Firechild

by Jack Williamson

  No loyalties bound him. When he began to learn what Alphamega was, or what others believed her to be, he saw her as the prize in a larger and more rewarding game than he had ever played, one which his own nerve and skill and wits might win. Turning against his old companions in the KGB, he felt no regrets.

  In Meg’s own mind, the color of hope shone stronger.

  33

  El Momento

  She found it hard to understand the glow of hope that washed the Scorpion at the times when she could touch his mind. The memories she awakened in him were nearly too strange for her to picture. Sometimes she wanted to hate him, because the cruel spy work had almost killed the kindness in him. A man who knew no law and valued no life, scarcely even his own, how could he carry hope for her?

  Yet she had to reach for him when she could, because no other ray of hope had come to her through that dead red fog. Shut up in her cell, the gringo guns always on her, she followed the Scorpion when she could, looking for understanding. Most of the time he stayed far from Enfield, afraid he might meet some survivor who would know him from a time when he called himself Herman Doerr, but she was touching his mind when he came to speak to Frankie Bard.

  Frankie was a security man from the post. The only love she ever felt in him was for money or food or drink, or for showing women the stud he was, never the warmer love that might have opened his mind, never even a gleam of hope. The Scorpion saw him as a dim-witted glutton, but yet a useful tool.

  On two or three evenings a week, Frankie drove off the post to fill himself with Chinese or Mexican food at a smelly place in Maxon called Juan Wong’s Taco Chinatown. The Scorpion came to meet him there, wearing a cowboy hat and a black patch over one eye. They parked their cars outside the cafe or at the all-night market across the highway. The Scorpion never left his car. He let Frankie speak with him, and then he drove away.

  Frankie was sometimes a balky tool.

  “When’s my payoff?” he asked one night. “Suppose the little bitch is worth all the millions you say she is, how do we cash her in?”

  “Leave her to me.” The Scorpion grinned and slapped his back. “We make one move at a time. When we have her where we want her, I’ll open up the bidding—for all the millions we’ll ever need, and some safe haven where we can spend them. I know the game. When the good time comes, I’ll see you get your cut.”

  Though she could never see into Frankie’s mind, she followed the Scorpion till she found the source of hope.

  They planned to take her away from the prison!

  Seeing that, with neither one aware of her, she was able to aid their planning. They wanted to take her to some far place where she might be safe from the gringos and from other enemies she saw in the Scorpion’s mind. Obeying his instructions, Frankie made copies of files the FBI and the special investigators had gathered on her and Sax and Panchito. She caused the Scorpion to search them again until he found a way to escape by avión.

  The idea, she let him think, was all his own. The files of the FBI reported that Panchito was a twice-escaped convict, under sentence of death for a murder committed after his first escape. A Mexican alien, he had begun his career flying illicit cargo into Arizona from secret airstrips in Mexico. His birthplace was a faraway town called San Bosario, where perhaps he would have family or friends who might be helpful if the bribes were big enough.

  The Scorpion built his plan around Panchito. Sax was not included. Meg ached with dread when she thought of him left alone in the hands of men like Mickey Harris, but the red fog always grew thick and dark around her when she tried to think of ways for the Scorpion to make a place for him in the plan.

  Late one night when they were ready, the Scorpion drove his rented car off the highway into a lonely arroyo a few miles outside the perimeter fence and climbed the slope beyond to fasten plastic explosive to three of the tall new poles the gringos had planted to carry the new power line into Enfield.

  He telephoned Frankie the next day to say that the weather had turned good for fishing at the lake. Uneasily waiting, Meg tried to reach Sax and Panchito. She found Sax on the bed in his room, snoring fitfully. Gringos in uniform were dripping something into him through a needle taped into his wrist, shouting angry questions at his ear. They got no answers, because they had made him too dead to speak or think or even dream.

  Panchito had been luckier. Answering questions in English and questions in Spanish for many days, he had told them and told them and told them all he could remember about San Rosario and coming away from it to la tierra de diós to fly aviones for the marijuaneros. He had told them many times about the sad death of Hector on the prison wall and about the bad luck of the girl who died in Enfield and the bad time in the jail before the frightened deputies who set him free.

  Sometimes angry when they pretended not to believe, often half loco for need of sleep, always aching toward the end from the cruel hands of Deputy Harris, he had sworn again and again upon the honor of his mother that every word was true when he spoke of La Maravilla who had come to him out of the little river and the strange months when they had been fugitivos together. Even when los medicos came to drip the drops into his body, they had found that he had no more to tell.

  Now at last they had left him almost alone. The guards were still with him, but they had taken off the irons to let him exercise his injured leg. The knee in fact had grown strong again since she brought Sax to help her touch it. Now it never gave him pain, but he still groaned and limped to prove the need for exercise.

  When the time came, she tried to make him ready.

  Just past midnight, the lights went out in her cell. She heard gringo curses and then the heavy thump of the explosions the Scorpion had made. She felt weak and cold when she thought of el pobre Sax, and the nearness of danger was a red fog around her when she remembered all the risks to Panchito.

  Pero ahora!

  Now! This was el momento! Trembling, she began to narrow her hands and her feet to slip them free. The irons were still too tight. They bruised and tore her skin, but at last they dropped away. She rolled off the cruel table, ran through the red dark out into the corridor.

  Flashlights flickered there. Gringos ran and shouted, and she hid for a moment behind a drinking fountain. She was near the outside door before the emergency lights came on. Guns thundering behind her, she dived outside into the dark. Red lights came flashing at her, wheels screaming on the road. A car stopped ahead of her. A man jumped out.

  Panchito!

  “Aquí, niñita!”

  He had no limp. His arms swept her up. She felt the strong thump of his heart, the way she used to feel it when he carried her in his shirt. The wheels screamed again. Roaring fast through dark streets, they passed another car. It followed. They came through a gate and stopped near a dark avión. The Scorpion ran to it, waving with a gun. Panchito carried her up the steps into its strange smells. The man Frankie came after them and then the Scorpion, all shouting loud.

  “Okay, chiquita,” Panchito whispered. “Con buena suerte, you will be okay.”

  With luck! She hoped for luck.

  Panchito put her in a soft leather chair. The man Frankie fastened a hard strap around her and took the next seat. His breath had a stink of onions and beer, and his body had a bad smell of terror.

  Panchito sat in front beside the Scorpion. The avión roared and moved. Cars came racing after them, red lights blinking, but they kept ahead. Gunfire crackled behind them, but she saw no harm. The avión roared louder.

  They were in the sky!

  A long time in the sky. Beside her, Frankie belched and swallowed a pill and belched again. Twice he yelled at Scorpion that he had to go. He came back to belch and scratch his hairy body. In the seat, he sagged against the straps and jerked himself awake and sagged again. Finally he was snoring.

  Panchito drove the avión. The Scorpion watched him and watched everything. He saw Frankie sleeping and yelled loud at him. Frankie moved and burped and scowled
at her and went to sleep again.

  The land beneath was dark, but she could feel the shape of it. She wanted to help Panchito drive the avión through the dark. He needed help, because he couldn’t feel the world the way she did. He had to look at maps and look at shining dials to know where he was. He was too wide awake to let her show him what she saw, yet she could feel his happiness. At last he had left the gringos and their cruel chair behind.

  Touching him, she could see the dark land the way it had been in his dreams. She saw the trees and neat fields that would turn green when there was light to show the green. The land that would be green slid slowly back, slowly changing to a wide bare dryness that would be brown when the sun came back.

  Sharp brown mountains grew slowly out of the dark ahead and slid slowly back beneath and sank again into the dark world behind. Searching ahead for some new brightness of hope, she began to feel instead the red badness of danger.

  “No, señor,” she heard Panchito saying. “No es posible.”

  The Scorpion’s voice was suddenly tight and angry, but Panchito still spoke very softly. Whatever diós might will, he was not afraid. She heard him explaining to the Scorpion, pleased to be speaking Spanish again. The Scorpion wanted them to set the avión down on the strip at the edge of the hills above San Rosairo where he used to land when he flew for the marijuaneros.

  “No es posible,” Pancho said again. The gasolina would not last. Instead, perhaps they should stop at the airport near la Cuidad de Chihuahua, where perhaps they might obtain more gasolina.

  Louder, the Scorpion said no such thing was possible. Warnings must have been sent. The policia would be waiting. Probably soldados. The stolen avión would be seized. They would all be shot for kidnapping the child, if it really was a human child.

  Were there no other secret strips they could reach?

  “Verdaderamente,” Panchito said. Indeed, he had known other strips, but they would have no landing lights and no gasolina. The avión would drink all the gasolina before the sun came, and it landed far too fast for them to live through a crash en el campo.

  Even saying that, Panchito’s voice was very quiet. He still felt happy. Diós mediante, they might survive. If they were fated to die in the avión, that would be la voluntad de diós. The will of God, and better by far than going back to the gringo torture boxes.

  The Scorpion shouted bad-sounding words in some language she had never heard. The noise woke Frankie, who blinked and listened and stumbled out of his seat, yelling commands at Panchito. He wanted them to land on some safe airstrip, where there were lights and gasoline. He told the Scorpion they could threaten to burn the airplane, with the little bitch inside it, unless they got fuel.

  The Scorpion laughed. Frankie shouted louder. The Scorpion told him to sit down and sleep off his beer. Frankie pulled a pistol out of his belt. A bright-bladed knife flashed out of the Scorpion’s hand. Frankie belched and sank slowly back into another seat with his own hot-smelling blood running over his hairy stomach where it bulged out of his shirt.

  The Scorpion came back to pull his knife out of Frankie’s throat. He wiped it clean on Frankie’s shirt and slid it back under his own clothing.

  “So what?” He shrugged and grinned at her. “Dumb bastard. We won’t need him again.”

  She hurt inside, feeling Frankie’s life pouring out, but she had never found any love that would let her reach him to ease the pain or help his body mend. The dimness of his life flickered into blackness, and his pain was gone.

  Panchito drove them on.

  “Quizas,” she heard him murmur to the Scorpion. “Si la luz viene—”

  Perhaps, if the daylight came in time, they might come down alive. She wished she could help him feel the shape of the land the way she did, but it was still dark to him. He drove the avión on and on, until its roar began to change and break. The Scorpion sat beside Panchito, but he had no skill to drive the avión.

  The roaring stopped. Panchito spoke to the mother of God. The Scorpion twisted to look back to grin strangely at her. He looked ahead again, and she saw that he was ready to die. All she could hear was the soft rush of air around them. She turned to the dark window, searching for the first pale grayness of day, or perhaps the color of hope. All she found was the redness of danger, suddenly so thick and cold that it was all she saw.

  The color of hope was gone.

  34

  Green Eyes

  and Pale

  Hair

  He woke with a throbbing head and a patch on his arm where the needle had been. The handcuffs were gone, with Band-Aids to show where they had cut his wrists. The nurse taking his pulse was a neat young woman he hadn’t seen before.

  “Feeling better, Dr. Belcraft?”

  It was a long time since anybody had greeted him so warmly.

  “I think so.” He frowned at her uncertainly. “Is—has something happened?”

  “Something has happened.” Carefully calm, she nodded. “The major will be coming in. I’ll let him tell you.”

  She let him use the shower, wash off the stiff and bitter-reeking film of drugs his body had sweated out. She found him a razor and the khakis Miss Hearn had brought him at the Fort Madison hospital, freshly laundered now. Feeling almost human again, he came out of the bathroom to find Kalenka squinting at his charts.

  “Well?” Kalenka’s piercing stare dimmed his hopes for really good news. “Something to tell me?”

  “A new situation.” Kalenka nodded. “While you were under sedation, the being you call Alphamega got away.”

  “She did?” He tried to cover his elation. “Still free?”

  “Still missing.” Trouble bit deeper into the dark, hard face; Kalenka had seen how he felt. “Though the search will continue.”

  “When did it happen?”

  “Night before last.” Kalenka spoke slowly, watching his responses. “Details not yet entirely clear, but we have evidence of an elaborate conspiracy. Some outsider set explosives under the power line. In the dark, the creature somehow slipped out of her restraints and escaped from the lab where she was under study.

  “They’d somehow enlisted a man inside. One of our own security people. He released another prisoner, this Mexican convict who had been with Alphamega before her capture. The security man drove them out to the airstrip in his own patrol car. The unidentified outsider caught up with them there—he had kidnapped one of our secretaries and forced her to smuggle him through the gate. The convict is a pilot. They got away in the general’s jet.’”

  “I see.” Belcraft smiled in spite of himself. “Now what?”

  “We still have you.” Kalenka’s narrowed eyes kept on probing. “Our last link.”

  “I don’t know anything—”

  “Maybe you don’t.” Kalenka shrugged. “Our interrogators say they’ve milked you for all they can. Not that you can hope for release. But—assuming you’ll agree to be reasonable—I can arrange to make things somewhat better for you.”

  “How much better?”

  “Enough to make a difference. An office job that should have a certain interest for you—we might call it occupational therapy. The available creature comforts; a very limited sort of freedom, here under guard and inside the fence … if you’ll agree to be reasonable.”

  “Reasonable? What does that mean?”

  “Accept the fact that you’re better off here than outside.” A bleak and fleeting smile. “There’s a story in Fort Madison that you’ve lost your mind as well as your practice. That you’ve been unhinged by the effects of a chronic but latent infection with the organism that killed Enfield.”

  “Huh?” Anger shook him. “Who started that?”

  “Who knows?” Innocently, Kalenka blinked. “But your old friends would be terrified to see you coming back. Your practice is dead. Suppliers are seizing equipment you hadn’t paid for. Bankruptcy proceedings are in progress. Warrants are out for your arrest on charges of arson and fraud. There’s a pending requ
est for your extradition to face them. I’ve been talking to your attorney, Higgs. He will advise you not to try to get back. Nothing good for you there.”

  “I see.” He caught his breath and peered into Kalenka’s wary face. “What is this work?”

  “Not too demanding.” Kalenka softened his voice, trying to be persuasive. “A job that fits your medical qualifications. Not, however, in the research lab. That’s fully staffed, and still discovering nothing. I want you on the crew we’ve set up to cope with the panic.”

  “Panic?”

  “Call it paranoia.” His thin-fleshed features tightened. “A graver danger now, on all the evidence, than the actual organism. People live in terror of getting infected from dust blowing out of the Enfield area or water flowing downstream. They’re terrified of what the media are calling ‘killer carriers’— people carrying latent infections and not aware of it. Those who think they’ve been exposed are trying to sue everybody they can. For property damage and mental suffering if they can’t think of anything else.

  “Your new job, if you take it, will be in public relations. Convincing people that all their fears are groundless. Better take the job.”

  “Why my job?”

  “You’re a doctor.” Kalenka met his searching stare. “Competent to deal with medical inquiries. If you suspect us of some devious plot, I can’t blame you. But you’re here to stay. You may as well lend us a hand. Why not?”

  “Why not?” He nodded. “Nearly anything would be better than your interrogators.”

  “Okay, Doctor!” Kalenka tried to seem pleased. “Agreed! So long as you observe the conditions I’ll have to impose. You’ll be working under Captain Holliday— Sam Holliday, who’s in charge of special investigations. He’ll assign guards to keep track of you.