Let the Fire Fall

by Kate Wilhelm

  Matt finished the story the following morning, leaving Lisa asleep in the bed, joining Winifred for coffee and eggs. There hadn’t been bacon in New York City for three years.

  “I don’t know why they turned us loose after it was over,” he said. “They could have held us there in the house while they filed a complaint, and waited for the authorities to take over. But they ordered us to get dressed and told us to get what we could carry in two paper bags, and then shoved us out the door. Finis. We expected the arrival of a copter and arrest any minute. We had friends, but we were afraid to implicate them and we decided to come here. There’s some money in the bank, and a good general practitioner won’t be out of work very long.”

  He was wrong about that. The secretary of the county medical association checked his credentials and told him frankly that they couldn’t use him. “In fact,” the man said, a flushed faced, harried, nervous, middle-aged Irishman, “before I leave today I’ll have to file a report on you and probably someone will call the authorities….”

  He was holding the information card between his forefinger and thumb, as if offering it to Matt, who took it and tore it into small pieces. The secretary looked relieved. “It’ll be in the data bank, but someone will have to ask a direct question now,” he said, mopping his face. “I don’t remember a thing.” He went back to paper work on his desk and didn’t look up when Matt left.

  Lisa said they should move to France until the madness subsided, but they knew they would be refused travel cards. There was no state from which they couldn’t be extradited, if the long hairs decided to make that move against them. After an all-night talk, they realized that they had no more than two alternatives. They could go to Florida and try to buy their way to the Bahamas, or they could permit Winifred to register them into the private hospital where she was a consultant and administer the cold sleep. The cold sleep made Lisa tremble, but they had to discuss it.

  “You would be a number only,” Winifred said. “The security regarding who is being kept that way is extremely tight. I can promise you that no one would find you. And in your file, in the computer for automatic restimulation, would be all the necessary data about when to awaken you. You would be safe.”

  “We’d he safe in the Bahamas,” Lisa said.

  “Not if this mania continued to spread throughout England at the rate it is now,” Matt said thoughtfully. That didn’t concern him as much as financing the trip to the Bahamas. He knew, everyone knew, of the mass exodus taking place, and it was a good bet that few of those fleeing had proper identification and permits. The going rate of passage probably was more than his meager bank balance would bear. “But whatever we decide to do,” he said, “we have to do it soon. And we have to get out of Winifred’s apartment now.”

  Very dryly Winifred said, “Too late. I’m already your accessory. The place has a man posted. He turned up when you did. The super tipped me off.”

  Lisa looked miserable and Winifred grinned at her. “Honey, my name has been on that list for a long time. I was very close to Johnny, remember? Obie isn’t going to want any of us who knew the kid to be out running free when he gets his hands on the Star Child. What he’ll want is lots and lots of confirmation about the kid’s powers, about his telepathic tie to his people, and his link to Obie. Probably he’ll start producing miracles that’ll make his purification process look like primer stuff, and when that starts, he won’t want an elderly psychiatrist loose who might throw an IQ score into the works.” She lighted a contraband cigarette with real tobacco, payment from a grateful patient, and blew out clouds of smoke, then said, “I don’t think the kid invented anything at all. Not so goddamned clever.”

  “It’s Blake’s work,” Matt said. He told about the rescue of Lorna. “As soon as Blake realized that they had his plans, he vanished again. Since then there’s been a better process for extracting water from rocks, patented by a J. M. Black. That’s his—” Suddenly he stopped and he stared ahead at nothing in particular. “That’s it! Of course! They want us to lead them to Blake!”

  Lisa knocked over her cup. Fortunately it was empty. Coffee was too hard to find any longer to let it be spilled on a tabletop. For a long time she and Matt stared at one another, and finally Lisa said faintly, “We’ll have to do it. Take the cold sleep.” She looked at Winifred sharply, “Are you certain that they won’t find us, that no one can restimulate us before the time chosen?”

  Winifred nodded. “It’s foolproof.”

  Matt’s hand was hard on Lisa’s. Her hand was very steady now, no trace of the trembling the idea had brought about before.

  “How long?” Winifred asked.

  Matt thought, then said, “Ten years. The turn of the year, the millennium will have passed by then. Either Obie will be a memory, or so firmly entrenched that it won’t matter any longer.”

  They agreed on the ten-year period of cold sleep and Winifred promised to make the arrangements on the following day. “We’ll have to give your tail the slip, but that shouldn’t be too hard. This is my territory here. I could lose my own shadow if I had to.”

  After Lisa was sleeping Matt remembered the black disk the alien woman had given to him in his office. He had it in the paper bag that he had brought out of the house with him. He got it out and rubbed his fingers over the smooth side of it again, for the first time in many years. It should go to Blake, he decided. Derek would see that he got it. Blake had said he would be in touch with Derek eventually. Matt put the touchstone and a brief note together in an envelope and wrote Blake’s name on it. That was all he could do. Winifred would have to pass it on to Derek, who, sooner or later, would see Blake and hand it to him.

  Two days later Matt and Lisa entered the low building where the cold sleep would protect them for the next ten years. The psychiatric division complex was almost a mile long, added to wing by wing as needed. There was a waiting list for admission of the hopeless whose relatives or doctors believed that in the future cures would be found for them. Because of her position in the hospital Winifred had been able to bypass the waiting list.

  Winifred processed them personally, and when it was over, eight hours later, she wept quietly. She didn’t believe she would ever see either of them again. Obie would send his goons for her, and she would be waiting. There was no one else involved in her case, no Blake to lead them to, only herself. And just maybe, a chance so remote that she knew it was like trying to reap enough silk from one spider to make a gown, just maybe when Obie sent for her she would get to see Johnny. And maybe he would remember her, the only friend he had had for such a long time. And maybe there would be some of the old influence left, just maybe.

  INTERLUDE NINE

  Philosophers

  Armageddon Now by Obediah Cox; Cox Foundation Press, 640 pp.; $9.95

  Obie Cox has gathered together under these covers all the revelations he has been granted and has added to them his understanding of the miracles thus revealed to him directly. Starting with his conversion and his acceptance of the call he heard from God, he has with great care and courage detailed each of the subsequent visitations he has been privileged to have. The book is a wealth of detail in chronological order which shows his growth as a man of God….

  Armaggedon Now, Cox, Obediah; Cox Foundation Press, 640 pp.; $9.95

  This book is important, psychiatrically speaking, because in it one can trace the spread of a pathological condition, first suffered by one man, Obie Cox, and through him transmitted to thousands, or even millions, of other people. A system of delusional grandeur emerges in the first chapter when Obie Cox suffered his first “blackout” and wakened believing he had heard the voice of God. From there it is a more and more hysterical recounting of other “visions,” intermixed with prophecies said to be documented, but it should be noted that when this reader tried to substantiate the documentation, it was found that referents cited did not in fact confirm those statements attributed to them…. offers a wealth of material for a graduate student
of mental pathology….

  Armaggedon Now, Cox, Obediah; Cox Foundation Press, 640 pp.; $9.95

  “‘Armaggedon is now,’ so saith the Lord to me. I sat in the dark woods with my trusty gun across my legs and I knew I had to kill the aliens that were bringing sickness to my loved ones, and fouling the air of this fair earth. And I heard the Lord speaking to me just like a man hears his wife across the table, or his partner across his desk.” This is how the testimony begins in this remarkable new book, and it doesn’t get any better as Obie Cox warms to his subject. It is a chaotic mishmash of half truths; illiterate constructions, misused words, fractured sentences, tortured syntax. The main thesis of the book appears to be, and I use this phrase advisedly because it is not a simple matter to separate the gibberish from the message, that there is on immense battle going on in the universe. A scale so enormous that man cannot conceive of its dimensions. I always say that if it is inconceivable, then don’t try to make me understand, but Cox tries. So there is this battle taking place now. That’s what the title refers to, he would have us believe. God is forcing the battle with Evil; it is taking place throughout the entire universe, one of Cox’s favorite words, and one awfully hard to disprove in the connection in which he uses it. It may well be that there is a battle taking place in the “entire, endless, infinite, unimaginable stretch of God’s universe.” But to get on, Earth is one of the major battlefields. Cox is presumably a general in this bottle. Cox says: “And only by waging unrelentless [sic] war with this vast enemy, the Evil that has token up dwellings in our fellow men, and by, winning that war with that enemy inside our fellow Earthmen, can His house, this Earth, be made safe for the believers in God and Good, who will prevail forever after that, and be ready to face the aliens, who are controlled by the Evil and who will return with poisonous germs and sweep over this house, this Earth.” Oh, I say now….

  Armaggedon Now goes into seventeenth printing!

  Chapter Sixteen

  ALMOST a year after the visit of Matt and Lisa, Winifred had another visitor. Derek. He was thin; he looked haunted.

  “Harvard has gone over,” he said. “We weren’t surprised. None of the universities will be able to hold our;”

  He looked like he wanted to cry, very much like a little boy who has had his laboratory dismantled by an angry parent after one too many vile odors penetrated to the living quarters of the house. Winifred resisted the impulse to hug him and tell him it would be all right. She wasn’t at all sure that it would be.

  “I think the apartment is bugged,” she said clearly. “So don’t say anything now.” Later she took him to the hospital where she had a room that she knew was safe, and she told him the details of why Matt and Lisa had taken the cold sleep. Winifred had written him a note saying only that they were safe and out of touch. He turned very pale at her words now. “Blake will get in touch with you somehow, sometime,” she said. “This is for him when he does.”

  Derek examined the envelope, then stuffed it into his pocket. “It would be safer with you, probably,” he said.

  “I don’t think so. They’ve been patient, but I don’t think it will last. Have you read of those new patents that are in direct competition with Obie’s tricks? Blake’s work certainly. I think the Church will become more and more harassed and begin to haul in those who might lead them to him.” .

  “That means me too,” Derek said.

  “You’ve got to keep out of their hands,” Winifred said simply. “I don’t know how, but you have to.”

  “I could write to him in care of the name he uses for the patents, send it to the brokerage firm that handles his affairs,” Derek said after a long pause. “He must have a method worked out so he can keep in touch with the world.”

  He wrote the note, and Winifred put it through her personal tube. The note was whisked to the central sorter department, dropped into another tube, and was sucked to the Wall Street division of the Post Office, where it was sorted from other mail once more, and put into the tube that led to the firm of Watkins Brokerage. Robert L. Kaufman pursed his lips when he saw the envelope. All letters addressed to his mysterious client, J. M. Black, were sent directly to him. No one else in the firm knew what he did with them, and he had resisted offers of bribes and threats alike to keep the secret that he had sworn to keep. He readdressed the envelope, sent it to Heffleman’s News Store in Cleveland, and leaned back wondering what was in it, how it was picked up at the other end, and most of all, who J. M. Black really was. He was a multi-millionaire, that was for sure, but who was he?

  A few weeks later a black-haired young man in slovenly, baggy pants, a coat salvaged from a rag pile, shoes that didn’t match but were whole, slouched along East 23rd Street in New York City. No one paid any attention to him as he elbowed his way through others who were dressed much as he was. No one raised his eyes high enough to see the steady gray eyes that were bright and inquisitive and not at all dulled by hunger and hopelessness.

  It was Blake of course. He had learned that his golden mop of hair was a dead giveaway when he didn’t want to be recognized, and as good as a banner on a staff when he did. He chose on this trip to remain unrecognized. He knew that Obie was after him seriously now. Heffleman’s was under surveillance suddenly. He had eluded three men staked out there, but there had been a fight, and two of them would no longer be of any use to the MM’s. That had been a surprise. They must be covering every place that he had been in the past. If they had been certain of his appearance at Heffleman’s they would have had a dozen men there, not the three who had been as startled as he was when the confrontation took place. He shuffled along, grinning at the sidewalk, remembering the fight. It had been a good one, the first one he’d had in three or four years. He was still in shape.

  At the corner he paused and glanced at the store across the street, a used clothing store. The meeting place. A tall thin man was standing in front of it, trying to look at home here in the slums, and failing. Blake grinned again. Derek was Matt made over. He crossed the street, to all appearances oblivious of the official traffic, but getting through it unscathed, so obviously his unconcern was not real. The traffic was made up of taxis, buses, trucks, no private cars at all, and the professional drivers were mean, considering pedestrians their natural enemy, to be cancelled out whenever the opportunity arose.

  Blake was pushed roughly by three boys under fourteen, who were sizing up Derek. He snarled at them under his breath and made a hand sign that no kid in the slum who wanted to stay alive failed to learn by the time he was six. The boys held their ground for less than a second, then turned and shoved their way through the crowds, mouthing’ asterisks. Blake waited fifteen feet from Derek, examining the crowds carefully for the sign of a tail. There was none, he was certain. Give Derek credit for that anyway. Blake knew the shadows could be posted in any of the buildings about them, using scopes and telltale devices to keep Derek in check, but unless they were down on the streets, they could be shaken easily enough.

  It was a cold day, drizzly, not quite freezing, but so near that the fine mist glazed what it touched before It melted away. People were out, as they always were, day and night, in order to line up for food rations, for water, for unemployment benefits, for medical care, simply to get out of the cramped rooms where eight or more of them lived together in the crumbling tenements. Many of the rooms were occupied on a staggered basis. A family could have the room for half of the day only, departing when the other family arrived for its occupancy. So they were on the streets. Mothers wrapped in blankets, holding squirming babies; kids who were old enough to walk were out walking; school-age kids were, thankfully, out of sight, packed into the schools where little learning took place, but where. there was heat and free lunch consisting of meal and water, and fish crackers. They were the lucky ones. By fourteen, or twelve, if the kid looked older, they were allowed to drop out, and they were on the streets after that.

  Derek looked frozen, he had been waiting for an hour, and had
almost given up hope when the unkempt youth touched his arm roughly and muttered. “Start walking, Dek, I’ll tag along.”

  Derek didn’t look at the stranger a second time, but jerked away from the building front and got into the masses shuffling up the street. He didn’t see Blake again for almost half an hour. Then he was there at his side, his hand hard on Derek’s arm, guiding him down an alley. It was worse here because of the people sleeping on and under newspapers and rags. Derek shivered not this time from the cold, and Blake hurried him on. They entered a basement and stopped.

  “Strip,” Blake said. He put a small light on the floor. It was blue and made his lips look purple.

  Derek looked around. “Why?”

  “Just do it,” Blake said.

  Derek stared at him for a moment, then very slowly started to take off his clothes. Blake examined each item, then Derek got dressed again. Blake looked at the envelope with his name on it curiously, but didn’t open it yet. He put it in an inside pocket.

  “I came prepared to take you with me, if you want, to.”

  Derek hesitated only a moment, then nodded. They picked their way through the darkness to a door on the other side of the basement. For the next half hour this was the pattern. Blake knew his way through the basements and the alleys like a rat finding his way through a familiar maze. Suddenly they were at the riverfront.

  Derek looked about quickly. The wind coming off the fetid water was cold and evil-smelling and constant. There was a black warehouse looming behind them, on both sides of them, and the river before them. Nothing else. They had lost the mobs, and might have been alone in the city.