Firechild

by Jack Williamson

  “And we’d be naked to it.

  “Knowing we couldn’t hope to immunize ourselves, I tried what looked like the next best thing. I tried to engineer another new creation, as different from Lifeguard as we were, but immune to it. At best, I was hoping to devise some kind of tool we might hope to use against Lifeguard. At the very least, perhaps I could design something able to survive to give some sort of life a fresh start on the planet.

  “Even for that, the outlook was so dim that I went through days and nights of depression so bleak that I couldn’t help alarming Jeri—that’s when she called her parents about us. All during that bad time I was only going through the motions, without much sense of creation.

  “It’s strange to say, but Lifeguard was what turned me around. Lorain’s team was inventing ways to design and assemble a wholly new class of self-replicating molecules. Led by the general, they were engineering an eternal destroyer, able to consume everything organic it could reach and wait forever to eat again.

  “Their progress horrified me, but it also set fire to my mind. It gave me the notion of my own creation, a design for life instead of death, something as everlasting as the killer molecules they meant to make. I decided to try for something like us in its own new way. A being greater and better than natural evolution might ever give birth to. Something able to grow and learn and change—evolving forever!

  “That was my new dream: a way out of racial suicide.

  “I had to be careful. I couldn’t let it become a rival creation, something as dangerous as Lifeguard, making endless copies of itself to crowd us off the planet. I engineered it to be immortal, endowed with every peaceful power I knew how to design into it. Except the gift of replication. It must exist alone, never breeding another.

  “Sax, have you ever wondered what a god must feel?

  “A heady thing. I was a god through those months, working twenty hours a day in the shadow of that final holocaust looming over us. The happiest I’ve ever been. You know I “never married. Even back when Jeri was still totally adorable, she was never even half my life. I had to tell her from the first that I’d never have time for all she wanted. The big wedding back at her Indiana birthplace, the big new house she wanted us to build, the kids, the summer travel—the lab had always meant more to me than any of that.

  “But Meg—

  “That’s my pet name for Alphamega, the new creation. Actually sexless, because she wasn’t designed to mate, but humanly female to my imagination. Meg became my own dear child. Genes of my own went into her, transmuted toward my ideal dream of what she should be. Transformed genes from Jeri—I’m sometimes surprised that she still tolerates me; genes I needed even from people on the Lifeguard team; reconstructed fragments of genes from a Paramecium and a nematode and a dragonfly and a condor and Jeri’s pet Persian.

  “Not that Meg will ever resemble any of them in any visible way. What she can evolve to be—if she lives to escape all the enemies she’s going to find around her— the final form of Alphamega is more awesome than I dare imagine.

  “Because she’s designed to keep on evolving.

  “There’s a fanatic named Clegg who has threatened to put us out of business for the way he says we were trying to steal God’s sacred power of creation. He preaches against what he calls the blasphemy of evolution. Meg’s the ultimate answer to his arrogance. A new creation, designed to be more perfect than we are, programmed to evolve and keep on evolving.

  “It kills me that I can’t be here to watch her grow.

  “There have been months of high elation, mixed sometimes with terror when I thought the Lifeguard device might be completed too soon. The climax was an hour of total joy when I saw Meg—I can’t quite say I saw her born, but I did feel all the pride and wonder and fear any father could, on that night in the lab when I watched her squirm over the rim, out of her petri dish.

  “I had to hide her and the fact of her creation. I knew from the first that she was never going to be the sort of counterweapon the general wanted. Her unknown potentials would have terrified him and Lorain, and certainly outraged Clegg. She’s still terribly vulnerable, and I felt pretty certain they’d order her destruction if they ever learned what she is.

  “She—”

  A shadow fell over the pages.

  “Need a drink?”

  Jim Gibson was beside the car, offering Anya a square canvas water bottle chilled by its own evaporation. With a grateful smile, she drank silently and passed it on to him.

  “We’re still reading.” He had seen Gibson’s anxious glance at the letter. “My brother’s telling us who killed Enfield.”

  49

  Deathguard

  “I‘d better wind this up,” Vic had written.

  “Sax, if you’re alive to read this, my life has been better spent than our poor father ever expected. I’ve set down all I dare to about how Meg came to be. This is my farewell to you, and a try at explaining a crime I can’t confess to Jeri.

  “Home for a few hours with her on that night when the way out struck me, I was feeling far too desperate to make any sort of love. Lying there, with Jeri sobbing in her sleep beside me, I saw a way to rebuild Lifeguard, to impose a limit on what Ryebold calls its kill-potential.

  “The answer to the weapon, the one I’m about to try, is simply the molecular clock that runs in all our body cells, counting and cutting off their generations. That’s one of nature’s earliest and most essential biological inventions. It controls growth and limits life. Erasing each aging generation to make room on Earth for the next, it’s what makes evolution possible.

  “I suppose you know that cells in a tissue culture generally stop dividing after a few dozen generations, because that automatic clock has turned them off. I saw a way to build that same control into the Lifeguard quasi-organism to limit its lethal range.

  “I took that suggestion to the team. Lorain wanted none of it—not just yet. Lifeguard itself was coming too near what he called perfection. He refused to sidetrack research into anything that might delay the effort. When I went to the general, he overruled Lorain—at first I didn’t see why.

  “The general called it Deathguard—a code name meant to disguise it. On his orders, I got more lab space and more help and more briefings from the Lifeguard crew on their plans and hangups. I found myself in a crazy race against them, the stakes too high for sanity. Tonight, as I write, I’m barely ahead.

  “Or so I hope.

  “Yesterday, reporting to Ryebold before he left to spend the weekend at Camp David and make his own report, I told him I had Deathguard as ready as it could ever safely be, needing only one final untested step to activate it. His poker scowl seemed to set a little harder when he heard about it, as if he had just picked up a royal flush.

  ” ‘Great news for the President!’

  “He called the whole team together, to congratulate us and talk about delivery systems. With Lifeguard far too hazardous for any actual use—even he had always admitted that—Deathguard promised to be the ultimate super-weapon.

  “A fact I’d never seen, I don’t know why. Working to counter Lifeguard, I had caught myself in an ironic trap. Lifeguard was too monstrous ever to be used— unless, ultimately, by some suicidal lunatic. In the general’s mind, Deathguard wasn’t. I saw no answer to his hard logic.

  “A single milligram of the Deathguard culture would be a thousand times enough. It would be absolutely undetectable by X-ray or Geiger or chemical sniffer or anything else. It could be loaded into a bullet-sized missile or hidden anywhere. A secret agent could carry it in a watch or a button or a hollow tooth. You could target it on a factory or a city or a ship or an army camp, without much risk to anything outside the target area.

  “Assuming, of course, that it actually worked.

  “The general asked me to work up plans for a test. That horrified me. We couldn’t be certain of anything about it. A failure, with Lifeguard set free, could wipe our sort of life off the earth. I told hi
m that. Never a change on that hard brown poker face, he said he had faith enough in my science. He’d already made his own cost-benefit analysis. Risky, he admitted, but the risk was one we had to take.

  Though Deathguard was still my secret, I’d talked to Lorain and the others on the team about a possible new mutation to limit the spread of the Lifeguard quasi-organism. Given the idea, that safety gene isn’t hard to build. They knew enough to let them duplicate all I’d done.

  “The general took off for Camp David and left me to face the grimmest decision I can imagine. Myself, I don’t much mind dying—Lifeguard itself had resigned me to that. Investing our lives in such weapons, all of us at EnGene had forfeited our own rights to survival. If we have spies on the staff, and I’m pretty sure we do, I can’t grieve for them. As for Ryebold himself, and whoever he reports to, I can’t help wishing they were here for the finish, but they know too little to matter.

  “Killing Lorain and the rest of the staff—that does hurt. They’ve been my closest friends, even through all our battles over the Pentagon intrusion. I respect their motives. Patriotism; they’re convinced that advanced biological weapons are coming, from some worse source if not from EnGene, and they want America to have them first. The sheer joy of discovery. A crazy confidence that we can control anything we create.

  “I admire them all. I might have loved Carole Bliss if she hadn’t put our research ahead of love.

  “What I plan must look like madness: to murder them; to murder a city. An insane dilemma, but one they’ve forced on me. It’s the only way I know to balk their own more unthinkable insanity.

  “But Jeri …

  “I’m afraid to tell her, because she wouldn’t understand. She might get hysterical enough to give me away. I can’t even risk making up some new scheme to get her out of town, because she’s expecting her folks from Indiana. With the stakes what they are, I can’t risk any more than I absolutely must.

  “I know I’ve never been quite fair to Jeri, but this— it’s too cruel to think about. Too horribly unjust for her and her parents, and for all those thousands of people in the town, innocent of anything, certain to be caught before that molecular clock turns Deathguard off.

  “Assuming that it does. I wish—but I’ve had no sleep the last two nights, sweating over possible alternatives.

  “They don’t exist.

  “Leaving Meg—that hurts more than anything. Like any proud parent, I’ve been longing to watch her learn and change and grow. It tears me apart to leave her so young and defenseless, lost in what will surely be a deadly wasteland.

  “Yet she’ll have a chance. She’s engineered to survive the Lifeguard pathogen. Which means she’ll be immune to Deathguard too. With luck enough, time enough for her own evolution, she should discover gifts that ought to keep her safe forever. Her genes are designed for infinite change, for the potential to grow forever toward the ultimate goal of life. If she does survive—

  “I’m terribly afraid. Her vital processes have never been tested. She has already begun to show tantalizing promise, but she needs tender care and understanding love I won’t be there to give—care and love she may never find in the aftermath of what I feel forced to do.

  “Am I insane?

  “The choices I face are harsh enough to break anybody. Groping for anything saner, I always came back to a reality worse than anything I plan. I know that sooner or later, some computer would malfunction, some command would be misunderstood, some test tube would be dropped, some idiot would make the wrong decision. Once spilled by any such inevitable mischance, the Lifeguard virus would spread to blot our kind of life off the planet.

  “Tonight—the fact seems too cruel to face, but this will be the final night for all of us here at EnGene and many thousand others. I’m driving out to Maxon to get this letter into the morning mail. That’s upwind and nearly twenty miles away, well outside the probable lethal zone.

  “I can’t stand to see Jeri again. There’s nothing I can say or do to help her now. I’ll get a snack at the truck stop—can’t remember when I last ate—and come on back in time to say good-bye to Meg. A hard thing, because she won’t understand. I must try to explain what she is and she was made for, but I know she’s still far too young to get it all.

  “Tomorrow morning, Lorain will be calling the team together for our daily planning session. We’ll all be there, the half dozen of us they’ve had to trust with Lifeguard know-how. It’s my turn to make the coffee. I’ll put half a milligram of Deathguard cells into the pot and drink the first cup myself.

  “The stuff will probably be tasteless, but that shouldn’t matter. My fellow engineers of Armageddon may have time enough to guess what’s hit them, but all they can do is to let those synthetic macromolecules replicate themselves until their internal clocks turn them off.

  “That’s the story, Sax—

  “I’ve taken too long to tell it, but I had a lot to say. You may hate me for laying such a hard burden on you. It’s a poor return for all you used to do for me. I always loved you, Sax, most of all for your everlasting tolerance and for everything you taught me. Believe me, I sometimes even thought of saying so. I never did, never could. Because, I guess, I couldn’t bring myself to admit how much I needed you.

  “Forgive me, Sax!

  “I hope you’ll be the first know the truth. I’m trusting you to get it out to all the world, in the surest way you can. Be careful! There are people in the Pentagon and out of it who’d do anything to stop you. Plan against them, and do what you can to play things safe.

  “This will be the Deathguard test Ryebold wanted me to make. If you’re reading this, you’ll know my molecular clock was able to turn the virus off. I’ve said all I dare tell about EnGene. Whatever may have happened here while this confession is in the mail, I hope you can use it to warn the world against the sort of thing we’ve done.

  “God help you get the warning out, and God forgive me!

  “So long, Sax.”

  50

  The Shining

  Virus

  A hot gust blew through the open doors of the Buick, sharp with alkali dust and the pungence of creosote brush. The heat had left Belcraft sticky with grime and sweat. Yet, passing Anya the last page of Vic’s letter, he shivered. A hard lump ached in his throat. Staring off at the yellow dust-devils dancing across the brown mesa and the far black fleck of the tunnel shimmering in the heat, he found everything blurred with tears.

  Anya finished the letter, and he saw her cracked lips quivering.

  “I didn’t know—” she whispered. “I couldn’t know—”

  “Nobody—” He gulped at the lump in his throat. “Nobody could.”

  It took a long time for him to shake off his pain. The letter had left him crushed under the weight of his brother’s hard ordeal, left him wounded as Vic had been by the ruthless necessity to sacrifice Jeri, to kill his fellow researchers and condemn the innocent city, to lose everything but Meg. And now—

  “If she’s dead—”

  His aching throat had closed.

  “We don’t know.” Anya tried to cheer him. “Not till we get there.”

  Moving to break that cruel spell, he started the car. Anya leaned out to wave at Jim Gibson. The blue Ford followed them, lurching and jolting and grinding up the one-time road toward La Madre de Oro.

  Outside the tunnel, a shelf had been bulldozed and blasted into the mountainside. Pancho’s battered pickup truck stood parked there, half camouflaged with juniper branches. Belcraft found a flashlight in the glove compartment of the Buick and led the way inside.

  Damp with sweat, he shivered. The tunnel was a dim pit, sloping unevenly down into the mountain as if the miners had been trying to follow a vanishing vein. Parts of it were timbered with rough logs. Decay had broken many of them, letting boulders fall from the roof. Somewhere ahead, he heard the drip and ripple of an underground spring. ‘

  Anya kept close to him. Both of them taut with a mix of dread an
d lingering hope, they spoke seldom and only in whispers. Maybe even more uneasy about what they might find, the photographer had taken a long time to gather up his gear, and Jim Gibson stayed to help him carry it.

  The tunnel was dark ahead of them until they came to a pile of fallen rock. The sound of water was louder beyond it, and they came upon a pale glow of light. The floor here had flattened, and the glow led them to a pile of sharp-scented juniper twigs laid to make a bed.

  “Nyet!” Anya breathed. “No! No!”

  Alphamega and Pancho Torres lay together across the crude bed. The light came from her body, which shone now like the body of that luckless bicyclist Bel-craft had seen overtaken by the advancing dust of Enfield. Her fine gold hair was already gone. Her thin little body was naked, the delicate limbs all turned luminous. The fine-boned head was bent grotesquely aside, and his flashlight glinted on the blade of the knife Harris had dropped beside her.

  Torres must have been holding her in his arms when the killer surprised them, wrapped perhaps in the worn blanket which lay near her now. He had toppled backward against the boulder pile from another cave-in. A worn 30.30 rifle with a broken and black-taped stock had fallen on the rocks beside him. The flashlight showed half of his gaunt, stubble-bearded face torn away where the bullets had struck.

  Silently, they shrank away together. Anya gripped Belcraft’s hand, and he felt her shiver. The dank air was suddenly hard to breathe. Falling water clinked and tinkled in the darkness farther on. Behind them, the photographer slipped on a rock and cursed.

  “I’m sorry,” Anya whispered. “Please, Sax! You’ve got to believe—”

  His throat closed, he could only squeeze her hand.

  The others arrived, Gibson lugging a heavy still camera and its tripod. The photographer set them up and took flash shots of the bodies and the knife and a flat-topped boulder where Torres had stacked his meager supplies—a few cans of food, paper sacks of beans and rice and ground corn. He set up a battery lamp and mounted a video camera on the tripod.