Firechild

by Jack Williamson

  “Perhaps. But you have not obtained the files.” His small eyes sharpened. “Did Carboni speak of anything of greater interest to the Center?”

  “Carboni says there are notes made on a word processor for a letter Belcraft was planning to write his brother. Carboni got into the computer to make his own printout of the notes. Sketching Belcraft’s whole career at EnGene. His disagreements with the weapon-builders and his ideas for some new creation. If the letter was actually written, it would be a fascinating document. Even the notes should be revealing.”

  “This brother? Where is he?”

  “He’s a physician in Fort Madison. A town on the Mississippi. We sent an agent there, who found him away. His office nurse says he called her on the morning of the disaster to say he was driving to Enfield. He has not returned. She has heard nothing more.”

  “Was he involved in the genetic research?”

  “Apparently not. On the night before the disaster, he received a telephone call from his brother at EnGene —a call Carboni was able to record. We have a transcript here.” She nodded at the envelope. “The brother —Victor Belcraft—speaks of a letter, which he says has been safely mailed. Perhaps he was anticipating the disaster. Something in his call seems to have alarmed the doctor-brother.”

  “He reached Enfield in time to die there?”

  “No. I don’t think so.” A troubled headshake. “Scorpio is not my only agent. We have informers in the American task force. One of them has reported a survivor picked up inside the quarantine perimeter—a Dr. Saxon Belcraft. He must be the brother from Fort Madison.”

  “If that’s true—” His eyes narrowed. “The Americans are doubtless interrogating him. We must learn what he says.”

  “There’s something stranger.” Her voice dropped. “The informer reports that this brother ventured into the devastated area, where all life had been erased. The task force is still afraid of contagion, but he came out alive. He brought a creature with him. A queer little animal that had survived whatever destroyed the city.” She caught her breath, leaning a little toward him. “It is said to be a sort of thing never seen before. Perhaps the para-life discussed in the Belcraft documents.”

  “The file you failed to obtain.”

  “We made every possible effort.” She tried not to flinch from his rasp of accusation. “Scorpio says Carboni is afraid of us and afraid of the CIA. He has refused to reveal where he is hiding. Since he failed to meet us in Chicago, we have no way to reach him. With military law in effect around Enfield, and the whole nation under emergency alert—” She shrugged unhappily.

  “The American investigators have accomplished nothing. I’m afraid we’ll do no better.”

  “Comrade!” he scolded her. “We are never negative.”

  “I’ll make every possible effort.” Gamely, she tried to brighten. “Even if we have lost Carboni, we have others as competent. I believe we are still ahead of the Great Enemy.”

  She used the familiar Russian phrase, Glavni Vrag.

  “They appear to know even less than we do about the deadly agent. The evidence indicates that all its makers died in the disaster. Though Carboni once threatened to have his films given to the CIA if harm came to him, that has not yet happened.”

  “If that is the case—”

  Shuvalov paused, hard little eyes fixed unreadably upon her. She had begun to flush before he reached across the table for the envelope. His sallow smile relieved her.

  “Comrade, I commend you.” His tone was suddenly too warm. “The fact that the Americans don’t know what is killing them will be welcome news at the Center. You have done well in a hazardous emergency, and I shall forward a commendation along with my analysis of this material.”

  “Thank you, comrade!”

  He was rising. “I’ll have new orders for you later today. Based on revised instructions from the Center. I believe our plan of campaign is already clear. The panic in the American military seems to indicate that the secret of their super-weapon was lost in the disaster.

  “We are to make certain that it is not recovered. If Carboni’s photos still exist, we must obtain them. If Belcraft’s letter to his brother was mailed in time to escape destruction, we must secure it. If the brother and the creature from the ruins can offer clues to the nature of the weapon—”

  He paused, quick little eyes probing into her.

  “I understand.” She came slowly to her feet. “The brother and his queer little creature must be eliminated, though.” She had to shake her head. “The Americans will have them under heavy guard, somewhere inside the quarantine perimeter. They may be hard to reach.”

  “They can be—have to be erased.” The pale smile turned him uglier. “Our best chance to sting the Glavni Vrag!”

  15

  Born of Fire?

  Before Belcraft reached the bridge, a chopper dropped and hovered ahead of him. A little blizzard of bright flakes swirled down around him. He stopped the car and climbed out to read smeary black print on an orange-colored leaflet.

  DANGER! KEEP OUT!

  AREA CONTAMINATED!

  All persons are hereby warned that the ruins of Enfield and the surrounding area are under a strict quarantine required by public safety and enforced by military law. Trespassers are in danger of infection by an unidentified biological vector.

  WARNING!

  LOOTERS WILL BE SHOT ON SIGHT!

  By order of General Adrian Clegg

  Commander, Task Force Watchdog

  Waiting in the car, Belcraft looked across the bridge into that forbidden ground. It was now an ashen gray, as if from a fall of dirty snow. He saw nothing in it moving, but closer to him sparrows were flitting around the untouched trees along the creek. The bicycle lay unharmed where that luckless boy had fallen. His dust had eaten no farther into the weeds. Higher up the slope, those straggling sunflowers stood where they had been, bent now toward the western sun.

  Had the contagion really stopped?

  Heart beating faster, he watched the chopper rise and then drove on across the bridge and up the slope. A hundred yards into the dust, he stopped again to look around him. The road was still nearly bare; all the growth beside it had been dissolved into that fine gray powder. A tall chimney stood starkly alone where a home must have been, a red-brick monument to death.

  He felt surprised to find so much unchanged. The dust was almost the color of ashes. Everything wooden had been consumed: buildings and signposts and telephone poles. It seemed strange to him that there had been so little actual fire to blacken brick or stone, crumple or darken the still-bright metal.

  The chopper was circling back, hammering the stagnant heat, flying so low that it lifted a thick gray cloud. A breath of that reached him, edged with a queer dry sharpness a little like vinegar, more like new paint.

  He scrambled out of the car. Fighting the impulse to shake his fist, he stood waving the chopper away. It kept drifting closer, the hot blast stirring up dust to wash him. His eyes began to burn. His nostrils stung. He sneezed. Gasping, close to panic, he waved both arms.

  It sank closer. His eyes had blurred, but he caught the glint of lenses. Men in uniform, leaning to watch him with binoculars. Eager to observe and report what the dust did to him.

  So far, nothing worse than a fit of hay fever. He didn’t like the stink, but it was no worse than anatomy labs he remembered. With a grin of bleak relief, he climbed back into the car and shut the windows. At least, he thought, they weren’t likely to shoot him for a looter. Not so long as he was their live guinea pig.

  He blew his nose and waited. The chopper rose a little, pulling back until the dust cloud no longer reached him, but still it hung there. He counted eight others farther off in the shimmering heat, all cruising low. Metal vultures, wheeling over this alien desert where only metal could survive.

  The closed car grew suffocating. He started the engine and turned on the air conditioner. The chopper dropped again, circling him. He opened the door
for a moment and waved to let the crewmen know he wasn’t dead. Not yet, anyhow. They kept on watching.

  Overheating, the engine slowed and bucked and died. He sweated again, watching the chopper and scanning the ashen landscape. A little cluster of taller downtown buildings stood undamaged on the dancing horizon. One of them, no doubt, was the Enfield Trust tower, where Marty Marks had watched the last convulsions of the dying city. A Chevron station, nearer, glistened red and white and blue, bright as an unwrapped Christmas toy. When at last the chopper rose and roared away, he got a can of water there and cooled off his engine.

  He drove ahead. Beyond that shining Chevron station, a pile of burnt-out vehicles clogged the entrance to a divided highway. He jolted over curbs to get around them, then turned south toward where he thought the EnGene labs must have stood.

  The road led him through what had been a residential district. The homes were gone, their flattened sites left littered with brick and metal: naked chimneys, uncovered plumbing, dusty appliances still in place on concrete floors or tumbled crazily where wooden floors had gone to dust. A business section looked oddly half intact, signs still bright and masonry walls still standing, though most roofs had caved in.

  The skeleton of a burned fire engine lay more than half across the EnGene exit ramp. He scraped around it, reckless of damaged paint. Half a mile beyond, bare steel beams rose out of toppled ruin. He picked a wary way toward them across fields of dust, avoiding dead fire trucks and police cars and the empty van from KBIO, until he had to stop before a wall of blast-tossed debris.

  What now?

  He sat sweating in the car for half a minute, then climbed gingerly out into ankle-deep dust. The new-paint reek rose strong around him, the stink of starkest tragedy. This dismal ruin marked his brother’s grave. The tomb, he thought, of all the EnGene staff—if Task Force Watchdog had found survivors, it would hardly be raking the dust so avidly for clues no longer likely to exist.

  Certainly, he had seen no hint of any answer. Yet this was the spot where the disaster had begun. If any evidence of the killer’s origin did remain, here was his chance to be first upon it.

  He caught a breath that almost choked him and plodded toward a gap in the shattered wall. A louder drumming checked him, and a rush of burning wind. A chopper floated closer, blinding him with dust. He bent to a spasm of sneezing. With a handkerchief to his nose, he pushed on—and saw a flash of pink.

  Something moving!

  Something small, slowly crawling, searching its way out of a mountain of shattered mortar and broken concrete blocks. The handkerchief slipped out of his fingers. Dazed by the thing’s total strangeness, he stood watching while it squirmed across a scrap of fire-scarred metal. Pausing at the edge as if to look ahead, it dived out of sight into the rubble.

  Life!

  How could anything be still alive, here in the killer’s very cradle? Gasping, trembling, he recovered the handkerchief and blew his nose and stumbled closer. There! He found it crawling over a broken brick. It paused, almost as if it had perceived him. The head end rose toward him. In a moment, it came on.

  They met. He knelt in the ashes to peer down at it.

  The blunt pink head appeared as if to look up at him, though it had no eyes that he could see.

  “In God’s name, what are you?”

  In all he knew of zoology, there had been nothing like it. The skin was slick and bright, unbroken anywhere. It had no legs or wings or antennae, no appendages at all, no apparent sense organs, yet he knew it was aware of him.

  He reached for it, and it leaned to rub against his fingers like a friendly cat. When he spread his hand, it curled into his palm. Its skin was warm and dry, and he felt it throbbing like a purring kitten. He stood up and held it close to study it again. It looked featureless as a pink sausage.

  “What are you?” he muttered again. “How’d you stay alive?”

  Its blunt head moved as if to study him, but it made no other response. Squinting at it, he recalled that long-gone night with Vic in Cincinnati after their father’s funeral, recalled Vic’s crazy-seeming dream of writing a new genetic code to create a new family tree engineered to grow something better than humanity, perhaps closer to divinity. Was this small thing the first fruit of that new tree, shaped of something different from any familiar natural protoplasm, its laws and limits unknown?

  He shivered at the notion—but only for an instant. For he liked it, in spite of its shape and its strangeness. He trusted it without needing to know why.

  “Whatever—” He shrugged, grinning down at it. “You’re okay, but still I’d like to know—”

  He started walking with it back into the tangled ruin, trying to follow the wavering track it had left in the ashes. It moved on his palm, shrinking back toward him as if it didn’t want to return, but he went on until he lost its trail at that gap in the wall.

  It had come out of the blackened wreckage beyond, a jungle of broken masonry and tangled steel too thick for him to penetrate. Fallen beams, shattered concrete and brick, burned wire, torn and flattened air ducts, twisted pipes and burned metal fixtures, all were covered with actual ashes darker than the dust, the bitter stink of recent fire sharper here than the new-paint reek.

  Born of fire?

  The notion stuck in his mind, not quite rational yet oddly appealing. Its actual womb must have been some test tube or petri dish now shattered and fused and forever lost, but its survival seemed to hint at some remarkable immunity to flame and chaos. He peered through the gap, wondering if it had endured the explosion in some basement space too deep for blast and heat to reach, but any search for such a site would have to wait for bulldozers.

  It squirmed and shivered in his hand. He found the chopper roaring close behind him, kicking up a suffocating cloud that rolled in around him. Two men with binoculars leaned out to study him. He gasped and wiped his stinging eyes. Trying desperately with his free hand to wave them off, he shielded the pink thing against his chest and stumbled back to the car.

  Keeping too close, flying too low, the chopper followed him back out of the ruin, back to the highway. He found a National Guard jeep parked on the bridge. A man in Army camouflage got out as he neared it, one hand lifted to stop him, a pistol ready in the other.

  He stopped and rolled down the glass. On the seat beside him, the pink thing nestled against his hip as if to hide. He felt it shuddering.

  “Halt!” A brittle-toned command. “Identify yourself.”

  “Belcraft,” he said. “Dr. Saxon Belcraft. I practice general medicine in Fort Madison, Iowa.” He climbed out of the car. “Who are you?”

  “Fair enough.” A tight-lipped grin. “Lieutenant Joseph Dusek, US Army. On temporary duty with Task Force Watchdog. My orders now are to find out what you’re doing here.”

  “I came here to Enfield to see my brother. He is—or was—employed here at EnGene labs. A state cop kept me out of town, but I was caught inside your quarantine line.”

  “You’re lucky to be alive. I doubt the cop is.” Impatient accusation sharpened Dusek’s voice. “You’re a trespasser here. Don’t you know that?”

  “I picked up a leaflet.”

  “You were seen picking up something else.” Dusek stepped closer. He hadn’t shaved. He smelled of sweat. His eyes were black-rimmed and bloodshot, as if he hadn’t slept. “Just now. In yonder.” His gun gestured. “What was it?”

  “If you want a look—”

  He reached for the pink thing. It recoiled, but he slid his hand under it and lifted it out of the car. It shuddered away from Dusek, trying to crawl up his sleeve. Dusek gaped at it, backing away with an equal aversion.

  “What the hell?”

  “I found it crawling out of what used to be the En-Gene labs. That’s all I know.”

  “It was alive in there?”

  “Evidently.”

  “Could it—” Dusek shrank farther. “Could it carry the plague?”

  “The plague—the lethal effect,
whatever it was— seems to have stopped.” He lifted the pink thing higher. “It seems harmless. Affectionate, in fact.”

  “You’re crazy!” Dusek blinked at him glassily. “Where are you going with it?”

  “For now, “back to that motel.” He drew the pink thing back away from Dusek, and it snuggled gratefully into his palm. “Afterward—” He shrugged.

  “Stay there!” Dusek waved the gun. “Keep your monster with you. Away from anybody else, in case it is the killer. Watchdog will want to see it.” Retreating toward the jeep, he paused to add: “If you try to claim you didn’t know, just remember the contaminated area is under military law. I could kill you for trespassing. I won’t do that, but you are under house arrest. Stay in your room till Watchdog comes.”

  He paused, scowling and backing farther from the pink thing.

  “Got that?”

  “I’ve got it.”

  Dusek backed the jeep off the bridge, beckoned him across, and followed him back to the motel. He parked outside number nine. Dusek stopped on the road, shouting into a mobile phone. Inside the stifling room, he heard the jeep roar and burn rubber, getting away.

  The pink thing wrapped itself around his forefinger when he tried to lay it on the unmade bed. He pushed it off gently. Starting to the bathroom, he heard a faint squeak and looked back to find it squirming off the bed.

  “Dry?”

  It shrilled again, and he saw a tiny mouth open now in the middle of its head. He picked it up and brought it with him. Whistling eagerly, it leaned toward the lavatory. When he opened the dripping faucet, it dived off his hand into the basin.

  “You were dry!”

  It played five minutes in the water, swimming and leaping and diving again before it climbed to the basin rim and raised its tiny mouth to whistle at him, he thought happily. He carried it back to the bed and left it there while he looked for a beer. Three cans were left from the six-pack. He opened one. When the warm beer spewed, the pink thing whistled, leaping eagerly toward the spray.