The Silicon Dagger

by Jack Williamson

  . . under arrest. Pastor Garron of the Temple of the Sword calls him a heroic soldier of God, now in the red hands of Satan.” He snapped it off.

  “That damned abortion clinic in McAdam. Burnt to the ground last night. Arson, Burleigh says. The firebug left a barrel of gasoline in a pickup parked against the building. Blowed up before he got away. Blast knocked him out and scorched the hair off his head. Firemen picked him up.”

  Out of the woods, we turned into a busy highway. I asked where we were.

  “Lexington road.” He jerked his head. “MeAdam’s ten miles behind us.”

  A few miles farther, he pulled off and parked on a gravel drive in front of a gray-painted farmhouse that looked a century old. A thickset woman in a yellow robe came out on the stoop and pushed up her steel-rimmed glasses to glare at me suspiciously.

  “Who you got?”

  “Poor guy beat up.” He walked past her, with a nod for me to follow into the house. The pickup keys clinked as he dropped them beside a flower pot on a little table at the door. “In bad shape. I said we’d give him a hand.”

  “Let the cops—”

  “He don’t want the cops. No money on him, but he says he’ll mail me a check when he gets back to Baltimore. Let him clean up. Look for things of mine he can wear.”

  Muttering under her breath, she jerked her head for me to follow and showed me through a cluttered living room into a bedroom with a bath beyond it.

  “Git outa them bloody rags. Throw ’em in the trash.”

  She gave me a towel and a thin sliver of soap, and slammed the bedroom door.

  I stripped the pajamas off, used the toilet, and ran the shower hot. The water burned the wound in my scalp and streamed pink down my torso. The heat of it stopped the shivering and restored a little life. I was out on the bath mat, toweling down, when I heard the woman’s angry voice:

  “—damn fool! Are you crazy?”

  The man said something I didn't hear.

  “He could cut our throats! Get him out of here!”

  I tiptoed to the door and put my ear against it.

  “Quiet, Marcy!” He was shushing her softly. “Don’t you tip him off. I know he’s desperate, but the radio says he’s worth a hundred thousand dollars. The cops are on the way.”

  “Load the shotgun!” She was hardly quieted. “Call the cops again.”

  I dressed as fast as I could. They had left a shirt and khaki trousers on the bed, but no socks or underwear. The faded denim shirt was nearly too tight to button, the trousers hung loose. I snatched a belt off a hook to hold them up, a pair of filthy sneakers off the closet floor. They pinched my toes, but I got them on and eased the door open.

  They were in the kitchen when I came out, the angry woman on the telephone.

  “Give ’em time.” Whispering hoarsely, he tried again to silence her. “He’ll be hungry. Make him some breakfast.”

  “The hell I will! He could butcher us like pigs—”

  The front door was open. I snatched the keys and ran toward the pickup. She was still ranting, but he heard the motor start and dashed out of the house, yelling at me. She came behind him with the shotgun. It took me two tries to get the cranky stick shift in gear, and bird shot peppered the cab before I reached the highway. Waiting there for space in a stream of heavy trucks and vacationers hauling boats, I heard the shotgun boom again.

  On the pavement at last, I turned toward Lexington and kept the pickup well below the legal limit. A few miles down the road, I pulled into a rest area where a dozen vehicles had stopped. A man in boots and a wide-brimmed western hat was walking toward the toilet from a Jeep with an empty horse trailer in tow.

  I parked the pickup beside it, climbed into the trailer, kicked a pile of manure out of the way and lay flat on the floor. The driver took an eternity in the toilet. Police sirens were wailing back toward McAdam before I heard the starter whine. The motor finally coughed, and we lurched back toward the Lexington road.

  CHAPTER FORTEEN

  EARLY ONE NIGHT five days later, I limped up the alley behind the old Georgetown house. The cops and the Feds had probably staked it out, I thought, on the chance that I might come home, but I had nowhere else to go, nor way or will to go any farther.

  Five days of desperate flight, desperate survival. One night I had slept in a bam. Another night, invited by rolled-up newspapers on the lawn, I had broken into an empty house, raided the kitchen, slept a few hours, and stolen a jacket. My feet were blistered in those pinching sneakers, the scalp wound had not healed, I felt faint and light-headed from hunger. But fortune had sometimes favored me. I was alive and free.

  I found the footholds in the cinderblock wall that Alden had helped me chisel. Used up as I was, they were harder to climb than they had been when I was five years old, but they got me over the top. The house was dark. Nobody came when I knocked and shouted and rattled the kitchen door, but the key was still where Alden had kept it, in a little magnetic box struck under the steel shelf of the barbecue grill.

  The house was hushed and cold when I got inside. I yelled and yelled again, and heard no sound. My hand was on a light switch, before I caught myself and blundered through the gloom to the kitchen sink. Water had been hard to find. I gulped too much, threw it up, leaned on the counter till I could drink again.

  My eyes were adjusting to the dim little night lights Marion had bought when the threats to Alden had begun to haunt her. Whistling against the dead silence, I walked through the empty front room and the den, climbed the stair. Everything was neat and clean as she had always kept it, beds made, fresh towels in the bath. No hint of violence or disorder. She and the children were simply gone.

  Where?

  Perhaps to her sister’s? The older sister, my Aunt Julia, was a retired nurse now, with a home on the shore of Puget Sound. The two were still close in spite of the distance, visiting nearly every Sunday by phone or infonet. Perhaps she had offered refuge when Marion wanted to escape the police and the media.

  Perhaps. I dared not risk a call to ask.

  In my own room, I found a flashlight and used it cautiously. Marion must have cleaned the floor, but everything was just as I had left it. I shucked off that tight shirt and the baggy pants and took a long hot shower. The scalp wound stung from the soap. I found antibiotic ointment for it, got into wonderfully clean clothing, and went back to the kitchen.

  Ravenous, I found a feast in the refrigerator. Most of a cold rump roast. A leftover broccoli casserole. A glass of cold milk and a slab of pound cake. Bloated with it, I got back to my room and slept till the phone woke me. Nearly noon next day, when I looked at the clock.

  Marion calling?

  I reached for it with a groggy eagerness, but checked myself before I touched it. Who would hear me? Cops staking out the house? Agent Botman? Acorn Three? Julia, concerned about her sister? Or only a subscription solicitor? In any case a wiretap was surely on the line.

  The blinds and curtains were tightly drawn, but the gray daylight seeping through let me explore the house again. Marion’s car was still in the garage—Alden, away so much and using rental cars, had sold his own. Upstairs again, I found a bit of order restored to his office. His blood was gone from the floor. A new desk stood where his had been, neatly stacked with the notes and drafts the bomb had scattered, all in new manila folders.

  Unlocking the wall safe, I found its contents undisturbed. His wallet lay in the wall safe were Tim had left it. Behind it, I discovered a brown-cased cryptophone. No doubt the one Rob McAdam had given him. Eagerly, I clicked the stud to extend the tiny microphone.

  I could call Beth! Find if she and her father had been harmed by the men who shanghaied me. Ask if she knew who they were. Let her know I was still alive. Tell her about the three acorns I’d found in the mud by my head. Most of all, I wanted simply to hear her voice, to know that she was safe.

  But of course I couldn’t. I clicked the stud again and put the little instrument back in the safe. Even tho
ugh the content of its signals might be secure, they would be transmitted through commercial satellite. Wiretappers would surely recognize the cryptophone code, locate the source, descend upon me.

  Downstairs again, I found a new infotel set in the den. Bought, perhaps, because Marion wanted more news from McAdam County than had come over the single infonet channel on the old TV. I found the Washington headline channel.

  “—McAdam County crisis.” The anchor was Tex Horn, an exmodel who had made his name as an infonet actor. He affected a West Texas drawl and wore a white Western hat tipped far back. “Washintel WebWatch One brings you a special update from Ramona Del Rio, our observer on the spot—a hot spot now.”

  Ramona Del Rio was a lithe, doll-faced brunette with a stylish snow-white strand through her sleek black hair.

  “Actual rebellion!” Her voice and look and words seemed a bit too theatrical. I wondered if she wrote her own copy, but her delivery was briskly professional. “The social historian Alden Kirk had spent the last few weeks of his life in McAdam County, documenting the sources of conflict and unrest for his infonet series and a book he never finished.

  “The simmering tensions here began boiling over just a week ago, with the burning of an abortion clinic, an act of defiance against a woman’s legal right to choose. Differences run deep, with threats of outright violence. Listen to Joel Garron—he calls himself‘Father Garron’—head of a militant sect, the Temple of the Sword.”

  She showed a brief clip of Garron on his pulpit, shaking his rawboned fist and calling the wrath of God down upon Dr. Stuben Ryke, “a red-handed baby-killer” engaged in the “Satanic slaughter of the innocent unborn.”

  Her sardonic tone grew serious.

  “The alleged arsonist—”

  She showed a clip of Sheriff Burleigh and District Attorney Hunn, seated with another man at a table in the county jail, steel-barred cell walls behind them. The third man wore yellow-striped prison coveralls. His hands lay on the table in front of him, linked with steel cuffs. A white bandage covered the top of his head.

  “Benjamin Coon.” He shrugged and gave the lens a carefree grin.

  “A clear case of arson.” Hunn’s hard fox-face wore a slight smile; clearly he relished the camera. “The arsonist backed a pickup truck loaded with three barrels of gasoline into the front door of the clinic. He touched it off and ran, but the blast of a premature explosion caught him only a few yards away. He was blown off his feet and knocked unconscious. Firemen arrived in time to save his life.

  “We have him here.”

  Smiling wider, Hunn gestured at Coon.

  “Thank you Mr. Hunn.” On the screen again, Del Rio nodded brightly and spoke to the camera. “That’s the police story, but listen to Colonel Stuart McAdam, commander of a local militia unit, the Kentucky Rifles.”

  The lens caught Stuart on his horse, lean and dramatic, gleaming with the gold braid and bright gold buttons on that trim crimson jacket. It zoomed to his face. Beth’s high-cheeked oval face, somehow transformed into a supercilious mask.

  “A flimsy accusation.” He bowed to the camera, with a shrug at the charge. “My good friends Burleigh and Hunn are running for reelection.” He smiled with bland disdain. “They seem willing, unfortunately, to sacrifice an innocent man on the altar of their ambitions. Our county knows Coon. I knew his good father. I’ve cheered his touchdown passes. He is no arsonist. Certainly no murderer.”

  The word arsonist was a highlighted hot link. I clicked on it and saw the clinic as it had been, a modest brick building, the glass door lettered in black.

  STUBEN RYKE, MD

  Obstetrics and Gynecology

  That dissolved into a close shot of a stout little man in a white jacket, lips primly pursed, smiling rather diffidently into the camera.

  “. . . victim of the blast,” Del Rio’s vibrant news voice came back. “Ironically, Ryke had returned to the building to place an order for a new security system. Repeated threats from militant fanatics had become too alarming to be ignored. Burned beyond recognition, his body was identified by his dentist.”

  His image faded.

  “. . . injustice rampant!” Stuart was back, standing now in Garron’s pulpit, the silver sword towering over him. “Coon is no firebug, but in fact a hero, as his attorney promises to prove. He was driving past the clinic when he saw the fire. He parked his car near the clinic. He was running toward the burning clinic, attempting to rescue Dr. Ryke when the explosion caught him. As it happens, he saw the actual arsonist in flight from the scene.”

  My own picture flashed across the monitor.

  . . Clayton Barstow.” Del Rio again. “Already wanted for the murder of Lydia Starker. A McAdam county farmer, Cyrus Kryer, has identified him as the fugitive he found on the morning after the fire, hiding in a strip-mined area near his home. Probably caught by his own firebomb, he was clad in charred and bloodstained rags. The Kryers gave him clean clothing and offered him food. He robbed them, seized their pickup, and fled.”

  Kryer and his wife were on the screen for a moment, she crimson in the face and shaking a knobby fist, he holding her arm to restrain her.

  “. . . happened a week ago,” Del Rio’s crisp news voice came back. “The object of a nationwide hunt. Barstow is still at large. Charged with the murder of Lydia Starker, he is wanted by the FBI for interrogation in connection with the unexplained disappearance of Special Agent Monty Botman. With the addition of funds raised by the Kentucky Rifles and the Border Bank, the rewards for his apprehension now total two hundred thousand dollars.

  “As for the other suspect, Coon, he is still in the McAdam county jail, held on charge of arson and the murder. Bond has been denied, but he belongs to an influential militia unit that is demanding his immediate release.”

  The tube flickered and I saw Del Rio standing on a McAdam street comer. The county courthouse rose in the background, several stories of age-faded brick under a white-painted dome. The camera zoomed to a crowd gathered on the steps below the concrete Doric columns that framed the front door. It picked up a squad of uniformed Kentucky Riflemen waving red-white-and-blue banners printed Free the Martyr! Free Ben Today!

  “. . . explosive situation.” The camera came back to her pert doll-face and white-streaked coif. “Judge Winter has ordered the sheriff to hold him in protective custody because of the high tide of sentiment, pro and con. His militia supporters are demanding his freedom, promising their own protection if he needs protection. The judge, however, may need protection more. Militia members have threatened to drag him out of his chambers and read him a lesson out of the Constitution.”

  The screen went black for an instant. The courthouse was gone. Del Rio sat at her newsroom desk, dark-lined eyes and crimson lips smiling vividly into the camera.

  “That was a few hours ago. Burleigh and Hunn came out of the courthouse to face the crowd—it was almost a mob. Hunn urged them to disperse, promising to call for the National Guard if any violence took place. That brought defiant hoots. The militia supporters did not scatter until Burleigh and his deputies fired tear gas grenades.”

  “. . . no actual resolution.” Tex Horn was at his own news desk, tipping his wide white hat even farther back and beaming cheerily with his sun-browned or more likely makeup-dyed Texas charisma. “Ramona Del Rio will be standing by with fresh updates on that troubled Kentucky county as events occur. For the freshest infofax, keep your mind’s eye on Washintel WebWatch One.”

  A specialist in cosmetic surgery came on the monitor with an infomercial for his penile reconstruction clinic. I tried a dozen other channels, but McAdam county was only one tiny spot on a world vexed with multitudes of more newsworthy problems. Crisis in the Balkans, famine in the sub-Sahara, strikes in China. Drought in Canada, flood in Florida, a hurricane sweeping Japan.

  World-vexing troubles, but the infonet also offered sports, comedy, hobbies, travel, faith, soap operas, interactive sex. After an hour or two, I snapped it off and roamed the
gloomy house. Upstairs, in Tim’s room, I found a narrow slit beneath a window blind that let me peer across the street. Afternoon traffic was slow. A police car crawled past, the driver’s head turned toward the house. Later, a brown sedan with two men in it was parked for half an hour at the end of the block, facing the house.

  Abram Koster came strolling along the sidewalk, walking his Dalmatian. Once an Olympic wrestler, he now was retired from the CIA and somewhat gone to fat. He owned a home in the next block, and his wife had played bridge with Marion back in easier times. Little Angela had made friends with the dog, and I had interviewed him for Alden, asking for the little he felt free to say about infonet censorship. Then friendly enough, cheerfully willing to agree that the infonet had outgrown its would-be censors, he had become a hazard to me now.

  I drew back from my lookout slit when he stopped to stare at the house. He was still there when I looked again, the Dalmatian sniffing the grass. He let it pull him a dozen paces on, and paused to peer again. Merely wondering, as I was wondering, why and where his neighbors were gone? Or searching for any sign of me?

  I felt better when he spoke to the dog and sauntered on.

  I took another long shower and put more antibiotic ointment on the scalp wound. In the kitchen again, I finished the leftover roast and casserole. Fatigue overwhelmed me before I had my dishes washed, but I looked again from Tim’s window before I went back to bed. The brown sedan was gone. Night had fallen when I woke.

  Back on the infotel, I found McAdam County still lost in the sea of more compelling sensations. A prime minister shot. A tour liner aground and on fire in the Indian Ocean. Fraud on Wall Street, crime on Main Street, sex scandal on a floating casino. Mars Magellan gone silent, more cities predicted to drown when global warming thawed the ice caps, a killer virus spreading across Brazil.