Firechild (29 page)

She let him use the shower, wash off the stiff and bitter-reeking film of drugs his body had sweated out. She found him a razor and the khakis Miss Hearn had brought him at the Fort Madison hospital, freshly laundered now. Feeling almost human again, he came out of the bathroom to find Kalenka squinting at his charts.

“Well?” Kalenka’s piercing stare dimmed his hopes for really good news. “Something to tell me?”

“A new situation.” Kalenka nodded. “While you were under sedation, the being you call Alphamega got away.”

“She did?” He tried to cover his elation. “Still free?”

“Still missing.” Trouble bit deeper into the dark, hard face; Kalenka had seen how he felt. “Though the search will continue.”

“When did it happen?”

“Night before last.” Kalenka spoke slowly, watching his responses. “Details not yet entirely clear, but we have evidence of an elaborate conspiracy. Some outsider set explosives under the power line. In the dark, the creature somehow slipped out of her restraints and escaped from the lab where she was under study.

“They’d somehow enlisted a man inside. One of our own security people. He released another prisoner, this Mexican convict who had been with Alphamega before her capture. The security man drove them out to the airstrip in his own patrol car. The unidentified outsider caught up with them there—he had kidnapped one of our secretaries and forced her to smuggle him through the gate. The convict is a pilot. They got away in the general’s jet.’”

“I see.” Belcraft smiled in spite of himself. “Now what?”

“We still have you.” Kalenka’s narrowed eyes kept on probing. “Our last link.”

“I don’t know anything—”

“Maybe you don’t.” Kalenka shrugged. “Our interrogators say they’ve milked you for all they can. Not that you can hope for release. But—assuming you’ll agree to be reasonable—I can arrange to make things somewhat better for you.”

“How much better?”

“Enough to make a difference. An office job that should have a certain interest for you—we might call it occupational therapy. The available creature comforts; a very limited sort of freedom, here under guard and inside the fence … if you’ll agree to be reasonable.”

“Reasonable? What does that mean?”

“Accept the fact that you’re better off here than outside.” A bleak and fleeting smile. “There’s a story in Fort Madison that you’ve lost your mind as well as your practice. That you’ve been unhinged by the effects of a chronic but latent infection with the organism that killed Enfield.”

“Huh?” Anger shook him. “Who started that?”

“Who knows?” Innocently, Kalenka blinked. “But your old friends would be terrified to see you coming back. Your practice is dead. Suppliers are seizing equipment you hadn’t paid for. Bankruptcy proceedings are in progress. Warrants are out for your arrest on charges of arson and fraud. There’s a pending request for your extradition to face them. I’ve been talking to your attorney, Higgs. He will advise you not to try to get back. Nothing good for you there.”

“I see.” He caught his breath and peered into Kalenka’s wary face. “What is this work?”

“Not too demanding.” Kalenka softened his voice, trying to be persuasive. “A job that fits your medical qualifications. Not, however, in the research lab. That’s fully staffed, and still discovering nothing. I want you on the crew we’ve set up to cope with the panic.”

“Panic?”

“Call it paranoia.” His thin-fleshed features tightened. “A graver danger now, on all the evidence, than the actual organism. People live in terror of getting infected from dust blowing out of the Enfield area or water flowing downstream. They’re terrified of what the media are calling ‘killer carriers’— people carrying latent infections and not aware of it. Those who think they’ve been exposed are trying to sue everybody they can. For property damage and mental suffering if they can’t think of anything else.

“Your new job, if you take it, will be in public relations. Convincing people that all their fears are groundless. Better take the job.”

“Why my job?”

“You’re a doctor.” Kalenka met his searching stare. “Competent to deal with medical inquiries. If you suspect us of some devious plot, I can’t blame you. But you’re here to stay. You may as well lend us a hand. Why not?”

“Why not?” He nodded. “Nearly anything would be better than your interrogators.”

“Okay, Doctor!” Kalenka tried to seem pleased. “Agreed! So long as you observe the conditions I’ll have to impose. You’ll be working under Captain Holliday— Sam Holliday, who’s in charge of special investigations. He’ll assign guards to keep track of you.

“You will wear a badge at all times. You will remain confined to the old campus area. You will obey orders and observe a curfew. You will recognize that the job is actually important, and you will give it the time and attention it deserves. Okay?”

“I don’t get the sense of it.” He frowned at Kalenka. “All those guards, balanced against whatever work I can do.”

“Holliday’s problem.” Kalenka shrugged. “Or maybe the general’s. It’s what they want. In any case, we have to keep you well secured.”

With no better alternative, he shook Kalenka’s vigorous hand. They let him shop in the PX for a few essentials and took him to meet Captain Sam Holliday, a lanky young man with an easy smile and an air of firm authority. Explaining his duties, Holliday let him know that he wasn’t going to be quite so free as he had felt.

Guards checked him into his new quarters on the third floor of what had been a residence hall at the college, checked him into the mess hall and out again, into his new office and out again. Walking anywhere he was allowed to .walk, he always found a man in uniform not far behind him. Willing enough to answer comments on the weather or the mess hall chow, the guards turned stonily silent when he asked for news of Meg.

His office had been occupied by some vanished professor in the school of business. Dusty maps and graphs and uninviting texts on statistics and economic theory still lined the walls. A computer terminal on the desk loomed forbiddingly at him, but he found at least a dim hint of liberty in the windows, which looked across the old quad, its lawns and shrubs now beginning to sear beneath the late summer drought.

Though the computer baffled him at first, the job itself was nearly too easy. Secretaries brought him stacks of angry or apprehensive letters. Many were similar, and somebody ahead of him had composed form letters that could be combined to answer most of them with fresh assurances that the Enfield incident had been brought to a safe and final close. When he asked for help with the computer, Keri Grant rapped on his office door.

She was a tall young woman with long pale hair and intense green eyes. Her shape brought muted whistles from the guards, and he thought she could have been an actress. He couldn’t help staring, the morning she came in, wondering why Holliday had sent her. He wondered again when the terminal seemed as puzzling to her as it had been to him.

“I took computer science back in Indiana.” Her slight accent baffled and enchanted him. “Years ago. The machines are all different now. I think we must experiment.”

After his cruel interrogation, the hopeless days and sleepless nights, the threats and blows and electric shocks, the thirst and hunger and hard restraints, Keri Grant seemed unbelievable. Her gleaming platinum hair, the hint of a warm caress in her haunting voice, the scent of her body and his thrill when she touched him, most of all her warm and quick responsiveness— everything about her was totally enchanting.

“Great!” he agreed. “Let’s experiment.”

Together, they found and read the operator’s manual. He learned which keys must be struck to call the form letters out of disk memory, which keys would delete sections that failed to fit the complaint and which would call up paragraphs that did, which keys would return the completed reply to disk memory, tagged with a code symbol that would let the secretarial pool call it out again, verify the name and address, and route it on to the printer.

Now and then he thought of Midge, but the bitterness of her departure was already fading into things long ago. All the events and tensions since that night Vic called from EnGene had driven her image away into an unreal dreamworld, along with the peaceful-seeming past of old Fort Madison and the romantic history of the river and the decayed stateliness of Tara Two.

It was strange to think of his elation on the day just a few months ago when Billy Higgs proposed him for membership in the Fort Madison Rotary Club and he had gone home to Midge with the news of his longed-for appointment to the permanent hospital staff. All that had dimmed into limbo.

Alphamega stayed closer to his mind, a mystery unresolved. Had her unknown rescuers taken her to some safe haven, Where she might grow up to find her destiny? Or was she dead in the wreckage of the general’s jet on some distant mountain peak? When Keri Grant began to seem a friend, he nerved himself to ask if she could tell him anything.

“Very little—even if the general hadn’t told us not to talk.” She gave him a companionable grin. “The stolen airplane has not been reported anywhere. They believe it headed south. The pilot had flown drugs from secret airstrips in Mexico. He may have tried to reach one of those strips, but high-altitude photo missions have failed to spot anything that looks like the general’s jet anywhere at all. We know he didn’t reach any commercial airport. Assuming he landed safe, he may have hidden the plane. He may have flown on to Cuba or Nicaragua—assuming he somehow refueled. He may have crashed.”

She stopped to look at him.

“Which leaves you.” Her greenish eyes had a quizzical glint. “Their only lead—and I think they’re wondering why you were left behind.” Her voice grew softer. “The creature means a lot to you?”

“Her name is Meg. And she really does.” After too many days of hostile interrogation, he liked talking to Keri Grant. “From that first glimpse, when I found her crawling out of the ashes of the lab, I wanted to love and trust and help her. I don’t know why.” He added. “Certainly I know nothing about how she escaped.”

“I’m sure you don’t.” She grinned easily again. “Entirely sure!”

She tantalized him. Slow at first to talk about her European years, she began to tell him about colorful characters she had known: hungry artists and kings of industry, hitch-hiking students and penniless exiles and relics of the old nobility.

Drinking in those tales and the way she told them, he began to picture her as a carefree and sometimes daring vagabond in a world of glamorous romance that seemed far indeed from Fort Madison and the schools and lakes and hospitals where most of his life had been spent. She came to seem utterly out of place among the dusty charts and reference books and business texts around them. Wondering again what had brought her here, he had to know her better.

“If you’re from Indiana,” he asked her, “how come the accent?”

“Five years in Europe.” Her quick smile lingered as if she really liked him. “Speaking everything but English. Living on a tiny legacy that’s now used up. Learning I hadn’t been born an artist or a composer or a novelist. I came back when the lawyers cabled the news that my sister and my parents had been trapped to die here in Enfield.”

“My brother died here.”

“I know about your brother.” Her haunting voice grew warmer. “Jeri knew him—”

“Jeri?” He started. “She was your sister?”

“We were twins.” She was sitting beside him at the computer keyboard, and now she reached to lay a sympathetic hand on his. “We seldom wrote, but once she sent a snapshot of Vic. An odd little big-eyed imp in his picture, not at all like you.” Her exciting eyes approved him. “They were planning to marry, once his big project was done.”

“I never saw her. Only talked to her once—”

Looking into the lively brightness of her oval face, he shook his head and said no more. Her hand on his, her voice in his ears, her fresh scent and her electric nearness transforming everything—he wanted her. Her level eyes met his, the pupils wide and dark, kept looking so steadily and so long that he forgot to breathe. He thought she wanted him.

“A sad thing.” Her fleeting half-smile faded, and she took her hand away. “The whole disaster—and they still want us to call it just the Enfield incident!”

Her voice changed.

“I came here asking for information about Jeri and my parents, never imagining what would happen. They arrested me; Detained me. Grilled me for facts I didn’t know about Jeri and Vic and genetic engineering. Three horrible days before I convinced them that I’d never been here and never met Vic and never even heard that much about him. And now—”

Her slight shiver was so eloquent of dread that he thought again that she should have been on the stage.

“Now they suspect me again.” She let him drop his hand on hers. “You see, I was involved in the escape—”

His breath caught. “Alphamega’s?”

“Your pet creature’s.” The quirk of her lips seemed almost malicious, but she went on to report her own adventure. “The plotters had a man outside—the man who set those charges under the power lines. The night they were ready, he called me out of my apartment in Maxon and made me drive him in through the gate, crouched down in the back of my car.

“My usual bad luck.” Her wry expression bewitched him again. “You see, I’d known Frankie Bard, the security man who joined the escape. Kalenka and the general seemed to think somebody must have paid me off. They gave me a bad day under interrogation. I might have been in more trouble, but Captain Holliday stood up for me. He’s okay.

“Even now—” A grave little shake of her fine-molded head. “They aren’t really satisfied. They wanted me to give up my little apartment and move into the women’s dorm here where they could watch me, but Holliday saved me again.”

“If you’re in trouble …” Looking at her, rejoicing in this new sense of trust after his long isolation, he nearly forgot to go on. “I’m in a rather more difficult fix.”

“I know.” Her warm hand squeezed his. “I’ve been told to report everything I can learn from you. Anything about contacts you might have with anybody off the base, any evidence that you’re really in some sort of touch with your dear Meg.”