Firechild

by Jack Williamson

  “This ultimatum?” His guttural Russian exploded at her. “Are you insane?”

  “Colonel Bogdanov, we—we have tested every alternative.” She held herself stiffly upright, trying not to tremble. “If anybody is insane, it is our informer in the weapons laboratory. A computer programmer named Carboni. He has demanded freedom for this dissident and his family, with adequate measures to assure their safety. He refuses to consider anything else. I think—” She had to catch her breath. “I think you should know why.”

  “So!” A grunted command.

  “We have gathered a dossier.” Eyes still on him, she tried not to see him. “Information that seems to explain his behavior.” She spoke rapidly and flatly, almost as if reading the words. “This Arnoldo Carboni was born in the American city of Boston. His mother’s family had once been wealthy, but while she was still an infant her father failed in business and killed himself. When her mother died, she used the insurance money to attend Columbia University in the city of New York. She met Leon Alyoshka there—”

  “In New York?” The colonel squinted, at her. “When?”

  “Many years—”

  “Comrade Bogdanov,” Shuvalov broke in, “the traitor was once a trusted man, though he had never joined the party. His Jewish ancestry had been concealed. He had earned honors in science at Moscow University. He was allowed to spend two years in America as a graduate student in nuclear physics.”

  “True.” She nodded. “And Carboni is his bastard son.”

  “A son?” The colonel blinked at Shuvalov. “Is that possible?”

  “Not likely.” Shuvalov shook his head, scowling at her. “I aided the investigations of Alyoshka. I never heard of any American son.”

  “Neither did Alyoshka.” She straightened to face their disbelief. “Comrades, if I may explain. Alyoshka was married. Here. His wife was not permitted to go abroad with him, no doubt to guarantee his return. It is not surprising that he fell in love with an American girl. A fellow student at Columbia. Although he seems to have told her about his wife, she allowed him to involve her in a passionate affair.

  “When his two years ran out, that had to end. The girl had become pregnant, but she never told him. She kept the child—named for him; he used to sign himself Arny Ames when they checked into motels. Later, she was briefly married to a laborer named Carboni. He adopted Arny, but she was still obsessed with Alyoshka and the marriage soon dissolved.

  “She raised Arny—raised him to love the father he had never seen. She tried to follow Alyoshka’s career through the news reports of his achievements in science and his later deviations. His photograph hung at the foot of her bed above a little shelf of momentos. A sort of shrine to him. Russian novels he’d given her, a doll in Cossack costume, a photo of St. Basil’s on a postcard that must have been the last message she ever got from him.

  “After her death, the son kept those items in his own room. He is described as a lonely oddball who knows computers better than people, but he seems to worship his father—or, rather, that saintlike image he got from his mother. It became the only human value in his life. He has brooded over the sensational speculations in the capitalistic press about Alyoshka’s current troubles. He has always longed to know him, longed for a chance to show his love. Now this freak of circumstance has given him a weapon. He’s determined to—”

  Beneath his blank stare, she had to stop for breath and courage.

  “Colonel, I think the dissident will have to be set free.”

  “Nyet!”

  Bogdanov shook his head, considering her. Absently, pale eyes still upon her, he took a rose from the vase to sniff its sweetness. Angry at herself, she knew she was flushing again.

  “You must be told.” He nodded at last. “Alyoshka is dead.”

  “Oh—” Her voice was gone.

  “He died in a psychiatric hospital.” The colonel seemed almost smug. “As you know, before the onset of his paranoid deviations he had been considered a brilliant scientist. Our foremost psychiatrists did everything possible to correct his tragic antisocial delusions, but their best efforts failed. They reported a bad reaction to the drug aminazin. The illness destroyed his mind.”

  “I—I see.” She tried not to shiver. “Could we—could we possibly inquire if Carboni would bargain for the wife and daughter?”

  As if surprised to find the rose in his hand, the colonel tossed it abruptly aside. His face turned bleaker. “They suffered from similar delusions. They attempted street demonstrations in support of the traitor. Loyal Soviet citizens were so much incensed by their activities that they were forced into hiding. Their whereabouts are not now known.”

  Silently, she nodded.

  “Your problem, Comrade Ostrov.” A tone of cold command. “You will return to America at once and proceed to solve it. I advise you not to tell anybody what you have learned about the fate of the deviants. You are free, however, to choose your own plan of action. In the past you have done excellent work, but never anything so important. You must not fail! If means to secure the Belcraft file do not now exist, you will create them.”

  “If—” She gulped. “We’ll do our utmost.”

  “Get them!” The colonel rose. “You may ago.”

  He bent to bury his nose in the roses.

  Anya Ostrov left Sheremetyvo by Aeroflot that same afternoon. In flight, she saw attendants gathered in the galley, whispering in a seeming alarm which they denied when she asked what was wrong. The weather ahead was excellent. The pilots had not reported any difficulty with the aircraft. It landed at Kennedy without incident. In the terminal building, she found excited people clustered around a man holding up a newspaper to show bold headlines:

  GENE PLAGUE

  KILLS CITY!

  11

  Plan Black

  Cat

  Clegg waited at the end of that massive mahogany table in the Holy Oaks library, watching Kneeland turn and move uncertainly back toward to group.

  “Please, Gus! For the good of the club—the good of the country—please sit down and listen.” Though he seldom smiled, his dark granite face had softened a little, and he kept his tone carefully placatory. “We’re going to need the best you can give us.”

  He paused again, while Kneeland hesitated and finally, almost sheepishly, sank into the big leather chair.

  “Thank you, Gus.” He cleared his throat and scanned the silent circle. “I’ve more to say to all of you. If things are as bad as they seem, we Catonians will have a new role to play. We can—we must seize the lead. The iron hand concealed of course, but we must act at once to defeat this newborn evil that our best efforts have failed to abort.”

  His shadowed eyes came slowly back to Kneeland’s red-flushed face.

  “We’re going to need you, Gus.” Again he tried to smile, but his voice had an imperative edge. “I hope you never forget that we depend on you as a founding member, your total loyalty duly sworn to the club. You are obligated to share in our decisions, and to let us share in the nation’s. We will continue to require your aid and advice. The whole nation will require ours.

  “I have news all of you must hear.”

  “Keep it brief,” Kneeland muttered. “The White House staff’ will be expecting me.”

  “The White House can wait.” Clegg stood silent for a moment as if to organize his thoughts. His voice, when he went on, had begun to ring with with oratoric overtones. “Gentlemen, in this grave emergency, I want you to recall the noble Roman whose name we honor. I want you to remember why we call ourselves Catonians.”

  He paused to scowl forbiddingly at Kneeland’s sullen headshake.

  “Founding the club, we pledged our lives—and our sacred honor, gentlemen, if you recall our oath—to defend a precious legacy. We—the founders of the club— stand among the privileged best of a nation God has favored greatly.

  “As Americans now, standing in the shadow of Armageddon but looking back across a magnificent past, we are the fortunat
e inheritors of four great millennia. Heirs to all that priceless legacy we call civilization. The faith of the Jews and the word of Christ. The glory of Greece and the splendor of Rome and the best of all the ages since.”

  Kneeland moved restlessly, looking at the door.

  “Gentlemen,” that solemn chant rolled on, “this dark moment has to make us all aware that our noble national heritage has fallen into desperate danger—a danger most of us have long foreseen. Our precious America has long been in danger from the foul decay of faith, from the corruption of democracy, from liberalism and Marxism and a hundred other idiotic delusions. Through decades of moral rot, everything we cherish has been sinking into gathering peril from all the hordes of apish fools rising up to riot and strike and fight for rights they never earned.

  “Unless we act at once, with resolute vigor and every resource we can command, this last chapter—this gene-spawned terror spreading out of Enfield—can be the end of us and everything we love.”

  He stopped to shake his lean-boned head at Kneeland.

  “We are banded together as the world’s last best hope, sworn to defend the sacred temple of mankind, to rescue and preserve the precious faith and wisdom that have made us what we are, to give our fortunes and our lives if need be to insure the safe survival of that holy heritage that can erase the ancient curse of Cain.

  “That is our holy mission. To defend that precious legacy that can transform the savage animal—the untamed creature that comes from the womb—into the statesman, the scholar, the minister of God. We founded the Catonians because we know that miracle can be wrought, acting in faith that we are chosen to perform it. This demon raging out of Enfield has come sooner than we had foreseen, its guise more dreadful. Even now, however—if you will trust my leadership— we still have a chance.

  “Because we are not naive. We have read the lessons of history and gathered the reins of power. Even now, here in the shadow of terror, with luck enough we can hope to avoid the fatal blunders that have always trapped those misguided leaders of the past who have tried and always failed to gather up and patch the fragments of toppling democracies. Democracies rotting and falling, as they all rot and fall, because they are finally infected with the virus of mobology.”

  Kneeland turned in his chair, frowning a silent question at the editor. The editor shook his head.

  “Look at the list!” Clegg boomed on. “Look at Alexander and Caesar and Napoleon and a thousand others, even down to Hitler. All caught in the same dilemma, trapped between the mobs and their own grand designs. To hold the mobs behind them, they had to wage foreign wars. Victorious or not, they wasted their nations and the nations around them, and they died by violence.

  “Our own hazards are the same. Those mobs would murder us gladly if they had any hint of what we are and what we plan. That’s why our oath of secrecy must be enforced so sternly. We have chosen a safer strategy than the best of our famous predecessors—and we must hold to it, gentlemen, even under this threat of genetic doom. Our control can be firm as any emperor’s, but we must use it with skill and caution.

  “We Catonians must remain invisible. Our rule must be through indirection, through all our means of influence, through our command of money and the media, through electronics and psychology, through a shrewd control of proxy politicos who must never know they’re proxies—not even those few unfortunates we may have to sacrifice.

  “Okay, Gus?” He swung to challenge Kneeland. “Are you with us?”

  “Of course I am!” Kneeland’s voice rose testily. “But you’ve got to remember where I am. Most of you are free to act. I serve two masters—”

  “You swore an oath!”

  “I’ll keep it. The Catonian Plan will always come first. But I should tell you that my other master has grown new teeth. In this emergency, the President wants total discipline. It isn’t martial law—not for us and not quite yet. But he was close to panic when he got us together in the Oval Room early this afternoon.

  “Can you blame him?” Kneeland moved as if to rise. “Suspecting everybody. The Russians. The Puerto Ri-cans. The revived Weathermen. Determined to hush up the crisis till we know what’s going on. If there’s any news leak from official sources, he threatens to have his Secret Service people run the new omnigraph on everybody and shoot suspects without further trial.” His Adam’s apple rose and fell. “I’m in danger, revealing even that.”

  “We’re all in danger.” Clegg shrugged. “Thank you, Gus, for your update on that chaos in the executive branch. Fortunately, we Catonians are in a better situation. The difference is that they’re trapped and helpless in their ignorance and indecision, while we know what to do. We’re going to do it.”

  He swung to face the group with an air almost of triumph.

  “Gentlemen, I have spoken to the President since that session in the Oval Room, and I was able to cool his panic. Slightly, anyhow. I doubt that many of you know that he has always been a secret Catonian. He has agreed to let us activate Plan Black Cat.”

  The men around the table stirred, exchanging puzzled glances.

  “A top secret plan,” he told them. “Developed by our Inner Council. An executive program designed to call up our resources for emergency action. As you are all aware, we do have resources. We have members in the military and the major corporations. People with money. People in the laboratories. We have Bioscience Alert. We have—”

  Kneeland was squinting at his watch.

  “Hold it, Gus. Just a moment more.” Clegg paused again, staring away at something beyond the old mahogany walls and the tall shelves of never-read Victorians. His deepset eyes came back to Kneeland, his tone harshly accusing. “You need to hear this, Gus, because you’ve let those fools at Enfield open the gates of hell. In spite of all your stonewalling, it’s clear enough that you’ve conspired with those fools in the Pentagon to let this demon out of hell.

  “In plainer English, that devil’s crew at EnGene has stolen God’s secret power of creation and abused it to create a monstrous weapon. I warned them, a year and more ago. In their Satanic arrogance, they ignored me. Now most of them are doubtless dead.

  “And we Catonians are going into action.”

  He waited until all their eyes were on him.

  “I have been recalled from retirement with the rank of brigadier general to mobilize and command Task Force Watchdog.” His voice rang with the sheer joy of new authority. “The President has assured me of total support from every arm of government. It should interest you, Gus, to know the true purpose of that conference call you are itching to be party to. The President is going to alert the Chiefs of Staff and order them to expedite our mobilization.”

  He swung as if to challenge Kneeland. Kneeland blinked and shook his head until that outlaw eye had focused on Clegg.

  “The President—” He gulped. “You say the President will approve?”

  “He has approved. As soon as we adjourn, I’m flying to the Enfield area to take personal command.”

  “One—one more question.” Kneeland was pale and trembling. “Under Plan Black Cat, what is to be the status of our own weapons research?”

  Clegg’s gaunt form drew straighter. “I never wanted a genetic weapon. I warned and fought those hell-sent fiends who sought to forge it. If they were the first victims, that is heaven’s justice. But if an actual biological weapon does exist—if God is pressing the blade of Armageddon into my hand—I intend to seize it.”

  He turned back to face the group, a righteous pulpit power returning to his voice. “Gentlemen, we stand in the awful shadow of Armageddon, with God’s final judgment close upon us. Whether or not some new hell weapon has been perfected, evil men from many nations will be scrambling to rule the monstrous fiend now loose in Enfield. Task Force Watchdog will challenge and defeat them, wherever their leering heads may lift. We fight for God, this sword of His wrath ready for our righteous hands, and we will not fail.”

  He nodded at Kneeland, his tone go
ne flat.

  “Okay, Gus. Now you may go.”

  12

  The Burning

  Dust

  Belcraft sat stunned and torn in number nine, staring at the silent TV. Fixed on the empty news desk and the KBIO logo behind it, the camera showed no motion. A faint scent of hot asphalt came through the open door. He heard choppers throbbing far away. Several of them now.

  Vic? Had Vic stayed in Enfield to die with Marty Marks and all those others? Stayed in a trap he knew was closing? That looked probable. But why? Guilt for his own share in some unthinkable scientific blunder?

  Not likely. On the phone last night, he had shown no hint of terror or remorse. Rather, his voice had rung with a sort of grim elation.

  Jeri? That young-sounding woman who had answered Vic’s home phone. The live-in companion whom he had never taken time to marry. Was she, too, among the dead? If Vic had known what was coming, and cared for her as he surely did, why hadn’t he gotten her out?

  Haunting questions. He found no answers.

  Here and now, what for him? Should he run for his life? That panic impulse swept him again. With more choppers arriving, the quarantine around Enfield must have been drawn tighter. Yet gaps would be left. If he waited for the moon and drove without headlamps, he might get through—and carry death for thousands more?

  Shuddering, he took fresh stock of his own sensations. Still stiff and dull from that long day on the road, he wanted food and drink. Later a good workout and a good night’s sleep. Certainly he felt nothing deadly consuming him. But perhaps there were no warning signs. Marty Marks had reported none.

  The killer? What could kill a city, so silently, so totally, so fast?