have with us one who can stop it.”

  He gestured at Stuart McAdam, who bowed and then sat straighter in his crimson jacket.

  “I give you a man you know. A man who bears a most respected name and shares our time-proven values and our trust in God. A man of high achievement, who has served us well as a devoted Rifleman and now pledges his sacred honor to serve us even better.”

  He gestured for Stuart McAdam to stand. Applause rippled through the hall.

  “I am happy to announce that he is now a candidate for our city-county mayor and manager in next week’s election. He promises to bring back the law of God, to stop the Satanic slaughter of the unborn, and to defend our sacred freedoms. I pray the blessing of Almighty God upon him and all his future works.”

  He stopped aside, waving McAdam onto the pulpit.

  “Good friends, good neighbors, fellow patriots!” McAdam made a striking figure in his tall yellow cowboy boots and the trim crimson jacket. When the footlights caught his face, I saw the likeness to his sister in her coldest, most official mode. It stabbed me with the question: Did she know or suspect that he was the killer?

  He spoke well, sliding fluidly between ringing old-time oratory and the intimate ease of an infonet sex confession. “I may have made my own mistakes, but I’ve always honored the family name. We McAdams have always fought for freedom. Back on the highlands of Scotland, we fought British tyrants for it. We came to Virginia when they overwhelmed us. We fought them to liberate the thirteen colonies. We fought their Yankee heirs for the freedom of the states.

  “That inborn instinct for freedom made America great. Our democracy has become a model for all the world. But now, my friends—” His voice fell, and he paused to shake his head. “Sadly, we have forgotten what we were. We have let our liberties die and rot for the lack of heroes’ blood to feed their roots. We let the fat-cat bureaucrats in Washington pour our tax dollars into UN rat holes all around the world, stifle honest business, pamper special interests, deny the sacred rights our forefathers shed their blood for.

  “My friends, am I a fool?”

  With an appealing smile, he bowed to his audience and got a chorus of No’s.

  “What can I do?” Modestly, he spread his hands. “As mayor and manager of McAdam County? Not much, perhaps. I make no promises to move mountains. The best I can do is to help you rekindle the precious spark of freedom. To gather the few embers still alive and begin our sacred mission when and where we can.

  “The task is forbidding, as all of you know, but our cause is far from hopeless. Others across the nation will surely follow our lead. Noble men and women everywhere have seen their faith mocked, their children seduced into drugs and crime, their jobs sent overseas, their earnings taxed away.

  “If you don’t like that, pray God to let you see the light! Listen to my warning. Watch the infonet. Read between the lines of all the clever double-talk that comes from Washington. Look at the crime and corruption right here at home. Our noble sheriff and even our courts have allied themselves with the federal forces swarming in to threaten our last spark of liberty.”

  He spread his arms and raised his eyes to the swordshaped silver cross.

  “Remember Waco!” His voice pealed louder. “Remember Ruby Ridge! Remember the new breed of martyrs pledging their lives to freedom all across the nation. Remember all that you yourselves are suffering under government gone mad. I beg for your votes, and pray Almighty God to let the holy flame of freedom spread from McAdam County all around the world.

  “Here is my platform, one I share with all who love our sacred heritage of liberty. We stand for the right to life. We stand for our Constitution. We stand for our freedom to worship God and speak our minds. We stand for a righteous America, where we live as the fathers of our nation hoped, free of aggression, safe from foreign or domestic tyranny.”

  “Praise the Lord!” Garron was on his feet. “Praise Him for blessing us with Brother McAdam and his campaign for a more sacred city and a consecrated nation. Let us pray for his victory on election Tuesday. Let God Almighty and our own eternal Temple bless his battle to recover our lost liberties and abolish this hellish abomination of slaughtering the unborn—”

  The roar of applause drowned his voice. People all around me were rising. Martha Korn and Gretchen Watson had come to their feet, clapping hard.

  “A great day!” Grinning
with enthusiasm, Coon turned to shake my hand again when the crowd began to scatter. “But we’ve got hard fights ahead. Barstow, we need you in the Rifles.”

  “Not me,” I said. “I’m not hungry for any kind of fight.” “Hungry or not, we’ve got a war ahead.” His grin was gone. “A war to save our liberty. We’ve got to take sides. I hope you take God’s side.” His hard voice followed as I turned away. “Think about it, Barstow. Think about it.”

  Thinking about it as I pedaled back to the Freeman office, 1 thought Botman would want my report on Stuart McAdam and Garron, who were certainly no friends of the bureau. And I added Garron to my own list of suspects. Had Alden’s sardonic comments on his past and his Temple of the Sword given him motive enough to mail the bomb? The incident of the pig fetus led me to wonder.

  “A bad day for McAdam county,” Pepperlake muttered when I reported to him. “Maybe for America. Stuart frightens me. Likely he frightens his family.”

  “Can we somehow oppose him?”

  “Not me.” He was emphatic. “Not the Freeman. Not here in the county. You’ve felt his charisma. And he is a McAdam. Even a black sheep McAdam can still be a local hero.” He tried to ease my disappointment. “Why don’t you call Rob Roy? A saner McAdam. Get his reaction to Stuart if you can. And ask again if he’ll let you do the CyberSoft story.”

  I placed the call. A secretary promised to get Mr. McAdam back to me, but never did. That midnight I dialed Botman’s number.

  “Acorn Three.” A strange voice answered, shrill with an edgy

  impatience. It paused for an instant. “Order number?”

  Without speaking, I hung up.

  Late one night I heard a noise at the locked front door of the Freeman. I had stayed to remake the back page to include a puff on a car dealership to run with a half-page ad Tom Hobbs had sold for a special promotion. I turned on the outside light and found a woman slapping the rain-streaked glass with her open hand.