Firechild

by Jack Williamson

  That was long months ago. With never a chance to call, he was doubtless on the “missing” list by now, his office probably closed. With no word from him, nor any pay, Miss Hearn had likely found another job.

  Trouble behind him. More ahead, even at home. He couldn’t help brooding, petty as he told himself his private worries were. He had doubtless been replaced on the hospital staff. Too many bills were far past due. Many of his patients must have gone to other doctors. When people learned he had been shut up inside the perimeter, a suspected carrier, they might become as skittish as that gas pumper. Not that he could blame them.

  Night was near before he saw the Mississippi. It lay wide and bright beneath the peaceful-seeming dusk, a long string of grain barges creeping around the bend to meet a white-painted tourist stern-wheeler that might have steamed out of Mark Twain’s age. That glimpse of the river gave him more comfort than the President’s promise, transforming old Fort Madison into an islet of enduring stability, securely remote from invasion by any monstrous biological creation.

  Pulling off the highway onto an empty street, Enfield far behind, he felt a moment of elation. That good moment faded when he saw the tall white columns of the house Midge had loved. Empty now and silent, probably smelling of its own long decay. A pang of loneliness stabbed him. Suddenly dreading the place, shrinking from all its silent reminders of happier times gone forever, he turned abruptly to drive to his office and look for Vic’s letter.

  The office was hot, the air conditioner off. It had a faint, stale scent of disinfectants and dusty emptiness, but Miss Hearn had left his desk neatly in order. The in basket held a stack of mail she had left for him to read, a sheaf of unpaid bills, announcements of professional meetings. He found a postcard from Midge, now with her mother in California. Signed “With love.”

  If he had somehow given her more time—but all that was gone. He shrugged and searched again. Nothing at all from Vic.

  He phoned Miss Hearn.

  “Doctor—” A muffled crash, as if she had dropped the receiver. “I thought—we were afraid you’d been caught in Enfield.”

  “A close call,” he told her. “I was trapped inside the perimeter. Held in isolation till they were certain I hadn’t been infected. I’m back at the office now. Looking at the mail. I was hoping for a letter from my brother.”

  “From Enfield?”

  “He died there. I think he had written me.”

  “Doctor—” Something made her hesitate. “A letter did come from Enfield. The same week you left. A thick brown envelope, marked personal. No return address, but I made out the postmark.”

  “Where is it?”

  “Taken in the robbery—”

  “What?”

  “I never had a chance to tell you. The office was ransacked the next Saturday night. Professionals, the police think, from the way the lock was picked. Somebody looking for narcotics. Frightened off before they found anything. All the drug samples were dumped on the floor, though little or nothing was actually missing. Except that letter. I looked everywhere. The letter was taken—I can’t imagine why.”

  “I—I see.”

  “Doctor, I tried hard to locate you.” Her voice was distressed. “There was no way. Phone lines were out. When I finally got through to the task force people, they said they had no record of you. If your brother—” Her voice caught. “If your brother was there in Enfield, I’m terribly sorry. I know the letter would have meant a lot. I’ve kept checking with the police, but they say they don’t have a lead.”

  “Thanks,” he muttered. “I know you’ve done all you could. Glad to find everything else okay.”

  But nothing was okay. He felt almost afraid to wonder who could have known about the letter, or what might come of its loss, but a thin, cold blade of dread had stabbed him deep.

  “Really, Doctor—” Miss Hearn came back. “I’ve done my best. Not knowing—not knowing if you would ever get back. I’ve been taking care of everything I could. Coming down every day to go through the mail and bank the checks—what few came in.”

  “Thank you, Miss Hearn!” He tried to pull himself together. “Can you be here in the morning at eight? I’ll have your check, and we can get the office open again.”

  “I’ll be there, Doctor. But I’m afraid—” An uneasy pause. “We’ve lost a lot of patients. Your landlord wants his past-due rent, and the whole town’s on edge about the disaster. The bank will want you to come in—”

  “Be here,” he told her. “We’ll do what we can.”

  Still dreading the silent house, he stopped for dinner at Stan’s Steak Place and lingered over the paper and another beer before he went on back to Tara Two. That name seemed sadly ironic now, and its airless emptiness depressed him again. He opened windows and put a Beethoven sonata on the stereo and spent a long time in the shower.

  The bedroom still held a painful trace of Midge’s scent, but somehow he was thinking of the pink thing as he get into bed. Would the missing letter have told more about what she was? About what she might become?

  He went to sleep wondering. Where was she now? Perhaps already dead? What secrets had Vic hidden in her unfolding genes? What was her link to the Enfield disaster? If any link existed? With the letter gone, would he ever know?

  He dreamed about her.

  “Señor Sax?” In the dream she could speak. Her voice was high and tiny, but very clear. Somehow, the anxious words were Spanish. “El hermano de mi querido Dr. Vic Belcraft?”

  She seemed to sense at once that he was not at home in Spanish, because she changed to English, or tried to, her faint treble grown hesitant.

  “The brother of Vic? El hombre bueno. The good man who aided me and fed me and kept me from the cazadores. The bad men hunting me.”

  He told her in the dream that he was Vic’s brother.

  “Soy Meg. Alphamega.” Her voice seemed very far away. “My name. From el señor Vic. El fabricante de vida. The maker of life.”

  He asked where she was.

  “En peligro!” He barely caught the words. “In very great danger. Running from los cazadores, I fell into a pit. A strange dark hoyo. It is cold and wet and very deep. I can’t—can’t—” He lost her fading voice, then caught a few more words, “Me duele … me duele—”

  She was in pain, and the dream was gone.

  22

  Meg Alone

  Sleeping on the thin brown blanket Panchito had spread on the hard earth floor, Meg dreamed that he had risen from beside her. Shoes in his hand, careful not to wake her, he moved to the doorway of the narrow wooden shed and stopped there to look down at her. She felt his love washing her like warm rain.

  Even in the dream, it troubled her for him to be away. But he was only going out to gather young frijoles and sweet green maiz and tender calabazas amarillas. She was always hungry, and in the dream she told herself that he would soon be back, loaded with food, ready to wake her and make their desayuno.

  “Ninita chiquita,” he would whisper, touching her tenderly, “es la hora por comer—”

  Terror broke her dream. Suddenly awake, she knew he wasn’t coming back. Yet he had seen no danger. He was still out in the garden, stooping over the row of frijoles, softly whistling a lullaby she loved. But even in the dream she had felt el peligroso creeping out of the brush and across the rows behind him like a thick red fog.

  Shivering on the blanket, she heard the harsh gringo voice mocking el pobre Panchito. She couldn’t feel the gringo himself, because there was no love to open him to her, but his voice was like a faint red mist spreading over the garden.

  She felt Panchito’s shock, and caught his wave of fear for her. She saw him try to run and heard the terrible crash of the gun and felt the numbness in his knee and the cruel stabs of pain when his leg bent where it shouldn’t bend and the way his mind dimmed and slowed when he went facedown in the mud.

  The red badness was suddenly thick all around her, so thick she could hardly breathe. She knew she
had to run and hide somewhere, before the gringos found her. Somewhere, perhaps, in the vacant house. Scrambling off the blanket, she turned to search for danger there.

  She didn’t have to use her eyes because the house was near and she had fixed it in her mind. Standing where she was in the shed, she could look out through the old wooden walls of the shed. When she found the red fog thick around’ the house, she knew the gringos were there. Listening, she stopped breathing and stopped her heart until she could hear their ugly voices and the thump of their boots and the crash when they broke down a door.

  Searching everywhere, she found a curved piece of rusty iron lying in tall weeds behind the shed. One broken wheel jutted above it, and a dark hole had rusted through the side. Una carretilla, Panchito had named it when she asked him. Hierro viejo. Buena por nada. An old wheelbarrow, in the language of the gringos. Junk. Good for nothing.

  Except, perhaps, to hide her.

  Shivering from the red haze that seemed like ice in the air, she slipped out of the shed. Crouching, stepping on rocks and weeds to keep from leaving footprints, she darted to the old carretilla and slid under it.

  Nobody saw her. Lying there, trembling, she felt the throb of pain in Pancho’s leg. When she reached his mind, all she found was a dimming flicker of sadness. All the sadness was for her. He was filled with a sick despair because he couldn’t move to help her, but he didn’t even feel the hurting and the terrible deadness in his leg.

  She heard the gringos shouting, tramping through the garden and the weeds, and the redness of danger grew so cold she had to shiver. Almost afraid to breathe again, she lay very still, feeling the pain Panchito couldn’t feel. After a long time, a chopper came down so near the ground shook under her from the roaring of it. Its wind shook the old iron over her and blew dust in her face. The engine died. The voices and the tramping boots came closer.

  “That yellow-livered killer spic!” The mist grew thicker, and she heard the near voice of the jeering gringo who had shot Panchito. “Hiding here for weeks, maybe months. Right under old Clegg’s nose! Glad I got the sneaky bastard. Not that Clegg will ever give a damn. All he wants is the baby monster.”

  Another voice said something, and the red-shadowed gringo spoke again.

  “Funny little critter like nobody ever seen. Some idiot civilian caught it crawling out of the dust and let it go again. It’s got the big brass all uptight, because they think it could have brought the plague. Whatever it is, Clegg’s hellbent to hunt it down.”

  “What for?”

  “How the hell do I know? He come out hisself to brief the detail. Got pretty hot about it. Called the critter a demon let out of hell to bring that plague to Earth. A scourge of God, he called it, sent to punish us for letting science freaks meddle into the secrets of creation.”

  Again that other voice.

  “I wouldn’t know. I ain’t all that religious. A baby demon, maybe, if it really is a demon. Ain’t no bigger than a baby.” The weeds crackled, closer. “Anyhow, they’ve got us on the trail—not that I’m exactly hank-erin‘ to catch it, if it does spread the plague.”

  “Better not let on you got cold feet.”

  “This ain’t the duty I signed up for, but I never got cold feet yet. They know the killer spic had the critter with him here, because they photographed it out of a chopper. Riding on him like a monkey while he worked his garden. Clegg wants it, and we’d better get it.”

  He must have kicked the iron wheelbarrow. It rang in her ears and tipped suddenly aside. She rolled to keep under it. The red fog clotted and froze like ice around her, until she couldn’t breathe.

  “—tangle with it,” the gringo was saying out of his red cloud. “Devil or whatever. But we’re hauling that gizzard-lipped bastard back to the hospital. When he gets fit to talk, they’ll persuade him to tell where it went.”

  Somebody shouted. Their boots tramped away, but the red haze stayed thick around her. They were moving Panchito. She felt his mind half alive again, trying not to show his pain, but they were too cruel with his leg. He moaned, and again his mind flickered out.

  The gringos kept yelling. The chopper coughed and came to deafening life. The rusty metal over her rocked in its wind. It climbed back into the sky, taking Panchito away. Listening, she heard no boots or voices.

  She was all alone.

  The redness had thinned, and its feel of cold was fading out, but still it clung around her, clouding everything. Though the gringos were gone, she was still afraid to move. High overhead, she heard other choppers drumming, watching from the sky. Their cameras would catch her if she showed herself. All day she lay there. The iron above her grew hot under the sun. She longed for cooler air. She didn’t know what a demon was, but she didn’t want the gringos coming back to hunt her.

  Sometimes a breath of cooling wind came through the hole in the iron. She crawled nearer to it and broke more weeds to help it reach her. Waiting for sunset and the coolness and her chance to get away, she lay trying to remember what she was and how she had come to be.

  Some things she had always known. The dear Vic Belcraft had been her maker, and she would love his name forever. He had shaped her for a mission that had been too big for him, a duty more important than her life or his. For Vic’s sake, she must discover that true goal and do everything to reach it.

  There were other things she could never know, because Vic had sadly lacked the skills and the time to make her all she should have been or to teach her all she should have learned. She felt afraid she might never be strong enough or smart enough or brave enough to carry out her mission, even if she were able to find what it was.

  The dear Vic could never tell her now, because he was gone, crumbled into dust, along with the EnGene and all his friends there, and those others who had to die because of the terrible harm they were about to do.

  Baking under the burning iron, she held her head close to the ragged little window in it and tried to remember her beginning. At first her world had been dark, with nothing she could reach or see. She was floating nowhere in a warm vast ocean, the only being in there.

  Yet she had not been alone, because the dear Vic was above her, loving her tenderly, toiling to keep her alive. When at last there was light, she could see the vastness of the ocean and vaster shadows drifting over it. She could feel the huge high shape of the dear Vic himself, like a cloud with brightness in it. Sometimes she heard his voice, a slow far thunder rumbling out of the cloud. The words meant nothing then, but she always felt his shining love.

  Through ages of darkness and ages of brightness, he sheltered her and fed her and let her grow. The ocean around her shrank and shrank until she could find its wall. She was larger, until at last she could climb out over the wall to the wide warm plain of his outspread hand.

  He could see her then without his microscopes. Speaking words she did not yet understand, he began trying to teach her what she would need to know. That was never easy. She could never understand enough. He always said he didn’t know enough, and the good time with him was gone too soon.

  “I must die.”

  He told her that on the dreadful night when she first felt the nearing danger, a faint red stain in the air and a chill that made her shiver, even when he held her in his hand. They were alone together. The lab was very quiet, with the staff all gone, and she wished for words to let her ask him what the danger was.

  “Baby, baby! Try not to let it hurt.” Feeling her shock of grief, he pressed her to his cheek. “If you can stay alive—you must stay alive! I don’t matter.”

  He stayed in the lab all that night. He spoke on the phone. He sat a long time writing with a pen and went from that to the computer and turned from it to work with the big machines that wrote new codes for DNA and other codes to create stranger things. When at last he had time, he came back to speak to her, trying to explain what the danger was, trying to tell her how to stay alive.

  “Baby, I hate it!” He held her in his hand, whispering in
the dim-lit lab. “Time gone too soon. Nothing ready. You still need me. Terribly. Still too young. No time to tell you anything. Never know how much your understand. But—but—”

  He held her against his cheek, and she felt the wetness on it. She wanted to tell him how sorry she was, but she had no words and no way to say them.

  “Stay alive!” he breathed. “Find yourself.”

  All she could do was hang on to his finger. It was trembling when he pushed her off to lay her back in the nest.

  23

  Billy Higgs

  Belfast sat up shivering. The dream was gone. The hurt and terror he felt in Meg had awakened him, her pain more real than any dream could be. He felt a sudden cold certainty that she was in fact the creation of Vic’s genetic science, an equal certainty that he had never designed her to harm humanity or bring death to Enfield.

  Somehow, she had reached him with a desperate call for help. That was real. He wished he had some power to respond. Yet it left him trembling with something close to dread. Even in danger, was she still somehow greater than human?

  Still groggy with sleep, he shook his head. The claims for ESP had never convinced him. The real pink thing had whistled expressive sounds, but she had never spoken. Whatever the case, the experience had left him shaken with a strange conviction that her danger was actual and deadly. Yet he had no idea where she was, no possible way to find and try to help her.

  Alphamega? He said it aloud. Her actual name? Had Vic really been her maker? Or had the dream grown out of his own troubled speculation?

  He went to the bathroom and then to the kitchen for a good shot of Cutty Sark out of a bottle Midge had won at a bridge party and left as a last little gift for him. He prowled the empty house for half an hour and finally went to bed again. At last he slept.

  And dreamed again of Alphamega.

  “Fuego! Fuego!” Her faint, far-off voice was sharp with desperate urgency. “Peligro, Señor Sax! Saiga de la casa! Get out of your house! Before it burns! Saiga, pronto!”