Firechild

by Jack Williamson

  “You will wear a badge at all times. You will remain confined to the old campus area. You will obey orders and observe a curfew. You will recognize that the job is actually important, and you will give it the time and attention it deserves. Okay?”

  “I don’t get the sense of it.” He frowned at Kalenka. “All those guards, balanced against whatever work I can do.”

  “Holliday’s problem.” Kalenka shrugged. “Or maybe the general’s. It’s what they want. In any case, we have to keep you well secured.”

  With no better alternative, he shook Kalenka’s vigorous hand. They let him shop in the PX for a few essentials and took him to meet Captain Sam Holliday, a lanky young man with an easy smile and an air of firm authority. Explaining his duties, Holliday let him know that he wasn’t going to be quite so free as he had felt.

  Guards checked him into his new quarters on the third floor of what had been a residence hall at the college, checked him into the mess hall and out again, into his new office and out again. Walking anywhere he was allowed to .walk, he always found a man in uniform not far behind him. Willing enough to answer comments on the weather or the mess hall chow, the guards turned stonily silent when he asked for news of Meg.

  His office had been occupied by some vanished professor in the school of business. Dusty maps and graphs and uninviting texts on statistics and economic theory still lined the walls. A computer terminal on the desk loomed forbiddingly at him, but he found at least a dim hint of liberty in the windows, which looked across the old quad, its lawns and shrubs now beginning to sear beneath the late summer drought.

  Though the computer baffled him at first, the job itself was nearly too easy. Secretaries brought him stacks of angry or apprehensive letters. Many were similar, and somebody ahead of him had composed form letters that could be combined to answer most of them with fresh assurances that the Enfield incident had been brought to a safe and final close. When he asked for help with the computer, Keri Grant rapped on his office door.

  She was a tall young woman with long pale hair and intense green eyes. Her shape brought muted whistles from the guards, and he thought she could have been an actress. He couldn’t help staring, the morning she came in, wondering why Holliday had sent her. He wondered again when the terminal seemed as puzzling to her as it had been to him.

  “I took computer science back in Indiana.” Her slight accent baffled and enchanted him. “Years ago. The machines are all different now. I think we must experiment.”

  After his cruel interrogation, the hopeless days and sleepless nights, the threats and blows and electric shocks, the thirst and hunger and hard restraints, Keri Grant seemed unbelievable. Her gleaming platinum hair, the hint of a warm caress in her haunting voice, the scent of her body and his thrill when she touched him, most of all her warm and quick responsiveness— everything about her was totally enchanting.

  “Great!” he agreed. “Let’s experiment.”

  Together, they found and read the operator’s manual. He learned which keys must be struck to call the form letters out of disk memory, which keys would delete sections that failed to fit the complaint and which would call up paragraphs that did, which keys would return the completed reply to disk memory, tagged with a code symbol that would let the secretarial pool call it out again, verify the name and address, and route it on to the printer.

  Now and then he thought of Midge, but the bitterness of her departure was already fading into things long ago. All the events and tensions since that night Vic called from EnGene had driven her image away into an unreal dreamworld, along with the peaceful-seeming past of old Fort Madison and the romantic history of the river and the decayed stateliness of Tara Two.

  It was strange to think of his elation on the day just a few months ago when Billy Higgs proposed him for membership in the Fort Madison Rotary Club and he had gone home to Midge with the news of his longed-for appointment to the permanent hospital staff. All that had dimmed into limbo.

  Alphamega stayed closer to his mind, a mystery unresolved. Had her unknown rescuers taken her to some safe haven, Where she might grow up to find her destiny? Or was she dead in the wreckage of the general’s jet on some distant mountain peak? When Keri Grant began to seem a friend, he nerved himself to ask if she could tell him anything.

  “Very little—even if the general hadn’t told us not to talk.” She gave him a companionable grin. “The stolen airplane has not been reported anywhere. They believe it headed south. The pilot had flown drugs from secret airstrips in Mexico. He may have tried to reach one of those strips, but high-altitude photo missions have failed to spot anything that looks like the general’s jet anywhere at all. We know he didn’t reach any commercial airport. Assuming he landed safe, he may have hidden the plane. He may have flown on to Cuba or Nicaragua—assuming he somehow refueled. He may have crashed.”

  She stopped to look at him.

  “Which leaves you.” Her greenish eyes had a quizzical glint. “Their only lead—and I think they’re wondering why you were left behind.” Her voice grew softer. “The creature means a lot to you?”

  “Her name is Meg. And she really does.” After too many days of hostile interrogation, he liked talking to Keri Grant. “From that first glimpse, when I found her crawling out of the ashes of the lab, I wanted to love and trust and help her. I don’t know why.” He added. “Certainly I know nothing about how she escaped.”

  “I’m sure you don’t.” She grinned easily again. “Entirely sure!”

  She tantalized him. Slow at first to talk about her European years, she began to tell him about colorful characters she had known: hungry artists and kings of industry, hitch-hiking students and penniless exiles and relics of the old nobility.

  Drinking in those tales and the way she told them, he began to picture her as a carefree and sometimes daring vagabond in a world of glamorous romance that seemed far indeed from Fort Madison and the schools and lakes and hospitals where most of his life had been spent. She came to seem utterly out of place among the dusty charts and reference books and business texts around them. Wondering again what had brought her here, he had to know her better.

  “If you’re from Indiana,” he asked her, “how come the accent?”

  “Five years in Europe.” Her quick smile lingered as if she really liked him. “Speaking everything but English. Living on a tiny legacy that’s now used up. Learning I hadn’t been born an artist or a composer or a novelist. I came back when the lawyers cabled the news that my sister and my parents had been trapped to die here in Enfield.”

  “My brother died here.”

  “I know about your brother.” Her haunting voice grew warmer. “Jeri knew him—”

  “Jeri?” He started. “She was your sister?”

  “We were twins.” She was sitting beside him at the computer keyboard, and now she reached to lay a sympathetic hand on his. “We seldom wrote, but once she sent a snapshot of Vic. An odd little big-eyed imp in his picture, not at all like you.” Her exciting eyes approved him. “They were planning to marry, once his big project was done.”

  “I never saw her. Only talked to her once—”

  Looking into the lively brightness of her oval face, he shook his head and said no more. Her hand on his, her voice in his ears, her fresh scent and her electric nearness transforming everything—he wanted her. Her level eyes met his, the pupils wide and dark, kept looking so steadily and so long that he forgot to breathe. He thought she wanted him.

  “A sad thing.” Her fleeting half-smile faded, and she took her hand away. “The whole disaster—and they still want us to call it just the Enfield incident!”

  Her voice changed.

  “I came here asking for information about Jeri and my parents, never imagining what would happen. They arrested me; Detained me. Grilled me for facts I didn’t know about Jeri and Vic and genetic engineering. Three horrible days before I convinced them that I’d never been here and never met Vic and never even heard that much
about him. And now—”

  Her slight shiver was so eloquent of dread that he thought again that she should have been on the stage.

  “Now they suspect me again.” She let him drop his hand on hers. “You see, I was involved in the escape—”

  His breath caught. “Alphamega’s?”

  “Your pet creature’s.” The quirk of her lips seemed almost malicious, but she went on to report her own adventure. “The plotters had a man outside—the man who set those charges under the power lines. The night they were ready, he called me out of my apartment in Maxon and made me drive him in through the gate, crouched down in the back of my car.

  “My usual bad luck.” Her wry expression bewitched him again. “You see, I’d known Frankie Bard, the security man who joined the escape. Kalenka and the general seemed to think somebody must have paid me off. They gave me a bad day under interrogation. I might have been in more trouble, but Captain Holliday stood up for me. He’s okay.

  “Even now—” A grave little shake of her fine-molded head. “They aren’t really satisfied. They wanted me to give up my little apartment and move into the women’s dorm here where they could watch me, but Holliday saved me again.”

  “If you’re in trouble …” Looking at her, rejoicing in this new sense of trust after his long isolation, he nearly forgot to go on. “I’m in a rather more difficult fix.”

  “I know.” Her warm hand squeezed his. “I’ve been told to report everything I can learn from you. Anything about contacts you might have with anybody off the base, any evidence that you’re really in some sort of touch with your dear Meg.”

  “Thanks!” he whispered. “Not that I know where she went or anything about her. Nor even expect to. That jet would have been too hot to come down safe in some pasture. If it crashed, she could be dead.”

  “So she could be.” She was nodding slowly as she spoke, green eyes growing remote and cold, as if the notion somehow pleased her. “We may never know.”

  He drew his hand away, that moment of closeness broken.

  35

  “The Whore

  of Babylon”

  Next morning Belfast was sitting in his office, staring at another angry letter, this one from a farmer threatening to sue because the claims office had refused to pay him even half the value of his seven prize-winning Holstein dairy cows, dead in the dust of Enfield. Instead of punching up a form-letter reply, he was wondering hopefully if Keri would be coming in. He smiled to greet her, when he heard a rap on the door, and started a little guiltily when he saw Captain Holliday.

  “Come along, Doctor. The general wants to see you.”

  Holliday failed to say why, but the waiting guard escorted him across the quad to the old administration building, almost as if he were under arrest. A black sergeant frisked him for hidden weapons and led him down a corridor walled with glass-cased trophies the college teams had won, at last into a big corner room where Clegg sat at the departed president’s glass-topped desk.

  In full uniform, medals on his chest and silver star shining, Clegg sat ramrod straight. His rawboned face seemed older, Belcraft thought, bitten deep with new trouble-creases. The guards had left him at the door.

  Clegg ignored him for half a minute, then looked up at him and paused as if expecting a salute.

  “Good morning,” Belcraft said.

  “Come in.” A commanding hand beckoned him closer, with no invitation to sit. There were, in fact, no chairs in front of the desk. “Major Kalenka informs me that you are now cooperating with us.” His voice was loud and flat. “Is that true?”

  “I am doing office work.”

  “I expect something better.” Clegg scowled, the dark, deep-sunk eyes narrowed as if to probe for his soul. “Perhaps you know your brother’s demon is now at large?”

  “Alphamega? Kalenka tells me she has been rescued.”

  “Rescued?” The cragged head jutted at him. “By whom?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I understand that in the past she has sent you revealing visions?”

  “I have dreamed about her, yes.”

  “Call them dreams!” Abrupt impatience. “Do they come since the rescue?”

  He shook his head.

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know. Unless she is dead?”

  “She’s alive!” Clegg rapped the words. “I saw her last night. In a vision of my own. The whore of Babylon! I heard the voice of St. John like thunder in the dark sky behind her. He was denouncing her monstrous fornications as he denounced them in his own apocalypse two thousand years ago.

  “He warned me that she must die again.” The general’s somber eyes lifted toward the ceiling, and his voice began to ring. “And yet again, as she has died so many times since he first warned the world against her. She has been burned at the stake. Hanged from the scaffold. Racked and drawn and quartered. Forever in vain.”

  Listening, Belcraft shifted uncomfortably on his feet, uncertain what to make of such an outburst.

  “Her evil is eternal,” the solemn tones rolled on. “She has been banished to hell and returned again to every whore-hungry nation, to tempt the innocent and corrupt the righteous and lure every soul she can into Satan’s blazing maw. Alive again, reborn through your brother’s hell-taught arts, she must die again and yet again, until almighty God decrees her death forever.”

  Half erect, he leaned across the desk, rawboned hands supporting him.

  “Hear them now if you never heard before.” His eyes fell to blaze at Belcraft, cold with accusation. “Hear and heed the words of St. John, as they are written in the Scripture and he spoke them to me last night in my vision.”

  Intoning them, his voice rang with a ritual power.

  ” ‘I saw a woman sit upon a scarlet-colored beast, full of names of blasphemy, having seven heads and ten horns. And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet color, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication. And upon her forehead was a name written. MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH. And I saw the woman drunken with the blood of the saints and the blood of the martyrs—’ “

  He broke off the chant, glaring at Belcraft.

  “Sir, do you challenge the truth of my vision?”

  “Your quotation is probably accurate.”

  “Dr. Belcraft, you hear this!” High on his forehead, his birthmark burned redly through its makeup. “That witch is sent upon us as a curse from Satan, bearing the sword of Armageddon. God has allowed her fearful weapon to destroy one city, to let us see how it can destroy the world. She has taken now it with her, wherever her demoniac minions have hidden her.

  “If we suffer her to live, she will wield that sword again, smiting every nation. Therefore she and all her monstrous iniquities must be banished again from the planet. Look now into the depths of your quivering soul. Don’t you see that her reign of sin must be cut short?”

  “No—no sir.” He had to catch his breath. “If I could see Alphamega as anything supernatural, it would be as an angel of mercy, sent to bring us life and hope and peace—”

  “Infidel!” Clegg’s hoarse boom cut him off. “Hear the judgment of the Lord, in the words of Saint John: ‘The ten horns which thou sawest upon the beast, these shall hate the whore, and shall make her desolate and naked, and shall eat her flesh, and burn her with fire.’”

  He scowled across the desk.

  “Sir, if you remain too stubborn to perceive the truth, let me explicate. Those ten horns are the company of the holy, that blessed group which I am chosen to command. I implore you to grasp the need of our God-appointed mission, which is to recover that mighty sword for the defense of our own sacred destiny, and to kill the witch before she can deliver it to the hosts of evil that teem all across our idolatrous planet. Understand?”

  “No, sir.” Belcraft straightened. “That’s nothing I can understan
d.”

  Clegg came to his feet, the handprint flaming brighter.

  “Then, sir, let me try to make it clear.” Fury trembled in his voice, and he paused as if to smooth it. “With the same hell-given craft that enabled her escape, that whore of Satan has evaded the CIA and the KGB and the police of all our international friends.

  “Others are after her, as desperate as we are. The hellhounds of the KGB have been hunting her with all their own Satanic zeal, hoping to seize her weapon for the evil schemers in the Kremlin, but we know that they also have failed.

  “Sir, the simple fact is this: To save the world for God, we must find her before they do. Since other means have failed, we must turn to you. Your own past visions have told you where she had hidden herself. When you dream again—”

  “I see.” Wryly, Belcraft smiled. “Now I understand.”

  “If you really do, I commend you.” An icy smile. “God will bless you for it. When any vision reveals her present hiding place, you will inform us at once. If you do that, we can cut her abominations short, with that holy sword restored to our own righteous hands. If you fail, all mankind may die before the ultimate wrath of God. Understanding God’s commandment and your own sacred duty, you may go.”

  “Thank you,” Belcraft told him. “I’m ready to go.”

  Glowering like a storm cloud, Clegg waved him toward the door.

  In bed that night, Belcraft wondered uneasily if another dream would come. The world’s future might be simpler, he thought, if Alphamega lay dead somewhere in the wreckage of the general’s jet, all her secrets lost. Awake next morning; he felt a gray depression because there had been no dream.

  Keri lifted his spirits when she brought in a new set of form letters she and Holliday had devised to answer a fresh flood of apprehensive letters inspired by rumors that governments all over the world were covering up fresh outbreaks of the Enfield plague.