Firechild

by Jack Williamson

  She waited while his passionless eyes weighed her again.

  “EnGene!” He spoke the name like a curse. “It has nothing to do with engines. It is a laboratory the Americans have set up for secret military research. This new information from your apparatus indicates that they are very near success.”

  “Success with what?”

  “The Glavni Vragl! He burst into explosive Russian. “The Amerikanski! They are about to grasp a deadlier secret than anything atomic. One of our own genetic engineers has called it the final weapon.”

  She sat staring, her eyes grown violet.

  “You will be more fully briefed by our own master biologists before you leave.” He returned to sober-toned English. “But here, in outline, is your task. Your special cell must act at once to secure complete technical information on the research at EnGene Labs. When that has been accomplished, the laboratory must be sabotaged. The top researchers must be identified. So far as possible, they must be eliminated.”

  “Comrade!” She shivered. “That’s too much!”

  “As I said, it will require extraordinary efforts, but you must understand that Mother Russia is facing a new and deadly danger. The Americans must be checkmated. Now, comrade! At any cost! Before they possess this weapon. That is your assignment. The nation depends on you. And I must warn you, comrade.” His tone turned bleak. “You must act with the utmost secrecy, without delay!”

  “There—there’ll have to be delay.” She had half risen, but now she sank back into her chair. “We are not prepared—not for this. I do have informers in EnGene, but nobody—no experts in genetics. No fit staff to sabotage the plant and dispose of the researchers. Even in America, foolish as their leaders are, some things are impossible.”

  “Make them possible! You’ll find means.” He lifted his teacup as if to drink to her success. His gaze grew thoughtful. “I regret Mr. Roman’s illness, because he has been so generous to you. Certainly, the association with him has given you an excellent cover, and I believe the trade ministry has found him a valuable partner. Even now—” The gold teeth lent a glint of malice to his grin. “Sick as you say he is, I think he will serve us one more time.”

  Jules Roman died in his bed that night. The cause, as reported by Dr. Vladimir Rykov, was a pulmonary embolism. His trusted private secretary, Anya Ostrov, carried his ashes back to his widow in Palm Beach, that island haven where so many senescent capitalists retired to die in luxury.

  Exit permission denied, the nurse stayed behind.

  3

  The Limits of

  Life

  Summer had come early and hot. On that breathless Monday night in Fort Madison, Dr. Saxon Belcraft stayed at the hospital with a recovering cardiac patient longer than he was really needed. He stayed for a second Bud with his sirloin at Stan’s Steak Place, and finally killed an hour at the office, frowning over his bank statement and the file of past-due bills. Since Midge left, he hated going home.

  Tara Two—that was her fond name for the old house on the river bluffs. Timbers decaying and foundations settling, it had cost too much, certainly more than a beginning physician should have mortgaged himself to pay, but the white-columned entrance was still impressive, and it overlooked a magnificent sweep of the Mississippi. Midge had loved it. Without her now, it had become an empty hell.

  The phone was ringing when he let himself in, too loud against the silence. He rushed to answer, spurred by the crazy hope that she might be coming back.

  “Hiya, Wulf.” His brother’s voice, so unexpected that he didn’t recognize it until he recalled how Vic used to cull him Beowulf. “Happy birthday!”

  The greeting surprised him again, because the years had let them drift so far apart. Even when he married Midge, there had been only that short note on the En-Gene letterhead. Sorry, Sax, but I can’t be there. We’ve just broken into something new here at the labs. Something too big to be neglected.

  “Thanks, Vic.” He paused, remembering. “It’s been a long time. What’s new at EnGene?”

  “Nothing I can say much about.” Vic seemed gently hesitant, no longer the brash kid brother. “How’s the young riverboat doctor? And the beautiful bride?”

  For a moment he couldn’t speak. The empty house got to him again. Midge had walked out just last week. Still crying for herself, blaming herself for wanting too much. There would never be anybody else. It was just that the hospital and the office and the night calls took too much of him. The grand old house was too lonely for her now, no longer enough.

  “So-so.” He didn’t try explaining anything to Vic. “I’m on the .hospital staff. Financial sunlight maybe in sight.” And he asked, “Is anything wrong?”

  “There has been, Wulf.” A rueful voice, older and graver, than he recalled. “But I’m on top of it now.”

  He waited, wondering about EnGene.

  “Listen, Wulf.” A sober-toned appeal. “I don’t think I’ve ever thanked you. Till now, I guess I never really wanted to, because I don’t think you ever forgave me for being brighter than you were. When you used to look after me, I always thought it was just because you had to, because I was your baby brother.”

  “Maybe.” He had to agree. “Maybe so.”

  “Not that I ever blamed you. I guess I didn’t care, not that much. I must have been pretty obnoxious, and I’ve been thinking lately that I do owe you something for wiping my nose and beating up the bullies that beat me up. Remember, Wulf? You taught me how to tie my shoes, and you signed for library books everybody said I was too young for. You even played chess, so long as I let you win now and then. I guess I loved you, Wulf, even if I never wanted to admit it.

  “I had to tell you that.”

  “You didn’t need to.” He felt a throb in his throat. “Though now and then you were hard to take.”

  “Anyhow, Wulf, I’ve just mailed you a letter. Marked personal. Make sure you open it yourself. When you’re alone. It will tell you why I called. And, well—” An odd little pause. “Thanks again for a lot of things. And so long, Sax.”

  The phone clicked.

  He slept fitfully that night, thinking and dreaming of the scrawny, myopic, loud-mouthed kid Vic had been. Seven years younger. A lot brighter in fact than he was, but too much given to letting it show. Getting into playground battles with kids who resented his brains and his arrogance. Kids big enough to maul him.

  Was Vic in need of help again?

  Before the night was gone, he knew he had to find out. Up at five in the creaky house, he made instant coffee in the microwave, gulped it with a slab of cold pizza, and dialed information for an Enfield number for Victor Belcraft.

  The phone rang a dozen times before a young woman answered, pounding sleepy and annoyed. She hadn’t seen Vic since yesterday morning. She didn’t know where he was, and she didn’t like being blasted out of bed in the middle of the night.

  Her voice warmed when he gave his name.

  “Wulf? The doctor-brother? He spoke about you just the other day. Seemed fond of you. Sorry if I sounded nasty.”

  She was Jeri—the way she said it told him how she spelled it. A commercial artist, she’d met Vic when she was doing PR for EnGene “back when EnGene wanted PR.” They had lived together the last two years. Planning to marry if his job ever left him time for a honeymoon.

  He asked her, “Is Vic okay?”

  “I don’t—don’t really know.” Her voice had slowed. “He never talks much about the lab, but I know something has disturbed him terribly. Some project he calls Alphamega. Keeps him there night and day. Something he won’t talk about. When I kept asking, he tried to get me out of town. Wanted to ship me off to a graphics exhibit in Memphis, and then to see my folks in Indiana. Of course I wouldn’t go. All I can do is sit here and fret.

  “Do you—do you know anything?”

  “Nothing. Except that Vic called me last night. What he said troubles me. It sounded too much like a final farewell. Could he be sick?”

  �
��Obsessed. With this Alphamega project. That’s sickness enough.”

  “Something dangerous?”

  “I wish I knew. It’s terribly important to him. He’s high when it’s going well, in the dumps when it isn’t. Yesterday morning he—” She paused uncertainly. “He frightened me. He’d set the alarm to rush off early the way he always does, but then he came back into the bedroom and took me in his arms. That terrified me, because he never liked to show that sort of emotion. I asked him if anything was wrong.

  ” ‘Not after today.’ The words puzzled me, because of the half-cheerful way he grinned and squeezed me again. Grinned with tears in his eyes. ‘Something has gone dreadfully wrong, but I’m about to set it right.’

  “He wouldn’t say what he meant. Just kissed me and rushed off.” Trouble dulled her voice. “Last night he never came home. Never even called. I tried the lab a dozen times. The switchboard girl always said his line was busy. I wondered if he just had no time to talk. Anyhow, I was worried so much I nearly never got to sleep last night.”

  “Neither did I,” he told her. “If you reach him, tell him I’m on my way to Enfield.

  “If I can—” She hesitated. “I’d better warn you that lab security has got awfully tight. I’ve never been inside. Once he promised to show me around, but security wouldn’t let me in.”

  “I’m driving. I’ll be there tonight.”

  “If we could get him out of EnGene—” A longer pause. “I’m sick about it, but he’s a stubborn man.”

  “I remember that.”

  Driving hard all that long midsummer day through fields of tall green corn and golden wheat and fat cattle grazing, he had time to think of the boy Vic had been. The arrogant oddball. Victor—he wanted people to use his full name because he said it meant winner, but nobody did.

  The scrawny little kid, always wanting too much, somehow often winning it. Grimly taking on bullies too big for him, projects too hard for him, begging for books too old for him. Reading them too late by a flashlight under a blanket in spite of his myopia. Always trying to build things his allowance wouldn’t buy: a steam engine and a microscope and finally his own computer. Sometimes they worked.

  Vic had always surprised him. He kept recalling their last night together, the night of moody silences and solemn recollections after their father’s funeral. They sat up late in the Cincinnati hotel room. He was sipping bourbon and water, which Vic refused.

  “I’ve got a fine brain. I want to keep it running.”

  He set his own drink aside.

  “A damn shame.” He knew Vic was thinking of their father. “After all he’d done—done for others—” His voice had broken. He gulped and went on. “But I guess he knew what was coming. I remember how he used to quote what he called the first and second laws of medicine. We’re machines. Machines wear out.”

  He nodded, recalling the reek of the pipe and the rasp of the rusty old voice and medical smells that always filled the front room where the old man met his patients.

  “Life—it isn’t fair!” Vic’s voice quivered. “He died too hard!”

  A bitter silence. He reached for his drink.

  “Too hard!” Vic paused and slowly brightened.

  “Someday we’ll do better.” He sat abruptly straighter, as if his grief had lifted. “I never liked those two laws. I always felt that we’re more than just machines—I know Dad was. I never wanted to wear out. And Sax, you know, perhaps—”

  Vic’s voice changed.

  “I hate to say this, Sax. Because of Dad. But I’m getting out of medicine. I never had your bent for it. Or his, though I never told him. I guess I’m—well, maybe just too restless. I never had Dad’s total dedication. Now that he’s gone, I’m giving it up.”

  “For what?”

  “Genetics.”

  “Why genetics?”

  “It’s where we’ll build the future.” Vic’s eyes shone behind the heavy lenses. “Here’s what I mean. An idea I’ve been incubating ever since I first began to see what’s possible. Dad would have called it a crazy dream. But listen!”

  He listened, a little awed by Vic as he had always been.

  “The genetic engineers are redesigning life. Give them a few more years, and they’ll be able to create nearly anything.”

  “Supermen?”

  “Could be.” Vic shrugged. “But let’s look first at something simpler. For example, microorganisms.”

  “Genetic weapons?”

  “I hope not!” Vic looked hurt. “A lot of bugs are bad, but others are benign. You’ve got benign symbiotes in your own gut, Sax. Suppose we could create a better symbiote.”

  “Like what?”

  “Call it a virus of life.” Vic’s voice had lifted. “A virus that could spread through your body, infect every cell —but to heal instead of kill. To repair damage and reverse the decay of age. People could be perfect. Eternal as gods. Think of that, Sax!”

  His own dark mood was slow to lift.

  “Wake up, Wulf!” Vic was the blithe child again, eagerly intense, dreaming impossible dreams. “Open your eyes! Even such a virus wouldn’t be limited. We don’t know the limits of life. We’ve never tested the limits of evolution. Suppose we could?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Experiment!” An eager gesture. “We all evolve. You remember the old saying that ontogony recapitulates phylogeny—that the growth of every individual replays the whole process of evolution? Suppose we design a new being able to keep on adapting till it reaches some final limit—if there is a final limit.”

  He couldn’t help shaking his head.

  “You’re just like Dad.” A sad little shrug, but Vic went on. “It could be—it will be done. I mean to be on the team that does it.”

  “If you think you can—” He raised his glass. “Dad would have told you to try.”

  Pushing the car all that blazing day, he kept wondering. He had seen Vic only briefly since that night. Twice at symposia, where Vic had been reading papers a little too technical for him to follow. Once at their mother’s hospital bedside, and again at her funeral. He had never spoken again of that Utopian dream.

  Suddenly, he wondered if Vic had really been pursuing it. EnGene, to guess from the name, must be devoted to genetic research. Could Vic’s Alphamega project have been an effort to realize that wild vision? An effort now gone perilously wrong? Why else Vic’s air of mystery about trouble at the lab and that alarming hint of final farewell in his voice?

  Night had fallen before the road signs named Enfield. A few miles out of town, the red-winking lights of a police car stopped him. He pulled up beside it and rolled the window down.

  “Road closed, sir.”

  Stiff from sitting and chilled from the air conditioner, he peered groggily into the hot dark to ask how he could get into Enfield.

  “No way, sir. All traffic diverted.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Disaster area—”

  A radio was squawking in the police car. Muffled shouts, maybe curses, somewhere off the mike. They faded into crackling static. The cop had turned from him to stare toward the town.

  “Disaster? What sort of disaster?”

  A cricket chirped in the brush beside the road. Heat lightning flickered far away. The cop ignored him.

  “My brother lives there!” He raised his voice. “I’ve got to reach him.”

  The cop stood fixed.

  He heard an overdriven engine, far off at first but whining nearer. Headlights stabbed through a thin gray groundfog. A quarter-mile away, they dimmed and went out. A long second later, he heard the squeal of skidding tires, the thud and shriek and jangle of the crash. The cop stood blankly staring at a yellow fireball lifting out of the fog. He shouted at the cop.

  “Listen! I’m an M.D. Let me get down there—”

  The cop wasn’t listening. In that sudden stillness, the cricket shrilled again.

  “Officer, please!”

  “Huh?” A bl
ink of blank surprise, as if the cop had forgotten him. “Nothing you can do.”

  “People could be dying—”

  “Mister, they are dying.” Shambling into the headlight glow, the cop grimaced at him. “God knows from what, but there’s something hellish loose down there. Killing—killing the city! All we can do is try to keep people out.”

  “If the problem is medical—”

  “God knows what it is! If you’d heard what’s coming out—” The cop’s head jerked at the crackling radio. His face looked lax and sick. “We’re diverting everybody.”

  “Sir, I’ve got to look for my brother—”

  “Turn your damn car!” A drawn pistol glinted. “Back the way you came.”

  Damn the cop! He wanted to gun the car past him and on toward Enfield, but you didn’t defy the law— not if you were a new doctor trying for a start in old Fort Madison, where the legends of Mark Twain’s river still mattered more than modern medicine.

  He turned the car on grating gravel and drove away. In his rearview mirror, the burning wreck was a tall golden tree, the bright yellow trunk branching into reddish smoke. The cop stood motionless, a black stick figure at its foot. Beyond, only the dark. Suddenly shivering, he turned off the air conditioner.

  4

  Scorpio

  Anya delivered the ashes to Jules Roman’s family, with no thanks from anybody. With no display of grief she could see, the funeral was a private graveside ceremony in an exclusive cemetery in West Palm Beach. A long black limousine brought the widow and her daughter across the lagoon from the family mansion, along with the widow’s nurse and her wheelchair. She sat happily through the service, smiling at her own fleeting illusions, or rousing herself now and then to ask the nurse who all those people were.

  They were only a handful. Julia, the daughter whom she no longer knew. A few long-time friends, most of them as old as she and very little fitter. Old Roman’s lawyer, almost as old as he had been. Two attorneys Julia had hired. The head of the New York office and a World-Mart attorney. Anya kept discreetly apart from them.