Let the Fire Fall

by Kate Wilhelm

  That night James Teague stumbled into the one-room apartment he shared with Will Thomlinson.

  “Teague! Jesus, man, where you been?”

  Teague looked blank and mumbled and shuffled his feet and looked greedily at the can of fish’n’beans that Thomlinson was eating from. He mumbled on and on and Thomlinson caught every tenth word or so, enough to know that Teague had been locked up somewhere, that he hadn’t been fed, that he had no idea of how long he had been gone, or where he had been. Mostly the incoherent chatter concerned his stomach.

  Thomlinson shoved the can and the spoon toward him and watched him wolf down the rest of the mess. He felt justified in not reporting his absence. At first he had been afraid he would be blamed, then more afraid of punishment for not making the report immediately, and so he never had made it. He beamed at his partner and even opened a second can of the fish mixture and pushed it toward him.

  Teague belched three times, curled up on the floor, and muttering softly to himself, fell asleep. The next morning he said they had to go back to the temple.

  “We ain’t got no orders to go back. They want us here, doing the work they assigned to us.”

  “…mumble, buzz, called back… worship… mumble, mumble… every year renew faith… mumble, mumble… and she says, that ain’t god you fool that’s noise in your ears and I takes up the ax and I cuts even her fingers apart at every joint and the kids say that ain’t god’s voice you old fool and I take up the ax and I cuts them up like sausages and God says you gotta go back to the temple and he says we got no orders mumble mumble and I takes up the ax mumble mumble… ”

  “Look, Teague, I’ll see if I can get us passes. We been out six months or more. You take it easy, you hear? Get some sleep. I’ll bring some fresh fish back with me if I can find some. You sleep a little bit, Teague. You hear? Don’t you go out now.”

  “…’n he says don’t got no orders and I says gotta go back to. the temple and listen to. God again. God’s at the temple. I heard Him at the temple….”

  Thomlinson left, locking the door after him, and he went straight to the church office where he made his weekly reports. The clerk on duty checked the record and said, “Fifteen fires, twenty-two beatings, three conversions… He do all that?” Thomlinson nodded fearfully. He had falsified the report every week, splitting it right down the middle, crediting Teague with exactly half of all he did. The clerk nodded and made a notation on the memo he had written. “I’ll see what I can do, Mr. Thomlinson. I’ll let you know tomorrow.”

  “Look, uh… sir, I don’t know if I can keep him in until tomorrow, You look at his file again, will you. He’s crazy, takes it by spells, then he’s as normal as you or me. But right now he is crazy as a bedbug. Talking about taking up an ax, stuff like that. He aims to go back to the temple, and I don’t reckon I want to try to stop him none.”

  So they were given passes to return to the temple for a pilgrimage, to start immediately, go by monorail, and report back to the New Orleans branch in ten days.

  Teague accepted it as if he had done it all himself. That night they boarded the monorail and headed north and east, and Teague never stopped muttering and mumbling. Thomlinson was driven to. sleep on the floor at the far end of the car, abandoning his seat to a thin woman whose short hair and fanatical eyes made her fair game for Teague. The car was jammed to overflowing. It smelled foul, and there was no air conditioning: it had broken down and had not been repaired. The windows were sealed. Also the trip was slow. Designed to travel one hundred and fifty miles an hour, the monotrain averaged less than forty because of the uncertainty of the condition of the rail all along the route. Several times it stopped completely while men on foot inspected a suspicious stretch of rail, and once they had to replace a length that was rusted through. When the line had been built many contractors had become very rich, and had not used up much of the steel allotted to the project so that they continued to get rich by using the same stock several times before it was depleted. There had been some arrests, and some sentences passed, but no jail terms had been served since the last of the appeals had not yet been heard. When the courts went over to computers, it was estimated that the ensuing jam of back cases would take a century to clear up. The estimates proved to be low. The new justice did guarantee the same sentence now for similar crimes no matter where committed, so that was a bonus, it was argued. The trouble was that no human being could now understand the laws at all, and it was felt that the old guarantors of justice with mercy were dead. What computer could understand that eating an apple from a neighbor’s tree was not in the same category as taking at gun point the neighbor’s ration of meat? In the case of the monorail scandal the two words steal and steel had proven too much for the computers and the engineers had been called back in and the semanticists, and the case was pending. Meanwhile the train crawled along and men inspected the line for breaks and soft spots and the people inside sweated and hated each other thoroughly.

  They stayed near enough the Mississippi for the first part of the trip not to leave civilization behind, but when the train headed east, the towns became ghost towns. Mile after mile of soybeans grew here, interplanted with corn, the two staples of the diet. Farther west wheat was the crop that stretched for hundreds of miles.

  The thin woman next to Teague looked past him out the window and talked, and talked, and talked. “Beat us right back, it did, like they said it would; can’t tame wild land, can’t live on it, beats you back to the ocean, then drives you in the ocean and it wins every time.” She was thirty, she said later, and look at her. Tried to make a living in New Orleans, honest work, that’s all she ever wanted, and there wasn’t no honest work left, only for engineers and scientists and teachers of engineers and scientists.

  “My strength is in Jesus Christ,” she said later after darkness lay over the land that she hated so passionately. “Sweet Jesus Christ, our redeemer and savior. And the meek shall inherit the earth, but they don’t want it. Scratch for corn, scratch for wheat, and a storm comes down and there it all goes and the stomach just gets flatter and the teeth fall out. Sweet Jesus, when will it end?” She sobbed noisily and finally fell asleep. Teague stopped his muttering and closed his eyes.

  With a whimper, he thought. A self-pitying whimper.

  All over the world the same thing. The people left the land for the cities and came to fear that which they had left behind. Technology fed the bellies, insufficiently, but that was a human fault, not a technological one. There were top many people in too small an area, pressing against each other, competing for jobs for half their number, and all going hungry most of the time. But even if technology could feed them all adequately, it they could all afford to eat well, they would be empty still. If only they could start over, take the people up like dots from material and distribute them again, spacing them out, giving them elbow-room, letting them see trees growing and flowers and stretches of grass and corn and blackberry bushes. Blake-Teague mused on this for the rest of the night.

  The next night Blake-Teague and Thomlinson slept in the temple dorm. They both lined up for tattooing the morning after that, and during the day the population at the temple swelled as pilgrims came from all parts of the country to celebrate the ceremony of the arrival of the alien ship and Obie’s subsequent meeting with God.

  Teague was avoided by everyone who spent a minute in his presence. He didn’t stink, but he looked as if he might, and his constant muttering and mumbling was maddening. He was permitted to wander the grounds alone, and he would be seen first here then there, all the while holding his endless monologues, all the while alone. He roamed at night also, and presently no one noticed him at all. He was another figure among many: who were accepted and no longer seen.

  The ship was guarded heavily, a large contingent of UNEF was on duty on the grounds at all times, reinforced by security guards of various dignitaries who arrived unannounced from time to time. The rigorous inspection made by the Militant Millenniumists conti
nued now that Blake was at large again. They still expected him to turn up at the ship sooner or later, and they were right. What they didn’t expect was that he would go through the temple grounds and get to the ship from the rear.

  On the night of the final ceremony of the unveiling of the initiates Teague was among the audience when the crackers were handed out with the invisible drop of XPT on them. He didn’t take his, but resumed his seat and kept his eyes on the source of the crackers. Presently he left the auditorium, his eyes half closed, a wide smile on his face. The MM at the door grinned and moved aside for him. He wandered about outside for a minute, then went straight to the back of the auditorium, where a passage led to the rooms used for serving meals. Here three MM’s were preparing the crackers, which were taken from cartons, spread out on the table, and dosed by one of the MM’s using an eyedropper. It all seemed very mundane now. Teague-Blake watched for a moment. There was a flask of clear liquid that was a duplicate of the flask being used by the MM with the eyedropper. Teague began to sing, the hallelujah song of Obie that was so stirring. The MM’s looked up in annoyance and one of them approached him and grabbed his arm.

  “Come on, old man. Out. You’re not permitted in here.”

  “I heard the Voice, brother. The Voice….” Teague clutched him and forced him back, behind the table, looking into his face earnestly, babbling nonsense, but with a grip that was viselike. The MM was taken by surprise He knew the stuff could affect them in strange ways, but this was too much to put up with. He pulled back his fist to strike and another of the three MM’s carne up and tried to pull Teague away.

  “Leave him alone. He doesn’t know what he’s doing.” The second one pulled Teague hard, and he let himself be turned and started for the door. In his pocket there was an eyedropper filled with the drug. He started to sing again and he kissed the MM on both cheeks, tried to envelop him with both arms and was finally put out and the door closed and locked. He could hear laughter in the room, and he walked away singing in a cracked hideous voice.

  He collected a sack of provisions he had stolen, added a drop of XPT to each of ten pieces of candied fruit in a box, and then went to the back gates where guards were on duty, singing as he walked, staggering and falling and rising again, but always singing. The guards waved him back and paid little more attention to him. He sat down on the grass and pulled the box of sweets from the sack. He pretended to eat one of them.

  “What do you have, old man?”

  “A present,” he said, cackling. “A present from God. He took me by the hand and said, James, behind that door you will find the sweetness of the Earth that I have saved for you, and I looked and there was this here box of goodies and I knowed it was meant for me to take them because God Himself told me so and I brought them out and they are good, like He said they would be, and if that was stealing may He send lightning down right this minute….”

  He went on and one of the guards whistled and said laughingly, “Boy, wait ’til he wakes up in the morning and knows what’s been happening. They’ll have his hide.”

  “We might as well have some too,” the other guard said. He turned off the current in the fence and came over to Teague and picked up a candied cherry. Teague snatched the box back and covered it with his arm. “One’s enough,” he said. “It’s mine. God said it’s mine.” The other guard came up and Teague allowed him to take one of the sweets. The guards laughed and one of them feinted an attack while the other one tried to snatch away the box. Teague called, “Help, help, robbers!” And the guards left him alone.

  He waited ten minutes then called them. He called them in a voice they hadn’t heard before, and they came obediently. He told them there was a fountain of fire off to the left, that they were to go and watch it so that it would not bum down the temple, which they were to guard with their lives, if necessary. They both saw the fountain of fire and they left him, running in order to watch and prevent the fire’s spread to the temple. Teague-Blake went through the gate, across the strip of grass that separated the temple grounds from the U.N. grounds, and followed it to the rear gate of the U.N. land, a gate used only by the military personnel. It was guarded also.

  He fed the U.N. men pieces of the fruit and then sent them to inspect the open temple gate, through which, he said, long hairs were streaming by the thousands. They trotted off. He approached the ship from the rear, and he changed as he neared it. His limp vanished. He pulled a dark green tunic from his pack and put it on, discarding the shabby coat he had worn. He smoothed the pack and folded it so that at a casual glance it looked more like a case than like a cloth bag. He tucked it under his arm. But most of the change came about In his manner of walking and the way he held his head. He looked like one of the bright young scientists who prowled about in the ship day and night.

  He walked in front of small clusters of men talking, past a man at a desk who didn’t even look up, past men dressed in UNEF uniforms, with sidearms. No one paid any attention to him . As he went up the ramp to the ship he turned for one last look about, still no one was looking at him questioningly, and he boarded the alien vessel, prepared to stay at least a week, or longer if he had to. No one knew he was there; he had food with him; the men he had duped at the two gates would have no memories of him, he had stressed that. He was probably the first man to board the ship with a key of any sort; perhaps, he thought, he would be the first one to come off it with some of the answers they had all sought for so many years.

  What he didn’t know was that three cameras worked night and day, photographing the ship and its entrance. The cameras were known to exist only by three people: Merton, who had ordered them, the expert who had installed them (one in the temple itself, high in the tower that afforded a view of the ship over the treetops), and Dee Dee, to whom Merton had confided. “Obie’s scared shitless by the kid,” he had said that night, “but I’m not. He’ll turn up at the ship one’ day and I’ll get him again. And the next time, I handle it my own way, right down the line.” An hour after Blake had entered the ship, his presence there was revealed to Merton, who examined the film carefully.

  “How in hell did he get that far without anyone’s seeing him?” He ran through the film that was taken of the main gate and it showed no Blake Daniels. There were other approaches to the ship, but only through temple grounds, and he didn’t believe even Blake would have tried to get through that way. He had the guards questioned the next morning and they reported that no one had gone through the temple exits. Besides there would have been U.N. men to buy or bribe or force, and that had been tried too many times by his own men to permit him to believe anyone else could do it.

  He played the film over and over and in the end became resigned that Blake’s entrance was a mystery. But one that he would resolve in due time. In due time, he promised himself, there would be no more mysteries regarding Blake Daniels. He called special forces together and gave them their orders.

  “Take Blake Daniels when he leaves the U.N. grounds. By any methods that are necessary, but take him. Alive would be best, but any way that you can, get him.”

  Merton then went to bed, believing that within twenty-four hours this phase would be over. Blake would be under lock and key, or dead. And they could start phase three.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  AFTER four days Blake still had found no way to use the disk he had received from Matt. There were no clues as to the origin of the aliens, their purpose, the propulsion system used in the ship, or their language. He lay on a bed, what he assumed was a bed, and thought about the ship again. He was tired; he had allowed himself only four hours’ sleep each night since boarding, and it was beginning to affect him. He fingered the disk and tried to imagine the purpose of it, where it could be made to fit.

  The ship was too big for one man to explore thoroughly and at the same time be alert for the officials who kept trooping through her. Although there were not the great numbers of scientists now that there had been in the beginning, there wer
e still fifteen or twenty almost every day popping up all over the ship. Hiding places hadn’t been hard to find, but it did limit the time that the main rooms could be examined. The public tours lasted from eight in the morning until nine at night, and then the scientists worked intermittently until two or three in the morning.

  The aliens had used black trim for many of the rooms, and the trim was plastic, or metal, carved in scallops, curves, diminishing circles within circles. The disk would fit in anywhere without being obtrusive. Blake fingered the disk and made a mental floor plan for the ship. It simply wasn’t right. There were curious anomalies: Anti-gravity, but the scream of entry pointed to conventional propulsion methods. The rows of coffin-like boxes-beds for the cold sleep for the passengers, but pregnant women! Why? The design of the ship, while not streamlined and bullet-shaped, was such that it suggested a fast ascent through atmosphere and a fast descent, with heat deflectors to protect the occupants; and the great exhaust openings from what had to be engine rooms confirmed rocket power of some sort as the propulsion, ion rockets perhaps. There was no clue in the engine room. Blake waited until the ship was quiet and the last of the scientists gone again, then resumed his search. The room he was in was very large, a dorm, he guessed, with fifteen beds, slings, that were comfortable for sleeping. The walls were lined with storage bins, with bits of clothing in them. Bits and pieces, the way closets at camp might look. He looked over a tunic carefully, then put it back. Man-made fibers, lightweight, comfortable. The plastic walls of the room were. pale green made up of thin layers of plastic that added a shimmering depth that was pleasing. The floors were of the same substance. The black plastic trim along the wall at waist height outlined the door that led to the corridor outside. The door was opened by passing a hand over a design of circles in a cluster. The design looked as if it was simply painted, but obviously was more than that. Heat sensors behind it operated the catch, releasing it, allowing the door to swing open. Where did the power come from? Blake went into the corridor and looked first in one direction then in the other. The corridors were wide, floored with the green plastic that was springy underfoot. Scrolls and curves of black were inlaid. They outlined every opening, formed every release for the doors, boxed in controls that must have been for communications, alarms, something that was needed at every corridor juncture. The use for the control boxes had not been determined. Inside the boxes were disks, much like the one Blake had, but they were all attached to boxes and could be taken out only by destroying the boxes. The boxes apparently were not connected to each other, or to anything else within the ship. The boxes were fastened to the walls, and the disks to the boxes. Blake studied the one nearest him for the tenth time, then turned from it with a frown of annoyance. His disk would fit in one of the hollows inside the box, except that all the boxes were filled already.