Joe Haldeman

by The Coming

  “Look, I know you’ve got company. I shouldn’t be recorded coming into your house anyhow. But we have to talk before I go to work in the morning.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Down on the corner, where the street splits. Blue Westinghouse with silvered windows.”

  “I’ll be there in a minute.” He pushed “end” and thought for a moment, and then rushed back into the dining room.

  “I have to run out for a bit, student emergency. Kid’s got an audition tomorrow, broke an A string.

  Sounds like he might need some serious hand-holding, too.”

  “Which student?” Rory asked.

  “Qabil. Just down the street.” She nodded, wordlessly, and forced a smile.

  Norman got a string from his study and said “back in a minute,” and went out the door and down the street.

  The passenger door opened as he approached. He slid in and closed it.

  One side of Qabil’s face was blistered, covered with a transparent gel. His right hand was bandaged.

  “What happened?” Norman said.

  “I’ll get to that. First would you tell me what the fuck is going on?”

  “The basics … Willy Joe Capra was going to blackmail me. About you and me.”

  “That much I know. He told me in some detail, after he kidnapped me from my own goddamned driveway. Then that Tampa thug Solo, you broke his hand?”

  “In a way, yes.” Crickets loud in the darkness. “I held a gun on him and he did it himself.”

  “A gun. You’ve been leading an interesting life, since we parted.”

  Parted. Norman tried to keep emotion out of his voice. “What did those bastards do to you?”

  “Do to me? What the hell did you do to them?”

  “Me? Nothing. Just the hand.”

  “Norm, you can tell me. If you can trust anybody in the world with this, it’s me.”

  “I was supposed to meet them at five. I talked to the lawyer, Moore; he said they had something to show me.”

  “Yours truly, Exhibit A. So what the hell did you do?”

  “I didn’t do anything. I got to about a block away and saw that the place was burning to the ground.

  I saw the medics cut you loose from the chair, saw you could walk, and got away as fast as I could.” He shook his head. “I’m sorry. I got you into this. I don’t suppose there’s any way to cover it up now.”

  “Wait. Before we talk about covering up. You didn’t kill those shits?”

  “I didn’t kill anybody. I was ready to, but … the fire. I saw you and figured it was a police thing.”

  “No … whatever that thing was, the police don’t have it. I’m getting debriefed tomorrow, and I’m not sure what to say. You didn’t do it?”

  “What was it? Some kind of firebomb?”

  Qabil touched his face gingerly. “The three guys just blew up. I saw it happen. I haven’t said anything to anybody, just that there was a fire. But I saw it all.”

  “They blew up?”

  “A window broke, a window behind me. The Tampa scumbag, Solo, raised his gun—it was already in his left hand—and started to stand. Then he just burst into flames.”

  “Jesus. Like a flamethrower?” Norman had seen them in use, and he still had dreams about it.

  “No—it was like he exploded from the inside out. Not his clothes, his flesh. Then the other two.

  One, two, three. Staggering around like something out of a movie. Then their clothes started to burn.

  Capra had a gun in a holster in the small of his back, and the rounds cooked off.

  “He fell into the drapes, and they went up like tinder. Some of the furniture was smoldering. Then fire running out of their bodies like burning oil. I was able to half stand up, tied to the chair, and had to kick my way through the front door, fell down the steps, and knocked myself silly. Some civilian sprayed me with a fire extinguisher, maybe saved my life.”

  “What the hell could do that? Make people burst into flame like that?”

  “I was hoping you could straighten that out. Some new military weapon or something.”

  “Come on, Qabil. I haven’t held a military weapon in thirty years.”

  Qabil nodded and then had a coughing spasm that ended with a stifled retch. “The smell was disgusting. You know I’m forbidden pork. When human flesh—”

  “I remember, Qabil.” He shook his head hard. “It must have been a Mafia thing. Or a gang thing.”

  “Well, the gangs … ” He cleared his throat. “The gangs don’t have any reason to love him. But they run more to baseball bats and knives. If they had burst-into-flames ray guns, we’d all be in real trouble.

  “I thought about the Mafia. But why would a hit man kill three hoods and leave a live policeman as a witness?”

  “Maybe he didn’t know you were a—”

  “I was still in uniform. But maybe, maybe that was the point. Maybe they want us to know they have this ungodly weapon. Willy Joe was not some godfather type they had to assassinate in a dramatic way.

  Just a bagman with delusions of grandeur.”

  They listened to the crickets for a minute. “What can make a body burn up?” Norman asked.

  “We’re mostly water, aren’t we?”

  “Yeah. Crematoriums need a really hot fire to get things going. But we’ve both seen what napalm does.”

  “That’s adding fuel. You said these guys just started to burn from the inside out.”

  “I saw that clearly. Their clothes weren’t even on fire, not initially. Then everything was on fire.”

  “There’ve been cases of spontaneous human combustion.”

  Qabil laughed one “hum” and touched his cheek. “That always turns out to be nothing. Some old person or drunk, or drunk old person, falls asleep smoking. They die without noticing they’ve died. After they’ve smoldered awhile, fat starts to drip out. They burn like a candle then. Like an oil lamp.”

  “What about the water, then?”

  “I guess it’s like the water in a green stick of wood. If it’s hot enough, the wood burns anyhow.” He scratched his head. “But this was nothing like that. They didn’t smolder or anything. They just ignited, like they were made out of gunpowder.”

  Norman sat straight up. “Oh, hell. It’s obvious.”

  “Enlighten me.”

  “It’s a police weapon. They knew you were—”

  “No, hold it. We don’t have anything remotely like that.”

  “Not that you know of. But let me finish. If the whole story came out, if any one of those three lived, there would be hell to pay. A homosexual policeman, a faggot’s wife bribing a cop, the Mafia involved—hell, they’d use atomic weapons to keep that under wraps.”

  “But nobody knows. It’s buried so deep—”

  “Willy Joe found out.”

  Qabil shook his head hard. “If the department knew, I’d have been eased out a long time ago.

  Believe me; I’ve seen it happen. We use administrative procedures long before we resort to supernatural weapons.”

  “You once told me there was no such thing as ‘supernatural.’ If something happened, it was part of Allah’s design, and therefore natural.”

  “Touché. And mystery is part of that design.” He shook his head, smiling at the thought. “So think of this as a murder mystery. Weapon, motive, opportunity.

  “The weapon, table that. Except to note that the person using it probably knew he was in no danger from his targets, once he pulled the trigger.

  “The motive. Well, Capra probably has more people in this town willing to kill him than anyone else but the mayor. Right now you’re the prime suspect, but I’m the only one who knows that, and if you say you didn’t do it, that’s enough for me. Who else? Did Rory know you were headed for a meeting with Capra?”

  “No; I didn’t want to involve her.” Jesus! It was Pepe! “Besides, she was on camera all afternoon.

  Perfect alibi.”

  “A
nd nobody else knew.”

  “No, of course not,” he lied. Could Pepe’s research have some kind of weapons application?

  Something developed from those gamma-ray bursters? Norman didn’t know much about it. Maybe a burst of gamma rays could catch someone on fire.

  “So what about opportunity? Usually linked to motive and weapon. If this is just a criminals-killing-criminals thing, the timing of it has to be explained.”

  “Because it’s so propitious?”

  He nodded. “And risky. In broad daylight, in a neighborhood full of criminal activity, someone sneaks around behind a house, breaks a window and kills three people inside, setting the house on fire, and walks away.”

  “There will have been witnesses.”

  “Most likely, but not models of good citizenship. And they probably don’t want to get on the wrong side of whoever did this. Would you?”

  “But wait. There’s going to be a record of your having come to my house and catching this guy, Solo, Willy Joe’s right-hand man. Then you wind up in a house with both of them dead.”

  “True. Except, as far as I know, there’s nothing in police records linking the two. That would have been a real red flag. He was ID’ed as an out-of-towner.” He breathed out, a loud puff. “We may get lucky. That fire was so intense it probably didn’t leave anything useful, DNA or skeletal remains.”

  “Which might in itself be suspicious.”

  “It happens. They had all kinds of weapons in the war that made it impossible to identify remains.

  Usually intense heat and chemical action.” He tapped his lower teeth with a thumbnail. “It’s an angle. A possible angle.”

  “That someone in the military wanted to get rid of Capra?”

  “Or someone with access to sophisticated weapons. I mean, suppose I just tell the truth, the part of it having to do with the weapon. Make the military connection, if no one else does.”

  “But then what puts you there, watching it all? Tied to a chair? Why did he kidnap you?”

  “I’ve already got that part worked out. Fortunately, my partner and I are part of an observation team tracking drug distribution, designer drugs, inside the city limits. Capra was in it up to his elbows.

  “I already told the patrolman at the hospital that’s what happened: they’d followed me home and snatched me, and once it was dark they planned to kill me in a dramatic way. That much is true. But it wasn’t for being on the drug task force.”

  “Yeah.” Norman touched his hand. “Sorry I got you into all of this.”

  He said something in Arabic. “What will be will be. This is not something either of us had any say in.

  And the evil are punished, for a change.”

  “Funny attitude for a cop.”

  He smiled and nodded. “You better get back. I’ll be in touch if anything happens.”

  Norman couldn’t think of anything to say that wasn’t a variant of “I hope I don’t hear from you,” so he just shook hands and headed back toward the house.

  Should he confront Pepe with what he knew? Or just leave well enough alone. Curiosity versus gratitude, with a sprinkling of fear.

  When he came back into the dining room, they were clearing away dessert.

  “He didn’t need the string?” Dove Slidell asked.

  “What?” Norman was still holding his prop. “Oh, no—he’d found one by the time I got there. We just tuned up and went through a few difficult passages.”

  “Is he going to be all right?” Rory asked, trying to keep the quaver out of her voice.

  “He’ll be fine. I think he can go the rest of the way alone.”

  She nodded slowly, her eyes on his. “We’re going to pick up some coffee at Nick’s and go check the observatory. I won’t even ask. You need your beauty sleep.”

  “Actually, I have to work for a bit. Started a new direction on the second partita.”

  “Well … party away.” They said their goodbyes.

  Aurora

  She told the car to go to Nick’s place. “He’ll probably be sawing away at the cello if I get home at three.” “Hard to live with an artiste?” Dove said.

  “Hard to live with somebody who doesn’t keep regular hours. As if I did!” She turned around in the driver’s seat. “But Norm’s really odd. He never sleeps more than a few hours at a time. Naps now and then, no particular schedule.” “Like Edison,” Lamar said.

  “No lightbulbs or phonograph. But he’s a heck of a good cook.”

  They murmured assent. “You’ll be glad when this thing’s over?” Dove said. “Get back to doing actual research.” “Not as much of that as I’d like. “This ‘thing’ has kindled a new interest in astronomy in the young.

  I’ve bowed to pressure and agreed to take on two sections of elementary.” “That’s a lot of kids.”

  “Fifty apiece. But I get two new grad assistants, so I just have to lecture.” “The rest of your load stays the same?” Lamar asked.

  “Yeah, but it’s not bad. A graduate seminar and a small class on nonthermal sources. And I’m getting a good bonus for the two extra sections.

  “I’ve always enjoyed elementary. I just don’t look forward to being spontaneous with the same lecture, three days a week.” Dove nodded. “I had to do two sections a couple of years back, when that boy genius from Princeton jumped ship. It’s a strange sensation.” The car pulled up in front of Nick’s, and the three went in for their coffee: burned, sweet, and rich.

  Nick waved at Rory. “Just a second, Professor.” She’d phoned in the order, not sure how late he stayed open.

  She said hello to the only other customer, not certain whether she knew him. She’d seen him before, writing by hand in a bound journal.

  The historian

  He nodded back at Professor Bell. She would be in the last chapter.

  He returned his attention to the book, up to the 1990s now.

  In August 1990, Gainesville had a week of horrid fame, all over the world. Over the space of forty-eight hours, a madman captured, tortured, mutilated, and killed five students.

  The bodies were rent with sixty-one slashes and stab wounds.

  He carefully cleaned them up afterward— even the girl whose head he sawed off and placed at eye level on a bookshelf, for the police. Then he arranged the bodies into obscene positions.

  The perversion eventually proved his undoing: he left semen at the scene, and its DNA identified him with no doubt.

  He’d been free for months, before being arrested on another charge. A quarter of the student body had left in fear, or in response to parents’ fears. The town was haunted by terror: gun sales skyrocketed while real estate plummeted. It was a good time to buy property in the student ghetto; a bad time to live there.

  In November

  Alarming hair growth had continued in young white males since August, when a musical mime group, the Epileptics, had been briefly popular. What caught on was not their semirandom twitching, now admired and imitated only by the very young, but their odd facial hair: each of them had a braided rope of beard growing from one cheek, and were otherwise clean-shaven. Of course it would take years to achieve a really long rope, but many adherents had managed four to six inches. They dyed it odd colors and some waxed it with a heavy pomade, so it lolled from the cheek like a spare penis, much to the delight of their parents.

  Two movies inspired by the Coming appeared. Second Coming was aimed at the Christian audience, and succeeded; To Serve Man, blatantly stolen from a century-old “first contact” story, did not do quite as well, once the joke of the title became common knowledge.

  Europe treaded further down the path to open war. Every member present in the German parliament died on 17 November, victims of a swift bioagent that turned their bones to jelly. No one claimed responsibility for the massacre. The next day the Eiffel Tower came down, four people freighted with high explosives sacrificing themselves simultaneously, at the monument’s four corners.

  No one took cr
edit for that, either. Official denials were discounted by most German and French citizens, as was the sober assertion that a third party was likely responsible for both atrocities; someone who would benefit from the two countries destroying one another.

  Both armies massed along the border, doing maneuvers.

  Insect restaurants opened all over California, Oregon, and Washington State. One chain, Eat More Bugs, was openly xenophobic, relating bugs with the Coming—cows and pigs and chickens are your relatives; eat something alien.

  Most of the survival stores were failing. People who stocked up on water and bullets and nitrogen-preserved beans only went to the store once. So it was one month of huge profits followed by bankruptcy. Some of them hung on grimly, hoping for bad news. But there was no news from space; just the unchanging signal.

  Norman told Aurora a version of the truth that did not include Pepe or weapons of incredible ferocity. The police investigation of the murder/arson did not publicly acknowledge that the bodies had been burned beyond even molecular recognition. The station scuttlebutt was that Willy Joe had arranged the arson to make it look as if he had died, a cover for disappearing out of sight. That was consistent with Rabin’s fantastic testimony and the absolute lack of organic residue: the “men” who were holding him hostage were just convincing dummy robots, loaded with something like thermite. It would have been an expensive masquerade, but well within Willy Joe’s budget, or at least the budget of his bosses.

  Rabin had one more clandestine meeting with Norm, where they discussed the unlikelihood of that explanation. Of course, Rabin had gone along with it during the investigation, because it turned the spotlight away from him: Willy Joe had only picked up a cop so he would have an unimpeachable witness to his dramatic “demise.”

  Norm and Rabin stropped Occam’s razor and concluded it must have been some clandestine military device that had fallen into the hands of an enemy of Willy Joe’s. Norm was still thinking privately about gamma-ray bursters, but he left well enough alone there.

  (An aspect of it that no one else was privy to was that the chief of police had a cousin in Washington who was high up in U.S. Army weapons research. He said there was nothing in the arsenal, or even on the drawing boards, that would do what Rabin had described. So it must have been fake.) 1 December