Firechild (3 page)

” ‘Not after today.’ The words puzzled me, because of the half-cheerful way he grinned and squeezed me again. Grinned with tears in his eyes. ‘Something has gone dreadfully wrong, but I’m about to set it right.’

“He wouldn’t say what he meant. Just kissed me and rushed off.” Trouble dulled her voice. “Last night he never came home. Never even called. I tried the lab a dozen times. The switchboard girl always said his line was busy. I wondered if he just had no time to talk. Anyhow, I was worried so much I nearly never got to sleep last night.”

“Neither did I,” he told her. “If you reach him, tell him I’m on my way to Enfield.

“If I can—” She hesitated. “I’d better warn you that lab security has got awfully tight. I’ve never been inside. Once he promised to show me around, but security wouldn’t let me in.”

“I’m driving. I’ll be there tonight.”

“If we could get him out of EnGene—” A longer pause. “I’m sick about it, but he’s a stubborn man.”

“I remember that.”

Driving hard all that long midsummer day through fields of tall green corn and golden wheat and fat cattle grazing, he had time to think of the boy Vic had been. The arrogant oddball. Victor—he wanted people to use his full name because he said it meant winner, but nobody did.

The scrawny little kid, always wanting too much, somehow often winning it. Grimly taking on bullies too big for him, projects too hard for him, begging for books too old for him. Reading them too late by a flashlight under a blanket in spite of his myopia. Always trying to build things his allowance wouldn’t buy: a steam engine and a microscope and finally his own computer. Sometimes they worked.

Vic had always surprised him. He kept recalling their last night together, the night of moody silences and solemn recollections after their father’s funeral. They sat up late in the Cincinnati hotel room. He was sipping bourbon and water, which Vic refused.

“I’ve got a fine brain. I want to keep it running.”

He set his own drink aside.

“A damn shame.” He knew Vic was thinking of their father. “After all he’d done—done for others—” His voice had broken. He gulped and went on. “But I guess he knew what was coming. I remember how he used to quote what he called the first and second laws of medicine. We’re machines. Machines wear out.”

He nodded, recalling the reek of the pipe and the rasp of the rusty old voice and medical smells that always filled the front room where the old man met his patients.

“Life—it isn’t fair!” Vic’s voice quivered. “He died too hard!”

A bitter silence. He reached for his drink.

“Too hard!” Vic paused and slowly brightened.

“Someday we’ll do better.” He sat abruptly straighter, as if his grief had lifted. “I never liked those two laws. I always felt that we’re more than just machines—I know Dad was. I never wanted to wear out. And Sax, you know, perhaps—”

Vic’s voice changed.

“I hate to say this, Sax. Because of Dad. But I’m getting out of medicine. I never had your bent for it. Or his, though I never told him. I guess I’m—well, maybe just too restless. I never had Dad’s total dedication. Now that he’s gone, I’m giving it up.”

“For what?”

“Genetics.”

“Why genetics?”

“It’s where we’ll build the future.” Vic’s eyes shone behind the heavy lenses. “Here’s what I mean. An idea I’ve been incubating ever since I first began to see what’s possible. Dad would have called it a crazy dream. But listen!”

He listened, a little awed by Vic as he had always been.

“The genetic engineers are redesigning life. Give them a few more years, and they’ll be able to create nearly anything.”

“Supermen?”

“Could be.” Vic shrugged. “But let’s look first at something simpler. For example, microorganisms.”

“Genetic weapons?”

“I hope not!” Vic looked hurt. “A lot of bugs are bad, but others are benign. You’ve got benign symbiotes in your own gut, Sax. Suppose we could create a better symbiote.”

“Like what?”

“Call it a virus of life.” Vic’s voice had lifted. “A virus that could spread through your body, infect every cell —but to heal instead of kill. To repair damage and reverse the decay of age. People could be perfect. Eternal as gods. Think of that, Sax!”

His own dark mood was slow to lift.

“Wake up, Wulf!” Vic was the blithe child again, eagerly intense, dreaming impossible dreams. “Open your eyes! Even such a virus wouldn’t be limited. We don’t know the limits of life. We’ve never tested the limits of evolution. Suppose we could?”

“How do you mean?”

“Experiment!” An eager gesture. “We all evolve. You remember the old saying that ontogony recapitulates phylogeny—that the growth of every individual replays the whole process of evolution? Suppose we design a new being able to keep on adapting till it reaches some final limit—if there is a final limit.”

He couldn’t help shaking his head.

“You’re just like Dad.” A sad little shrug, but Vic went on. “It could be—it will be done. I mean to be on the team that does it.”

“If you think you can—” He raised his glass. “Dad would have told you to try.”

Pushing the car all that blazing day, he kept wondering. He had seen Vic only briefly since that night. Twice at symposia, where Vic had been reading papers a little too technical for him to follow. Once at their mother’s hospital bedside, and again at her funeral. He had never spoken again of that Utopian dream.

Suddenly, he wondered if Vic had really been pursuing it. EnGene, to guess from the name, must be devoted to genetic research. Could Vic’s Alphamega project have been an effort to realize that wild vision? An effort now gone perilously wrong? Why else Vic’s air of mystery about trouble at the lab and that alarming hint of final farewell in his voice?

Night had fallen before the road signs named Enfield. A few miles out of town, the red-winking lights of a police car stopped him. He pulled up beside it and rolled the window down.

“Road closed, sir.”

Stiff from sitting and chilled from the air conditioner, he peered groggily into the hot dark to ask how he could get into Enfield.

“No way, sir. All traffic diverted.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Disaster area—”

A radio was squawking in the police car. Muffled shouts, maybe curses, somewhere off the mike. They faded into crackling static. The cop had turned from him to stare toward the town.

“Disaster? What sort of disaster?”

A cricket chirped in the brush beside the road. Heat lightning flickered far away. The cop ignored him.

“My brother lives there!” He raised his voice. “I’ve got to reach him.”

The cop stood fixed.

He heard an overdriven engine, far off at first but whining nearer. Headlights stabbed through a thin gray groundfog. A quarter-mile away, they dimmed and went out. A long second later, he heard the squeal of skidding tires, the thud and shriek and jangle of the crash. The cop stood blankly staring at a yellow fireball lifting out of the fog. He shouted at the cop.

“Listen! I’m an M.D. Let me get down there—”

The cop wasn’t listening. In that sudden stillness, the cricket shrilled again.

“Officer, please!”

“Huh?” A blink of blank surprise, as if the cop had forgotten him. “Nothing you can do.”

“People could be dying—”

“Mister, they are dying.” Shambling into the headlight glow, the cop grimaced at him. “God knows from what, but there’s something hellish loose down there. Killing—killing the city! All we can do is try to keep people out.”

“If the problem is medical—”

“God knows what it is! If you’d heard what’s coming out—” The cop’s head jerked at the crackling radio. His face looked lax and sick. “We’re diverting everybody.”

“Sir, I’ve got to look for my brother—”

“Turn your damn car!” A drawn pistol glinted. “Back the way you came.”

Damn the cop! He wanted to gun the car past him and on toward Enfield, but you didn’t defy the law— not if you were a new doctor trying for a start in old Fort Madison, where the legends of Mark Twain’s river still mattered more than modern medicine.

He turned the car on grating gravel and drove away. In his rearview mirror, the burning wreck was a tall golden tree, the bright yellow trunk branching into reddish smoke. The cop stood motionless, a black stick figure at its foot. Beyond, only the dark. Suddenly shivering, he turned off the air conditioner.

4

Scorpio

A
nya delivered the ashes to Jules Roman’s family, with no thanks from anybody. With no display of grief she could see, the funeral was a private graveside ceremony in an exclusive cemetery in West Palm Beach. A long black limousine brought the widow and her daughter across the lagoon from the family mansion, along with the widow’s nurse and her wheelchair. She sat happily through the service, smiling at her own fleeting illusions, or rousing herself now and then to ask the nurse who all those people were.

They were only a handful. Julia, the daughter whom she no longer knew. A few long-time friends, most of them as old as she and very little fitter. Old Roman’s lawyer, almost as old as he had been. Two attorneys Julia had hired. The head of the New York office and a World-Mart attorney. Anya kept discreetly apart from them.

Julia was a hawk-faced blonde, recently and bitterly divorced. She stood possessively behind her mother’s chair and kept staring watchfully at Anya Ostrov through dark-lensed sunglasses. When the brief service was over, she demanded a look at the will.

Back at the beachfront mansion, the old man’s lawyer found it in a wall safe. He gathered them around a table in what Roman had called the cathedral room, a long dim hall that shone with the color-and gold of old Russian icons and a huge photomural of an ancient iconostasis that framed the doorway to his study. The lawyer’s voice changed as he read, and he stopped once to stare hard at Anya. Listening, the company men scowled and blinked in consternation.

Roman-World-Mart was to be liquidated. Half the proceeds would be used to establish a foundation for Soviet-American studies. To be the administrator of the estate, the guardian of his beloved wife, and the first director of the foundation, he had chosen “my faithful private secretary and a loyal member of our corporate family,” Anya Ostrov. There was a final provision that the bequests to “my wayward, headstrong” daughter, Julia Rose, be reduced to one dollar in the event that she contested the will.

“You c-c-conniving huh-huh-whore!” White-faced and stammering with wrath, Julia shook a red-nailed forefinger at Anya. “You and your cr-cr-crooked commie pals! I’ll see you never get a penny.” She appealed to the attorney. “Barry, tell the filthy b-b-bitch!”

The lawyer scanned the will again and went into a huddle with the muttering company men and Julia’s attorneys. She waited impatiently, glaring at Anya through her dark lenses and gasping for breath as if her legacy had been her father’s emphysema.

“Julia, I don’t know what to think.” The attorney left the huddle to shake his head at her. “This is certainly not the document I drew up a year ago.” He gave Anya a scathing glance and turned again to the quivering daughter. “As I had informed you, Julia, the instrument I saw named you as executor, your mother’s guardian, and the ultimate heir. It contained no provision for this Anya Ostrov or any Soviet-American foundation.”

“Mr. Roman changed his mind.” Anya had risen, her fair skin flushed and her accent stronger. “He made this new will last month, just before he left on his last trip to the USSR.” She paused to smile at Julia, a happy malice in her eyes. “It was drawn up by the lawyers for our new foundation. They have signed and notarized copies, kept where they are safe. The will expresses Mr. Roman’s wishes, and it is legally correct. The courts will support it.”

Early next morning she was on her way to Enfield, leaving legal matters to the lawyers. From the airport, she called Scorpio, the agent she had first known as Ranko Barac. He was now working as a night guard at EnGene Labs, where he used the name of Herman Doerr. Her call woke him. Muttering angrily, he agreed to let her pick him up at a bus stop a few blocks from his apartment.

Though Scorpio’s competence had been well proven, she hated him heartily. Probably of some mixed Turko-Balkan ancestry, he was muscular and bald, with cold, lead-colored eyes set wide apart beneath heavy black brows. She had met him first in Miami.

Using yet another name, he had come across from Cuba with the Mariel boat lift in command of a death squad. His targeted enemies of the Cuban revolution had been efficiently removed, but, reporting his success to her, he had displayed a proficient willingness to kill that appalled her. Though enemies of the people sometimes had to be neutralized, that was a duty she always tried to avoid.

She knew he hated her. He disliked working under a woman and resented her for rejecting him. Once, drunk on straight vodka at the Miami safe house, he called her- a cheap Ukrainian whore when she laughed off his clumsy passes, and then tried to rape her when she said she wasn’t cheap enough for him. Now, climbing into the car beside her, he greeted her with a snarl.

“What crap is this?” He was good at many things, his English convincingly native. “You can get me killed.”

“Or both of us.” Careful with the unfamiliar car on unfamiliar streets, she pulled away from the curb and drove slowly on toward the few tall buildings in the city center. Just as careful in dealing with him, she kept her voice emotionless. “A necessary risk. I protested. I was overruled. I’ve brought you a revised assignment.”

“And the CIA tramping on our heels?” He twisted in the seat to glower at her. “What is wrong with the O’Hare drop?”

“Time. The Center wants action now.” She glanced into the rearview mirror. “I know the danger. I take good care. I have been driving for an hour. We are not followed.”

“I told you not to come here. If Moscow is unhappy with me, let them find somebody else—”

“They are pleased.” Detesting everything about him, even his unbathed, animal odor, she rolled down the car window. “Your reports have been extremely important. They asked me to commend you. But they want action. Now.”