The Silicon Dagger

by Jack Williamson

  “Hey!” His black-rimmed eyes blinked as if they had just discovered me. “You said your name’s Barstow! You’re Clayton Barstow? Wanted by the FBI?”

  He hardly seemed to care, and I simply nodded.

  “So you’re on the run?” He paused to contemplate me, and finally shook his head. “Good luck. You’ll need it.”

  I sat there staring at nothing till he spoke again.

  “Tell me why—”

  His voice caught again. Bare shoulders shaking, he sat for a time slumped down on the hood of the car before he went on.

  “My wife and I.” He nodded toward the barrier. “We’re Christians. I was baptized into the Church of Christ when I was seven years old. I’ve tried to live right, the best a man can. I never thought God would let such hell happen. I don’t know why—”

  He blinked dully at me.

  “Things change.”

  I knew nothing better to say, and he went on as if he hadn’t heard. “You’ve heard of Father Garron?”

  “I’ve seen him.”

  “Who hasn't? He’s on TV even day. Martha listened to him on KRIF and tried to take me with her into his temple. He wanted us to tithe half what we made and give our lives to his crazy Kingdom of Christ. His God ain't mine, but Martha went mad for him. Hellbent on saving even unborn baby.

  “I asked who was going to love 'em and feed 'em and teach ’em anything. She said the Lord will provide. I told her to look at the gangs shooting drugs and shooting up the streets, and she'd see He had left 'em for the Devil to provide. That made her mad. She never paid no mind to common sense. Gave Garron’s temple even penny she could get her hands on. and she’s been spending even minute she could at his phone bank, selling salvation. Begging suckers to shell out all they have for tickets to Garron’s crazy paradise.

  “She was there the morning Stuart McAdam promoted himself to colonel and said he and his pals had declared their independence. Called me to get to the temple as quick as I could, because Garron said Armageddon had broke out. The final war between God and Satan. The babv-killing minions of Satan would find that their judgment day had come, and his Legion of the Sword would prevail.

  “He was declaring a golden jubilee. McAdam County had become his Kingdom of Christ. The Holy Spirit had anointed him to rule it as the Viceroy of Christ. He was giving command of his Legion to Stuart McAdam, who would be marching out to conquer the rest of the world for the new age of the Apocalypse.

  "She was still talking when the phone went dead. I never knew what happened, but my pickup wouldn't start. The power went off. The TV died. I started out to the paddock to look after the horses and ran into a wall I never seen. It scared me. Mister. It still scares me. I don’t what to think. Martha don't know Stuart the way I do. and I don’t trust Garron or his God.

  “But still—” He made a hopeless gesture toward the smoke still drifting around the foot of the barrier. "I just don’t know. Maybe Martha was right. Maybe Garron has set the Devil loose to scourge evil out of the world. Let me show you what they’ve done to me.*’

  He slid off the hood of the car and limped stiffly up a side road to what was left where his farmhouse had stood: A pickup with the paint and tires burnt off, standing in the tangled steel and tumbled concrete blocks that had been a garage; a naked foundation, littered with burnt bed springs and appliances. He bent to pick up a little mass of twisted brass.

  “A Seth Thomas clock. In the family for five generations.”

  He tossed it away and nodded toward a white-painted fence.

  “I had horses. A young stallion sired by Rocket Dust. A Thoroughbred mare out of Final Friday, with a fine foal she’d throwed this summer.”

  “Caught in the fire?”

  “Just as bad.” He shook his head forlornly. “We ain’t inside the county. That damn wall don’t follow county lines. Cuts right across my place. The horses were caught on the other side.” He waved his empty hands. “I’m cleaned out. Nothing to eat. Nowhere to sleep. Nothing to wear but the rags I’ve got on.”

  I reached for Alden’s wallet.

  “Thank you, Mister.” He shook his head. “I ain’t begging.”

  “So what will you do?”

  “I don’t know.” He stood there half a minute, lips quivering, shaking his head at the charred relics of his life. “I guess I’ll just start walking.”

  Wondering what I myself could do, I stared after him. A hundred yards up the road, he stopped and turned back, pointing into the sky. I heard the drone of an aircraft engine and saw a small plane diving out of the west.

  “The wall!” Pointing again, he was hoarsely shouting. “It’s down! They’re coming out.” He was suddenly running back to me. “Get out of sight till we know what they want.”

  We scrambled into the car. The plane came low up the road.

  It circled twice to survey the wreckage along the wall, passing close over us, and climbed a little as it went on east.

  “Now what the hell?” He stared at it in sick bewilderment. “If devils claimed the county, has God let them out?”

  We sat in the car till the plane turned in the distance and came back along the road, flying a little higher, and finally vanished in the direction of McAdam City.

  “Our chance to get inside!” I told him. “Let’s go.”

  “Whatever you say.” He shrugged, with a bleak grimace. “I guess they’ve done what they can to me.” We got out of the car and started for the highway. “There’s a short cut.” He gestured. “Through the paddock.”

  I followed him down a side road. We had to leave it twice to skirt craters where bombs or missiles had fallen, but it led us along the white-painted paddock fence. The horses were gone. Dismally, he stopped to point at a gap they must have broken out when the assault terrified them. A mile or so farther we heard traffic and climbed a wooded ridge that let us look out to the highway.

  “Garron!” He turned to me in glum-faced wonderment. “Garron and his soldiers of the sword.”

  A long line of cars and pickups was creeping slowly from McAdam City. It was led by a silver-painted pickup filled with men in Kentucky Rifle uniform, who held a huge silver-painted sword pointing into the sky. Loudspeakers were blaring out “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

  Mine eyes have seen the glory of

  the coming of the Lord.

  He is trampling out the vintage

  where the grapes of wrath are stored.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  "GARRON’S HOLY LEGION!’’ Whispering, he shrank back into the shadows of the trees behind us, and we stood watching till the loudspeaker faded and the silver pickup had gone on beyond where the barrier had been. “The saints of the sword, marching out to save the world.”

  He turned to me with a bleak ironic grin.

  “Or has Garron turned them all to devils?”

  Devils was the better word, I thought, but he cried out before I could speak.

  “Martha!” His face was twisted with emotion. “Likely with them, coming home. When she sees what happened to our place—”

  He stood still for a moment, and plunged headlong down the slope toward the highway. I went back down the other way and walked on behind the ridge till I reached a disused road that came through a gap to a woodlot stacked with drying firewood.

  The highway was empty when I looked through the gap. I stopped under the cover of a leaning tree, sat down on a rock, and tried the cryptophone. After a moment, I heard Beth’s brisk recorded voice.

  "Caller not identified. Please repeat the alphabet for voice match.” That took my breath, and it took me a moment to begin. “Clay!” Her actual voice broke in. “Where are you?”

  I saw her in my mind, recalled the warmth of her lithe body against me and the light scent she had worn that night in the garden when we stumbled together in the dark. Trembling, I had to catch another breath.

  “Hiding under a tree,” I said. “At the end of a ridge near the west highway—”

  “
Here?” She cut me off. “Inside the county?”

  “A stroke of luck. I got through the barrier.”

  “Bad luck.” Her voice went flat. “You shouldn’t be here.”

  “I’m hunted. Nowhere else to go.”

  “You’ll be hunted here. Nowhere to hide, unless you have a plan.”

  That dimmed my elation.

  “No plan,” I confessed. “I’ve been living on the run. No way to make a plan.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  I yearned for her sympathy, even if I had no right to it, but all I heard was a crisp detachment. I felt afraid she might hang up. She owed me nothing, after all.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “With the county sealed off, I don’t know what to expect.”

  “Nothing good.” Her voice was slow and grave. “We seem to have won our battle with America, but we have wars of our own right here in the county. Just as bitter. Outcomes yet to be decided.”

  She seemed absorbed with them.

  "I watched the bombardment.” I tried to hold her. “Incredible fireworks. Did anything get through?”

  "Through Rob Roy’s screen? He calls it the silicon shell. It was magnificent.” Pride lifted her voice. “Nobody here got a scratch, not that I’ve heard about. But you?” I heard a sudden concern. “You were outside?”

  “And close,” I said. “Burning junk fell all around me.”

  “You were lucky.” A new concern edged her voice. “Clay, why did you come back?”

  Because of her, more than anything, but I couldn’t say that. “To look for Marion Kirk. My brother’s widow and her kids. She’d heard of my troubles and came back here hoping to help me. Do you know anything—”

  “Not much.” She stopped as if impatient with the question, but in a moment she went on. “Pepperlake called to tell me that Mrs. Kirk was here, asking about you. I had lunch with her and the children.” Her voice softened. “I fell in love with your little nephew. So anxious about you, and doing his best to be the man of the house. Of course there was nothing I could tell them, except that you had disappeared.”

  “Are they still here?”

  “In this madhouse?” Her voice sharpened. “Who knows? They’d come on the last commuter flight. Finally, when you weren’t here, they wanted to rent a car to get out of the county, but it must have been too late for that. Too many people scrambling to escape Zeider’s tanks.”

  “I’ve got to find them.”

  “Forget it.” I imagined her forbidding frown. “You can’t show your face. You know my brother Stuart?”

  “Too well. He doesn’t like me.”

  “He hates you, Clay.” Her voice fell, I thought with regret. “His Kentucky Rifles are the army now. He controls the police. He’s had your picture on KRIF a dozen times a day.”

  Her voice stopped as if she had no more to say. Sitting there under that storm-battered tree, I felt a wave of weakness and defeat. Getting through the barrier had seemed a victory, Beth’s voice a benediction. All for naught. My finger was on the button to snap

  the microphone back into the slick plastic case of the cryptophone, when I heard her voice again.

  “Has anybody seen you here?”

  I put the little instrument back to my ear. “One man, but he’s gone now with Garron’s convoy.”

  “They’ve closed the shell again. He won’t be back.” She was silent so long that I thought she had hung up. “Wait.” She was crisply decisive. “Wait where you are.”

  I waited, wondering what I was waiting for. My watch was running again. I set it by guess, listened, watched. Twice I heard the engine of a small airplane. Cawing crows cruised over the woodlot. A pebble in my dry mouth did nothing for my thirst. I moved to the cover of another tree where I could watch the road. Traffic on it had ceased. It must have been near noon when I saw a lone car coming fast from the direction of McAdam City.

  It slowed, turned off the highway, stopped finally in the gap not a hundred yards below where I hid. The driver rolled a window down to look out. A man, I thought, till she took off a Reb cap and the sun caught her face.

  Beth!

  I ran to meet her. In the same tan sweater I remembered, she looked as lovely as she had been in my dreams. Her eyes really violet, her hair the hue of polished amber. Eager for her, I opened my arms as she slipped out of the car, but she stepped back to study me as critically as if I had been a stranger.

  “You look used up.”

  Her feelings were hard to read. “Hungry,” I said. “Thirsty.”

  “Wait a few minutes.” She turned to look around us. “What’s beyond the ridge?”

  “A woodlot. Stacked firewood. Young trees that cut off the view of anything beyond.”

  “Good enough. Get in the car.”

  My anxiety was lost in the clean shape of her body, the glow of her skin, her slight but haunting scent, her fine-boned face, but she scarcely looked at me. Driving on through the gap, she parked in the shadow of the leaning tree.

  “Okay. Let’s talk.”

  She turned, waiting expectantly.

  “I’m pretty desperate. It’s wonderful to see you again, but—” I had to hesitate. “I don’t know the situation here.”

  “Nobody does.” She frowned. “An ugly muddle.”

  “I’ve no right to put you in danger.”

  “It isn’t just you.” She shook her head, staring across the stacks of drying firewood. “My brothers have put the world in danger. Rob Roy’s new science promises consequences he never took time to think about. Stuart wants to conquer the world with it. America, anyhow. As for you—”

  She turned back to frown very soberly at me.

  “You’ve got yourself involved, but that’s not all. You’re a threat to my father and me. Even to Stuart. I don’t want him forced to kill you.”

  “Neither do I.”

  I saw the fleeting ghost of a smile, but her tone was grim.

  “Do you know it was his men who took you out of the house? Carried you out of the county.”

  “And beat me up on the way? I thought so.”

  “My own brother.” She flinched from the pain of it. “I can’t help what he is. I’ve always tried to save him from himself, but now—” Gloomily, she shook her head.

  “Stuart may dislike me,” I said. “But I don’t see how I’m any threat to him.”

  “He thinks you are.” She nodded, her lips set tight. “He told me so when I tried to confront him. Made an ugly scene. He does hate you, Clay.”

  “He has no reason—”

  “He hated your brother. He blames you both for his time in prison.”

  I wondered again if Stuart or his friends had mailed the letter bomb, but the FBI had turned up no evidence of that. Neither had I.

  “Because of the book?’' I asked. “He did expose a lot of people who didn’t want to be exposed, but I don’t think he ever made Stuart a special target.”

  “Or did he?” Her fine eyes narrowed, searching me. “Alden wasn’t a witness at the trial that sent him to prison, but Stuart still blames him. He thinks your brother came here as a secret agent of the FBI. He thinks you were sent to take his place.”

  That hit me hard. It recalled Bella Garlesh and Agent Botman and Acorn Three. She must have seen me wince.

  “Is that true?”

  I wanted to deny it.

  “Partly true.” Looking into her face, I had to nod. “The FBI was investigating Alden’s death, with no sign of success. An agent took me to meet Director Garlesh. She told me Alden had agreed to make secret reports to them.”

  Beth was nodding, her face set hard.

  “I didn’t want to believe her,” I said. “Alden had ethics, but he was desperately concerned about the future of America. Garlesh said his love of the country persuaded him. And—” I had to hesitate. “She wanted me to report anything I learned.”

  “I suspected something of the sort,” she murmured, “the day you turned up in my office. Go on.
”

  “I’m no great spy,” I told her. “They gave me a phone number for the contact agent, but I never had much to report. And then— I don’t know what happened, but my calls were somehow7 intercepted. I quit calling, and heard no more from them.”

  “That’s all?”

  I nodded. I said nothing of the acorn fragments identified in the remnants of the bomb that killed my brother, nothing of the three acorns I found in the blood around Lydia Starker’s head, nothing of those I found by my own head when I woke up in the mud. A grim enigma I had no answers for.

  “I’m glad you told me,” she said, “though the fact could make you harder to defend.” A moment of sober silence. “I’m taking you back to our place.”

  That took my breath, and she saw my concern.

  “A hard choice,” she said. “I don’t like the risk from Stuart and his police—he’s made the city cops take an oath of loyalty to him. He wants to be president of the Free State—or whatever they name their new nation. I talked your problem over with my father. We didn’t come up with anything better.”

  I was still reluctant.

  “I think we can keep you safe. Stuart is out of the family now, after a bitter fight with my father. I’ve always loved him, or tried to, though he has often made it difficult. Sometimes impossible. He’s crazy now.” Her voice had sharpened, and I felt the pain of her regret. “Gone crazy with his sense of power. He had this mad dream of sharing Rob Roy’s weapon with other militias. Uniting them to conquer the continent.”

  She shook her head and sat silent, staring moodily across the woodlot through the cracked windshield. Rousing herself at last, she turned back to me.

  “He was mocking President Higgins for his concern for the needless loss of life. To justify his stand, he quoted Thomas Jefferson. I think I recall the words. After Shay’s Rebellion in 1787, Jefferson wrote, ‘God forbid we ever be 20 years without such a rebellion. . . . The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.’