Firechild

by Jack Williamson

  “Still …” Dazedly, Kalenka shook his head. “Still a prisoner. Still a riddle to us. Now in apparent need of medical care we don’t know how to give.” He squinted into Belcraft’s face as if to find his answers there. “She is, of course, under interrogation. More intense as she recovers from her hardships. She is clearly intelligent, though reluctant to speak and then only in the broken Spanish she must have learned from Torres. However—”

  His lean face turned bleak.

  “She won’t tell us anything. Her unfortunate attitude has placed her life in danger. Yesterday she was badly injured by an interrogator who seems to have displayed more sadism than common sense. I thought she was dead—though we know too little about her vital processes to be certain of anything about her. This morning, like Torres and yourself, she seems to have begun a remarkable recovery. Still, however, she refuses to talk. All of which brings us to one more question.”

  His probing eyes narrowed.

  “About her contacts with you.”

  “She amazes me.” Belcraft shrugged. “I don’t understand anything she does.”

  “There are things we’ve got to understand.” Kalenka bent closer, with an air of dogged patience. “We let you return to Fort Madison. You were hospitalized there for minor injuries suffered in a gas explosion not yet well explained, though it happened around the time the creature is thought to have fallen into that well.”

  “She saved—saved my life.” Belcraft hesitated. “It’s nothing you’ll want to believe, but if you want what happened, here it is. She had been searching for me— searching, however she does it, from down in the bottom of that well, because she needed my help. She saw the explosion about to happen. Speaking in what seemed like a dream—it’s nothing I can explain—she warned me to get out of the house.”

  “Nothing I want to believe.” Kalenka turned sardonic. “Military intelligence reports from Fort Madison that you had abandoned your medical practice and fallen heavily into debt—”

  “No choice of my own!”

  “Your insurers are charging—”

  “Perhaps.” He shrugged. “Perhaps I am suspected of arson. But I’m alive. So is Meg—unless you kill her here. Which is all that really matters to me now.”

  “Belcraft, I don’t know what to make of you.” Kalenka’s frown bit deeper, his stare still accusing. “No matter how you try to rationalize whatever you’re involved in, you’ve got a lot to answer for.” He gestured with his finger as if pointing at items on a list. “You were a patient in the Fort Madison hospital. You conferred with your attorney, who admits that he had informed you of pending legal charges. You walked out at night, with no permission from anybody. He let you have his car—he says unwillingly. You drove back here. You walked directly to that well and pulled the creature out. How did you find her?”

  “Another dream—if that’s the word for however she reaches me. Of course I wonder. I never took much stock in parapsychology, but this has to be some sort of mental contact. It seems to happen only during sleep or half-sleep. Could be the waking mind creates some kind of barrier. Not that I can explain Alphamega or anything about her.”

  “I don’t know—” Kalenka sat down slowly on the bed, looking suddenly very tired. “I don’t know what to think.”

  “About Meg?” Belcraft caught at a hint of troubled sympathy in him. “Are you—are you going to kill her?”

  Kalenka sat silent for a moment as if he hadn’t heard.

  “She’s—well, a very difficult problem.” He shook his head, speaking half to himself. “Too many riddles with no apparent answers.” His baffled eyes returned to Belcraft. “You realize that we’ve got to learn all we can about what she is and how she’s linked to the disaster. She came out of the same lab where it began. If En-Gene was working toward some biological weapon, we need all we can learn about it. For the sake of national defense. In any case, she offers fascinating scientific puzzles. But in the end—”

  He paused, with a darker frown at Belcraft.

  “In the end, she will have to be destroyed.”

  “No!” He tried to smooth his voice and frame some reasonable appeal. “She hasn’t hurt anybody. I don’t think it’s in her to hurt anybody. Think—think what she is!”

  “I’m afraid of what she is.”

  “But she isn’t—isn’t anything to fear. I admit she does sometimes frighten me, but that’s only because I don’t understand all her gifts. My brother created her. He used to talk about what he hoped to do with genetic engineering. Our own natural creation, he used to say, came about through a random, hit-or-miss evolutionary process that took billions of years. Now, he thought, we should be able to engineer evolution to create some better sort of being than we are.

  “That’s what he hoped to do. His great dream was to create a new sort of life without the defects and limits we owe to all the accidents of our animal origins. Something closer to gods than to men, he used to say, as we have always imagined gods. To my mind, that’s what Alphamega was meant to be. But she’s still a child. Maybe less than he hoped to make her, because his work was interrupted. Yet I’m coming to see her as the first try toward a new and better species. The Eve, perhaps, of a totally new order of being. A child goddess!”

  “Perhaps she is.” Kalenka nodded gloomily. “That’s why I’m afraid.”

  “Of a single harmless child?”

  “Because of what she might become.” Though the room was cool, he found a handkerchief and mopped his haggard face. “Belcraft, it does trouble me. However she came to be, she’s certainly something wonderful. But I’m afraid to let her stay alive.”

  Staggered by Kalenka’s deliberate finality, he groped to recover himself. “Have you—have you talked to other scientists?”

  “Of course!” Kalenka seemed oddly angry. “We’ve debated her. Ever since you found her. Among ourselves in the research staff. With a few outsiders we’ve had to trust. There is sentiment in her favor, and tremendous scientific curiosity. But nothing else touches the one big issue: Whose world do we want it to be?”

  “Whose world?”

  “I told you I’m a Jew.” Silent for a moment, Kalenka looked almost apologetic. “I’ve seen genocide. I abhor it. But let’s assume she’s all you think she is—the first pioneer of a better race than we are, engineered to replace us on earth. Are you ready to say humanity has failed? Ready to let her children crowd us off the planet, the way our own forebears must have pushed a hundred or a thousand older species off?”

  “A crazy notion! One baby girl? Do you think Vic engineered her to exterminate mankind? You didn’t know my brother …”

  “Nor do I know what he did.” Wearily, Kalenka sagged where he sat on the edge of the bed. “But I can’t forget what happened to Enfield. I’m afraid your brother blinded himself to all that was coming out of his lab. We simply can’t afford to take the chance that this little monster could be deadlier than the dust—harmless as she may look to you.”

  “You’re wrong!” Belcraft whispered. “Terribly wrong!”

  “Another thing,” Kalenka added, frowning unhappily. “General Clegg is following everything we do—he has called me twice already today. He seems more frightened than I am by what he believes about the creature. To him, her abilities are gifts of Satan. He keeps quoting a passage out of the Bible. Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.

  “He sees her a literal witch, sent from hell to lure the world toward destruction by science turned Satanic. He’s convinced she brought the disaster. Only a warning, he says, of the terrors she has come to spread. He’s demanding her destruction—soon!

  “Officers on his staff and people in his Cato Club are holding out for time to complete our study of her. Some of them are keen to get a biological weapon. More are hoping we can learn how to defend ourselves against biology gone wrong. But the fact is that we have very little time.”

  “I … I see.”

  “Something else I must add.” Kalenka hesitated, look
ing uncomfortable. “I don’t like to threaten you. I can’t honestly promise that either you or Torres will ever be liberated. You both appear to know too much. But I want you to keep in mind that we can make things easier for both of you if you and she cooperate.”

  Belcraft found no words to say.

  “I’m sorry.” Kalenka’s features tightened as if with genuine regret. “But that’s that way it is. You won’t be released again.”

  31

  Keri Grant

  Anya came back to Kennedy on a Concorde, wearing a curly red wig and more exotic makeup. In her new identity, she was returning to America after five years in Europe. Her passport had been expertly forged to support a cover story based on information Tim Clegg had gathered from the Watchdog files.

  She and her twin sister had grown up on an Indiana farm, encouraged by their mother to hope for great careers in art or letters. Liberated by money from an uncle more generous than their hard-headed farmer-father, they both left the farm on the day they turned twenty-one.

  Jeri entered a New York art school. Keri, with more wanderlust than any settled aim, had gone on to Paris, looking for the fabulous world of carefree bohemians their romance-minded mother had always dreamed about.

  She found the old Left Bank long since faded into mythic history, along with Hemingway and Steinbeck and Gertrude Stein. Even when her own talent proved to be another mirage, she had kept on chasing romantic illusions through an Amsterdam commune and love affairs with a penniless Italian who claimed to be a count and an American drifter who said his father owned a Las Vegas casino and finally a Frenchman who promised to make her a movie star.

  Now, in the aftermath of the Enfield tragedy, she had resolved to put those silly dreams behind her. The legacy nearly gone, she would soon need an honest job. First, however, she had come home to learn what had happened to her sister and her parents. In Piedmond, the nearest airport town still alive, she checked into the quaint old Norman Towers, whose red-brick battlements had been laid up the year the railroad came.

  Tim Clegg, so their story went, had met her while he was stationed in Europe. She called the number he had given her for Captain Sam Holliday. Two hours later, he came up to her room and stopped a moment in the doorway to study her.

  “Different.” He nodded, with a smile of frank approval. “You look the part.”

  “I am—was—an actress.” She closed the door and turned to take his hand. “I’m coming to like Keri, but also to feel she’s a very risky role to play.”

  “So far, so good.” He scanned her again, the smile still lingering. “The survivors have been interrogated pretty thoroughly about EnGene and everyone connected with the research staff. Jeri Grant and her parents are dead; I’m certain of that.

  “Jeri had some hint of trouble coming. An Indiana neighbor says she made a phone call that frightened her folks into driving down here. They must have gotten here just in time to die. Our background for you came from what we learned in Indiana. No survivors in the Enfield area are likely to know that Jeri had no twin. If American intelligence had penetrated your cover, I’d have been informed.”

  “I hope you’re right.”

  “A lot will depend on you.”

  Feeling a little easier, she found herself responding to his smile. The room was warm, and they sat beneath a lazy antique ceiling fan. Honeysuckle scented the air from a spray in an imitation Chinese vase on the antique mantel. She had found a kind of comfort in the Norman Towers, because it belonged so much to the past, because it seemed so secure from the faraway Center. She had begun to like Tim Clegg, but his next words disturbed her.

  “I must tell you, however, that things have changed.”

  “How?” His open face seemed to show both admiration and concern. She wanted to trust him. In fact she had to trust him now. Yet she could never quite forget that he belonged to the Glavni Vrag. “We’ve come too far to start changing plans.” She frowned in spite of herself. “I let my superiors believe you’re defecting to us. It’s a story they’re sure to suspect. Double agents are too often double-crossers. If I report some new plan—”

  She shivered.

  “My own risks are just as great,” he assured her soberly. “Even if the general is my father—I know him too well to think he would hesitate to have me shot if it came to that, but nothing has changed our actual goal. That’s worth any risk.” He was leaning urgently toward her. “We’re still fighting to shield civilization from genetic war—or maybe something worse. We can’t afford to fail.”

  “So what’s the change?”

  “Not our aim. We must kill this synthetic being before Kalenka and his team get the secret of whatever hit Enfield. The difference is that ridding the world of her looks a lot harder now.”

  The big fan spun slowly overhead, its gears humming a monotonous rhythm. The honeysuckle spray was suddenly too sweet. She wanted to toss it out of the window, but she sat where she was, waiting uneasily.

  “Here’s the problem.” He shifted uncomfortably.

  Alphamega was killed here in the lab. Or at least mauled so severely by a sadist on the staff that Kalenka announced her death. He went out of the room to arrange for staff and equipment to study the body and came back to find her reviving.”

  “A medical mistake?” Anya frowned. “Just a coma?”

  “Who knows? She’s still a riddle to Kalenka. To everybody. Even her chemistry—something he calls her nucleotides. Totally different, he says, from those in any known form of life. As strange to him, he says, as lasers might be to an ape. He admits that he doesn’t understand anything about her. Doesn’t know what she can do. Or can’t. Which is why she frightens him.”

  A baffled shrug.

  “Her own revival is not half of it. She has friends. Two fellow prisoners. Belcraft’s brother, the man who found her in the ashes. And a Mexican alien named Torres, who seems to have looked after her while she was hiding. All three—”

  He shook his sandy head.

  “There’s a link between them Kalenka can’t explain. Somehow, they’re all able to keep in contact, even when kept physically apart. The creature seems to know all that happens to them. She can touch them— heal them when they’re hurt—by some means Kalenka has failed to discover.

  “Torres was shot at the time of his capture. The wound was infected, and he had a bad reaction to the antibiotics. Kalenka evidently tried hard enough to save him, electric shocks and drug injections when his heart stopped. But he died, and lay dead too long for recovery without brain damage. So Kalenka says.

  “But he did revive, or somehow was revived. The infection is gone, and his knee healed amazingly. Kalenka thinks the creature’s uncanny powers are behind the medical miracle of his revival, with maybe a medical assist from Belcraft. Even Belcraft himself has made what Kalenka calls a very puzzling recovery from a fairly serious concussion he suffered when he was captured.

  “All of which makes our mission pretty tricky.”

  He stopped to gaze at her again with an absent-seeming approval.

  “We’ve got to be careful, because we don’t know Alphamega. If she does possess some crazy psychic gift, she may sense what we’re up to. So far she hasn’t used her mental powers, whatever they are, to hurt anybody, but we don’t know she won’t. Not that we can let that matter.” He shrugged. “Whatever she is or can do, this display of unknown powers has raised all the stakes.”

  “Our lives do matter.” She shivered again. “But I get what you mean. If the Center gets a hint of what you’re telling me, they could want their own chance to squeeze the secrets out of her.”

  “Even my father—” Frowning, he seemed to share her dread. “In one way, he’s bent as much as we are on killing the creature, because he sees her as an actual agent of an actual Satan. But she also excites his Hitler complex. He wants Kalenka to get the biological bomb, if there is a biological bomb, and whatever else she knows while she’s still alive to talk.

  “So far she has
n’t talked. Our best hope is to learn how to stop her before she does. Belcraft—this Dr. Saxon Belcraft—looks like our only possible point of attack. Jeri was living the past year or so with his brother, the one at EnGene, who have been the actual creator of the being. That ought to give you an opening.”

  “If he—this doctor-brother—didn’t know Jeri too well.”

  “They never met—I’m almost sure of that. The brothers had been out of touch. The thing is risky. I know that, but it’s the best chance we have.”

  They went downstairs to the nearly vacant and peaceful-seeming dining room for a southern-cooked dinner under languid fans. He drove back to the post. She followed next morning. On the basis of a brief interview and a strong recommendation from him, she was given a job in the secretarial pool at post security. Finding no quarters available inside the perimeter, she bought a used Toyota and rented a garage apartment in Maxon, a tiny farm town a dozen miles away.

  The pool had been expanded to cope with a flood of demands from people concerned about relatives or property lost in Enfield. Armed with basic typing and filing skills she had learned for her first approach to Jules Roman, she felt fit enough for the job. Meeting Belcraft was not so easy.

  The three prisoners were kept in separate buildings now, heavily guarded. The whole perimeter area was under martial law, with guards and staff under strict orders not to talk. Tim Clegg had scraps of news when he called her to his office, but never anything revealing.

  “The creature’s still defiant,” he told her, “in her own passive way. She’s on a hunger strike. She still somehow knows all about how Belcraft and Torres are faring. She keeps refusing to eat until they get better food and freedom in the open air. Kalenka won’t give in. In fact, he can’t. I was present when he reported the problem to my father. Dad jumped up and banged his desk, threatening to have the two men shot at once as a lesson to the creature.

  “A stalemate, with no sign of a break.”