Let the Fire Fall

Chapter Eight

JOHNNY watched the conference from outside the window by closing one eye and training the open eye on the slit in the center of the draperies where the two halves failed to close tightly. He listened intently through the earplug he had stolen from a careless guard two years ago. With a tap on the window and the plug in his ear he could hear every sound in the room down to the stomach noises being made by Wakeman. Wakeman had indigestion that night.

Johnny detested Wakeman but didn’t fear him. He did fear Lenny Mallard. He didn’t trust anyone who smiled all the time. Lenny turned toward the window and Johnny almost fell from the ledge, but of course Lenny couldn’t see him. There was also the new swim coach, Serge Dmitov, And the last man, a brand-new one, dark-haired and quick in his movements, with blue eyes and a grin that made him look very nice. Johnny decided he didn’t like the new man with his nice grin when he saw Lenny pat him on the shoulder and wink at him.

“Cold turkey, that’s the answer,” Lenny said.

“I’m sorry it came down to this,” Wakeman said, feeling his stomach carefully, then belching. “Sorry,” he murmured. He looked relieved. “Yes, as I was saying, it will be traumatic for him. His reaction will be to reject overtures, food, everything for a few days, then sulk for another week, have a recurrence of asthma with nightly coughing and congestion, probably fever. That’s when we’ll introduce you, Peter. You know your role?”

Peter nodded. “Sure. Bored as hell at this assignment, bored to death with the kid and his bellyaches, full of mutinous ideas…. I know it all.”

Wakeman nodded, patted his stomach again and waited, but this time nothing. “Now,” he said, “about this other matter. When he is twelve, we’ll have to set up a school here on the grounds….”

Johnny left his post. He knew about the school. In his room he hid the tap carefully in a pocket he had fixed to the back of one of his drawers. Then he huddled on the bed and shivered looking at the sky that showed over the trees, very black, very distant and cold. He did what he did every night: he wished. Every child—every?—most children know sooner or later that they were found by these people masquerading as parents. Since there are so few kings any more, and none at all for the American child to revere, the fantasy father—figure dreamed of is often poorly defined, but is always someone else: a famous scientist perhaps, or a wealthy industrialist or a Roman Catholic cardinal, or for the truly grandiose fulfillment, the pope, or the president. Winifred knew, must have known, the mental processes that would follow her disclosure to Johnny about his origins: the exhilaration and joy at learning that what he knew was true, for children know many things that are not true; the pride of accomplishment achieved by his people, but claimed by him; the fairyland life suddenly opened to him; feelings of grandeur mixed with fear and anxiety about his jailers. And the surge of superiority that made it almost impossible not to take command of the estate immediately.

They really shouldn’t have taken Winifred away from him. Possibly she shouldn’t have been so concerned by Johnny’s lack of self-identity. She could have exaggerated the signs of disintegration she observed in him. But, in any event, having given him his heritage, she should not have been removed before he had a chance to assimilate his newly discovered self. Had she been on hand she could have unraveled the complex mechanics of what Johnny now went through. She could have educated him to the inner world where a vision can so possess a person that he emerges from it as one born again. The religious experience, drug induced, brought on by fasts, fear, fatigue, deliberately directed by hypnosis, electrodes, shocks, however it originates, can result in nearly instant transformation. As Johnny learned.

He concentrated as hard as he could on that patch of sky and called for his people to come and get him and take him away. He stared so hard and thought so hard that presently he forgot about his shivering body, and forgot about the men talking in the room on the top floor of the house, forgot about his only friend, Dr. Harvey, forgot everything and sat without moving, without awareness for minute after minute, cross-legged, hands on his knees, floating now, beyond contact, and in the patch of dark sky a light blinked at him. He didn’t move, couldn’t move, and the light blinked again and took a form. A tall shining man in white smiled at him, and nodded. From the sky. Then was gone. Johnny stared and stared; until he fell over and slept with a smile on his face.

The next day Winifred didn’t appear to have breakfast with him as had been the custom for the past six months. He didn’t ask for her. He ate little, and there was a distant look on his thin face. He spoke to no one all morning, had his lessons from his teaching machine, and did reasonably well. Lunchtime and still no Winifred. His face was slightly more remote-looking, and still he asked nothing. Two or three bites were all he could manage. More lessons, swimming, horseback riding. Dinner, a television show; his favorite Western, bath, and bed. Throughout the day he had spoken only half a dozen words. He was watched closely that night, and the watcher reported that he had sat up looking out the window for an hour and a half, but nothing else. No tears. Nothing else. He had slept calmly.

And so on for the rest of the week. Wakeman had a bad time with his stomach that week, and on Saturday called for the boy for a talk. Johnny looked straight into his eyes and said, “I bet you’ll die in six months.” Wakeman had an instant pain in his lower intestines and terminated the conference without speaking a word. At the door the Star Child had turned and looked at him once more and said, “And I’ll be glad. Everyone I hate will die.”

They brought Peter in without going through the preliminary stages, simply because Johnny had failed them thoroughly. He didn’t have tantrums, didn’t develop asthma, didn’t have a fever. He stayed remote and cool and unreachable, and, strangest of all, for him, thoughtful.

“How do you do,” Johnny said formally and distantly to Peter, much as a young prince might receive a new ambassador to his court. He ignored Peter after that, returning to the book he had been reading, dismissing him until further notice. Peter tried to introduce conversations, and was rebuffed with polite silence until he too fell silent. His report was dull that night. And the following nights. Wakeman was curious. With Winifred’s departure the kid changed into someone entirely new and different, and he didn’t know how to handle him. Johnny stared at and through him when they met now, and there was no trace of the dislike that Wakeman had seen on his face in the past. In his notebook Wakeman asked himself: Paranoia with delusions of grandeur? He didn’t attempt to answer as yet. They would wait and see.

Wakeman didn’t like the way Johnny was behaving; it wasn’t according to his schedule, and there was no pre-set plan to bring to bear on him. Wakeman liked his experiments to be rigidly controlled in order to prove a hypothesis already accepted as true. Action, reaction as predicted leading to new action, and so on. But always as predicted. Action: remove Winifred. Reaction: neurotic behavior and illness, depression. New action: offer acceptable substitute. Reaction: wariness, suspicion, caution, full acceptance. And no more problems. So what had gone wrong? Wakeman didn’t know and not knowing made him uneasy. It made his stomach ache and rumble and gurgle.

Johnny at eleven decided to take his schoolwork seriously, and while he had to plug away at it for hours, he mastered the lessons that had stymied him only a few weeks ago, and within a month he covered the work that he had been dragging back on for six months. He completed the lessons through methodical study for hours at a stretch, did his tests, getting high grades in every field, and asked for science courses. He was refused. It was summer, vacation time, Peter said smiling hugely. He wanted to show him how to fly fish, and scuba dive.

Johnny stared at Peter and said, slowly and deliberately, “I want to learn everything, fishing, diving, and everything in books. If I can’t have the books I want I won’t leave my room and I won’t talk to anyone.”

Wakeman patted his stomach happily. This was more like his Johnny. He went to see him in person, with Johnny’s medical chart displayed conspicuously under his arm. Johnny stared at him stonily and didn’t speak.

“What’s the problem, son?” Wakeman asked.

Johnny didn’t speak then or throughout the half hour examination. He simply stared at Wakeman, and after ten minutes let his gaze drop to contemplate Wakeman’s gurgling stomach. Wakeman felt an attack coming on and speeded up the interview.

Wakeman had been one of those who believed that the Star Child’s apparent stupidity or, more kindly, his average mentality, would be replaced by a high degree of intelligence at a postponed date, due to the delayed maturation of his kind, and he was happy now to see that his expectations were being realized. Johnny’s sudden interest in books and in studying with the subsequent high test grades was encouraging and he could overlook the accompanying reports of the time needed by Johnny to master his subjects. He failed to see the change in motivation that had occurred, and he had no idea that Johnny was preparing himself to join his own people.

Wakeman filed his report, the first optimistic one he had written since being on this assignment, with the general board that convened monthly to discuss the Star Child, and with the report his recommendation that the school proposed for a year from that fall be started instead in the coming September, with boys of higher than planned for IQ’s.

Winifred, although no longer allowed on the estate, was still one of the board members, and was aghast at the conclusions reached by Wakeman. She bit her lip when she realized that she couldn’t state reasons for demurring, and she knew she had to try to make them stick to the planned education. Poor Johnny might be totally discouraged if he suddenly had to compete with the kind of near genius they were talking about now. She tried to visualize Johnny and Derek, Matt’s son, working on a problem together, and she shivered. It would be even worse if Johnny were exposed to someone like Blake, whose IQ no one had tested as far as she knew. Blake simply didn’t think like other people, but made staggering leaps from point to point to arrive at a conclusion that was inevitably correct. Johnny would have to plod in and out of every sentence, around every period, up and over every letter, not miss a comma or a single step or be lost before he could hope to get to that same conclusion, and to know that another had reached it within seconds or minutes when he required hours or days might send him right back to the Dick and Jane series.

She argued for another year in which to observe the maturation of the Star Child and his mental abilities, argued for a series of new tests to prove Wakeman’s claim of a startling mental leap, or disprove it. And in the end she won most of her arguments. Wakeman was to administer new tests, and if they confirmed his prediction of the sudden increase in IQ, the school would be started that same year, otherwise the plan was to remain unchanged.

Wakeman was to give the tests himself. But first he had to compromise with the Star Child. Johnny wouldn’t speak to Wakeman at all now, but communicated to him through Peter, who was treated like a court servant. Johnny had upped the ante: he was to be allowed access to the large library of the manor, no more to be offered a choice of a dozen pre-selected books. If he was not allowed this concession he would not take the tests. There was no discussion of the terms because he wouldn’t discuss them. When Peter returned from Wakeman’s office with a shrug and a muttered, “Sorry,” Johnny smiled. And said nothing. And did nothing. Absolutely nothing. The tests were brought to the room used as a school, and he refused to go there. When Wakeman threatened to have him carried, he smiled. Wakeman brought the tests to his room and Johnny turned his back and stared out the window, and whistled softly. An early nurse had taught him how to whistle and it was one of the very few things he could do better than most others, and he whistled when Wakeman tried to reason with him about. the tests. Finally Wakeman gave in and asked specifically what he wanted and Johnny said access to the library.

“You can’t read most of the books in there,” Wakeman said. “They’re for adults. You wouldn’t understand them.” Secretly he exulted. This was brand new. It buoyed his hopes about Johnny’s maturation process.

Johnny said, “I want to be able to read what I want to read, and I want to be allowed upstairs when I want to go up, by myself.” The library was on the second floor.

Wakeman gave in finally and the tests were given, and Johnny’s IQ registered at a 105 to 115 range. Wakeman accused him, through Peter, of cheating. Johnny simply looked at Peter when he brought up the results and Wakeman’s accusation. After a while Johnny said, “Maybe they don’t know how to test my IQ, or anything else.”

Peter Wyett was not an evil young man, nor was he terribly ambitious, no more so than the average Harvard graduate, holder of a Phi Beta Kappa ring, on the Dean’s list for three years, with impecunious relatives who had good addresses and good marriages and good names in academic circles. Peter Wyett, son of a university president, nephew of three university presidents and one dean of law school, unmarried at twenty-seven, with a doctorate in psychology and a future as a department head, then a dean, then probably a president of a university, had decided that it was time to break the system. He had gone to the C.I.A. with hat in hand and asked for a job. He had gotten the Star Child as his first assignment. From boredom to boredom. Dreaming of adventures in foreign ports with lovely girls flanking him, he had found instead one skinny boy, not too bright, bad-tempered, spoiled, pampered, tormented, and frightened. That had been the first surprise of the assignment. The second surprise was that everyone was afraid of the Star Child. A skinny snot-nosed kid. Not of what he was now, of course, but what he could become, and what his people would do when they returned. Faced with this problem Peter would have voted to have the kid done away with a long time ago, when they had the opportunity; during the open heart surgery on the blue infant they should have squeezed one of the tiny vessels shut for a couple of minutes, then off with the gloves and masks, tsk, tsk, and on to something else. That’s how it should have been handled, but having kept him alive then, they had to continue to keep him alive, and healthy, and reasonably happy. Of course, they failed in each department except the first, and there might be some question about that depending on who was asked. They watched him and tested him and examined him and probed into his mind and tried to see into his soul and they were afraid of him and what he might tell his people, and what he might do if he began to develop powers.

“Of course, he is human. As human as you are, or as I am, so how can he suddenly get ‘powers’? That’s Sunday supplement junk. No one seriously believes stuff like that.” So they said, but they believed it all right, and if one of them caught Johnny staring at him, he became cold and had pains that hadn’t been there moments earlier. Headaches developed over nothing more than looking up to find those pale eyes locked in a stare at a person’s head. Wakeman got those awful stomach aches over finding the kid staring at his stomach. One of the F.B.I. nurses had developed such a rash that she had been medically discharged and turned loose to scratch. No one knew when the first such case had been laid to Johnny; the first to appear in the official reports had been when he was seven, and it had been dismissed as irrelevant and ridiculous. One of the male nurses had struggled to undress Johnny for a physical examination and later had needed emergency surgery for appendicitis, peritonitis, and a hernia, none of which could have been brought on by a frail child, They seldom reported other suspicious illnesses and accidents officially, but everyone in the estate knew. Except possibly Johnny.

So when Johnny said innocently, “Maybe they don’t know how to test my IQ, or anything else,” Peter Wyett heard it echo through his head most of the night. He didn’t report it immediately. He thought about it. He decided that Johnny had hit it dead center. They didn’t know how to test him, what to look for, how to measure it if they found it. Whatever it might turn out to be. His people had come across space, light-years, in a craft that still defied all attempts to unravel its secrets. They had gadgets and machinery and equipment the use of which was guessed at, disputed, guessed at again, argued about, and so on, daily by the world’s most renowned scientists of every country. No one had been able to decipher their language. They couldn’t operate the tape recorders or the computers aboard, and couldn’t play the tapes on any Earth equipment; in fact, they weren’t even certain that what they had found should be called tapes. They hadn’t been able to duplicate the metal of the ship. Someone had said, facetiously perhaps, that in a vacuum at absolute zero, with one million pounds of pressure, perhaps they could turn out such an alloy. Peter didn’t know anything about metallurgy; he knew that he wouldn’t know how to go about turning a hunk of iron ore into finished steel, and he was an intelligent man, so it didn’t surprise him that no one had solved the ship’s puzzles yet. It didn’t surprise him that the Star Child should test low on tests made for standards that were questioned here on Earth. Who knew what they were measuring?

So it was that Peter Wyett, scion of some of the intellectual giants of the century, wrote the first report suggesting that the Star Child did indeed have un-Earthly powers, powers that could and did affect those about him, influence them in ways hitherto unknown. He suggested that the Star Child was potentially more dangerous than the hydrogen bomb and biological warfare and chemical warfare all combined. When his powers were fully developed, it was suggested, the estate might no longer hold him, man might be reduced to slavery, he might indeed be the conquerer of Earth single-handed. Or, his people might have sent the ship with the expendable crew simply to get this one child to Earth, to prepare the way for others at some future date. How much of this Peter himself believed will never be known. He wrote his report in a straightforward manner, with proper punctuation and impeccable spelling and sentences that varied to avoid monotony. It made very fluid reading, and it was one of the smallest, neatest, coolest bombshells ever delivered by man to man. The board sat stunned when the report was read aloud to them at the monthly meeting.

Winifred gasped, the first sound heard in the meeting room. The chairman, British, a don at Cambridge before this assignment, with protocol, propriety, and procedure so deeply ingrained that he was forever enmeshed within the three-sided straitjacket, gave the report the very same attention that the medical reports received, and the financial reports, and the reports of the agents and the counteragents and the counter-counteragents. The co-chairman, a Hungarian named Skatz, called the report hogwash, or so it was said afterward. He denied this and said the word he used was much stronger. Whether or not the board believed any part of the report is no longer relevant. They acted on it as if they believed in it. By the end of the summer there were only three familiar faces on the estate. Peter Wyett was one, Lenny Mallard another, and Yura Petrov, supplies coordinator, the third. This time there were leaks when the dismissals became effective, and there was a flurry of stories in all the media.

In his Mount Laurel retreat Obie Cox read all the reports as they came in and he was very distracted for a week or longer, during which time he prayed for long hours, and had many long talks with his newest lieutenant, Merton, the one-time F.B.I. agent, now number two in the growing hierarchy of the Voice of God Church. His black head and Obie’s silver blond head were together most of the week. Obie announced his acceptance of the evil intentions of the aliens; he had known this from the beginning and had prayed for succor from the start. This was well documented. Now he prayed no longer. He demanded that the Star Child be turned over to a civilian board, which would examine it for its humanness, and if it was found lacking, prescribe a merciful death for it. This was no more and no less than was done routinely for animals. Those lacking the qualities of the breed were destroyed, not allowed to mingle with the pure strains and contaminate them. If a maverick stallion got into the corral and terrorized the gentle mares, it would be shot. If a mad dog roamed, threatening people, it would be shot. If a diseased or imperfect specimen of any sort threatened God-given order, it was man’s duty to destroy it. Let those who understood what made for humanness examine the alien and determine its fate.

Obie also said, but not for public consumption, that fate was arranging the future along the lines he had suggested when he first realized that his son had powers to heal. The alien could cause people to sicken and die, and his son could heal them. God is good. God is omniscient and provides the cure along with the complaint. Obie’s eyes glowed when he spoke thus. He tripled the number of men searching for his son. Until he had the boy back he could not make public this, the greatest message ever given to man to deliver to God’s people.