Firechild

by Jack Williamson

  Forcing a smile for another driver parking beside them, he was moving to get out of the car. With no appetite, she made him drive her back to the apartment.

  “Play your own game,” she told him. “I’ll play mine.”

  Watching him drive away, she shrugged and let her thoughts drift back to Saxon Belcraft. Perhaps the world’s future would in fact depend on her own loaded dice. Perhaps it wouldn’t. She had trained herself not to fret too much over uncertainties she couldn’t control. Whatever the case, she enjoyed her game with Belcraft.

  As a sex-armed missile of the KGB, she had been targeted on various men, none so exciting. Old Jules Roman had been the only one she liked or respected. She enjoyed his devotion and the luxury he lavished on her, but he had been decades past his prime before she captured him. His occasional attempts at sex had been humiliating failures. She had always pitied him, and his final disposition in Moscow seemed almost an act of mercy.

  Belcraft was a far more tempting target, young and vigorous enough, entirely likeable. His naivete sometimes amused her. All he knew was medicine and the rural Ohio in which he had grown up, a world so different from her own that she found it hard to imagine, but so near the rural Indiana she claimed for her birthplace that she always felt afraid to talk about Keri Grant’s fictitious childhood.

  He intrigued her with the mystery of his contacts with Alphamega. What sort of thing was the creature? How had she come to rule him so totally? How had she made herself matter more to him than his medical practice and even his life?

  Belcraft himself was another puzzle. She had lived in a world of cynics, and she had been moved to surprise and sometimes to pity by his fascinated belief in her tales of Keri’s vagabond years in Europe. Spinning them, watching his innocent envy of the imaginary worlds she was describing, she found herself afraid she might come to like him too much. Sex with him was the best she had known, even on that hot night when the air conditioning died.

  “You know, Anya, I’m falling in love.” He told her that next morning, coming naked out of the shower and erect again with the recollection. He looked at her oddly, shaking his head. “I just woke from a funny dream. I thought you’d turned into Alphamega.”

  Sitting up in bed, she uncovered her breasts to divert him from her own trembling tension.

  “Have you been bewitched?” She tried to seem merely malicious. “Even after last night, you’d really like to exchange us?”

  “She haunts me.” He sat down beside her, soberly staring at nothing. “At that first glimpse, crawling out of the ruins, still only a little pink worm, she took hold of me. I don’t know how she did it. Or what she is. Or what Vic designed her to be. I’ll probably never know. I do know there will never be anybody like her.”

  “Does the dream—” Trying not to seem too eager, she stopped to smile at his jutting penis. “Does it mean she’s still alive?”

  “Just a dream.” He shrugged and drew her toward him to kiss her nipples. “No message. With no trace reported, I suppose she’s probably dead.”

  She saw his penis wilting.

  The following night was equally hot, but the air conditioner kept on purring and she found his pent-up vigor undiminished. Talking with a boyish sort of candor about whatever crossed his mind, he had begun revealing a wry wit he had always felt to be dangerously unbecoming in a serious young physician, showing a brain so keen that sometimes she trembled with a new terror of detection.

  They woke together in the cooler-seeming dawn, and she hoped he would want her again. Instead, he slid out of her arms to sit bolt upright in bed.

  “Another dream.” She was uncovered, but he frowned blankly past her. “The sort Clegg calls a sending.”

  “A vision?” She tried not to seem unduly anxious. “Do you think that’s possible?”

  “Nothing I can understand.” He shrugged uneasily. “I thought she was calling me. She is terribly hurt and in desperate trouble somewhere.”

  “Somewhere?”

  “That’s the problem.” His frown bit deeper. “I saw her in a sort of cave. There was a rock roof above her, with rough timbers supporting it. Day was just breaking, gray sky outside. She lay on a pile of juniper branches—I could even smell them. That Mexican she calls Panchito was with her, trying to give her water.

  “She’s paralyzed. Unable to speak or even swallow. What she really needs is help from Vic. She came to me because I’m Vic’s brother and a doctor and because in another dream or vision or whatever it was she thought I had helped her diagnose and heal Panchito. He had suffered broken bones and internal injuries in the fall of what she called el avión—”

  His breath caught.

  “That must—that must have been the general’s jet! Down somewhere. Panchito hurt and dying, the way she was. With whatever medical knowhow she thinks she got from me, she was somehow able to save him, but she doesn’t understand her own body well enough to heal herself. She was hoping I’d learned enough from Vic to help her.”

  His whole body drooped in dejection.

  “Of course Vic hadn’t told me anything useful. The dream was over when I had to tell her that. She had no strength to hold me any longer.” His staring eyes looked stricken. “Keri, she’s somewhere, dying …”

  “And you don’t know where?”

  “Mexico.” He spoke slowly, frowning in thought. “That’s where Torres would want to go, and I did get a clear impression that the crash was there. If it happened after the fuel had run out on their flight from Enfield, we have at least a suggestion of the distance. The cave suggests mountains. An area high and dry enough for juniper.”

  Silent for a moment, he looked hard at her.

  “All pretty vague. Not much to go on, unless I get another message. But Meg needs me. Terribly! I’m afraid I couldn’t do anything, but I’d give anything to get there. If I could possibly escape—”

  “Maybe—” She shivered inside. “Maybe I could help you.”

  “If you could—” He sagged again, shaking his head. “But the odds would be too ugly. Keri, I couldn’t let you risk it. No reason you should.”

  “I—” She had to catch her breath. “I love you, Sax. Reason enough.”

  His searching eyes probed so deep that she shuddered again, afraid he had seen the truth. But then his own breath went out, and he reached to pull her body to him. She felt the thudding of his heart and knew he believed her.

  That morning at work she called Sam Holiday to report a bug in the new letter-framer software. That phrase was a code signal. He called her to bring the latest printouts to his office. She shut the door behind her and told him about Belcraft’s dream.

  “Very little we didn’t already know.” Resting his feet on the cluttered desktop, he blinked at her doubtfully. “The Mexicans found what was left of the jet after our search planes spotted it. Down on a dry desert lake. Two bodies in the wreckage. We’ve got our own agents there. They’ve identified one of the dead as Bard, the missing security man. The other looked Mexican, but it wasn’t Torres. Possibly the unidentified man who kidnapped you.”

  He scratched his sandy head.

  “No sign of Torres or the creature except the tracks of a vehicle that drove out of the lake, to a highway that has a lot of travel. So far, they’ve got no way to trace the vehicle. It could be anywhere in Mexico by now.”

  “A cave,” she said. “In some dry mountain region where juniper grows.”

  “Which is nearly anywhere in western Mexico.”

  “Belcraft’s hoping for another dream. He says she called because she needs him. He’d do anything to reach her. I told him I’d try to help set up an escape—”

  “You did?” He nodded, admiration in his eyes. “You’d go along to kill the creature?”

  “Not that.” Soberly, she shook her head. “I’ve done hard things in the line of duty, but I’ve got limits. I couldn’t murder that creature, human or whatever. What I can do—if I do get the breaks—is to guide some professional to f
inish the job.”

  “Maybe—” He took his feet off the desk and sat up to face her. “I see a lot of tricky complications, but nothing else has got us anywhere. Could be—” He nodded slowly, tugging at the lobe of his ear. “Could be our best chance, if I can get the general’s okay on it.”

  40

  Agent of the

  KGB

  Two days later, Sam Holliday drove Anya to the old college administration building to get the general’s approval. A black sergeant escorted them past the glass-cased athletic trophies into the big-windowed office and left them standing in front of the glass-topped desk. Clegg scowled across it.

  “Grant?” His accusing boom startled her. “You are the young woman suspected of complicity in the monster’s escape?”

  “I am Keri Grant—”

  “Sir!” Sam Holliday was already protesting. “She has been fully cleared.”

  “So I’m told.” The deep-sunk eyes pierced her again. “I hope this new scheme is not another such plot, invented to aid another escape.”

  She felt herself flushing.

  “Ask Captain Holliday.” She let her voice rise. “I’m not here to be accused.”

  “Sir, please!” Holiday caught her arm as if to shield her. “They will be under surveillance. Our own hit man in constant contact. I trust Miss Grant. She’s aware of our duty to extirpate this menace to every nation.”

  “That is true.” She met the general’s eyes. “I know the mission is uncertain. Unlikely to succeed unless Belcraft gets another vision to guide us to that cave. I suppose there will be danger. But if the creature has to be destroyed to prevent another Enfield, or something worse, I’m willing to face the risks.”

  “Sergeant!” He called at the door. “Bring Corporal Harris in.”

  “The hit man,” Holliday told her. “You’ll be in touch by radio.”

  She decided not to say she knew him. When the black sergeant brought him in, he gave no sign that he knew her. His thick dark hair was bright with oil and combed straight back. The black mirror sunglasses hid his eyes and made his expressionless Indian face an ominous mask. She shrank uneasily from his unreadable stare.

  “Mickey Harris, Keri Grant.” Clegg called their names in a loud drumbeat voice. “You may not meet again, but I wanted you to see each other. Captain Holliday will brief you on the mission, but I want you to know its importance. For the safety of the world, that synthetic she-demon has to be destroyed. Understand?”

  “I do,” she said.

  “Trust me, sir!” Harris came to military attention. “I’ll slaughter the bitch!”

  “We’ll trust you for that.”

  “About my payoff—”

  “My staff will set up your guarantees.” The general turned from Harris to face her. “Anonymous private sources are putting up rewards. Five million each, payable upon due proof of success.” He scowled again at Harris. “But if you fail—”

  His heavy voice fell.

  “Don’t fail!”

  He beckoned the sergeant to show them out. Later, alone with Holliday, she protested bitterly.

  “Why that—that slimy cockroach! That’s what the other guards call him. I see why. Those black mirrors! And the knife he wears under his shirt—I know weapons, and I could see the bulge of it. The way he looked at me! Thinking how he’d love to cut my body up. Made my flesh creep!”

  “His special hobby.” Holliday made a face. “So it seems. Cutting women up. Young women when he can catch them young. Takes his time, like a very sadistic cat. There’s something else in this FBI report. Something so gruesome it’s hard to believe. New testimony from a Mexican source that he used to suck their blood while they were dying.”

  “Clegg—” She shivered. “Does Clegg know that?”

  “He’s seen the reports. Of course the guy was never convicted of anything. Skipped out of Mexico and left the border to get away from the rumors. The FBI has turned up evidence to nail him, so I’m told. That’s what got him the assignment. The general wants that creature hunted down and killed. He’s convinced that Harris has the special expertise the job calls for.”

  Silent for a moment, lips drawn tight, Holliday added: “I didn’t want to wish him on you. The general’s choice.”

  That night she left her car with the trunk unlocked under Belcraft’s third-story window in the residence hall. Their plans were complete. The escape vehicle was to be waiting at a rest stop on the Maxon highway. Harris would be parked where he could watch and follow. Holliday had arranged funds and travel documents.

  Too tense to eat, she and Belcraft skipped the mess hall dinner. He drank two beers and she had a Perrier at the club. They danced a few times to the jukebox and went back to his room to wait for a cold front forecast to arrive at ten. It came late. Midnight had passed before the sudden rainstorm struck. The phone range. Belcraft answered.

  “The Maxon police,” he told her. “Fire at your apartment.”

  “Our cue,” she told him. “Let’s go.”

  The residence hall had been reserved for women students, the visiting hours evidently too strict to suit them. Belcraft had found a well-worn rope ladder in the closet. Opening the window into a gust of rain, he rolled it out. She ran down the stairs, told the guard huddled in the doorway that her place was on fire, and darted past him into the driving rain.

  A lightning flash showed her the ladder swaying in the wind, Belcraft scrambling into the trunk. She slammed the lid on him and drove into the street through drumming hail. The guard at the gate listened with a half-restrained leer to the story that her place was on fire, but he let her go on.

  They were out of the storm before she reached a rest stop. The escape car was a small brown Buick, left standing by a picnic table. She parked beside it and let Belcraft out of the trunk. He gave her a delighted kiss, and they scrambled into the Buick. She drove them away, toward Maxon and Mexico.

  The rearview mirror showed her the lights of another car, following toward the highway at a cautious distance. Recalling Mickey Harris, his dark, high-cheeked face and those dark mirror-lenses and the ominous bulge of his hidden blade, she couldn’t help shivering.

  She lost him when she could in the traffic on the interstate. Their reservations had been made in different motels. She didn’t see his car again, but now and then she picked out others, driven, she felt sure, by agents of the CIA. Every night she got away from Belcraft long enough to file a new report on the tiny radio hidden in a jar of face cream.

  They crossed at Ojinaga and drove south across Chihuahua. The Mexican authorities had been alerted to search for Alphamega. Police roadblocks stopped them several times to ask their business. Belcraft always said he was looking for a cousin who had brought a map and come to find the lost Dos Cabezas mine. The officers grinned and warned them to watch for bandidos in the hills.

  For her, the drive was a bittersweet adventure. Mexico was new to her. She loved its stark majesties of mountain and desert. More than ever, she loved the days and nights with Belcraft. Yet she suffered an always keener dread of the coming moment when he must learn how she had betrayed him.

  He was pushing hard. They took turns at the wheel. He hated to stop at all until a time came when he felt uncertain which way to go without another guiding dream. Even when she reminded him that sleep might invite another vision, he said he was too tense to relax. When she kissed him, with her promise to help with that, they stopped at a dingy little inn that called itself La Fonda Eldorado. In the creaky bed, he seemed reluctant at first, but her old skills soon aroused him. His sudden passion lifted her into ecstasy again.

  Afterward, lying relaxed beside him, she had to fight an overwhelming wave of regret. Sick with it, she wanted to tell him what she was, to warn him of Harris on their trail, but the time for that was too long gone. Even if he forgave her, even if he forgot his insane obsession with Alphamega, they could never hope to get away together to any sort of happiness.

  His dream did come. Before
dawn, she woke with the light in her eyes to find him out of the bed, pulling on his clothes.

  “Baby, I’ve got it!” He pulled her against him, and she felt his rapid heart. “She found me! From somewhere very high. As if she were somehow lost from her body and searching for it from far out in space.

  “I felt her touch Panchito. Begging him to help her show me the road he’d followed to the mine—it’s no cave at all, but another abandoned mine called La Madre de Oro. To get there, we drive on south through the next town and turn right up a canyon just beyond a bridge. It’s not all that far. And Meg—Meg’s still alive!”

  “Darling, I’m so glad!”

  She managed to whisper the words. Promising to hurry, she carried the jar of face cream into the bathroom to file her radio report while he was loading the car and cleaning the windshield. Day was breaking before they passed the next town. The bridge was where it should have been, but they had to backtrack and search the rock slope beyond a weed-grown ditch before he found the road.

  It looked seldom used, though he was cheered to find fresh car tracks in a patch of sand. Floods had slashed it with deep washes, never repaired. In a mudhole at the bottom of a gully, he hit something that burst a tire. He had to unload the trunk to get at the spare.

  Before he had finished the change, a black van came up behind, looming suddenly over the gully’s edge and plunging down the rocky slope, horn blaring. It jolted past too fast, splashing him with mud. He glimpsed the driver, a heavy man with sleek black hair and mirror-glinting sunglasses, turning his head to grin at Anya. Showering him with gravel, the van roared up the farther slope and vanished over the rim.

  Wiping at the mud on his face, he peered at Anya.

  “Who could that be?”

  “Quién sabe? as the Mexicans say.” She shrugged. “Who knows?”