Firechild

by Jack Williamson

  “The Pentagon had taken us over.”

  47

  The

  Pentagon

  Way

  The contact car had arrived. It was a sleek new German minibus, bristling with radio antennas. Besides the driver, it carried a Mexican police official, two technicians, and a Colonel Quayle, the American in command. The air conditioner had died. They were all sweat-grimed and grumbling, the colonel pale and sullen from Mexican dysentery.

  He sat in the minibus till Anya went back to meet him.

  “Clegg’s hit man.” She pointed at the red trail across the gravel to the black van. “He told us he’d found Alphamega at her hideout in the old mine ahead of us. Said he killed her. Whatever happened, he came back unhinged. Attacked me. I had to stop him. The remains are your problem now. We’re going on up to take photos and verify her death for Clegg.”

  “We’ve got our own photographer. We’ll follow you.”

  “Not quite yet,” she told him. “Before we go on, we’re reading a letter Victor Belcraft wrote to his brother just before the Enfield disaster. He’s telling how the whole thing happened.”

  “I want to see—”

  The colonel’s face grew paler. He rolled suddenly out of the bus and ran for the arroyo. Gibson escorted the Mexican cop to look at the body in the van. Anya and Belcraft returned to the letter.

  “A hard jolt to me,” Vic had written. “Lorain kept me an hour, trying to excuse and defend himself. Claiming patriotism—the obligation to defend his country. Pleading the sheer allure of science. Insisting that we really had no choice except to carry on under Pentagon control.

  ” ‘I do feel trapped,’ he told me. ‘I guess I fooled myself. In spite of all the evidence, I clung to the notion that we had total freedom to find what we could and control what we found. When you look at how most researchers are tied up with grant restrictions and funding limits and peer reviews and policy objectives and yards of red tape, that seemed to repay what it cost us.

  ” ‘I came here as eager as we all were to engineer a better future for humanity. It’s true that lately I’ve had to mislead the rest of you. But not from choice, Vic. Not from choice!’

  “He looked unhappy about it.

  ” ‘I stumbled on the truth just a few months ago, when the Pentagon began calling on the FBI and CIA and military intelligence to beef up security—they were afraid the Ruskies or somebody else would learn what we were up to.’ He frowned at me. ‘I’ve been wanting to tell you, Vic, but I was afraid of how you’d take it.’

  “Myself, I took it hard. I threatened to quit.

  ” ‘Too late for that.’ He looked unhappier. ‘I tried, but we’re in too deep. All of us, Vic. They act apologetic, but they’ve made it plain they’re ready to kill us if they have to. We’re here for the duration—of I don’t know what. That’s hard to live with, but they’re afraid to risk what we might reveal. The best we can do is try to see it all the Pentagon’s way.’

  “When I said I couldn’t, he tried to put a better face on our predicament.

  ” ‘It’s an ugly age, Vic. A world with no center. No purpose. No sane direction. Too many selfish forces contending, with ethics and reason commonly forgotten. If a few of us don’t stay awake to that, if we don’t try to hold one last fort for sanity, the world’s done for.’

  “He shook his head at me.

  ” ‘Genetic engineering is a race for world dominion. So the Pentagon says. Here at at EnGene, we’re still ahead. Just barely. Too many potential enemies too close behind us. People as desperate as we are.’ His worn face turned sadder. ‘All of us driven by what we don’t know about the hell-weapons we think the others are making. All afraid somebody else will beat us to something that will wipe us off the map. Scrambling hard to steal anything they can’t invent.

  ” ‘The Pentagon says we’re about to lose the race. That could be true.’ He scowled and bit his lip. ‘If we really do—if we let the Ruskies or some crazy ayatollah or Qadhafi beat us to an unstoppable weapon—that’s the end of everything. The worst case would set evolution back to where it started four billion years ago.

  ” ‘That can happen, if EnGene fails.’

  “He sat straighter, staring hard at me. He didn’t mean EnGene to fail.

  ” ‘Vic,’ he tried to challenge me, ‘you’ve got to look at the facts. No matter what we find, genetic science will never be anybody’s monopoly. All there is to know about the gene is written in the cells of everything alive. The gene and the atom—the secrets of both have always lain open, waiting for anybody with the wit to read them. Just now, we’re ahead—I hope we are. At best, a few years ahead. Maybe only weeks or months.

  ” ‘See that, Vic?’

  “I told him I saw more than he did.

  ” ‘You’re one of the best.’ The old charisma burning again, he was genially urgent. ‘Maybe the best brain in the game. We’ve got to keep you on the team.’

  “Yet he didn’t seem much surprised when I told him I’d never do weapons research.

  ” ‘That’s okay, Vic.’ He nodded in a speculative way. ‘I respect your attitude. I’ve talked it over with the general. He has agreed to an alternative, one I think you’ll have to accept.’

  “He saw my head shaking.

  ” ‘Listen, Vic!’ He turned on the charm. ‘You’re a loyal American. You’ve got to believe that EnGene exists for the national defense. All we ask for is security from conquest or extinction. Which boils down to the fact that our real goal here is not to make genetic weapons but to discover effective defenses against them.’

  “He stopped to look at me.

  ” ‘Can’t you turn your talents to that?’

  “I had to hesitate, reminding him that defense and offense aren’t all that easy to separate. Any defense challenges enemies to break it. Any defensive technology can support aggression. I told him I’d have to think about it.

  ” ‘We’ll give you time.’ He seemed relieved. ‘Think it over, and I know you’ll come along. The general has promised funding and full support for any defense-related research project you want to set up. And, Vic, please keep in mind—’

  “The charm faded into grimness.

  ” ‘The fact is, you’ve got no choice.’

  “I lay awake all night, looking for any way out. All I could see was prison or worse. Next morning I agreed to go along.

  “Mr. Mason was in uniform when I saw him again. Brigadier General Latham Ryebold. A man I had to admire, though I never felt quite at home with him. A plain old soldier, openly contemptuous of West Pointers, and proud of how he’d fought his own way up from the ranks. Not fond of us scientists—I won’t quote his phrase for us—but tough as rawhide and totally devoted to his country.

  “Cutting his teeth in Korea, he’d scored high in ‘Nam and done his bit in Central America. He meant to fight the next war the same way he’d fought the last. To his way of thinking, a genetic weapon would be just another weapon. I don’t think he ever asked what a gene is. He’d seen field exercises with phosgene and nerve gas, and all he seemed to care about was efficient delivery systems and reliable data on dispersal and toxicity and possible counteraction.

  “To give him credit, he gave me freedom to try any route I wanted toward biological defense. If I undertook the task almost alone, that was my own choice. Most of my colleagues were ready by then to see things the Pentagon’s way. One or two of them were so persistent about joining my team that I felt sure they were informants for the general.

  “He did give me everything I asked for: lab resources, access to the big computer, routine help at the few jobs I felt willing to share. Most important of all, he had to let me keep up with the work Lorain and the others were doing—after all, I couldn’t design defenses against weapons I didn’t know about.

  “Their research appalled me. Not just me. One day I found Lorain sitting at his desk, face unshaven and eyes fixed on something I couldn’t see. He’d been caught by something so
horribly compelling in his own imagination that he wasn’t aware of me till I caught his arm.

  ” ‘Vic! Glad to see you.’ He took off his reading glasses and blinked at me. ‘I need to talk, because I’ve got a problem. We’ve all got a problem.’ He waved me toward a chair. ‘We’re getting too close to a deployable weapon—one no sane man could want.’

  “I sat down to listen.

  ” ‘A bad thing.’ He waved the black-rimmed glasses at me, a gesture he must have learned when he was free to lecture. ‘Bad! I used to think you were too uneasy about EnGene, but now I get your point. The military gene begins to look worse than the military atom.

  ” ‘A lot worse. In spite of all the peacenik propaganda, the atom never really threatened anything total. Most of the people in the southern hemisphere would survive any probable war. Even if you sterilized the land, life would surely come back from the sea. Nothing atomic could get at all the microbes buried in the deep-sea ooze, and they’re complex enough to save a billion years of evolution.’

  “He fell silent with that, but his air of brooding apprehension was enough to send a chill down my own spine. He sat there as if he had forgotten me, glasses nervously tapping the desk, sick eyes squinting at nothing. I finally asked if security would let him tell me anything about the weapon.

  ” ‘Sorry, Vic.’ He tried to grin. ‘There’s nothing ready for security wraps. Not yet, thank God. But the lethal agent we’re in sight of—it looks like something absolutely ultimate.’

  “He forgot me till I prodded him again.

  ” ‘Let’s begin with theory, Vic.’ He tried hard to pull himself together. ‘How did life begin? I think we’d all agree that the first molecular seed was put together out of galactic gas and dust out in space before the stars and planets formed. The original miracle, you used to say, wrought by blind cosmic chance. I know how you’ve dreamed of working new miracles of your own. Inventing ways to repair nature’s blunders.

  ” ‘Here at EnGene, we’ve revised theory to let us try a different and very dangerous evolutionary track. We’re about to start creation all over again, in a way that terrifies me. Vic, we’ve drawn blueprints for something new in the universe. Not exactly a new sort of life, because it won’t be life at all—not in the sense that its basis would be anything much like the double helix that blueprints all of us. We’re all of us kin, we microbes and men, sharing a common ancestry.

  ” ‘Here in the weapons lab, we’re about to design something utterly alien, yet patterned after our sort of life in ways that make it altogether dreadful. We can design it into cells able to grow and reproduce. We can engineer them to feed on anything organic, make them immune to nearly any harm, equip them to exist anywhere and endure anything.

  ” ‘I’m scared, Vic!’

  “He dug into a drawer for a bottle I’d never seen. I waved it away when he offered it to me. He tipped it up, gulped, and shuddered.

  ” Turned loose, it could sterilize the planet forever.’

  He sat blinking glassily till he remembered me again.

  ” ‘Your cue, Vic.’ His haggard eyes seemed to plead. ‘They call it Project Lifeguard. I’ve debated it with the staff and then with Ryebold. They think the lethal effects can be contained and controlled. The general has ordered us to go for it, balls out. I’m afraid they’re all still crazy—crazy as I was when I was conned into organizing EnGene.

  ” ‘And you—you’re our last chance to stop them.’ “

  48

  Who Killed

  Enfield?

  The crunch of gravel underfoot brought them back from EnGene. Belcraft laid the letter aside to face the fat Mexican cop. Wheezing and sweating in the desert heat, he had come with the gray-faced colonel to question them about the killing. He sneered when Anya told him the dead man had been Hunter Harris, wanted by Mexican law along the Texas border.

  “Qué mentirosa! Qué puta infamosa! Qué matadora!”

  Too many gringos had been mocking Mexican justice. Mopping his dark face, he paused to give Belcraft a half-apologetic nod, but a man lay dead and no truth could be expected from a gringo killer-whore.

  His manner changed when the colonel spoke up to identify her’ as an American agent. Indeed, stationed once in Tamaulipas, the cop had heard of el tejano malo, the bad Texan and his deplorable thirst for the blood of virgins. Suddenly courteous, he congratulated Any on her courageous resistance. With one of the technicians for a driver, he took the body away in the black van.

  After another panic flight into the arroyo, the colonel said he had to see a doctor. He left in the minibus with his driver. The other technician loaded cameras and tripod into Jim Gibson’s Ford to ride on to the mine and record whatever they found there.

  Belcraft and Anya went back to the letter.

  “Pawns of the Pentagon!” Vic had been tired by then, his hurried script no longer so neat. “I can’t tell you how I felt, finding out how we’d been expertly conned. Desperate is too weak a word. One more night when I couldn’t sleep. Jeri was worried sick, but of course I couldn’t tell her anything. Except that I was up to my neck in work I couldn’t leave.

  “Though of course I couldn’t warn her, I did urge her to take a week off to visit her folks in Indiana while I caught up. No luck with that—she said they were already on their way to Enfield. Worried about her because she’d told them we were living together.

  “It didn’t help next morning when I found somebody had gotten into my office. Not the first time. My lab notebook had been moved from where I left it. Copied, I suspected, by the general’s agents. He dressed me down when I reported it. He’d warned us our offices weren’t secure. Anything secret was to be kept locked in his office safe and signed out when we needed it. A crazy arrangement, considering the hours we worked and the notes we had to keep.

  “When he’d finished his scolding, I tried to persuade him to stop research on the Lifeguard device. Absolute insanity, I told him. Some remnant of humanity would surely survive the worst the nukes could do. Certainly some seed of life. But Lifeguard—if it was really going to be as totally lethal as Lorain expected—Lifeguard could erase every natural organism from the planet.

  “Forever!

  “He listened to me, poker-faced, chewing on that wet stump of a cigar he never lit.

  ” ‘Thanks, Dr. Belcraft.’ He nodded, with no expression. “Glad to have a man with your know-how able to confirm the kill-potential estimates we’ve been getting from Lorain and Kalenka. The weapon looks better than we ever hoped for.’

  ” ‘But, sir—’ “

  “I groped for a way into his skull. Nobody could hope to hold a monopoly on biological weapons any more than on the nukes. Hostile nations weren’t going to sit still. If they couldn’t duplicate the weapons in their own labs—which any competent genetic research facility could surely do, given the key fact that they were possible—spies would go all out to steal them. Which itself might lead to the ultimate accident.

  ” ‘What if somebody drops a test tube?’

  “He nodded again, seeming bleakly pleased. ‘That’s the clincher.’

  “I don’t recall what I said. It couldn’t have been anything coherent.

  ” ‘Doctor, you haven’t got the whole picture.’ He shook what was left of his forefinger at me. He’d lost most of it to a piece of shrapnel in Korea. ‘That total kill-potential is the beauty of the weapon, because it means we’ll never need to use it.’

  “He saw how I felt.

  ” ‘Here’s why,’ Very soberly, he tried to reassure me. ‘When the tests are completed, when we know there’s absolutely no chance of any survival, I want the Ruskies to find out we have it—they’ve got spies enough all around us. Myself, I’d like to let them steal the blueprint. The President and the chiefs of staff will never go that far, but some double agent can make sure they do find out what will happen if anybody breaks that test tube. Knowing, they’ll never dare order a launch. Your crew here has given us the absolute d
eterrent.’

  “He waved that cigar to keep me silent.

  ” ‘Listen, Doctor. I know you’ve never really been with us. Frankly, I’ve wanted to get rid of you, but they always told me you knew too much not to be watched. I understand you’re working on a counterweapon now.’

  ” ‘No weapon, sir.’ I tried to let him know how I felt;

  about it. ‘I’d give my life to stop all military research. Lorain has authorized me to work toward some kind of biologic shield. It looks like an impossible assignment; from what he tells me about Lifeguard, I doubt that any shield can be—’

  “He didn’t let me finish. ‘Keep at it! Give it all you’ve got.’

  “With no choice, I kept at it. I called it Project Alphamega. A name chosen to hint at what EnGene was up to. We’d been exploring the processes of creative evolution from beginning to end. Alpha to omega. Maybe writing the end of everything, right here in the lab, unless the project turned out better than I thought it could.

  “Worried more than ever about spies, the general shook up security again. He had the CIA recheck us all, made Lorain and Kalenka cut their research group down to those they simply had to trust, and stationed round-the-clock guards to watch his office safe. The Lifeguard team still had orders to keep me briefed. What I learned left me very little hope for Project Alphamega.

  “For billions of years, we natural creations have been inventing defenses against one another. Thorns and rinds and evil tastes, nicotine and strychnine and penicillin, teeth and spears and guns. But no such shields had ever been evolved against Lifeguard, because we’d never been exposed to anything even remotely like it. It was engineered to consume us.