Firechild (25 page)

Sharing her joy, he turned with her to the elevated evil-odored leg. The knee was shattered, severely infected, swollen and draining, possibly gangrenous. Feeling together, they reached beneath the stiffened bandages to palpate the hard-swollen skin, reached deeper to explore the torn ligaments, the lacerated menisci, the shattered patella.

The bullet had been removed, but all its harm remained. She needed him to help her know how the knee should have been. Together, they sensed the badness that had spread from the wound to kill the good flesh. Together, they taught the hurt cells how to live again.

“Gracias,
Sax!” They were suddenly back in the room where she had found him. “You were wonderful!
Qué
marveloso!”
She caught his hand to kiss it. “Panchito
sera
okay!”

Time had passed before he woke, lying on a hospital bed like Panchito’s in the dream. A tight bandage wrapped his head, but the long pain was gone. He felt remarkably well. Suddenly restless, he wanted to get out of the bed for a cold shower and ham and eggs and then a brisk walk out in the sunshine.

He tried to sit up. Hard steel clicked. His left wrist was handcuffed to the rail of the bed. He heard motion behind him and knew a guard stood there.

He lay back, remembering the desperate drive from Fort Madison, the panicky search the perimeter fence, the cold wet stiffness of Meg’s tiny body when he pulled her from the well, his icy certainty that she was dead. But now—

Meg was alive!

Not only that. In the dream—and he knew the dream was real—she had somehow revived the man she called Panchito, who had been clinically dead.

Trembling with awe at what he knew she must have done, he knew her healing power had touched him too. He recalled the flapping chopper landing, the crewmen tramping around him, and then the long dim time that had left no memory except the dazing throb of pain in his head.

That blanket of blackness had been lifted.

” ‘Morning, if that’s what it is.” He turned his head to find a man at the door, a sunburned kid in an Army uniform too big for him, standing with his sunburned hand on a leaning rifle. National Guard, by the look of him. “What’s this place?”

“Post hospital, sir. Used to be the infirmary, here at what used to be Enfield College. Three miles out of what used to be the town. Feeling better, sir?”

“A lot better. Can I use the bathroom?”

“Not without permission, sir. Have to call the doctor.”

“Do it, please! And then I’d like some breakfast.”

A nurse came in to take his temperature and pulse and blood pressure, frowning in silent surprise at what she found. A second guard unlocked the handcuffs and followed him into the adjoining bath. Instead of breakfast, an orderly came to wheel him away for a head X ray.

Waiting while they processed the film, he heard excited voices. One was Dr. Kalenka’s. The technician came back for a second shot, then three more at different angles. When he asked what they were finding, the technician gave him a look that seemed uneasy and told him to wait again. Back in the room, still with no breakfast, he sat by the bed till the National Guardsman snapped to attention and Kalenka came in, now in a major’s uniform.

“Belcraft?” His puzzled tone made the name a question. “What has happened to you?”

“I’m wondering what your X rays show.” When Kalenka merely frowned, he added, “I must have been hit on the head.”

“Somewhat too hard.” Kalenka squinted at the chart and took his pulse. “Or so we thought. All the evidence of a serious concussion. Large clots forming. Dangerous pressure on the brain. Last night we were considering surgery. Your recovery is—well, unbelievable. Remarkably rapid and complete.” He leaned to peer into Belcraft’s face. “Can you explain it?”

“I can’t. But I do feel good again—if I can get something to eat.”

“Later.” Kalenka nodded at the nurse behind him. “First, I’ve got a few questions.”

“Okay.” He felt too fit to let anything trouble him. “I’ve got a question of my own. Do you—or did you have a patient here who revived from apparent death? Named maybe Panchito?”

“Torres?” Kalenka gaped and stared. “What do you know about Pancho Torres?”

“Nothing,” he said. “Except what I dreamed.”

“The man—the man was dead.” A slow half-whisper. “Of anaphylactic shock following an adverse reaction to antibiotics given for a neglected infection. No heart action for a good many minutes. He did revive—I don’t know why.”

He paused for another searching frown.

“Like you, he woke up this morning begging for breakfast. The infection is apparently under control. I have just seen a new X ray of Torres’s knee. The major fragments of the shattered patella are somehow back in place and beginning to knit.”

Shaking his head, he stopped to peer into Belcraft’s face.

“You say you dreamed about that?”

“About Alphamega. The little creature I found crawling out of the ashes of EnGene after the disaster. Do you know …” Tension shook his voice. “Is she here?”

“She is.” Kalenka nodded slowly, staring at him. “A prisoner, captured when you were. You claim she was with you in this remarkable dream?”

“We were together …”

Recollection washed over him. He sat silent, living the dream again, lost again in that instant devotion that had come with his first glimpse of Alphamega, trembling again with awe at her unknown gifts.

“Together?” Kalenka’s voice was sharper. “How could that be? When we have her shackled, lying in a guarding cell?”

“In the dream she wasn’t shackled.” He wanted to smile at Kalenka’s baffled dismay. “She took me to Torres, if that’s his name. Acting together—almost as if we were two hemispheres of the same compound mind—we examined the injuries. If she actually needed my skills, I don’t know why. She touched injured organs as if she knew how to heal them. A knowledge she seemed to get from me.” His breath caught. “How is she?”

“Still …” Dazedly, Kalenka shook his head. “Still a prisoner. Still a riddle to us. Now in apparent need of medical care we don’t know how to give.” He squinted into Belcraft’s face as if to find his answers there. “She is, of course, under interrogation. More intense as she recovers from her hardships. She is clearly intelligent, though reluctant to speak and then only in the broken Spanish she must have learned from Torres. However—”

His lean face turned bleak.

“She won’t tell us anything. Her unfortunate attitude has placed her life in danger. Yesterday she was badly injured by an interrogator who seems to have displayed more sadism than common sense. I thought she was dead—though we know too little about her vital processes to be certain of anything about her. This morning, like Torres and yourself, she seems to have begun a remarkable recovery. Still, however, she refuses to talk. All of which brings us to one more question.”

His probing eyes narrowed.

“About her contacts with you.”

“She amazes me.” Belcraft shrugged. “I don’t understand anything she does.”

“There are things we’ve got to understand.” Kalenka bent closer, with an air of dogged patience. “We let you return to Fort Madison. You were hospitalized there for minor injuries suffered in a gas explosion not yet well explained, though it happened around the time the creature is thought to have fallen into that well.”

“She saved—saved my life.” Belcraft hesitated. “It’s nothing you’ll want to believe, but if you want what happened, here it is. She had been searching for me— searching, however she does it, from down in the bottom of that well, because she needed my help. She saw the explosion about to happen. Speaking in what seemed like a dream—it’s nothing I can explain—she warned me to get out of the house.”

“Nothing I want to believe.” Kalenka turned sardonic. “Military intelligence reports from Fort Madison that you had abandoned your medical practice and fallen heavily into debt—”

“No choice of my own!”

“Your insurers are charging—”

“Perhaps.” He shrugged. “Perhaps I am suspected of arson. But I’m alive. So is Meg—unless you kill her here. Which is all that really matters to me now.”

“Belcraft, I don’t know what to make of you.” Kalenka’s frown bit deeper, his stare still accusing. “No matter how you try to rationalize whatever you’re involved in, you’ve got a lot to answer for.” He gestured with his finger as if pointing at items on a list. “You were a patient in the Fort Madison hospital. You conferred with your attorney, who admits that he had informed you of pending legal charges. You walked out at night, with no permission from anybody. He let you have his car—he says unwillingly. You drove back here. You walked directly to that well and pulled the creature out. How did you find her?”

“Another dream—if that’s the word for however she reaches me. Of course I wonder. I never took much stock in parapsychology, but this has to be some sort of mental contact. It seems to happen only during sleep or half-sleep. Could be the waking mind creates some kind of barrier. Not that I can explain Alphamega or anything about her.”

“I don’t know—” Kalenka sat down slowly on the bed, looking suddenly very tired. “I don’t know what to think.”

“About Meg?” Belcraft caught at a hint of troubled sympathy in him. “Are you—are you going to kill her?”

Kalenka sat silent for a moment as if he hadn’t heard.

“She’s—well, a very difficult problem.” He shook his head, speaking half to himself. “Too many riddles with no apparent answers.” His baffled eyes returned to Belcraft. “You realize that we’ve got to learn all we can about what she is and how she’s linked to the disaster. She came out of the same lab where it began. If En-Gene was working toward some biological weapon, we need all we can learn about it. For the sake of national defense. In any case, she offers fascinating scientific puzzles. But in the end—”

He paused, with a darker frown at Belcraft.

“In the end, she will have to be destroyed.”

“No!” He tried to smooth his voice and frame some reasonable appeal. “She hasn’t hurt anybody. I don’t think it’s in her to hurt anybody. Think—think what she is!”

“I’m afraid of what she is.”

“But she isn’t—isn’t anything to fear. I admit she does sometimes frighten me, but that’s only because I don’t understand all her gifts. My brother created her. He used to talk about what he hoped to do with genetic engineering. Our own natural creation, he used to say, came about through a random, hit-or-miss evolutionary process that took billions of years. Now, he thought, we should be able to engineer evolution to create some better sort of being than we are.

“That’s what he hoped to do. His great dream was to create a new sort of life without the defects and limits we owe to all the accidents of our animal origins. Something closer to gods than to men, he used to say, as we have always imagined gods. To my mind, that’s what Alphamega was meant to be. But she’s still a child. Maybe less than he hoped to make her, because his work was interrupted. Yet I’m coming to see her as the first try toward a new and better species. The Eve, perhaps, of a totally new order of being. A child goddess!”

“Perhaps she is.” Kalenka nodded gloomily. “That’s why I’m afraid.”

“Of a single harmless child?”

“Because of what she might become.” Though the room was cool, he found a handkerchief and mopped his haggard face. “Belcraft, it does trouble me. However she came to be, she’s certainly something wonderful. But I’m afraid to let her stay alive.”

Staggered by Kalenka’s deliberate finality, he groped to recover himself. “Have you—have you talked to other scientists?”

“Of course!” Kalenka seemed oddly angry. “We’ve debated her. Ever since you found her. Among ourselves in the research staff. With a few outsiders we’ve had to trust. There is sentiment in her favor, and tremendous scientific curiosity. But nothing else touches the one big issue: Whose world do we want it to be?”

“Whose world?”

“I told you I’m a Jew.” Silent for a moment, Kalenka looked almost apologetic. “I’ve seen genocide. I abhor it. But let’s assume she’s all you think she is—the first pioneer of a better race than we are, engineered to replace us on earth. Are you ready to say humanity has failed? Ready to let her children crowd us off the planet, the way our own forebears must have pushed a hundred or a thousand older species off?”

“A crazy notion! One baby girl? Do you think Vic engineered her to exterminate mankind? You didn’t know my brother …”

“Nor do I know what he did.” Wearily, Kalenka sagged where he sat on the edge of the bed. “But I can’t forget what happened to Enfield. I’m afraid your brother blinded himself to all that was coming out of his lab. We simply can’t afford to take the chance that this little monster could be deadlier than the dust—harmless as she may look to you.”

“You’re wrong!” Belcraft whispered. “Terribly wrong!”

“Another thing,” Kalenka added, frowning unhappily. “General Clegg is following everything we do—he has called me twice already today. He seems more frightened than I am by what he believes about the creature. To him, her abilities are gifts of Satan. He keeps quoting a passage out of the Bible.
Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.

“He sees her a literal witch, sent from hell to lure the world toward destruction by science turned Satanic. He’s convinced she brought the disaster. Only a warning, he says, of the terrors she has come to spread. He’s demanding her destruction—soon!

“Officers on his staff and people in his Cato Club are holding out for time to complete our study of her. Some of them are keen to get a biological weapon. More are hoping we can learn how to defend ourselves against biology gone wrong. But the fact is that we have very little time.”

“I … I see.”

“Something else I must add.” Kalenka hesitated, looking uncomfortable. “I don’t like to threaten you. I can’t honestly promise that either you or Torres will ever be liberated. You both appear to know too much. But I want you to keep in mind that we can make things easier for both of you if you and she cooperate.”

Belcraft found no words to say.

“I’m sorry.” Kalenka’s features tightened as if with genuine regret. “But that’s that way it is. You won’t be released again.”