Firechild

by Jack Williamson

  “Okay! All yours! Take ‘em home to Moscow!” Clumsily, he was trying to pull a toylike nickel-plated pistol. “Now I know what it was you were bribing me to steal. Genetic poison! Maybe loose already! Whatever happens, I’m through playing games with the KGB—”

  Scorpio threw his knife. The little pistol spun into the ashes. Carboni sobbed and fell. Scorpio finished him off and inspected the ashes. Nothing readable was left. Searching the house, he failed again to find anything Ostrov and the Center would care about. Always methodical, he took time to wash the knife and his hands and erase his fingerprints. Two blocks down the street, he met Holliday’s old brown Chevy, racing up through the dark too late to do anything for Arny Carboni.

  Driving toward the highway, he stopped to bang on the door of Frankie Bard’s shabby duplex. Bard was a security sergeant he had come to know at the weekend beer parties. A thick-set man with pale, watery eyes and deep acne scars, he nursed a chronic bitterness because life had seldom given him what he felt it owed him. Their acquaintance had ripened after Scorpio caught him cheating at poker.

  Silent then, Scorpio approached him discreetly the next day, offering to work with him instead of exposing him. His first furious denials wilted into mumbling confession. Thereafter, Scorpio taught him skills he hadn’t known, some of them legal, and lent him money when he bungled and lost. Now, holding his IOUs for several hundred dollars, Scorpio saw a chance to collect.

  A long time waking, Bard came nearly naked to the door, squinting groggily.

  “Huh? What the hell?”

  “Real hell!” Scorpio dropped his voice. “Loose in Enfield. Drag some clothes on. Anything except your uniform. Fast! We’re getting out of town.”

  Bard blinked and gulped and had to piss, but obediently he pulled odd garments on and stumbled out to the red pickup. A few miles out of town, he pointed at the red-winking neon of the Enbard Mo el.

  “My mom’s place. Reckon we could stop—”

  He braked the car, but suddenly Frankie was shaking his head.

  “Let her sleep. Nothing we could tell her. Anyhow, nothing from the lab can get this far.”

  He drove on for half the morning, however, before they got breakfast at a truck stop out of Little Rock and rented a motel room on Bard’s credit card. Bard went back to bed. He watched the TV. Noon was gone before he roused Bard to hear the first confused reports of the Enfield panic.

  They stayed two days there, living on Cokes and beer and hamburgers to go, glued to the news. Bard was philosophic about the danger to his mother.

  “Don’t matter much, not to me. All she ever talks about is how sick she is and how she prays for people to repent their sins. Tell the truth, I’m fed up with all her nutty notions. She’s past her time. Just as well if she’s gone.”

  When the White House announced that any possible danger out of Enfield had been safely contained, Scorpio left for Chicago.

  “But I’m coming back to Enfield. Or close as I dare. In spite of whatever hit the city—maybe because of it —I get the smell of money waiting there.”

  “Money?” Bard was groggier than ever, from too much beer and too much sitting. “Money for who?”

  “For us. Big money, if we’re smart enough to pick it up.”

  “If EnGene’s gone, I don’t see how—”

  “Nothing it’s safe to say much about,” Scorpio warned him. “But I was on the trail of something rich the labs were cooking up. Remember Dr. Belcraft? The little guy with glasses that had Lab C?”

  “Sure do. Used to work all night.” Bard scowled. “Caught me asleep in the guardroom once and threatened to report me.”

  “Probably dead now, along with most of the rest. But there’ll be businessmen and governments keen to pay for whatever they were making.”

  “You mean—” Bard shivered, abruptly sobered. “Whatever touched off that plague?”

  “Whatever.” Scorpio shrugged. “Worth a lot of millions to whoever uncovers it. I’ve got better clues than anybody, but I can’t risk my neck around Enfield. For reasons I won’t go into. Which is why I need you in the game. If you want to earn yourself more millions than you can count.”

  Bard gulped and said he did.

  “Then get back there. Get inside this quarantine line any way you can—you can say you’re looking for your mother. Look for another inside job. This task force will want recruits. They’ll want to talk to you when you tell ‘em you were an EnGene guard.

  “One thing.” He caught Bard’s arm. “Whatever you have to say, never tell ‘em I’m alive. Let ‘em think Herman Doerr died in Enfield. I’ll get messages to you in care of your mother or her motel, but under another name. It will be—it will be Dave Dodd. Write that down.”

  Bard wrote it down. Scorpio gave him funds for bus fare toward Enfield. That night, a hundred miles from Little Rock, he took the license plates off the red pickup, set fire to it and pushed it off a bluff, buried the plates in the ditch a mile away, and tramped on toward Chicago.

  Ostrov met him there. In a back booth at Kelly’s Tavern, they waited most of the night for Carboni to appear with the Belcraft file. Bright-eyed at first with hope, she stirred him to wish the crisis had given him an hour free to do what he wanted with her, and he hated her again for her insolent aloofness. To amuse himself, he spent the time teasing her with possible reasons for Carboni’s delay, none of them the real one.

  When she decided to give up the wait, he hit her for another twenty thousand of old Roman’s money. She gave him ten. A neat brown-paper package of twenties and fifties that he promised to use for another try for the Belcraft files. Leaving her there, looking worry-worn and too old for her years, her fine shoulders drooping forlornly, he couldn’t help grinning.

  After a couple of nights with more willing women, though none so tantalizing, he went on to Fort Madison to look for Belcraft’s brother and the letter he should have received. The best record left of what had hit Enfield, perhaps the only record.

  The brother was a doctor, now out of town. No word since he drove toward Enfield on disaster day. Tearful about him, his office nurse prayed he was still alive. Scorpio waited for him most of a week, playing the role of an unemployed hypochondriac in search of a medical miracle. He haunted the hospital, talking to doctors and nurses and the brother’s former patients, picking up what he could. One night he got into the brother’s office and found the letter on a desk.

  The computer printouts Carboni brought out of the lab had always been too technical to tell him anything. Not quite so baffling, the letter did give him two clear facts. First, the doctor-brother had known nothing about what was going on at EnGene. Second, Belcraft had created a strange new being he called Alphamega. If that still survived, it could be the key to a future far richer than his difficult past.

  He got into the brother’s house and set a trap for him there, just in case he did get back to look for the letter. Leaving Fort Madison, he called the EnBard Motel from a pay phone in Hannibal. A male voice answered. The motel was closed, commandeered by Task Force Watchdog. If he wanted to get in touch with anybody inside the perimeter, he could call the post message center.

  He called the message center. Two nights later, registered as Dave Dodd at a motel in East St. Louis, he got a call from Frankie Bard. Frankie’s mother was okay, gone to live with his aunt in Colorado. He had found work, but he could get the weekend off for fun and games if Dave wanted to meet him at Ozark Falls.

  At Ozark Falls, they rented a boat and rowed out across the lake. A quarter-mile from shore, with no sign of trouble, he started asking for news. Frankie had got on as a civilian night watchman at the old Enfield municipal airport, which was inside the perimeter and now reserved for military traffic.

  “They gave me a hell of a time!” He had brought a six-pack, and he stopped to open a beer. “Grilled me like a spitted chicken when they heard I’d been at EnGene. Wanted all I knew about the lab and the research staff and the other guards. Especially, they we
re curious about you.”

  His bulgy eyes blinked accusingly.

  “Your poker parties. Wanted to know who was invited and what we talked about and what you’d ever said about anybody else and where you’d been before you came to Enfield and what any of us knew about Arny Carboni.”

  Frankie stopped to squint.

  “Are you some kind of spy?”

  “They may think I am.” Scorpio grinned, reaching for a beer to click against Frankie’s bottle. “What they think won’t buy us any women. I work for money. Came back to EnGene because I’d got the odor of it. It’s got to be still there. Waiting for us to dig it up. You’ll have to do most of the digging.”

  Glancing at the shore, he dropped his voice.

  “What have you picked up about the plague research?”

  “Nothing—which is all I want to know.” Frankie shrank away from him. “They’ve strung barbed wire along the edge of the dust, with signs to warn people out. Don’t ask me to risk my ass in there.”

  “I won’t do that,” Scorpio assured him. “Not yet, anyhow. What we want is this little animal Belcraft made in his lab. If it’s still alive—”

  “I think it is!” Frankie brightened. “The chopper crew was talking about a funny critter they caught. Must be something pretty odd. Supposed to have crawled out of the ashes of the EnGene lab. A big hunt for it, ever since the task force got here. It had gotten outside the perimeter fence. Trying to hide, it fell into an old well.

  “Funny thing, how they found it. Belcraft had a brother. A doctor somewhere. A lab technician I met at the new canteen told me about him. The brother somehow knew where the critter was. Came here to haul it out of the well. Chopper crew caught ‘em both—”

  “Our game!” Scorpio grinned. “The animal? What’s it like?”

  “I haven’t seen it.” Frankie looked uneasy. “Can’t say I’m keen to. The lab man says it looks like a little girl, maybe two years old, starved half to death. Big-headed and skinny. They’re got it chained to a table in a guarded room, with alarms all around and guns trained on it.”

  “Our baby!” He beamed with elation. “No wonder they don’t want it to get away again, because it looks to be the only relic left of EnGene. The only key to what they were doing—maybe making genetic bombs.”

  “Bombs?” Frankie was alarmed. “They ain’t my dish.”

  “Or mine. But don’t sweat that. They’ll be taking the beast apart to find out what makes it tick. But listen to this! I’ve got contacts panting to pay big money to get their own chance at her. Just leave the bidding to me. Old Clegg might top ‘em all. No matter to us.”

  Scorpio lifted his bottle.

  “Here’s to her, Frankie! There’s an old song about a million dollar baby. Once we get our hands on her, she’s our own billion dollar beauty!”

  30

  “Whose

  World?”

  Belcraft dreamed again of Alphamega.

  “Véngale, Sax!” Her little hand was tugging desperately at his. “Véngale al pobre Panchito. Muerto! Muerto!” She was calling him to come with her somewhere, because poor Panchito was dead.

  He tried to tell her in the dream that the dead were dead forever, but she pulled him with her into a hospital room where the wall monitors no longer flashed with signs of life and a nurse was pulling up the sheet to cover a starkly rigid face.

  “Help him, Sax! Por favor! He must live!”

  He knew there was no help, but she drew him closer to the bedside.

  “Digame, Sax! Tell me what to do!”

  There was nothing at all to do.

  “Hagale qué viva! Make him alive!”

  She pulled him closer. Suddenly he and she were one. Reaching inside the unmoving thorax, they found the stopped heart. Their dream-hand squeezed. Responding, the heart quivered and contracted. They squeezed again and yet again, until the quivering muscle resumed a strong and steady beat.

  Panchito lived again!

  Sharing her joy, he turned with her to the elevated evil-odored leg. The knee was shattered, severely infected, swollen and draining, possibly gangrenous. Feeling together, they reached beneath the stiffened bandages to palpate the hard-swollen skin, reached deeper to explore the torn ligaments, the lacerated menisci, the shattered patella.

  The bullet had been removed, but all its harm remained. She needed him to help her know how the knee should have been. Together, they sensed the badness that had spread from the wound to kill the good flesh. Together, they taught the hurt cells how to live again.

  “Gracias, Sax!” They were suddenly back in the room where she had found him. “You were wonderful! Qué marveloso!” She caught his hand to kiss it. “Panchito sera okay!”

  Time had passed before he woke, lying on a hospital bed like Panchito’s in the dream. A tight bandage wrapped his head, but the long pain was gone. He felt remarkably well. Suddenly restless, he wanted to get out of the bed for a cold shower and ham and eggs and then a brisk walk out in the sunshine.

  He tried to sit up. Hard steel clicked. His left wrist was handcuffed to the rail of the bed. He heard motion behind him and knew a guard stood there.

  He lay back, remembering the desperate drive from Fort Madison, the panicky search the perimeter fence, the cold wet stiffness of Meg’s tiny body when he pulled her from the well, his icy certainty that she was dead. But now—

  Meg was alive!

  Not only that. In the dream—and he knew the dream was real—she had somehow revived the man she called Panchito, who had been clinically dead.

  Trembling with awe at what he knew she must have done, he knew her healing power had touched him too. He recalled the flapping chopper landing, the crewmen tramping around him, and then the long dim time that had left no memory except the dazing throb of pain in his head.

  That blanket of blackness had been lifted.

  ” ‘Morning, if that’s what it is.” He turned his head to find a man at the door, a sunburned kid in an Army uniform too big for him, standing with his sunburned hand on a leaning rifle. National Guard, by the look of him. “What’s this place?”

  “Post hospital, sir. Used to be the infirmary, here at what used to be Enfield College. Three miles out of what used to be the town. Feeling better, sir?”

  “A lot better. Can I use the bathroom?”

  “Not without permission, sir. Have to call the doctor.”

  “Do it, please! And then I’d like some breakfast.”

  A nurse came in to take his temperature and pulse and blood pressure, frowning in silent surprise at what she found. A second guard unlocked the handcuffs and followed him into the adjoining bath. Instead of breakfast, an orderly came to wheel him away for a head X ray.

  Waiting while they processed the film, he heard excited voices. One was Dr. Kalenka’s. The technician came back for a second shot, then three more at different angles. When he asked what they were finding, the technician gave him a look that seemed uneasy and told him to wait again. Back in the room, still with no breakfast, he sat by the bed till the National Guardsman snapped to attention and Kalenka came in, now in a major’s uniform.

  “Belcraft?” His puzzled tone made the name a question. “What has happened to you?”

  “I’m wondering what your X rays show.” When Kalenka merely frowned, he added, “I must have been hit on the head.”

  “Somewhat too hard.” Kalenka squinted at the chart and took his pulse. “Or so we thought. All the evidence of a serious concussion. Large clots forming. Dangerous pressure on the brain. Last night we were considering surgery. Your recovery is—well, unbelievable. Remarkably rapid and complete.” He leaned to peer into Belcraft’s face. “Can you explain it?”

  “I can’t. But I do feel good again—if I can get something to eat.”

  “Later.” Kalenka nodded at the nurse behind him. “First, I’ve got a few questions.”

  “Okay.” He felt too fit to let anything trouble him. “I’ve got a question of my own. Do yo
u—or did you have a patient here who revived from apparent death? Named maybe Panchito?”

  “Torres?” Kalenka gaped and stared. “What do you know about Pancho Torres?”

  “Nothing,” he said. “Except what I dreamed.”

  “The man—the man was dead.” A slow half-whisper. “Of anaphylactic shock following an adverse reaction to antibiotics given for a neglected infection. No heart action for a good many minutes. He did revive—I don’t know why.”

  He paused for another searching frown.

  “Like you, he woke up this morning begging for breakfast. The infection is apparently under control. I have just seen a new X ray of Torres’s knee. The major fragments of the shattered patella are somehow back in place and beginning to knit.”

  Shaking his head, he stopped to peer into Belcraft’s face.

  “You say you dreamed about that?”

  “About Alphamega. The little creature I found crawling out of the ashes of EnGene after the disaster. Do you know …” Tension shook his voice. “Is she here?”

  “She is.” Kalenka nodded slowly, staring at him. “A prisoner, captured when you were. You claim she was with you in this remarkable dream?”

  “We were together …”

  Recollection washed over him. He sat silent, living the dream again, lost again in that instant devotion that had come with his first glimpse of Alphamega, trembling again with awe at her unknown gifts.

  “Together?” Kalenka’s voice was sharper. “How could that be? When we have her shackled, lying in a guarding cell?”

  “In the dream she wasn’t shackled.” He wanted to smile at Kalenka’s baffled dismay. “She took me to Torres, if that’s his name. Acting together—almost as if we were two hemispheres of the same compound mind—we examined the injuries. If she actually needed my skills, I don’t know why. She touched injured organs as if she knew how to heal them. A knowledge she seemed to get from me.” His breath caught. “How is she?”