Firestarter (42 page)

John Rainbird went on smiling.

Andy McGee sat in front of his television set. The little amber Home Box Office pilot light glowed in the square gadget on top of the TV. On the screen, Richard Dreyfuss was trying to build the Devil's Butte in his living room. Andy watched with a calm and vapid expression of pleasure. Inside he was boiling with nervousness. Today was the day.

For Andy, the three weeks since the blackout had been a period of almost unbearable tension and strain interwoven with bright threads of guilty exhilaration. He could understand simultaneously how the Russian KGB could inspire such terror and how George Orwell's Winston Smith must have enjoyed his brief period of crazy, furtive rebellion. He had a secret again. It gnawed and worked in him, as all grave secrets do within the minds of their keepers, but it also made him feel whole and potent again. He was putting one over on them. God knew how long he would be able to continue or if it would come to anything, but right now he was
doing
it.

It was almost ten in the morning and Pynchot, that eternally grinning man, was coming at ten. They would be going for a walk in the garden to “discuss his progress.” Andy intended to push him … or to at least try. He might have made the effort before this, except for the TV monitors and the endless bugging devices. And the wait had given him time to think out his line of attack and probe it again and again for weak spots. He had, in fact, rewritten parts of the scenario in his mind many times.

At night, lying in bed in the dark, he had thought over and over again:
Big Brother is watching. Just keep telling yourself that, keep it foremost in your mind. They've got you locked up right in the forebrain of Big Brother, and if you really expect to help Charlie, you've got to keep on fooling them.

He was sleeping less than he ever had in his life, mostly because he was terrified of talking in his sleep. Some nights he lay wakeful for hours, afraid even to toss and turn in case they should wonder why a drugged man should be so restless. And when he did sleep it was thin, shot with strange dreams (often the Long John Silver figure, the one-eyed pirate with the pegleg, recurred in these) and easily broken.

Slipping the pills was the easiest part, because they believed
he wanted them. The pills came four times a day now, and there had been no more tests since the blackout. He believed they had given up, and that was what Pynchot wanted to tell him today on his walk.

Sometimes he would cough the pills out of his mouth into his cupped hand and put them in food scraps he would later scrape down the garbage disposal. More went down the toilet. Still others he had pretended to take with ginger ale. He spat the pills into the half-empty cans to dissolve and then let them stand, as if forgotten. Later he would turn them down the sink.

God knew he was no professional at this, and presumably the people who were monitoring him were. But he didn't think they were monitoring him very closely anymore. If they were, he would be caught. That was all.

Dreyfuss and the woman whose son had been taken for a ride by the saucer people were scaling the side of Devil's Butte when the buzzer that marked the breaking of the door circuit went off briefly. Andy didn't let himself jump.

This is it,
he told himself again.

Herman Pynchot came into the living room. He was shorter than Andy but very slender; there was something about him that had always struck Andy as slightly effeminate, although it was nothing you could put your finger on. Today he was looking extremely reet and compleat in a thin gray turtleneck sweater and a summerweight jacket. And of course he was grinning.

“Good morning, Andy,” he said.

“Oh,” Andy said, and then paused, as if to think. “Hello, Dr. Pynchot.”

“Do you mind if I turn this off? We ought to go for our walk, you know.”

“Oh.” Andy's brow furrowed, then cleared. “Sure. I've seen it three or four times already. But I like the ending. It's pretty. The UFOs take him away, you know. To the stars.”

“Really,” Pynchot said, and turned off the TV. “Shall we go?”

“Where?” Andy asked.

“Our walk,” Herman Pynchot said patiently. “Remember?”

“Oh,” Andy said. “Sure.” He got up.

The hall outside Andy's room was wide and tile-floored. The lighting was muted and indirect. Somewhere not far away was a communications or computer center; people strolled in with keypunch cards, out with swatches of printouts, and there was the hum of light machinery.

A young man in an off-the-rack sport coat—the essence of government agent—lounged outside the door of Andy's apartment. There was a bulge under his arm. The agent was a part of the standard operating procedure, but as he and Pynchot strolled, he would fall behind them, watching but out of earshot. Andy thought he would be no problem.

The agent fell in behind them now as he and Pynchot strolled to the elevator. Andy's heartbeat was now so heavy it felt as if it were shaking his entire ribcage. But without seeming to, he was watching everything closely. There were perhaps a dozen unmarked doors. Some of them he had seen standing open on other walks up this corridor—a small, specialized library of some kind, a photocopying room in another—but about many of them he simply had no idea. Charlie might be behind any one of them right now … or in some other part of the installation entirely.

They got into the elevator, which was big enough to accommodate a hospital gurney. Pynchot produced his keys, twisted one of them in the keyway, and pushed one of the unmarked buttons. The doors closed and the elevator rose smoothly. The Shop agent lounged at the back of the car. Andy stood with his hands in the pockets of his Lee Riders, a slight, vapid smile on his face.

The elevator door opened on what had once been a ballroom. The floor was polished oak, pegged together. Across the wide expanse of the room, a spiral staircase made a graceful double twist on its way to the upper levels. To the left, French doors gave on to a sunny terrace and the rock garden beyond it. From the right, where heavy oak doors stood half open, came the clacking sound of a typing pool, putting out that day's two bales of paperwork.

And from everywhere came the smell of fresh flowers.

Pynchot led the way across the sunny ballroom, and as always Andy commented on the pegged-together floor as if he
had never noticed it before. They went through the French doors with their Shop-shadow behind them. It was very warm, very humid. Bees buzzed lazily through the air. Beyond the rock garden were hydrangea, forsythia, and rhododendron bushes. There was the sound of riding lawnmowers making their eternal rounds. Andy turned his face up to the sun with a gratitude that wasn't feigned.

“How are you feeling, Andy?” Pynchot asked.

“Good. Good.”

“You know, you've been here almost half a year now,” Pynchot said in an isn't-it-amazing-how-the-time-flies-when-you're-having-a-good-time tone of mild surprise. They turned right, onto one of the graveled paths. The smell of honeysuckle and sweet sassafras hung in the still air. On the other side of the duckpond, near the other house, two horses cantered lazily along.

“That long,” Andy said.

“Yes, it is a long time,” Pynchot said, grinning. “And we've decided that your power has … diminished, Andy. In fact, you know we've had no appreciable results at all.”

“Well, you keep me drugged all the time,” Andy said reproachfully. “You can't expect me to do my best if I'm stoned.”

Pynchot cleared his throat but did not point out that Andy had been totally clean for the first three series of tests and all three had been fruitless.

“I mean, I've done my best, Dr. Pynchot.
I've tried
.”

“Yes, yes. Of course you have. And we think—that is,
I
think—that you deserve a rest. Now, the Shop has a small compound on Maui, in the Hawaii chain, Andy. And I have a six-month report to write very soon. How would you like it”—Pynchot's grin broadened into a game-show host's leer and his voice took on the tones of a man about to offer a child an incredible treat—“how would you like it if I recommended that you be sent there for the immediate future?”

And the immediate future might be two years, Andy thought. Maybe five. They would want to keep an eye on him in case the mental-domination ability recurred, and maybe as an ace in the hole in case some unforeseen difficulty with Charlie cropped up. But in the end, he had no doubt that there would be an accident or an overdose or a “suicide.” In Orwell's parlance, he would become an unperson.

“Would I still get my medication?” Andy asked.

“Oh, of course,” Pynchot said.

“Hawaii …” Andy said dreamily. Then he looked around at Pynchot with what he hoped was an expression of rather stupid cunning. “Probably Dr. Hockstetter won't let me go. Dr. Hockstetter doesn't like me. I can tell.”

“Oh, he does,” Pynchot assured him. “He does like you, Andy. And in any case, you're my baby, not Dr. Hockstetter's. I assure you, he'll go along with what I advise.”

“But you haven't written your memorandum on the subject yet,” Andy said.

“No, I thought I'd talk to you first. But, really, Hockstetter's approval is just a formality.”

“One more series of tests might be wise,” Andy said, and pushed out lightly at Pynchot. “Just for safety's sake.”

Pynchot's eyes suddenly fluttered in a strange way. His grin faltered, became puzzled, and then faded altogether. Now Pynchot was the one who looked drugged, and the thought gave Andy a vicious kind of satisfaction. Bees droned in the flowers. The scent of new-cut grass, heavy and cloying, hung in the air.

“When you write your report, suggest one more series of tests,” Andy repeated.

Pynchot's eyes cleared. His grin came splendidly back. “Of course, this Hawaii thing is just between us for the time being,” he said. “When I write my report, I will be suggesting one more series of tests. I think it might be wise. Just for safety's sake, you know.”

“But after that I might go to Hawaii?”

“Yes,” Pynchot said. “After that.”

“And another series of tests might take three months or so?”

“Yes, about three months.” Pynchot beamed on Andy as if he were a prize pupil.

They were nearing the pond now. Ducks sailed lazily across its mirror surface. The two men paused by it. Behind them, the young man in the sport coat was watching a middle-aged man and woman cantering along side by side on the far side of the pond. Their reflections were broken only by the long, smooth glide of one of the white ducks. Andy thought the couple looked eerily like an ad for mail-order insurance, the kind of ad that's always falling out of your Sunday paper and into your lap—or your coffee.

There was a small pulse of pain in his head. Not bad at all. But in his nervousness he had come very close to pushing Pynchot much harder than he had to, and the young man
might have noticed the results of that. He didn't seem to be watching them, but Andy wasn't fooled.

“Tell me a little about the roads and the countryside around here,” he said quietly to Pynchot, and pushed out lightly again. He knew from various snatches of conversation that they were not terribly far from Washington, D.C., but nowhere as close as the CIA's base of operations in Langley. Beyond that he knew nothing.

“Very pretty here,” Pynchot said dreamily, “since they've filled the holes.”

“Yes, it is nice,” Andy said, and lapsed into silence. Sometimes a push triggered an almost hypnotic trace memory in the person being pushed—usually through some obscure association—and it was unwise to interrupt whatever was going on. It could set up an echo effect, and the echo could become a ricochet, and the ricochet could lead to … well, to almost anything. It had happened to one of his Walter Mitty businessmen, and it had scared the bejesus out of Andy. It had turned out okay, but if friend Pynchot suddenly got a case of the screaming horrors, it would be anything but okay.

“My wife loves that thing,” Pynchot said in that same dreamy voice.

“What's that?” Andy asked. “That she loves?”

“Her new garbage disposer. It's very …”

He trailed off.

“Very pretty,” Andy suggested. The guy in the sport coat had drifted a little closer and Andy felt a fine sweat break on his upper lip.

“Very pretty,” Pynchot agreed, and looked vaguely out at the pond.

The Shop agent came closer still, and Andy decided he might have to risk another push … a very small one. Pynchot was standing beside him like a TV set with a blown tube.

The shadow picked up a small chunk of wood and tossed it in the water. It struck lightly and ripples spread, shimmering. Pynchot's eyes fluttered.

“The country is very pretty around here,” Pynchot said. “Quite hilly, you know. Good riding country. My wife and I ride here once a week, if we can get away. I guess Dawn's the closest town going west … southwest, actually. Pretty small. Dawn's on Highway Three-oh-one. Gether's the closest town going east.”

“Is Gether on a highway?”

“Nope. Just on a little road.”

“Where does Highway Three-oh-one go? Besides Dawn?”

“Why, all the way up to D.C., if you go north. Most of the way to Richmond, if you go south.”

Andy wanted to ask about Charlie now, had planned to ask about Charlie, but Pynchot's reaction had scared him a little. His association of
wife, holes, pretty,
and—very strange!—
garbage disposer
had been peculiar and somehow disquieting. It might be that Pynchot, although accessible, was nevertheless not a good subject. It might be that Pynchot was a disturbed personality of some sort, tightly corseted into an appearance of normality while God knew what forces might be delicately counterbalanced underneath. Pushing people who were mentally unstable could lead to all sorts of unforeseen results. If it hadn't been for the shadow he might have tried anyway (after all that had happened to him, he had damn few compunctions about messing with Herman Pynchot's head), but now he was afraid to. A psychiatrist with the push might be a great boon to mankind … but Andy McGee was no shrink.