Angel Fire

by Andrew M. Greeley

  Frau Lutz___”

  The new colors were pale, the patterns little more than straight lines.

  “Gaby,” he croaked.

  “Herr Schmidt”—Helmstadt pointed at a grim, sandy-haired man in a white lab jacket—“is monitoring the emissions through another interesting mechanism that I will take great pleasure in explaining to you later. When the alien ceases to exist, we will be able to measure the remaining energy levels, compare them with earlier levels, and make an estimate of its composition. Unless, of course, its colleagues wish to negotiate ...”

  “Negotiate?” Sean tried to clear the fog out of his head. What colleagues? Which negotiations?

  “Ja ...” The little man shrugged nonchalantly. “We are civilized and cultivated humanists. If they wish to join our attempts to

  build a socialist world, we will spare their colleague, for a time at any rate: If not ... well, we will learn more about them from analyzing the debris of this one and will capture others. Eventually, they will come to terms.”

  Force angels to come to terms?

  “Hitler!” Sean shouted, doing terrible things to his throat.

  Frau Lutz slapped his face, hard.

  “You must to the Herr Direktor speak with respect.”

  “Ja, it is true— Ah, so ... Lutz, time for the latest picture.”

  A transparency was removed from a boxlike tube on the control panel and placed in the projector.

  There were only a few thin lines.

  “So, Schmidt, what discharges do you have?”

  “None, Herr Direktor. All energy waves have ceased. Not gradually, but suddenly.”

  “Dummkopf, that is impossible.” Helmstadt rushed to the monitor screen. Over his shoulder, Sean could see that it was completely black.

  Poor Gaby. Well, she knew now whether there was Anyone else.

  The Direktor was swearing a blue streak in noisy German, momentarily distracting the Volpos. Sean lunged toward the box on the door frame.

  He almost made it. He jammed his shoulder against the box and pushed furiously.

  But he didn’t hit the right buttons.

  A Volpo cracked him on the skull, and he tumbled to the floor, a whole new mass of pain crowding into his head.

  “He has become unnecessary. We will say he defected and display to the world the double we have trained.” Helmstadt’s voice came from a great distance. “Lutz, eliminate him.”

  Through a thick mist, he saw the Wagnerian heroine take an AK-47 from one of the Volpos and point it at him.

  “Gaby ...” was his final prayer.

  The weapon in Lutz’s hands melted, and her hands and arms melted with it. The Direktor’s head dissolved into a messy white liquid; the control panel erupted in a series of rapid explosions. The Volpos crumbled to the floor, their uniforms covered with the

  same oozing cream that was flowing down the Direktor’s headless lab coat. The wall with the miniature cyclotron turned bright red, like a blast furnace.

  Desmond remembered the assassin in the shower room of the Grosvenor. Try to keep a typhoon in one room. Fools.

  He felt himself lifted off the ground and dragged rapidly through the steel and concrete walls of the fortress and up a snow-covered hill. At the top of the hill he was unceremoniously dropped in a snow bank. The pains in his body seemed to have been healed on the way there.

  Somewhere in the depths of Sean Desmond’s drugged and battered brain a voice said, “This should be quite a show.”

  It was.

  The Elster flowed on one side, a dark slash in the snow. Above him the stars watched silently. And on the other side, the administration building began to glow with the same bright red as the wall in the control room. The light flicked on and off, like a stop sign blinking on a country road. Each flicker seemed brighter than the last one.

  Then little bits of green and white light slipped in and out of the sides of the building as the red glow became brighter and brighter, tiny sparks of energy creeping like an infection through the whole center. One by one the other buildings began to pulsate with crimson light. Finally even the guard towers were caught up in the ominously ticking red glow. Screams echoed briefly on the night air and then abruptly ceased. The whole center now was glowing like a rocket about to lift off or a Roman candle ready to explode.

  The quarter-square-mile area pulsated, on and off, on and off, for several seconds, a solid mass of seething red light. Then the top of the headquarters exploded and soared into space.

  From the absolute center of the haunted castle, a broad pillar of white light leaped into the sky, up and down, several times— dazzling, swirling, implacable light, glowing like molten plasma and turning the night into a blinding daylight.

  The thunder of the accompanying explosion was like a combination of the sound tracks of films he had seen of tidal waves, hurricanes, tornadoes, nuclear blasts. Then the roar was drowned out by the peal of thousands of trumpets blaring in glorious triumph.

  In the midst of the trumpet crescendos he thought he heard Aaron Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man.” Probably not, but you couldn’t tell what angels would do when they started playing games on their horns.

  Then the whole institute seemed to be drained into that column of incandescent daylight, absorbed into a mighty vacuum. Then the light expanded to the far edges of the barbed-wire fences, becoming a vast pole of bubbling light reaching from earth to sky.

  The light then turned scarlet, a broad band of terrible red heat and light tearing at the sky. Slowly it passed through the rainbow from blazing red to somber violet. Then back again to red. Then the brightest, cleanest, most terrible white light Sean Desmond had ever seen.

  Angel fire! Seraph fire!

  He was aware as the light ascended to the heavens that his eyes were being shielded. The woman thinks of everything.

  That’s what she really looks like, a fusion reaction. A seraph, a being on fire with love, and now with love driven by anger.

  There was a mighty explosion, a fireball like a hydrogen bomb, brighter than a thousand suns.

  Then the light ceased, as abruptly as it had appeared.

  And the Honecker work center was no more. All that remained was a large black scar in the snow. And the starry skies above.

  Goddamn Nazis. Mess with my Gaby, will you?

  And then he lost consciousness again.

  The young GI with the blue scarf and the blue beret signaled them through the gate. Gaby rated a smart salute.

  “Where you from, soldier?”

  “Laramie, Wyoming, ma’am.”

  “It’s colder there than here. And more snow.”

  “Not as weird there, ma’am.”

  “Tell me about it, son.”

  They both laughed and the kid, eyes wide with awe, saluted again.

  Good taste, kid.

  They went through the checkpoint and into the efficiently plowed streets of West Berlin.

  Socialism was not all that good at plowing streets. So all right, it was more ugly and messy and corrupt on this, the capitalist side of the city. At least they’ve shoveled the snow off the streets.

  “Checkpoint Charley,” she said. “Feeling better?”

  “You didn’t need my help,” he said, the words coming up from a swamp of confusion and pain.

  “Will it make any difference if I say that I cherish your brave effort to help?”

  “You must have kissed the blarney stone, woman.”

  “You are better.”

  “Don’t you believe it.”

  “Seriously, how do you feel?”

  “For some odd reason most of the aches and pains went away up there on the hill while you did your show. I’m just sort of exhausted with small hurts all over.”

  “Shock. You’ll be all right in a day or two.”

  “Fine. That was some show out there. Now I know what a seraph really looks like.”

  “All right, you win. I am a seraph.”

  “Ca
ndidly, I’m not surprised. And that was really you, wasn’t it? I mean the plasma column of light. Are you really that size?”

  “Oh no.”

  “Smaller?”

  “I didn’t say that.” They turned a corner and drove onto a broad street swarming with people, more vitality than in the all of the Democratic Republic. Kurfurstendamm, he supposed.

  “Bigger? How big are you really?”

  “Big enough----To take a phrase from your descriptions of

  certain parts of my analog’s anatomy: monumental.”

  “I can believe it.”

  Already they were bantering again. They had wiped out the sorcerers and they were joking as though they did it every day.

  Well, as though she did it every day.

  “How could those guys figure they could fight you? But give me the details, how did you do it?”

  “You did not remember London?”

  “Only at the end ... the real you never went into the Hon-ecker Center at all.”

  “That’s one way to put it. I was there all right, but, ah, I left much of my energy pattern and resources outside. I am so sorry”—her voice choked—“that you had to suffer. I could not act, however, until they actually tried to kill you. Then”—she sighed—“it went very quickly.”

  “I noticed that.”

  “Poor fools___You forgive me for permitting you to suffer?”

  “Hell, Gaby, I feel fine, more or less. And they’re finished.”

  “The horror is chained, yes, for a time.”

  “Tell me more about it.”

  “We knew that they were the ones who were trying to kill you. It seemed so absurd. There was so little danger to their work in your speech. Their attempts were so clumsy, even more inept than Project Archangel. You yourself suggested that perhaps it was me they were seeking.” She eased their rented Mercedes slowly down the bustling Kur’damm. “You see, they were very serious about creating supermen. They didn’t think you’d be much help, but they thought they could use you as bait to trap one of us. They presumed—quite correctly, I’ll admit—that we know pretty well what the direction of your evolution is.”

  “They were crazy.”

  “Obviously. And for two reasons. First, you are right when you say that all your species can do is to stand in the way of the directionality of the organism. And secondly—“

  “Secondly, never mess with seraphs.”

  “Angels.”

  “But why did they think your crowd would, ah, take me under its wings?”

  They both laughed, nervously, to release tension.

  “We have left traces of our interests and concerns down through the ages. Someone who studied it carefully—both the East Germans and the Project Archangel but surely not your CIA— might suspect that we would be concerned about you. They had nothing to lose by trying. And all you had to lose—“

  “—was my life.”

  “Precisely. So when two of their hit teams vanished, they presumed that we were involved.”

  “They outsmarted your bunch?”

  She smiled ruefully. “That’s one way of putting it. But they’re all dead, aren’t they?”

  “True enough.”

  He chewed on it for a time.

  “Why do angels bother with people like me?”

  “Figure it out yourself.”

  “Because I was saying something important, more important than I knew?”

  “That’s part of it. More important than you knew and more dangerous, as it turns out.”

  “As it turns out.”

  She pulled up in front of an elegant hotel, the Bristol Kempin-ski. Nothing but the most elegant hotel in Berlin for my Gaby. “I began to suspect what they were doing when you pointed out the possibility. So you can tell everyone that you beat a ser—an angel to a clue.”

  “No one will believe me.”

  “Tough.” She laughed, pushing the trunk button. “But you understand that I had to find out their goals to report to the others.”

  “Your superiors?”

  She laughed softly. “I don’t think that’s how they would describe themselves.”

  My Gaby is the boss. I bet even Mike takes orders from her. I wonder if he’s the suitor. It would be kinda nice if he were. She deserves the best.

  Gabriel and Michael, husband and wife—what would Sister Intemerata think? I hope God doesn’t let her know. It would spoil her heaven.

  “And you played the game out to the end to learn all the details?” They continued to sit in the car.

  She nodded. “I am sorry that you were worried”—she hesitated—“and not unmoved by your generous heroism. Yet, in addition to being bound by my rules to do nothing until they tried to kill you, I felt I had to learn everything about their plan before destroying them. It was, after all, at least possible that they could do harm to my kind. Improbable, but not utterly impossible. Obviously that was not a major concern.”

  A doorman, dressed as though he were a field marshal in the army of Frederick the Great, opened the door.

  “Were they going in the right direction?”

  “Lock an angel—all right, I’ll be precise—a seraph up in a lead room and destroy her with puny proton blasts? ... You gotta be kidding.”

  “Pretty dumb, huh?”

  They were silent until the doorman had carried off their luggage.

  “Very dumb.” She resumed the conversation. “Like all sorcerers, they underestimated our power and overestimated their own.”

  “So they lost.”

  “Rather decisively, if I do say so myself. Still, Jackie Jim, it was a bit of St. Crispin’s day, wasn’t it?”

  “You bet. Only I won’t be able to tell my grandchildren about it. They would want to lock me up.”

  “Oh, you can write the story down. Maybe some future generation will believe it. In the meantime, you loved almost every second of it___Now we must get you up to your room and make

  those remaining aches and pains go away.”

  Then we’ll both have to go home. I don’t want that to happen, Gabriella. I’ll miss you terribly.

  In their dark maroon suite, her gentle hands made the hurt go away, mother again curing her injured little boy.

  “Might I sing some more for you, Jackie Jim, softly so that the others in this somewhat vulgar place will not think we’re crazy?”

  “By all means. Especially that Bethlehem hymn.”

  “Bethlehem?”

  “The last one you sang out in the Skargarden.”

  “You speculate too much.”

  However, she began with the song.

  As she sang, softly and tenderly, Sean understood for the first time that she had risked her life. Helmstadt and his storm troopers might have had something that could harm her kind. There was no way to be sure beforehand. Unlikely but not impossible. Somehow her husband had gambled and lost.

  So she risked my life too, he thought ruefully.

  Well, I told her she was the boss. I can’t complain if she took me literally.

  Then he realized that she would not have permitted any harm to come to him.

  Why not?

  Because she’s my guardian angel, that’s why not.

  After the Bethlehem songs she sang several he had never heard before, wordless songs that created images of peaceful fields and lakes, quiet sunsets, sparkling dawns, and radiant blue skies. Minnesota in the summer. The farm they used to visit before his father died.

  His pain was healed, but he was still groggy from the drugs they had injected into his veins, and probably, as she had said, from shock. The world existed in a hazy but pleasant confusion, and the world was entirely Gabriella.

  He loved her.

  A marble statue perhaps or a pillar of white fire. It didn’t matter, he still loved her.

  Unthinkingly, automatically, his fingers went to the buttons on her blouse. Her big brown eyes widened, but she did not resist him. In the heat of his quickly ignited desire, the
re were no metaphysical or moral issues to consider. Only Gaby.

  His lips moved to her breasts, her fingers tightened their grip on his head.

  She was skilled in tender and prolonged foreplay. It probably takes them a couple of hundred years, Sean thought, as waves of sweetness rolled over him, like the peaceful waves of a caressing ocean.

  Then, when it was time that he must enter her, their love changed. No, they don’t do it that way. Sons of God and daughters of man. Other way around. But maybe the scripture was afraid to even hint at the daughters of God and the sons of man.

  Their love became a fire rushing through a forest, a river plunging over a waterfall and dashing to the sea, a hurricane battering against the coast, molten lava running down a mountainside.

  Gaby’s fireball penetrating the sky.

  ANGEL FIRE!

  Laced with gold and silver waterfalls of love which swept him along irresistibly.

  The sweetness, the pleasure, the joy were intolerable. Sean was drawn into a raging blast furnace, an out-of-control inferno that would devour and destroy.

  He wanted to remain in the inferno for all eternity. He desired

  nothing but timeless union with its destructive sweetness. He knew that his own existence would end, but it didn’t matter. There would be nothing but warmth. Forever.

  Then he was dumped unceremoniously back into the room at the Kempinski, a room which, he noticed for the first time, was much chillier than a room at an American hotel.

  “I almost destroyed you.” A grief-stricken disembodied voice.

  Why must I always deal with guilt-ridden women, even when they’re angels.

  She’s going to be as bad as a first-year graduate student to whom some idiot gave the first B in all her life. Well, I owe her this, God knows. Don’t you, God? You’re responsible for this whole bloody mess. There had to have been better ways than sexual differentiation.

  “But you didn’t, now, did you?” He sighed audibly. Sure it had been quite a ride.

  “I ought to have known better. I thought I could control the union. It is impossible for our two species to unite without destruction. Our love is too terrible.”

  “ ‘Tis interesting, I’ll say that. Keeps a man warm in a damp hotel room, it does.... Now stop hiding, I don’t like arguing with someone I can’t see. It’s hard on my imagination, if you take my meaning.”