Firechild

by Jack Williamson

  Why had he let the creature go?

  How could a fat pink worm command instant sympathy? What had it done to win so much aid from a trained physician, a responsible American citizen, a man who certainly should have known how vital it would be to the investigation? He found no answers that pleased them, none that made much sense even to him.

  Why had he come to Enfield? What, exactly, had Vic told him on the phone?

  Dutifully, he repeated most of the words he could recall, repeated them over and over into tape recorders. Most of them. A secret urgency kept burning higher in him, a driving need to get home to Fort Madison and dig through his piled-up mail to find the letter Vic had mailed.

  He knew he ought to reveal its existence. The dust had been a threat to everything alive. Perhaps it still was. All the thousands of troops and scientists and federal agents gathered around the perimeter were fighting to crack the riddle. The letter might hold answers. He told himself all that, and still he didn’t speak.

  A Colonel Heydt arrived in another jeep. He was commandeering the motel for his forward control post. As wary as the rest, he sat in the jeep, watching Belcraft through binoculars and shouting more demands, snarling obscenities when Belcraft kept insisting that Vic had never said or written anything about his work or his life here.

  Two Army trucks pulled into the parking lot before noon, filled with sunburnt National Guardsmen. Colonel Heydt appeared again, barking angry orders and listening from the jeep while he described the pink thing for them. He watched them scatter into the weeds toward the creek.

  They discovered nothing.

  He spent most of the next two months in number nine, Dusek in command of his guards. Heydt’s staff headquarters were in the front rooms. Meals came from a field kitchen on the parking lot. Most of the choppers had departed. The National Guard company kept searching, mowing weeds and clearing brush, finding only chiggers.

  One morning Mrs. Bard was escorted to his room, looking ill and weepily grim, claiming her pay for the extra night he had spent there before the Army commandeered the motel. He borrowed his billfold to find thirty dollars, and let her keep the change.

  She wanted to know if he had seen her son when he went across the creek. Her poor dear Frankie. She felt sure he was still alive, trapped and suffering in the ruins of the lab. Next day the guards told him that a search detail had found her wandering in the ashes. Later he learned that she had been sent away to her sister in Colorado.

  The colonel was a pudgy little man, with sagging red dewlaps and a raspy nasal voice. A retired Army doctor, unhappy about his recall from a comfortable private practice, he seemed to blame Belcraft for the whole Enfield disaster. Pressing the inquisition, he refused to let him get a lawyer, or call anyone outside, or even see the general.

  Kept in isolation, Belcraft spent sleepless nights enduring torments of his own. Guilt grew in him over Vic’s letter. In spite of ceaseless appeals to his sense of humanity in danger and threats of a federal prison, in spite of sometimes feeling half convinced that Colonel Heydt had good cause to blame him, he never spoke about it—and never quite knew why. He never found a rational reason to care what became of the pink thing. Yet, to his own surprise, he felt a haunting loneliness for it. Somehow, he missed it even more than he missed Midge.

  Kalenka came to trust him more than the colonel ever did. When he set up a laboratory in what had been the motel dining room, he let Belcraft work with him, washing glassware at first, weighing specimens and keeping records, finally running tests on his own.

  They found the dust to be sterile, consisting mostly of simple oxides apparently formed from the calcium and other nonvolatile elements in the life it had devoured. Nothing remained to reveal what had made it so deadly then, so harmless now. Mixed with the oxides, Belcraft found complex molecules that baffled him.

  “Heat sinks?” he suggested. “The oxidations must have released a lot of heat, but there was never any warmth I could feel. Perhaps this stuff was formed by endothermic reactions that protected the lethal agent from the heat of its own metabolism.” And he had to add, “We’re dealing with something new in biology— something we haven’t learned how to see.”

  Kalenka merely shrugged.

  His interrogators had never seemed to listen when he wanted to take his case to the general. Dusek seemed as surprised as he was one day when a message came that Clegg wanted him at post headquarters.

  The perimeter had been extended since the night he got to Enfield. Headquarters was a commandeered mansion on a hill, a safe ten miles back from the ashes but still inside the redrawn lines. Dusek parked the jeep on the drive and took him inside. A black sergeant kept them waiting for an endless hour before he let them into what had been the dining room.

  “So you’re Saxon Belcraft?”

  General Clegg faced him across a big table. A window wall beyond it showed banks of well-kept flowers around a huge swimming pool. Against that strong backlight, the general’s features were hard to see.

  “I’m Belcraft.” He nodded. “I’ve been asking to see you. I think I’ve been detained here too long, with very little cause.”

  “Perhaps.” The general kept him standing. “Kalenka has asked me to consider your release, but you’ll have to answer my questions first.”

  He waited under the general’s coldly probing stare. Eyes adjusting to the light, he made out a figure of autocratic power, tall and gaunt, sitting very straight, medals glinting on the uniform. On the high forehead, a pale birthmark showed faintly through makeup meant to cover it.

  “Better answer carefully.” The questions came at last, solemn-toned and slow. “Are you a loyal American?”

  “I think so.” Bitterly, he added, “I’ve had to swear that a thousand times since your men arrested me.”

  “Your loyalty is important to us.” The general nodded calmly. “Can you put service over self?”

  “I’m a physician.”

  “Can you accept discipline?”

  “From whom?”

  “Authority.” The general’s voice rose slightly. “Legitimate authority, sanctioned under God.”

  “I try to respect the law, if that’s what you mean.”

  He waited, puzzled and resentful, until the general shrugged.

  “Doctor, I had hoped for something more affirmative.” A doubtful frown. “In your special case, however, perhaps that will have to do.” Yet the general paused again, as if to give him time to wonder. The rawboned face creased with what was meant to be a smile. “Dr. Belcraft, I am going to offer you an opportunity we have always reserved for a very few selected men. I am inviting you to join an extremely exclusive organization —a group that exists and acts in the strictest secrecy.”

  Belcraft was shaking his head.

  “You can trust me.” A frosty smile. “You must trust me, because I can tell you very little more before you accept the obligations of membership. Under our very strict rules, I am forbidden to reveal the name of our group, or its meeting place, or the identity of any other member.”

  “Sir,” Belcraft began. “I don’t—”

  “I can’t allow you to decline.” The commanding voice never paused. “If you insist on some stronger assurance, I can at least inform you that the organization is devoted to our own high vision of a regenerated America. As a member, you will be required to subordinate your own private concerns to that noble vision. You will submit yourself to a necessary discipline—”

  “Sir!” Belcraft nerved himself to protest. “Coming from you, that surprises me. It puzzles me. But it doesn’t sound like anything I want to join.”

  “Better think about it.” The general’s tone grew colder. “Membership can give you rewards that most men never even hope for. I can’t define them now, not until you have been inducted. However, there is something else I can tell you.” His long pause seemed deliberately ominous. “If you refuse to join, we’ll make you regret it.”

  Trembling, Belcraft wished he had been
allowed to sit. He heard the rasp of wrath in the general’s voice, and saw that crimson birthmark turning darker.

  “However,” he heard himself saying, “I do refuse.”

  “Fool!” The general came upright. For half a minute he stood trembling, big fists clenched. At last, jaws set, he sank slowly back into his chair. “You’ve had your chance. Don’t forget it!”

  “I’m not likely to forget.”

  “Your best chance.” The general scowled and shook his head, his emotion almost controlled. “That’s all I can say about our secret group, but I can brief you on two very public organizations that share some of the same high objectives. Those two are Bioscience Alert and Task Force Watchdog. I like to call them the armies of God. Called to battle in a holy Armageddon to stamp out the madness that destroyed the city of Enfield.”

  His voice had assumed an oratoric roll.

  “Belcraft, we serve a sacred cause! A desperate campaign that I had to lead alone for too many years. A year and more ago, I came here to warn your brother and his fellow madmen what their Satanic work could lead to. They laughed at me and returned to their black blasphemy. You have seen the frightful consequences.”

  The general paused with a savage little grin.

  “I hope you don’t approve of them!”

  “Sir! Please—”

  “Your brother!” The general mouthed the word like something foul. “Your brother and those others should have been destroyed like the fiends of hell they are. And they could have been—but for the tragic circumstance that we must also wage another holy war.

  “That is our unending campaign to save the freedom and the soul of mankind from the atheistic blight of Marxist communism. The Soviets have their own devil’s nests of genetic engineers—most of them, so I understand, unwilling slaves toiling under torture in the prison labs—toiling to perfect genetic horror bombs with which the Kremlin plots to overwhelm the world. Your brother’s crew begged for research funds, promising that they could give us a genetic defensive capacity.

  “The debate was secret—as it must remain!” The general stabbed a warning finger at him. “But the weapon-makers won. Your brother and his fellow demons were allowed to brew their broth of hell, the genetic terror that wiped out Enfield! I’m delighted that they have met their own divine atonement. A forgiving God has apparently erased the plague they engineered, all but that single demoniac creation.

  “Your own pet monster!” His tone turned harsh with accusation. “A literal demon, I believe, conceived in hell and left on Earth to spread the plague again. I am told that it bewitched you, Doctor. True?”

  “I never felt bewitched.” Almost overwhelmed by the general’s air of righteous might, Belcraft shook his head. “The creature did appeal to my emotions. It seemed helpless. Pathetic. I know—I’m certain it is absolutely harmless.”

  “Hah!” An indignant snort. “It’s a child of Satan, left here among us like the serpent in Eden. It has tempted you and escaped to mock us. But it has to be hunted down. It has to be exterminated, like the devil’s spawn it is.” A raw violence shook his voice. “Crushed like a venomous spider! Burned with holy fire. Its foul dust cursed forever!”

  “You’ll have to find it first.”

  “You—you are bewitched!” The handprint burned redder, and the general’s savage thunder made him almost sorry for that impish interjection. “But I warn you, Belcraft! Your brother and his friends have created death and desolation. They themselves have perished for it, and their evil creations shall not prevail. Almighty God has struck them down and quenched their hellish fire. And His work is not yet done.

  “Look at me, you infidel!” The general clenched a hairy hand. “Look at the hard fist of God! Raised to smite these infernal engineers and win our Armageddon. I warn you, Belcraft!”

  The general dropped his voice and leaned across the table.

  “I warn you not to speak of what I’ve told you here. Not to anybody, not for any reason—you don’t know who our agents are, but they will follow you. They will see to it that you keep silent. And, in time to come—” The general shook his head in mock regret. “You’ll repent the witchcraft that has led you to deny the righteous cause of God!”

  “Sir, you’re dead wrong—”

  No longer listening, the general bent to touch a button on the table. The black sergeant came to take him back to the jeep. He was astonished next morning when Dusek returned his billfold and his keys, with the news that he was free.

  “To go?”

  “Wherever.” Dusek shrugged. “Orders from the general. I’m to see you out of the perimeter. No stops inside.”

  As much puzzled as relieved, he started the car and pulled away from the Enbard Mo el. Dusek followed him in the jeep, out beyond the general’s commandeered hilltop mansion to a new chain link fence, barbed wire strung along the top and guards on duty at the gate. The guards frowned at him and questioned Dusek and phoned headquarters and finally let him out.

  With an uneasy glance behind, he started back toward Fort Madison.

  21

  A Dream of

  Alphamega

  Going home!

  Dusek and General Clegg and number nine left behind him, Belcraft rejoiced in the speed and power of the car. It drove well, and he rolled a window glass down to relish the rich scents of summer. The day was splendid, bright and windless, not yet too hot, a few small puffs of cumulus budding white against the milky blue.

  Getting back at last to pick up his neglected practice. Back to look for Vic’s letter and whatever it might reveal. His own man again—or was he, really?

  The car swayed from a rough spot in the pavement. Eighty miles an hour. He squinted into the rearview mirror. The guarded gate was already far behind, diminishing fast, and he saw no pursuit.

  Slowing to a. careful fifty-five, he tried to imagine what might lie ahead. That wasn’t easy. The ashes of Enfield were too hard to forget. The pink thing stuck in his mind, a riddle never solved. What had she been meant to be?

  Awe brushed him again. If she was really Vic’s creation, the seed of a wholly new tree of life, engineered to bear more perfect fruit than the human—what might she mean to the human future? Should he want her to live? Or was she in fact the insidious serpent in Eden, somehow bewitching him into betraying his kind?

  He shrank from the thought, shivering a little, but still he longed to know how she had fared since he had watched her crawl away into the weeds. Whatever she might become, he couldn’t help hoping that her unknown gifts had been great enough to keep her alive.

  Longing to know, hoping for news, he tried the radio. Washington authorities had confirmed more ugly details of what they had at last begun to call the Enfield catastrophe. Just this morning, General Clegg had allowed the first camera crew inside the quarantine perimeter, far enough to see the strange gray killer-dust that science was still unable to explain.

  “Thirty thousand killed,” the surgeon general had reported. “All that remains is the ashy residue into which the unidentified lethal factor crumbled all organic matter it had touched. Collected specimens now appear totally inert, with no pathogen discoverable. Until the unknown fatal vector can be understood and controlled, we must take every possible precaution against reactivation.”

  Martial law remained in effect around the disaster area, General Adrian Clegg in command. At his insistence, both the FBI and the CIA had been shaken up, new directors appointed. Four different congressional investigations were in progress, none with findings ready to report.

  Once again, the President had repeated his expressions of bewilderment and grief, offering heartfelt sympathy to surviving relatives and friends, trying to restore the courage of the shaken nation. “Though such losses are painful, we have kept the rest of America safe. We’ll continue to keep it safe.”

  Nothing new. Uneasily, he kept looking into the rear-view mirror. At first the road was empty, but presently a light-blue car crept up as if to pass and then
lagged back again. He slowed to fifty, and still it didn’t pass. He pushed the car to seventy and beyond, and still it stayed in the mirror. Finally, he pulled into a Chevron station that shone with the same bold red and white and blue he recalled, shining in the dust.

  The blue car went on by. He glimpsed a frowsy-looking woman at the wheel. A heavy bald man sat slumped down beside her, apparently asleep. They didn’t slow or glance at him, yet he kept on wondering.

  His abrupt release was still a puzzle. Refusing to join Clegg’s super-secret group had certainly earned him no favors. If the lethal vector was still unknown, the pink thing still at large—why had they let him go?

  He shrugged and pulled the car toward a no-lead pump. If they had no convincing reason to turn him loose, they had none to hold him—not since they had found him uninfected. Nor any cause to follow, so far as he could imaging. Anyhow, whatever the reason, he was on the way.

  The attendant eyed him warily.

  “Mister, where you from?”

  “Back toward Enfield.”

  “Sorry, sir.” The attendant backed way. “Fresh out of no-lead.”

  “May I use your phone?” He nodded at the curbside booth. “I need to call home.”

  “Out of order.” The attendant waved him toward the road. “Sorry, sir. Uh—a funeral coming up. Got to close the station.”

  He drove on. At the next town he circled a block to be coming from a different direction when he pulled into another Chevron station, and got gas with no questions. He found another phone and dialed his office number. No answer.

  Which was no real surprise. Driving out of town that morning before he thought Miss Hearn would be awake, he had stopped by the office to leave her a note.

  Unexpected trip to Enfield to see my brother there. Cancel everything through Wednesday. Will call tomorrow.