Fire

by Alan Rodgers

  Some small shade in his heart whispered that his life was almost over. He didn’t ignore it — he couldn’t have ignored a whisper that quietly intense — but he didn’t mind it, either. It just didn’t matter to him, in that one moment, whether or not he’d still be alive in half an hour. The moment was that powerful — that seductive and important. More important than his life.

  That was what his heart told him then, anyway. If it had still beat to speak to him three hours later, it might have told him otherwise.

  “What are you?” Ron heard himself ask, and he knew that he’d asked the question before, but he wasn’t sure if he’d asked it out loud or in a dream. The Beast looked at him, and suddenly his heart knew something, but it didn’t know the words to tell his mind exactly what it understood.

  “You’re . . . you’re —” The other word was missing, and he had no clue where he should look to find it.

  The Beast nodded at him, and he would have sworn that it smiled, except there was no way that a mouth of that construction could smile recognizably.

  “I’ve got to turn you loose,” Ron said. “You shouldn’t be in any cage. Not you.”

  As he spoke Ron looked at the cage, trying to figure out how he was going to get it open; there was a heavy steel bolt there where the bars met to form a door, and the bolt was secured with a padlock.

  The light seemed to flicker in the Beast’s eyes — no, there wasn’t any light, nothing physical you could point at — the . . . something seemed to flicker in the Beast’s eyes for a moment. Almost . . . indulgently? Tolerantly? Warmly, and with humor, and mercy, and ease. And in a way that told Ron that the idea was futile.

  Then there was something in the music — not-music? — that was all around them, something understandable and almost real enough to be certain of. You have to leave now, it meant, it meant that clearly, even though there were no words to carry the meaning between them. Run now, and in the moments that are left you will get far enough to survive.

  And Ron understood that, and the way that the understanding came to him made it impossible for him to doubt. Still, if he couldn’t doubt, he could deny:

  “That’s silly,” he said. He said the words out loud, even though he knew it wasn’t necessary. “Don’t be silly. You’re important — more important than I’ll ever be. I’ve got to get you out of here. The hell with my job and everything and anything else: God didn’t make you to live in a cage. No sir. Not for another instant.”

  Already Ron was climbing on the bars, pulling on the cage door with all the strength in his arms and legs. Down there — the weld that bound the door-bolt secure — he could feel it beginning to stress. To give. If only he had more leverage, or stronger legs, or — or more —

  Go now, the Beast told him. You’ll still be trapped in the blast, but if you run fast enough it might not kill you.

  “Blast? What blast? What are you — talking about?”

  A vision, then, seen with his mind’s eye — or perhaps he saw it with his memory: Luke Munsen’s briefcase. On the floor of Luke’s lab. After Luke had already left for the airport. After Bonner had skulked into the place, when he thought no one else would see.

  A briefcase that couldn’t be there, since Ron had seen Luke leave the building with his briefcase in hand.

  The latch-weld suddenly burst loose; the force of the door flying free all at once sent Ron tumbling to the floor. And the Beast, in the instant that the two of them had left to live, reached down to help Ron to his feet. Their hands had only barely clasped when the bomb Bonner had planted brought the whole building to rubble in a hail of fire and dust.

  Only Ron and the Beast were caught in the blast. Bonner and Ralph Hernandez were long gone from the scene; there were guards on the institute’s grounds, but none of them close enough that the explosion could do injury.

  It was twenty minutes to midnight on Thursday evening. Half an hour later the first hydrogen bomb fell, on a wheatfield in western Kansas.

  ³ ³ ³

  Chapter Three

  OUTSIDE — MOUNTAINVILLE, TENNESSEE

  While Luke Munsen drove to the airport, President Paul Green got on the radio and declared that the country was in a state of “unlimited nuclear emergency.” Luke kept his radio tuned to a rock-revival radio station — one that played old music from the 1960s — so he hadn’t had to listen to too much of the noise and nonsense floating up from Washington these last few days. But this was news; big enough news that it meant that the civil defense network would be commandeering Luke’s station within another half an hour. Big enough news that the station turned off the music and ran the President’s speech live.

  Luke gritted his teeth, tapped his fingers on the steering wheel, and sighed. What this probably meant most of all to him was that he ought to forget about the side trip to New York, and probably the main one to Washington, too.

  Annoying.

  Luke didn’t like to concern himself with national or world affairs; his idea of maintaining a social conscience and perspective was to live his life fairly, to do his work well, and to mind his own business. He found government — on those occasions when he could not avoid coming into contact with it — tedious and annoying, and in general a waste of his time.

  No, he decided. This was nothing but a lot of nonsense. By Monday it’d all be over, and he’d have to fly to Washington and testify, and there wouldn’t be any chance to stop by New York and make the visit he’d planned. He wasn’t going to let these pompous idiots do that to him. No way. There wasn’t anything real happening, not anything you had to worry about, and he was going to go on to the airport and not let it worry him. To hell with the elected idiots, and to hell with all their sound and fury.

  When he got to the airport, of course, there was trouble with his flight. There was a lot of confusion, he gathered: apparently, even though the President was saying that the country was at war, the congress and the rest of the government were saying that the President was . . . well, mistaken. Right after the President had got off the radio, the Speaker of the House had got on and apologized for him to the world and to Russia in particular. The airlines were having trouble deciding what they were supposed to do. If the crisis was real, then they needed to keep the air clear of unnecessary traffic. If there wasn’t any real crisis, then they needed to keep things as normal as possible, to help keep down the panic. Added to all of that was the fact that not many people were interested in being up in the air, what with the President talking about throwing nuclear bombs, and there were other people, too, who wanted desperately to fly to the places that they thought of as home — home being an important place to be at the end of the world.

  Luke wasn’t having any of it.

  His regular flight was canceled — that airline had closed up shop for the duration. A few of the others were still running, but none of them had the simple hop down to Atlanta and then back up to New York. He went from one counter to the next, trying to find decent connections, and for a while he almost began to think that there wouldn’t be any way to get up north after all. Never mind the simple flights; even the complicated ones had dried up. Maybe that was best. Maybe the fact that he was having trouble finding a flight was fate’s way of telling him that he shouldn’t be trying to go there in the first place.

  Maybe.

  The idea made him smile, but just the same he was about to say the hell with it and drive back to his apartment when the clerk at the Blue Mountain Airways counter where he was standing, looked up at him all amazed and delighted, and she said, “I did it! There, I did it!” And she’d managed to find him a flight to New York. And he had to take it, of course; after putting the woman to so much trouble, how could he not take it?

  But now there was an awful foreboding in his low gut. There was something wrong here. Wrong with the whole world, whether he wanted to admit it to himself or not. And everything that happened fr
om that point forward played to that foreboding. Starting with the connections themselves.

  They were more complicated than airline connections had any right to be. No simple flight to Atlanta, or Raleigh-Durham, with a connecting flight to Kennedy. No such luck. There were three stops, altogether, and two separate planes. First a flight that ultimately went to St. Louis, with an interim stop in Memphis. Then another flight from St. Louis to La Guardia Airport in New York City, with a stopover in Indianapolis. It’d be nine in the morning before he got to New York, but he’d get there.

  If everything went as it was supposed to.

  If.

  The thing to do, he told himself as he walked through the terminal toward a flight for which he was already late, was to turn around and get out of here and forget about all of this. To go home, and curl up in his basement with a big pile of blankets and a thick novel and a tall bottle of whiskey. And pray — he shouldn’t forget to pray.

  It would have been good for him if he had. But Luke Munsen was a man with considerable nerve. That nerve did not fail him — and by not failing it betrayed him. His feet went, one in front of the other, through the terminal hallways, through the waiting lounge outside the boarding gate. Past the check-in counter. Out, onto the boarding ramp. Onto the plane.

  All that time his mind was blank as a sheet of clean paper.

  He began to come back to his senses as the plane taxied to the runway, but by then the cabin was sealed and pressurized and it was already too late.

  Much too late.

  At least, he thought as he watched Mountainville’s three dozen street lights recede from his tiny cabin window, the fear of nuclear death kept his mind off the thing in his breast pocket that could never be dead enough to suit him. That was a blessing, and thank God for it.

  When the stewardess came by and asked him if he wanted a drink, he ordered a double whiskey, straight. She handed him two miniature bottles and a cup full of ice, and he handed the cup back to her and told her he didn’t need the ice. Not now. He didn’t want anything coming between him and his whiskey. She tossed the shiny-wet cubes back into their bin and set the cup on his tray.

  Once she was gone he took a long, fiery pull of the whiskey and took a careful look around the plane.

  There were only three other passengers aboard. All of them looked as scared as he felt, or maybe more scared. Luke took a second swallow of the whiskey, a third, and when he went to take his fourth he found that he’d already emptied the clear-plastic cup.

  Damn. Two shots of whiskey and he couldn’t feel it — not yet. He needed more. A lot more. Enough whiskey that he wouldn’t have to worry. At least enough that worrying wouldn’t concern him. With the plane so empty it wasn’t too hard to get the stewardess’s attention, anyway. He gave her a twenty-dollar bill, and had her leave him four more of the tiny bottles. By the time he got them all into his glass he was finally beginning to feel the effect of the first two.

  Better. Easier. Or not better, exactly; the alcohol didn’t make him feel good. It just made him feel less, and it was good to feel less of his circumstances at the moment.

  He took a sip from the brimming glass and sighed. It wasn’t until he’d had that sip that he realized that the stewardess was still standing in the aisle beside him. He looked up and saw that her hands were trembling, and that her eyes were tight and bloodshot and fearful-looking.

  “I was waiting — I wanted to . . .” She pursed her lips and looked away; Luke half expected her to cry. “I just wanted to get your empties. Damn it all.” She sniffled, and then suddenly her voice was a stewardess’s, calm and serene and relaxed even though there was every reason to panic. “I’m sorry. Can I take those for you?”

  Luke’s head was spinning, partly from the whiskey, partly from confusion. “Yes — sure. Go ahead.” He pulled his arms away from the tray where the bottles rested, to give her free access to the bottles. “Anything I can do to help?”

  The question surprised her, threw her off balance; for just an instant she looked as though she’d reached the brink of her self-control. Was she going to scream — ? No, already she was calming again, her face relaxing into a role it obviously found comfortable. “No,” she said, “I’m fine. Everything’s fine here.”

  “You’re sure?”

  She smiled. “Don’t worry,” she said. “Everything’s going to be just fine.” And she turned and walked away before he could say another word.

  That conversation unnerved Luke maybe more than anything else had that night; maybe because the woman’s voice so obviously told him that she was lying to him, and that probably she wasn’t even admitting the lie to herself. She was like him, like a bad caricature of him, lying to himself, telling himself it was all going to work out. Being brave when that was probably the stupidest thing he could do.

  He took a sip of the whiskey — a thin one, so that the cup would last — pulled the in-flight magazine from the pocket of the chair in front of him. And started reading. Reading was always good for keeping his mind from the world around him.

  He was half-way through the magazine and almost done with the whiskey when he drifted off to sleep.

  ³ ³ ³

  Chapter Four

  WASHINGTON

  The Secret Service men kept telling Vice President Graham Perkins that there was nothing to worry about. The mob outside, they said, wanted the President’s blood. None of the teeming mass out there had shown the least interest in Blair House, or in the Vice President. He was as forgotten now as he had been for the last eighteen months, and for once it was a blessing.

  That was what they told him, anyway. Graham had trouble making himself believe it. He was certain, in his heart of hearts, that the bloodthirsty throng outside his window would kill him if only it knew to look for him.

  It was a nightmare — a nightmare that stretched far into his past, and into the future as far as Graham Perkins could imagine.

  For Graham the nightmare had started two years ago, all the way back at the Reform Party National Convention.

  The convention where Paul Green had made Graham his running mate.

  He’d been a natural choice; Graham was a good political balance for Paul Green. Where Green was a Midwesterner and a member of the party’s right-wing fringe, Graham was from the East, from New England, in fact, and you weren’t likely to find more centrist a Reformer than Graham Perkins. He was so much a centrist, in fact, that there’d been those in Green’s coalition who’d looked at Graham’s Senate voting record and screamed at the top of their lungs that while he might be a Reformer, he voted like a Democrat. And they’d wanted to know what business he had being on a ticket with Paul Green.

  When he’d heard those people shouting, out there in the convention hall, he’d actually given two minutes’ thought to the idea of turning down the nomination. Then it’d been a senseless idea; the people who were shouting were only the lunatic fringe of Green’s coalition. They might be loud, and they might be unpleasant, but in the end they were too few in number to be genuinely important.

  A hundred times since then Graham had wished he’d listened to his good sense there, in the steamy-sweaty Miami heat of that convention. He was certain now that his unconscious mind had been trying to speak to him, and he’d long since decided that he would listen to that part of him more carefully in the future. If he’d listened, things would never have come to this. It was even possible that without Graham on the ticket Green would never have been able to get elected — any Presidential ticket with the man’s name on it was desperately in need of balancing. And there weren’t many people who could have balanced him better than Graham had.

  He almost did back out a week later, after all the loudness and excitement of Miami was over, and Graham and Paul Green had been able to take a day to get to know each other so that they’d be able to campaign together comfortably. Graham hadn’t realized un
til that meeting exactly how unhinged Green was. The man tried to hide it. He even seemed to think he managed to succeed in keeping his crazier ideas to himself. He didn’t. They were always there, flickering behind his small, pale eyes; caught on his tongue before they were spoken, but never caught before Graham saw them coming.

  “So,” Green had said, stirring a third spoon of sugar into his cup of instant coffee, “what was it brought you into politics, Gram?” Paul Green had always pronounced his name that way — as though Graham were a measurement or a grandmother, and not himself. “What brings a man like you into this business?”

  They were on the plane that the party’s campaign committee had leased for the duration, flying cross-country from Virginia to San Diego. Once they got there, they’d have the rest of today and most of tomorrow to catch their breath and get to know each other. Then, tomorrow evening, the first big rally after the convention. They weren’t quite alone on the plane, but they might as well have been. There were no reporters, and Green’s closest aides were all asleep, trying to recover from the hecticness of the last few weeks — it hadn’t been an easy ride into the convention for the Green campaign; Tom Cohen, from New York, had actually been a few delegates ahead of Green on the first ballot. The campaigning and politicking and infighting at the convention had been even more intense than it had during the primaries.

  “Why politics. . . ?” The question caught Graham off balance — it had been years since he’d asked it of himself. Long enough, in fact, that he no longer had an answer for it. The truth was that political office had pretty well happened to him. He’d come back from Korea with a handful of medals, and there’d been a spot on the town council open, and before he’d even realized what was happening the town’s mayor had him on the Reform slate. Fifteen years later he’d been a Senator. Still. It was the sort of question you had to have an answer for, or to be able to make an answer for, if you were a politician. Graham Perkins lied easily and naturally when the need arose; it wasn’t a thing he was proud of, but he did it when he had to. “Government,” he said, “is a place where I can make a difference. I think it’s important to give your best to the world.”