Firechild

by Jack Williamson

  “Careful, Sax!” Anya dropped her voice. “He’s deadly.”

  He sat staring. The flat Indian face and the black mirror sunglasses brought back a sudden drug-dimmed memory of the interrogation cell back at Enfield and Harris mauling him until Kalenka interfered.

  “We’re okay, babe!” Grinning at Anya, Harris raised two fingers in the victory sign. “Clegg’s millions, safe in the bank! I pumped the little bitch full of lead. Her pet spic too. We got it made.”

  The mirrors flashed at Belcraft. The grin fading, the thick voice faltered into silence.

  “Well done!” Anya returned the victory sign. “I’ll inform the general. Where are you headed now?”

  “I—I dunno.” Harris hesitated, shivering. “Something—back there in the dark. I dunno—” He glanced uneasily behind him. “I was taking her head. A trophy for the general. But I got the shakes. Dropped my knife and ran. I dunno why—”

  He stumbled to the car and gripped the rim of the window as if for support.

  “Mickey?” Anya slid out of the car and came around to him. “Mickey, are you sick?”

  “Dunno— Dunno—” He stood there a moment, unsteady fingers combing at the slick black hair. “I’ve had my share of fresh young meat, and nothin’ never bothered me. Even had my hands on the little bitch back at Enfield, and nothin’ hit me then. I dunno—”

  “If she’s really dead—”

  “Cold as stone!” He shuddered again, blinking woodenly at Anya. “Funny thing. Chilled me just to touch her. I had a grip on that yellow hair and her head half off—and not a drop of blood. There shoulda been blood.” He licked his lips. “I always gotta kick outa the blood.”

  “Better get along,” she told him. “Let the support people know where you’ll be, so the general can set up your payoff. We’ll drive on up and take photos for verification—”

  He stood silent for a time, thick lips working, black mirrors staring.

  “Watch out, babe—” His voice had slowed to a rusty creak. “Go in there and you’ll be sorry.” He swung to shake his head at the far tunnel-mouth. Better stay away. Something I can’t shake off.” He came back toward Anya, heavy hands trembling. “I need a shot. You got a bottle?”

  “No.” She shrank away. “We don’t have a bottle.”

  “Something better!” His flat nostrils flared, his broad face twitching into a sudden, ugly grin. “Dunno how she hit me, but you’ll do, babe!” The black mirrors clung, and his voice sank to a breathless rasp. “You got the juicy meat I really need to warm that chill.”

  “Why, Mickey!” Her cool voice reproved him. “You wouldn’t hurt me. You couldn’t. You haven’t even got a knife. Not if you left it—”

  “Silly bitch! I’ll take care of the knife.”

  “Mickey, are you crazy?”

  “Dunno—” Again he peered back toward the tunnel. “But I gotta forget. That’s when I always wanted fresh red meat. When things got to eating on—”

  Belcraft tumbled out of the car, gripping a tire iron.

  “Drop that, bud.” Harris backed away, a big revolver drawn. “I’ll drill you here and now.”

  “Better drop it, Sax.” Anya’s steady voice seemed far away. “You wouldn’t have a chance.”

  The muzzle of the gun looked large and black and very steady. He let the tire iron fall.

  “Good girl, babe!” The mirrors flashed at her. “You’re the cure for what I’ve got. And your heroic pal ain’t gonna stop me.” The idiot grin spread wider. “One thing he can do, if I save him for later. I’ll fix the bodies to look like it was him sliced the meat—”

  “Wait a minute, Mickey!” She stepped quickly toward him, empty hands spread as if to plead. “Before you get rash, better look behind you!”

  “Now, now, babe! I ain’t that dumb.”

  “Listen, Mickey!”

  “Hah! You can’t fool—”

  He heard the whine of gears and backed away to glance toward the sound.

  “Hey, you bitch—”

  Bare hands reaching, Anya darted at him. He swung the gun to meet her. She dived under its crash, and Belcraft heard it clatter on the rocks near his feet. Lunging to meet her, Harris went over her bent shoulder and came down hard. The mirrors clinked and shattered. Back on her feet in an instant, she recovered the gun and fired two expert shots into his head.

  Ears ringing, Belcraft peered at her groggily. He felt humiliated, but also vastly relieved.

  “So what, Sax?” Almost smiling, she blew smoke from the muzzle of the gun. “You’re a physician. I’ve trained for the other side of the coin.” With a grimace of disgust, she stepped away from the man on the gravel. “If killing had ever been a pleasure, this might be the moment.”

  The gears whined louder. A car was coming into view above the rise behind.

  “Huh?” Anya scowled at it. “I was expecting the support group.”

  The car was a blue travel-battered Ford. It stopped close behind them. A heavy man in khakis got out. Walking toward them, he stopped to peer at the body on the ground and came on toward Anya.

  “Scorpio!” Belcraft saw her hand tighten on the gun. “You’re close enough.”

  “Miss Ostrov!” He seemed more amused than alarmed at her hostility. “Let’s forget the Scorpion.

  Right now, here in Mexico, I’m Jim Gibson, American.” He bent to frown again at the red wreck of Harris’s head. “My old friend Mickey?” He shrugged. “Nichevo, as you used to say. High time he got dealt out.”

  “What are you up to now?”

  “Nothing for you or the KGB.”

  “Then, why—” The weapon followed him. “What do you want?”

  “Things have happened to me.” He waved as if to push the gun aside. “I know you used to hate me, but I’m not what I used to be. You won’t have to shoot.”

  “You robbed me.”

  “So?” A cheerful shrug. “I never liked taking orders from a woman. Never felt you were paying what my skills were worth. When too many agents from too many places started closing in, I decided to play a lone hand. Followed you back to Enfield and set up the escape with Alphamega—”

  “You?” She kept the gun steady. “The man I drove to the general’s jet? I did wonder—”

  “A trick that worked.” He spoke in the flat half whisper she recalled. “One I picked up years ago.” He made a face at the gun. “Really, Anya, you won’t need that. Not since whatever happened back there on the desert. You can blame me that the jet went down. Torres wanted to land on some lighted field, but I was still hoping to auction Alphamega off for my own retirement fund.

  “The crash left me dying—”

  Her eyebrows rose. “You look alive to me.”

  “I’m okay now. Better in fact than I ever was.” Suddenly grave, he glanced up the road, the way the black van had come. “But I think we all died. Even Alphamega. There was no sign of life when I looked at her body. Yet somehow—”

  He stopped to blink absently at her and Belcraft and the body on the gravel, seeming to search for words.

  “Here we come to matters I can’t claim to understand. Nothing I say is likely to persuade you, but in spite of all that, Alphamega was—still is alive. Somehow, some part of her. Don’t ask me how. With help from Belcraft’s doctor-brother—and somehow without her own body moving, because the wreck hadn’t left it fit to move—she revived Torres and me.”

  “Help from me?” Belcraft started. “I never knew—”

  “If you’re Dr. Saxon Belcraft.” Gibson nodded, dark eyes probing. “I knew your brother, back when I was an EnGene guard. Alphamega wanted to bring you when we made the breakout. Not a chance, with you lying drugged in Kalenka’s interrogation room.”

  “If you say she was dead, and you were dying—” Anya squinted at him, shading her eyes against the sun. “How do you explain—”

  “I don’t.” A slow, solemn headshake. “I can’t pretend to understand. While I lay there dead, she came to me. Don’t
ask me how. Or how she and Belcraft put me back together.”

  His empty hands spread wide.

  “I woke up dazed. Only half remembering her visit, I thought it must have been just a crazy dream. I looked at her and Torres. No question she was dead. Torres close to it. I wandered off and found a road. I had no notion what had happened till days later, when she appeared to me again.

  “She’d been somewhere off the earth. She was just coming back to look for her body. Searching, she reached me. I followed her back to where Torres had taken her. A queer experience! It ended with her shock of terror. I caught her awareness of sudden danger closing in—she has senses I can’t even try to explain. I was hoping to get there in time to help her.”

  Scowling at the body, he dropped his empty hands.

  “I guess I’m too late.”

  “Too late.” Belcraft nodded unhappily. “Harris said he’d pumped them both full of lead.”

  “Which might not kill her any deader than the crash left her.” Gibson squinted again toward the far black fleck of the tunnel-mouth. “We’ll have to take a look.”

  With a scowl at the flies already crawling over the body, he turned back to Anya. “What’s with that?”

  “Dump it in the van,” she told him. “Let the support crew explain it to the Mexicans.”

  Belcraft helped him heave the body into the back of the van. Back at the blue Ford, they washed their hands with warm water out of a plastic bottle.

  “Thanks, doc. Now—” Gibson paused to study Belcraft. “Before we go, I’ve got a letter for you.”

  Opening the trunk of the Ford to find a grime-stained briefcase, he dug out a thick brown envelope.

  “Sorry, Doctor.” He seemed apologetic. “It’s to you, from your brother at EnGene. I took it in a midnight raid on your Fort Madison office. After I’d read it, I rigged the booby trap that took out your house.” A wry grimace. “That was back when I was still the Scorpion.”

  He gave Anya a quizzical nod.

  “I had a hunch by then that the letter might be worth more than she was willing to pay. The whole situation was getting too sticky for comfort. I decided to hold out for a safer occasion and a higher bid. I’m glad now to get it back to you.

  “If you’ll forgive me—”

  With an odd little bow, he offered the envelope.

  “Better read it before we look in the tunnel.” Awe in his eyes, he peered again at that far mountain. “I’m half afraid of what we’ll find when we get there. Being a doctor, you ought to understand what your brother wrote better than I do. Maybe he’s warning us what to expect.”

  46

  EnGene

  Gibson went back to his mud-splashed Ford to check the engine and pump air into a leaky tire. Nodding for Anya to follow, Belcraft climbed into the Buick. Both doors open against the heat, he looked again at the letter. It trembled in his sweaty fingers.

  Avid to read it, he already dreaded what it might say. The thick brown envelope was wrinkled and coffee-stained, one end slit. Though the postmark was worn dim, he made out “Enfield.” With no sender indicated, the letter was addressed to his Fort Madison office in Vic’s hand. The neat black-ink script brought him an image of the pesky kid brother he recalled, brighter than everybody and cocky about it, eager to tackle anything or anybody, myopic eyes peering through thick-lensed glasses to pick up facts most people missed.

  “Here it is.” Sadly, bitterly, he grinned at Anya. “The letter you were trying to buy for the KGB. It really is from Vic. Written from the EnGene lab the night before the city died. I guess you’ve paid enough to see it.”

  “Thanks, Sax.” An ironic murmur. “You’re far too kind.”

  Reading the closely written pages, he passed them silently to her.

  “Dear Sax,” Vic had begun, “I should warn you that even receiving this may place you in danger. For your own safety, you should read it in private and consider the possible consequences before you let anyone at all know anything about it. I’d understand if you decide to destroy it and try to forget you ever saw it.

  “With only a few hours alone in the lab tonight, I’ll have to be brief, but I want to make things clear. This will sum up the story of the EnGene Laboratories, so far as I know the story. The final chapter remains to be written. I can’t predict its outcome, but your own survival to read this farewell implies something happier than I feel sure of.

  “My involvement with EnGene began the year I finished my doctorate. I’d read a summary report on my own graduate research at the regional AAAS meeting in Chicago. Bernard Lorain came up to me afterward. He’s half-forgotten now because they have kept such a security lid on us, but you probably heard of his early work. He’d begun with Jim Watson at Harvard and gone on to Johns Hopkins and later to Stanford. He was a leader of those bright Young Turks who had just begun turning genetic science upside down.

  “EnGene was just being planned. I was in hog heaven when he offered to take me aboard. We’d find kindred souls at work there, with nearly unlimited funding and total freedom to dig into the deepest secrets of life. Not to worry, he assured me, about any demands for profit-making or military applications.

  “Of course I asked questions. Who was funding EnGene? Why? He didn’t know. The best he could offer was a guess, based he said on inadvertent hints from lawyers and accountants. The endowment came, he suspected, from some big industrialist who had come to deplore the way he and his kind had misused technology—stripping the planet bare, wasting resources to build frivolous gadgets and unthinkable weapons.

  “This anonymous benefactor was betting some of his millions on serendipity. That, at least, was Lorain’s hope. We’d be free to study the ultimate nature of life. With no pressures to sell anything or kill anybody, we had a chance to stumble onto something that could turn civilization toward some saner future.

  “That’s what Lorain believed. I never got a name for that benevolent idealist, or even found anybody who claimed to know a name. Maybe he did exist, long enough at least to launch EnGene. Maybe he didn’t. As things worked out, I was never sure.

  “I wanted to know why there had to be such tight security. Lorain’s reply seemed reasonable. We would be free to discover whatever we could. The secrets of the unlocked gene might be as explosive as those of the atom. As a hedge against disaster, all our work must be evaluated in advance of publication.

  “Who would be doing that evaluation? Our whole scientific staff; that’s what Lorain understood. The final disposition of our discoveries—to be locked away in some military safe or published for the world’s benefit —that was to be settled by a full staff discussion and a democratic vote. On that basis, I signed up for my first year.

  “The look of the place was a painful disappointment. The first of many to come. We’re in an old brick building where a TV maker failed. We do have a top-of-the-line Cray computer and adequate equipment— compared to nucleonics, you can do genetics for peanuts. Salaries are low; we could earn twice as much anywhere else. We weren’t allowed to patent anything.

  “Yet I stayed. Partly because of Lorain. Mostly because we were left free, at least at first, to follow our findings wherever they took us. After the shock of this shabby old firetrap, those early months were great. Lorain was a charismatic leader. He’d recruited a fine team of his fellow Young Turks. The brightest minds in genetics. We got on well together. I began to feel that we shared the same grand dream:

  “Directed evolution!

  “Natural evolution seems to have been creation by blind accident, working through endless waste and needless death. A multibillion-year affair of random trial and error. Countless trillions of fatal blunders had to be killed off to get one chance advance good enough to survive.

  “We did better, because we had an intelligent aim and we knew the rules. Instead of running haphazard experiments that might take a million or a hundred million years to work or nearly always fail, we could plan what we wanted to do and run it through the computers
in fifteen minutes.

  “We were creators!

  “A great feeling, Sax. We commanded new technologies powerful enough to remake the human race. We could create a race of demigods, or one of demons. Sometimes the possibilities frightened me, but I never thought of quitting. I wanted to make certain—as certain as I could—that nothing went wrong.

  “It hurt us not to publish, but at least we could talk. We did, and we reveled in it. Our whole group as a unit seemed keener than any one of us. We worked long hours and long after hours and talked just as long, at coffee breaks and after work and at weekend get-togethers.

  “We developed a fine sense for truth, and a vast respect for the cleverness of natural evolution. The process has been glacial, but the wonders it has done— sometimes I thought we’d never match them. We soon came to realize that natural life is more complex than we had ever imagined, its future potentials more amazing. Yet we always dreamed of going further.

  “EnGene was the most fun I ever had—the most exciting game I ever hoped to play—till I began to notice that Lorain was changing. His temper got short. His old sense of humor dried up. His brain seemed keen as ever, but he began avoiding our coffee breaks and parties. Too busy, he said, with paperwork the corporation was demanding.

  “I thought at first that the company security system was simply getting under his skin. He was still doing brilliant work that should have been reported in Nature or Science, making breakthroughs in theory that gave us new models of the gene and new ways to take it apart and rebuild it. He—the whole group of us—might have been up for Nobels if we’d been allowed to publish.

  “That security pinch hurt him, and all of us. Other restrictions soon got worse. EnGene executives began turning up to inspect the facility and dig a little too sharply into what we were doing. There were other men, odd characters who introduced themselves as representatives of pharmaceutical firms wanting to know what was delaying the new wonder drugs they said the company had promised them.

  “Puzzling people!

  “Whatever they were or claimed to be, none of them seemed to know all that much about biology or any other science. They were all in plain clothes, but one day Lorain slipped. Talking about a Mr. Mason, a big-shot coming to look us over, he called him General Ryebold. When the general had finished his inspection and gone, I dug the truth out of Lorain.