Firechild

by Jack Williamson

  “Just a hoax? I saw a car go off the road and burn.”

  “Crazy!” Back at the door, she squinted at him through dirty lenses. “Simon-pure craziness. I know they ain’t nothing to it, because my own son’s down there. A security guard at EnGene. Anything bad, my Frankie’d a-called me before—”

  Her knobby hand darted at her throat, and he saw her gulp.

  “Before the phones went out.”

  “My brother works there.” He stepped closer to her, into that sharp turpene reek. “Do you know what they do—what they did at EnGene?”

  “Nothing bad. That’s certain sure.” Her head jerked for emphasis. “Frankie calls it bio research. Inventing new farmer sooticals. Frankie says they’ll wipe out cancer and asthma and my neuralgia. I just hope it’s soon!” She pushed a stringy gray wisp off her face. “All hush-hush, Frankie says, because the formulas—” She stopped to stare at the TV. A toothpaste commercial had broken off to show an empty news desk. The logo on the wall behind it read ENFIELD TONIGHT.

  “That crazy drunk, coming back. Claiming he’s the last man alive in Enfield—”

  6

  Pancho Torres

  The ladies and ladylike men of the Enfield Garden Club had toiled long to enhance “the tiptop lifestyle of the city magnificent,” planting ornamental pines in traffic islands and supporting the antilitter ordinance and phoning the mayor to gripe about weeds in vacant lots, but their civic benevolence had never reached the county jail. Filth festered there. The air conditioning had been broken all summer, while commissions and contractors squabbled over who should pay for repairs. In the baking heat, it was an evil-odored oven.

  Pancho Torres had been there since winter, when it was an evil-odored icebox. Lying naked and sweating through that last night in the solitary cell, he slept little and uneasily, escaping at last into a happy dream of San Rosario, back when he was small and dreams were real. It was morning in the dream. He lay listening to the slap-slap-slap of his mother patting out tortillas and the mouth-wetting smell as they toasted.

  “Hombres! Desayuno!”

  Men! His mother’s voice, calling him to breakfast with his father. No longer would he have to wait with Estrella and Roberto and little Jose until his father and Hector had eaten. For this was his cumpleaños! Today he was seven, and his mother had called him a man!

  She had bought him his first huaraches, made from a worn-out tire, and today he was going to the ejido with his father. Estrella and Roberto would have to take over his old tasks, carrying water to fill the olla and learning to work with their mother, climbing the hills for firewood and grinding masa for the tortillas.

  Barefoot no longer, he would be proud today, walking with his father in the strange-feeling huaraches. On their way out of the barrio and through the plaza and down to the growing crop of frijoles and maiz, people coming home from early mass would see them and know that now he was a man.

  “Hey you, killer spic! Hit the deck!”

  That mocking shout shattered the dream. He woke to the heat and the stinks of old sweat and old piss and old vomit and the dark flat face of Deputy Harris grinning through the bars.

  “Up and at ‘em, greaser boy! Good news for you.” Harris stopped to chuckle. “You’re leaving us today. Your lawyer won’t be down to see you off, but he left a message. Says he’s found no grounds for appeal. Ain’t that just too bad?”

  “A disappointment.” He nodded, trying hard not to show how much he hated Harris and the court-appointed lawyer and every Mexican-hating gringo. “No surprise.”

  The game of life had been rigged against him from the start. He had tried to play it by the hard rules the gringos taught him, against odds he had never really understood. A tantalizing game, because it let him win enough to think he was born lucky, until the mala suerte snatched everything away.

  A cruel gringo game, where his unlucky people always lost.

  “Listen up, greaser boy.” Harris raised his taunting voice. “You can pack your things and kiss your girl good-bye. You’ll be riding upstate this afternoon. They’ll be hooking up your chair.”

  “Okay, Mister.” He looked hard at Harris, taking care not to let his Spanish accent show. “I’ll be ready.”

  An endless morning after Harris was gone. He had no girl to kiss good-bye, no sign of sympathy from anybody. The Anglo prisoners all despised him, perhaps the blacks and Latinos too. With nothing to pack, nothing at all to do, he walked the narrow cell and sat slumped on the narrow bunk, hating all gringos.

  Most of all, even more than Deputy Harris, he hated the gringo marijuaneros who had put him there. Gringos who didn’t want Mexicans to pilot airplanes or make money or have beautiful women. Ugly cabrones who called him and his people bungling fools, who laughed at them and cheated them and bullied them. Those jealous rivals had helped set up the sting, to get him and Hector and all their compadres out of the way.

  His one visitor that last morning was another hateful gringo, a fat Protestant preacher who came with a guard to stand outside his cell and beg him to kneel and pray for one final precious chance to escape the roaring fires of hell.

  “Believe with me!” The preacher’s pale eyes lifted toward his Lord. “Cast yourself into the loving arms of Jesus. I beg you, brother! Open your damned soul to admit His holy light. Believe and receive—”

  “That’s enough.” He cut the preacher off. “I’ve believed too many lies.” He turned to the guard. “Take him away.”

  His lunch came on a paper plate, a heavy gray slab of what the jail cook called meat loaf. A dead cockroach lay on top of it, legs up. Thanks, he thought, to Deputy Harris.

  It was Harris again who came with two guards to shackle his wrists and escort him down the corridor, past those stares of silent scorn and out to his cage in the police car. Two deputies drove him away.

  “Your final ride, killer boy! To something hotter than your cucaracha pie!”

  Harris stood waving. Glad to have no more of him, Torres moved his arms to ease the pressure of the handcuffs and sank into bitterness. Tierra de Diós, his brother Hector used to call it. God’s country. So it had seemed through all his hard childhood years in San Rosario. He remembered his father struggling to sound out the letters from fabulous Los Angeles.

  The city of the angels. Letters from his mother’s brother, Eduardo, who had become el tío rico. Later, those from Hector, who had gone north to share Eduardo’s good fortune and discovered enough to begin coming back to land his own airplane on the narrow airstrip the marijuaneros had made in the rocky campo above San Rosario.

  At last, when he had grown old enough, Hector had taken him north in the roaring airplane, all the way to la tierra de diós. There, sharing Hector’s buena suerte, he had learned to shoot guns and pilot aviones and date stunning gringo girls.

  God’s country, en verdad till those envious gringos set up la picadura. Their poison sting. Eduardo had posted a million-dollar bond and gone back to buy the hacienda where he had been a peon. Left with nothing for the mocking gringo lawyers, he and Hector had gone to prison, sentenced to twenty years. Hector died climbing the wall. Outside and on the run, but very little luckier, he had jumped off a freight train on a bleak winter night and found himself in Enfield.

  Penniless and shivering, he tossed a rock through a pawnshop window. The owner had left no cash, but he found a gun and tried a 7 Eleven for cash. The counter girl screamed. He waved the unfamiliar gun. It exploded. And now, many years and many miles and many disappointments since that first one, the day he discovered that digging weeds out of the ejido strip was really no fun at all, he was on his way to die.

  A dull concussion roused him. He felt it jolt the car. Distorted voices on the radio began squawking code numbers that meant nothing to him. He leaned to peer out. They were still in Enfield, crawling down a crowded street. Another dull explosion. The men in the front seat turned to scowl at each other. He heard sirens shrieking, and they had to stop.

  The signal
lights went green and red and green again, but all traffic had been halted. He saw ambulances and fire trucks racing up the street ahead. The driver listened to the blasting radio and turned again to squint at his partner. They nodded together. The driver bent to the wheel. The car roared, lunged ahead, careened across the median into the other lane.

  Their own siren howling, they barreled back across the town. He shouted questions through the steel mesh, but the men in front ignored him till the car slowed and stopped beside the road. The driver stayed at the wheel. The other scrambled out and ran to unlock the door that held him in.

  “Okay, Pancho. Let’s see your cuffs.” He held out his hands. “With all hell bustin‘ out behind us, corrections won’t have time to ask what we’ve done with you.”

  “Qué hay? Spanish came in spite of himself. “What’s going on?”

  “God knows!”

  7

  The Cato

  Club

  The day Enfield died, Adrian Clegg called the executive council of the Cato Club into emergency session. They met at the Holy Oaks Hotel. That historic monument, just off Pennsylvania Avenue, was now owned by the club. Built to be the Washington residence of a railway tycoon, the noble old mansion had been refurbished for another tenant every generation since: to house an Asiatic embassy, an exclusive residential hotel, a philanthropic foundation, a museum of primitive art.

  Now, for all the world knew, it was once more a hotel, through its public rooms were always closed for renovation and most would-be patrons never found reservations available. The sole occupants now were the sworn and tested members, a few of their well-screened guests, and the discreet black staff. As the Cato Club, they remained zealously invisible. No club activity was ever announced; no untrusted outsiders were ever admitted. Staffers wore the historic gold-braided Holy Oaks livery, but also badges and guns.

  The meeting on that fateful afternoon was in the old library, itself monumental, the high wainscoting and tall bookcases and great table all dark mahogany. An isolated island, the room seemed untouchable by any hazard from Enfield, remote even from the capital around it. Traffic noise was muted to a faraway whisper, and the air carried the faint fragrance of good cigars and the mellow aroma of old leather from the massive chairs and the gold-stamped books moldering on the shelves.

  Though the club itself strove hard for nameless-ness, few of those seated there had ever shunned their own publicity. Clegg himself, like the lobbyist and the ex-Secretary of State, had always courted it. The pollster made a science of it. The oil baron, the shipping magnate, the banker, the media tycoon, the newspaper editor, two or three journalists and a few others too secretive to be classified: they all were or longed to be brokers of power. Their talk ceased when Clegg came in.

  “Got anything?” the editor greeted him eagerly. “Anything new?”

  “Enough to make us move.” He stalked to the end of the long table. “Gus is on his way from the White House now. He’d have the latest, but we won’t find comfort in it. They’re buzzing like a nest of stirred-up hornets with nobody in sight to sting.”

  He paused to clear his throat, and his voice rose enough to fill a larger hall. “Gentlemen, when we’ve heard whatever update Gus may bring, I’ll have news for you. Before we get to that, however, this is a moment when we should all renew our solemn pledges. Beginning with our oath of secrecy.”

  Hands on their hearts, they echoed the ritual he intoned. Again he made them wait, while he turned to frown at the liveried black waiting at the door.

  “So?” The editor ventured the question. “What’s happening in Enfield?”

  “Up to now, nobody knows.” He kept his cavernous eyes on the doorway. “I pray to God it’s what we Catonians stand ready for. I pray again that such procrastinators as Gus haven’t been able to delay us too long.” He paused for effect, and his voice fell solemnly. “Gentlemen, I’m afraid we’re the nation’s only chance, though all I’ve seen up to now is those first unconfirmed AP bulletins. Which the government is hushing up.”

  “The facts will get out,” the editor muttered.

  “Not from us.” Clegg’s cragged features stiffened forbiddingly. “I should remind you that our pledges are enforced.” He nodded at the guard. “Here’s Gus.”

  Gus was Dr. Gustave Kneeland. Washed out of the Air Force Academy after a crash that left one eye almost blind, he had entered academe to earn an engineering degree from Cal Tech and the Ph.D. from M.I.T. Nearing fifty now, he had kept himself straight and fit as the young cadet. He attired himself with an effect of stylish elegance—strangely broken now and then in moments of emotional stress, when his bad eye went suddenly askew.

  After a brilliant beginning—rumored to have come at least in part from his shrewd choice of research associates—he had been director of a science foundation and then an arms expert for the Pentagon. Now National Security Adviser, he stood high among the secret founders and directors of the club.

  Uneasily silent, Clegg beckoned him to the end of the table.

  “Fellow Catonians—” Tight-lipped, he paused to shake his head. “I’m afraid you’re expecting more than I can say at this point. I have to tell you that we have every indication of a grave national disaster, but its actual dimensions are not yet known. No outcome is yet predictable.”

  “Why not?”

  “Panic.” A helpless shrug. “Civil defense, the police, the media—all in the dark. Nobody can confirm anything. Hundreds dead in Enfield before communications got cut off—the worst reports say thousands. Nothing at all for hours now. Disorder spreading out across the state. Total breakdown.”

  “What hit it?” Clegg was still on his feet, the words a hostile-seeming challenge. “Some devil’s brew out of EnGene?”

  Kneeland shrugged, his dark, hawkish face carefully blank. “Nothing confirmed.”

  “What else could it be?”

  “We don’t know. We may never know.”

  “We can guess.” Clegg’s knobby forefinger stabbed at him accusingly. “We know Lorain and what he’s been up to. Gathering Victor Belcraft and his gang of devils there to pry into God’s power of creation. Stealing His holiest arts to create genetic monsters—military monsters, since you decided to allow Pentagon funding. Can you deny—”

  “We admit nothing.” Kneeland’s lean mask stiffened. “There will be no official comment. Not from anybody. That’s an order straight from the top. No comment whatever. Not until we have something confirmed on the nature of the disaster—if it is an actual disaster.”

  “It is. Gus, you’ve got to know it is.” Clegg was patronizing, almost sneering. “Proof enough of that got out before anybody tried to muzzle the media. A disaster I expected—and warned you to expect. Lorain and Bel-craft should have been scotched a year ago. Instead, you let the Pentagon funnel secret millions—”

  “Colonel Clegg, you don’t make military policy.” Kneeland’s voice took on an edge of its own. “The President does, in consultation with people who have earned his trust. EnGene has been receiving confidential funding because his expert military and strategic advisers approved confidential funding.”

  Lifting a hand to hold off Clegg’s rejoinder, he lectured the others like the professor he had been.

  “I must clarify the basis for that decision. Progress in science isn’t something you can turn off or on. When the time has come for a new step forward, it won’t wait for any man or any nation. Lorain and Belcraft aren’t the only genetic engineers who have reached what you might call the brink of creation. Others—in Russia, in half a dozen countries—are only one jump behind us.

  If a biological superweapon is going to be possible, we want America to own it. Even if lives must be lost—” Clegg rapped a question, “How many lives?” Kneeland’s wild eye darted at the ceiling, but his voice flowed evenly on.

  “The nukes are bad enough, but genetic war could become a worse nightmare. Genes don’t have to be mined and run through billion-dollar refineries. Each o
f us carries our own. Bioscience labs are cheap enough to build. If anybody does perfect a weapon, genetic proliferation will come soon and come fast. The weapons could be spores, deployed by the wind—”

  “God’s first power, desecrated into an instrument of death!” Clegg had come without the brown beret, and the blood-colored handprint had begun to show through his ashy makeup. “And you admit—”

  “We’ve nothing to admit.” A rap of anger. “Whatever we’ve done was done in good faith, planned to bolster the national defense. If genetic weapons are to exist, we need them in time to develop defenses against them. Perhaps it’s true that we’ve lost a city. Its sacrifice may well save the nation.”

  “If you and your Pentagon friends are willing to sacrifice innocent cities—” Clegg’s hard jaw jutted out. “What else must we expect?”

  “That’s impossible to say.” Kneeland shrugged again. “At this early point, our field reports don’t make much sense. When I left the President, he was tied up with the Secretary of Defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Strategic Air Command in a conference call. Cheyenne Mountain has been alerted, but up to now NORAD hasn’t picked up any hint of missiles.

  “Pending something definite about what the hell is happening, we’re alerting everybody. Civil defense, the military, the CIA and the FBI, state governments in the threatened areas—but very quietly, not to ignite a greater panic. We are confident that the danger can be contained and eliminated—if in fact any widespread danger does exist.”

  “If Enfield is dead,” Clegg muttered sourly, “I think a worldwide danger does exist. A danger even to our own survival.”

  “You don’t know that.” Kneeland’s odd eye stabbed suddenly aside, and his voice rose sharply. “We don’t in fact know anything. We won’t until broken communication links can be restored.” Both eyes back in focus, he squinted at his watch. “At this early point, that’s all I can say. If you’ll excuse me, I’ll have to get back—”