Firechild (16 page)

On another day, they had eaten well. She was still hardly bigger than a kitten, and he held her on one arm, snuggled against him. She was purring, trilling softly, her eyes trustfully violet and fixed on his face. Her silky hair had turned pale gold. He stroked it gently.

“Chiquita querida,”
he was murmuring.
“Chiquita mta
—”

“Chiquita querida.”
At first he wasn’t sure what he had heard, but her tiny treble repeated the words. A carefully accurate echo, they reflected all his fond emotion.
“Chiquita querida! Chiquita miá!”

Faster than his baby brothers and sisters, she learned to talk. She learned his name. “Panchito,” as he called himself at first, because somehow she made him feel a child again. Proudly, she piped her own name. Meg. Alphamega. A strange name. When he first tried to ask what it meant and where she came from, she shrank against him, silent and quivering.

On another day she tried to tell him more. The choppers droning too far away to be alarming, they were in the garden. She was riding on his shoulder, clinging to his hair. He had found squash and green corn and new potatoes for another feast, and they were starting back toward the house when she saw a butterfly. Its brilliant wings enchanted her, and they followed it to the back of the garden, where she could see the nearest streak of dust. The butterfly forgotten, she trembled against him again.

“Ceniza.”
He pointed into the gray desolation.
“Polvo.
Ashes. Dust.” He took her in his hand to ask another question. “Did you come from there?”

“Si “
Half her few words were Spanish. “Meg came.
Polvo
malo.
Kill all. Kill Vic.” Her eyes went indigo, glistening with tears.
“Pobre, pobre, querido Vic!”

“Vic?” A puzzling name, because it was nothing he had taught her.
“Quién es?
Who is Vic?”

She lacked words enough to tell him.

“El polvo toma el pobre Vic!”
The dust had taken Vic, and she shivered in his hand.
“El fuego, fuego malo
hurt Meg. Too hot, too hot!”

A chopper was drifting back, and they retreated toward the house. She never wanted to look into the wasteland again, or to speak of Vic or the evil
polvo.
Most of the time, her terrors apparently forgotten, she seemed as happy as he was, delighted with the food he found her, interested eagerly in everything, learning and growing amazingly. Late one night, however, when they had gone to sleep together on their blankets in the tool shed, she woke him with a shrill little shriek.

“Sax, Sax! Sax,
peligro!”
She was screaming at his ear. “Tell Sax!
La casa! Peligro!
Tell Sax!
Peligro en la casa.”

“A nightmare,
chiquita?”
He took her in his hand and held her trembling against him in the dark. “We’re okay, here in our own little house.”

“Sax!” She kept sobbing the name.
“El pobre Sax!”

“Who is Sax?”

“Hermano.”
A frightened mosquito voice.
“El hermano de mi querido Vic. El hermano de mala suerte.”

Vic, her dear Vic, was dead in the dust. Sax, at least in her nightmare dream, was the unlucky brother, still alive but now in some danger she lacked words to explain. Patting her, trying to still her trembling dread, he told himself it must have been only a dream, but new alarms kept his nerves on edge. One day he saw smoke climbing from a place where he had seen a farmhouse standing a few miles nearer the perimeter. Two choppers came to wheel around the tall black column, and one of them dropped out of sight.

Vandals, again? And the crewmen landing to hunt them down?

Possible.
He must take more care to keep the house the way it had been, doors closed and blinds drawn, to leave no footprints in the garden, to avoid moving around in daylight that might betray them. But nothing, he thought, could hide them forever. Some evil day would come. If the dust stayed dead, men on foot would venture in to study it. The refugees would be eager to return. Lawmen would come to comb the landscape, looking for those vandals and such
desafortunados
as he was.

“El mal tiempo.”
He shrugged.
“Por la manaña.”

Some evil time must come, but let it be tomorrow.

Until then, he would stay with Meg and try to make her happy. Until the bad time came, he would help her grow and learn and do his best to keep her safe.

El mal tiempo.

It came one morning at dawn, when she was still asleep. The choppers had awakened him. He hated to disturb her, but the beans and peas and squash should be picked before the sun rose and the watchers in the sky came near enough to spot him. Leaving her, he turned back in the doorway to look fondly down at her.

A delicate doll-form as she lay on the bare dirt floor in their stolen blankets. She was bare and perfect in the dimness, not yet grown so large as he recalled his baby sisters, certainly not so chubby. She smiled in her sleep, and her breath was a tiny sighing, faster than his own. How long, he wondered, could he save her from harm?

“Hasta la mal.”
Until the badness came. He whispered that, cold with foreboding, and tried to be silent, closing the creaky door.

The badness came. He was in the garden, bent over the row of beans, when he heard the tramp of boots and the click of a gun and a gloating voice he remembered.

“Doggone! If it ain’t the greaser killer!” The voice of Deputy Harris, who had sent the
cucaracha
pie to his cell in the Enfield county jail. “Livin‘ high on the hog and laughing at the law? Stealin‘ yourself a nice mess of green frijoles to fill your ugly gut.”

A gun clicked.

“Fall flat, spic!”

He tried to run for the brush that might hide him. Three steps. The gun crashed behind him. His leg went numb and crumpled under him. He fell facedown in the mud.

20

“The Hard

Fist of God”

B
elcraft watched Kalenka turn the jeep and drive away.

“Okay, Doctor.” Still keeping an uneasy distance, Dusek escorted him back into the room and made him lay his car keys and billfold and pocket knife on the dresser. “I’ll hold you here till we get other orders.”

Careful not to touch them, he used the phone book to sweep those articles into a wastebasket and waited at the door until two intelligence officers arrived in an Army car. Impatient men in gray business suits, afraid to come in his room, they had Dusek send him outside and kept him standing well away while they demanded more information than he could give about EnGene and Vic and the pink thing.

Why had he let the creature go?

How could a fat pink worm command instant sympathy? What had it done to win so much aid from a trained physician, a responsible American citizen, a man who certainly should have known how vital it would be to the investigation? He found no answers that pleased them, none that made much sense even to him.

Why had he come to Enfield? What, exactly, had Vic told him on the phone?

Dutifully, he repeated most of the words he could recall, repeated them over and over into tape recorders. Most of them. A secret urgency kept burning higher in him, a driving need to get home to Fort Madison and dig through his piled-up mail to find the letter Vic had mailed.

He knew he ought to reveal its existence. The dust had been a threat to everything alive. Perhaps it still was. All the thousands of troops and scientists and federal agents gathered around the perimeter were fighting to crack the riddle. The letter might hold answers. He told himself all that, and still he didn’t speak.

A Colonel Heydt arrived in another jeep. He was commandeering the motel for his forward control post. As wary as the rest, he sat in the jeep, watching Belcraft through binoculars and shouting more demands, snarling obscenities when Belcraft kept insisting that Vic had never said or written anything about his work or his life here.

Two Army trucks pulled into the parking lot before noon, filled with sunburnt National Guardsmen. Colonel Heydt appeared again, barking angry orders and listening from the jeep while he described the pink thing for them. He watched them scatter into the weeds toward the creek.

They discovered nothing.

He spent most of the next two months in number nine, Dusek in command of his guards. Heydt’s staff headquarters were in the front rooms. Meals came from a field kitchen on the parking lot. Most of the choppers had departed. The National Guard company kept searching, mowing weeds and clearing brush, finding only chiggers.

One morning Mrs. Bard was escorted to his room, looking ill and weepily grim, claiming her pay for the extra night he had spent there before the Army commandeered the motel. He borrowed his billfold to find thirty dollars, and let her keep the change.

She wanted to know if he had seen her son when he went across the creek. Her poor dear Frankie. She felt sure he was still alive, trapped and suffering in the ruins of the lab. Next day the guards told him that a search detail had found her wandering in the ashes. Later he learned that she had been sent away to her sister in Colorado.

The colonel was a pudgy little man, with sagging red dewlaps and a raspy nasal voice. A retired Army doctor, unhappy about his recall from a comfortable private practice, he seemed to blame Belcraft for the whole Enfield disaster. Pressing the inquisition, he refused to let him get a lawyer, or call anyone outside, or even see the general.

Kept in isolation, Belcraft spent sleepless nights enduring torments of his own. Guilt grew in him over Vic’s letter. In spite of ceaseless appeals to his sense of humanity in danger and threats of a federal prison, in spite of sometimes feeling half convinced that Colonel Heydt had good cause to blame him, he never spoke about it—and never quite knew why. He never found a rational reason to care what became of the pink thing. Yet, to his own surprise, he felt a haunting loneliness for it. Somehow, he missed it even more than he missed Midge.

Kalenka came to trust him more than the colonel ever did. When he set up a laboratory in what had been the motel dining room, he let Belcraft work with him, washing glassware at first, weighing specimens and keeping records, finally running tests on his own.

They found the dust to be sterile, consisting mostly of simple oxides apparently formed from the calcium and other nonvolatile elements in the life it had devoured. Nothing remained to reveal what had made it so deadly then, so harmless now. Mixed with the oxides, Belcraft found complex molecules that baffled him.

“Heat sinks?” he suggested. “The oxidations must have released a lot of heat, but there was never any warmth I could feel. Perhaps this stuff was formed by endothermic reactions that protected the lethal agent from the heat of its own metabolism.” And he had to add, “We’re dealing with something new in biology— something we haven’t learned how to see.”

Kalenka merely shrugged.

His interrogators had never seemed to listen when he wanted to take his case to the general. Dusek seemed as surprised as he was one day when a message came that Clegg wanted him at post headquarters.

The perimeter had been extended since the night he got to Enfield. Headquarters was a commandeered mansion on a hill, a safe ten miles back from the ashes but still inside the redrawn lines. Dusek parked the jeep on the drive and took him inside. A black sergeant kept them waiting for an endless hour before he let them into what had been the dining room.

“So you’re Saxon Belcraft?”

General Clegg faced him across a big table. A window wall beyond it showed banks of well-kept flowers around a huge swimming pool. Against that strong backlight, the general’s features were hard to see.

“I’m Belcraft.” He nodded. “I’ve been asking to see you. I think I’ve been detained here too long, with very little cause.”

“Perhaps.” The general kept him standing. “Kalenka has asked me to consider your release, but you’ll have to answer my questions first.”

He waited under the general’s coldly probing stare. Eyes adjusting to the light, he made out a figure of autocratic power, tall and gaunt, sitting very straight, medals glinting on the uniform. On the high forehead, a pale birthmark showed faintly through makeup meant to cover it.

“Better answer carefully.” The questions came at last, solemn-toned and slow. “Are you a loyal American?”

“I think so.” Bitterly, he added, “I’ve had to swear that a thousand times since your men arrested me.”

“Your loyalty is important to us.” The general nodded calmly. “Can you put service over self?”

“I’m a physician.”

“Can you accept discipline?”

“From whom?”

“Authority.” The general’s voice rose slightly. “Legitimate authority, sanctioned under God.”

“I try to respect the law, if that’s what you mean.”

He waited, puzzled and resentful, until the general shrugged.

“Doctor, I had hoped for something more affirmative.” A doubtful frown. “In your special case, however, perhaps that will have to do.” Yet the general paused again, as if to give him time to wonder. The rawboned face creased with what was meant to be a smile. “Dr. Belcraft, I am going to offer you an opportunity we have always reserved for a very few selected men. I am inviting you to join an extremely exclusive organization —a group that exists and acts in the strictest secrecy.”

Belcraft was shaking his head.

“You can trust me.” A frosty smile. “You must trust me, because I can tell you very little more before you accept the obligations of membership. Under our very strict rules, I am forbidden to reveal the name of our group, or its meeting place, or the identity of any other member.”

“Sir,” Belcraft began. “I don’t—”

“I can’t allow you to decline.” The commanding voice never paused. “If you insist on some stronger assurance, I can at least inform you that the organization is devoted to our own high vision of a regenerated America. As a member, you will be required to subordinate your own private concerns to that noble vision. You will submit yourself to a necessary discipline—”