Let the Fire Fall

Chapter Sixteen

ALMOST a year after the visit of Matt and Lisa, Winifred had another visitor. Derek. He was thin; he looked haunted.

“Harvard has gone over,” he said. “We weren’t surprised. None of the universities will be able to hold our;”

He looked like he wanted to cry, very much like a little boy who has had his laboratory dismantled by an angry parent after one too many vile odors penetrated to the living quarters of the house. Winifred resisted the impulse to hug him and tell him it would be all right. She wasn’t at all sure that it would be.

“I think the apartment is bugged,” she said clearly. “So don’t say anything now.” Later she took him to the hospital where she had a room that she knew was safe, and she told him the details of why Matt and Lisa had taken the cold sleep. Winifred had written him a note saying only that they were safe and out of touch. He turned very pale at her words now. “Blake will get in touch with you somehow, sometime,” she said. “This is for him when he does.”

Derek examined the envelope, then stuffed it into his pocket. “It would be safer with you, probably,” he said.

“I don’t think so. They’ve been patient, but I don’t think it will last. Have you read of those new patents that are in direct competition with Obie’s tricks? Blake’s work certainly. I think the Church will become more and more harassed and begin to haul in those who might lead them to him.” .

“That means me too,” Derek said.

“You’ve got to keep out of their hands,” Winifred said simply. “I don’t know how, but you have to.”

“I could write to him in care of the name he uses for the patents, send it to the brokerage firm that handles his affairs,” Derek said after a long pause. “He must have a method worked out so he can keep in touch with the world.”

He wrote the note, and Winifred put it through her personal tube. The note was whisked to the central sorter department, dropped into another tube, and was sucked to the Wall Street division of the Post Office, where it was sorted from other mail once more, and put into the tube that led to the firm of Watkins Brokerage. Robert L. Kaufman pursed his lips when he saw the envelope. All letters addressed to his mysterious client, J. M. Black, were sent directly to him. No one else in the firm knew what he did with them, and he had resisted offers of bribes and threats alike to keep the secret that he had sworn to keep. He readdressed the envelope, sent it to Heffleman’s News Store in Cleveland, and leaned back wondering what was in it, how it was picked up at the other end, and most of all, who J. M. Black really was. He was a multi-millionaire, that was for sure, but who was he?

A few weeks later a black-haired young man in slovenly, baggy pants, a coat salvaged from a rag pile, shoes that didn’t match but were whole, slouched along East 23rd Street in New York City. No one paid any attention to him as he elbowed his way through others who were dressed much as he was. No one raised his eyes high enough to see the steady gray eyes that were bright and inquisitive and not at all dulled by hunger and hopelessness.

It was Blake of course. He had learned that his golden mop of hair was a dead giveaway when he didn’t want to be recognized, and as good as a banner on a staff when he did. He chose on this trip to remain unrecognized. He knew that Obie was after him seriously now. Heffleman’s was under surveillance suddenly. He had eluded three men staked out there, but there had been a fight, and two of them would no longer be of any use to the MM’s. That had been a surprise. They must be covering every place that he had been in the past. If they had been certain of his appearance at Heffleman’s they would have had a dozen men there, not the three who had been as startled as he was when the confrontation took place. He shuffled along, grinning at the sidewalk, remembering the fight. It had been a good one, the first one he’d had in three or four years. He was still in shape.

At the corner he paused and glanced at the store across the street, a used clothing store. The meeting place. A tall thin man was standing in front of it, trying to look at home here in the slums, and failing. Blake grinned again. Derek was Matt made over. He crossed the street, to all appearances oblivious of the official traffic, but getting through it unscathed, so obviously his unconcern was not real. The traffic was made up of taxis, buses, trucks, no private cars at all, and the professional drivers were mean, considering pedestrians their natural enemy, to be cancelled out whenever the opportunity arose.

Blake was pushed roughly by three boys under fourteen, who were sizing up Derek. He snarled at them under his breath and made a hand sign that no kid in the slum who wanted to stay alive failed to learn by the time he was six. The boys held their ground for less than a second, then turned and shoved their way through the crowds, mouthing’ asterisks. Blake waited fifteen feet from Derek, examining the crowds carefully for the sign of a tail. There was none, he was certain. Give Derek credit for that anyway. Blake knew the shadows could be posted in any of the buildings about them, using scopes and telltale devices to keep Derek in check, but unless they were down on the streets, they could be shaken easily enough.

It was a cold day, drizzly, not quite freezing, but so near that the fine mist glazed what it touched before It melted away. People were out, as they always were, day and night, in order to line up for food rations, for water, for unemployment benefits, for medical care, simply to get out of the cramped rooms where eight or more of them lived together in the crumbling tenements. Many of the rooms were occupied on a staggered basis. A family could have the room for half of the day only, departing when the other family arrived for its occupancy. So they were on the streets. Mothers wrapped in blankets, holding squirming babies; kids who were old enough to walk were out walking; school-age kids were, thankfully, out of sight, packed into the schools where little learning took place, but where. there was heat and free lunch consisting of meal and water, and fish crackers. They were the lucky ones. By fourteen, or twelve, if the kid looked older, they were allowed to drop out, and they were on the streets after that.

Derek looked frozen, he had been waiting for an hour, and had almost given up hope when the unkempt youth touched his arm roughly and muttered. “Start walking, Dek, I’ll tag along.”

Derek didn’t look at the stranger a second time, but jerked away from the building front and got into the masses shuffling up the street. He didn’t see Blake again for almost half an hour. Then he was there at his side, his hand hard on Derek’s arm, guiding him down an alley. It was worse here because of the people sleeping on and under newspapers and rags. Derek shivered not this time from the cold, and Blake hurried him on. They entered a basement and stopped.

“Strip,” Blake said. He put a small light on the floor. It was blue and made his lips look purple.

Derek looked around. “Why?”

“Just do it,” Blake said.

Derek stared at him for a moment, then very slowly started to take off his clothes. Blake examined each item, then Derek got dressed again. Blake looked at the envelope with his name on it curiously, but didn’t open it yet. He put it in an inside pocket.

“I came prepared to take you with me, if you want, to.”

Derek hesitated only a moment, then nodded. They picked their way through the darkness to a door on the other side of the basement. For the next half hour this was the pattern. Blake knew his way through the basements and the alleys like a rat finding his way through a familiar maze. Suddenly they were at the riverfront.

Derek looked about quickly. The wind coming off the fetid water was cold and evil-smelling and constant. There was a black warehouse looming behind them, on both sides of them, and the river before them. Nothing else. They had lost the mobs, and might have been alone in the city.

Derek was bitterly cold. The mist here at the river was freezing, coating everything with dirty ice. Blake left him, felt around one of the lower boards of the warehouse, withdrew a thin pencil-shaped object. He put it to his lips and blew once, then put it in his pocket. He motioned to Derek to follow him and went down to the edge of the pier and waited. After a moment there was a stir in the black water. A homing device, Derek realized. He had an ultra-sonic homing device to bring his boat to him when he whistled. The craft broke through the water and floated easily alongside the pier. It was shaped generally like a ground effect car, circular, disklike, but it was black and featureless. Blake ran his hand over the thing and a hatch opened. He went inside with Derek following. A few seconds later they were sinking down into the water again.

“We’ll take off from the bay,” Blake said. “Less risky there.”

Derek was warming up now and he studied the interior of the craft with interest. Blake had modified it until all traces of the original vehicle had been erased. It was roomy inside, and warm, with a simple-looking dash-control board that housed a four-inch-square screen which now was showing the river and its banks in a continuous sweep. The strangeness Derek felt for this Blake persisted and he remained silent. Blake also was silent, giving his attention to the screen and the controls he operated. They were in the bay. There were National Guards craft, and some navy ships, several tugs, a pleasure cruise ship at anchor.

“Wouldn’t it be safer to wait until dark?” Derek asked.

“Don’t think so. They’ll rely on instruments after dark, but now they’ll sight us visually. Much easier to fool their eyes than their instruments.” Blake grinned then; and all at once the stranger was gone, and they were kids playing together in a tree house again. Derek grinned back.

They shot up from the water like a flying fish, climbing straight up through the cloud cover to three thousand feet before Blake leveled their flight and headed west. Below them there was excitement as instruments and men clashed over what had happened. Radar was turned to scan the sky, but by then Blake had dropped to skim over the treetops and so escaped the magic eye.

And that was how Derek Daniels joined Blake and became his partner.

Half expecting to feel jealousy, he felt only admiration and loyalty to this unschooled boy-man changeling. Blake read Matt’s note twice, then handed it to Derek and walked outside the cabin high in the Pennsylvania hills handling the black disk that was his heritage.

The note was as follows:

“Dear Blake, I should have found time to talk to you when you were with us the last time, when you brought Lorna home to us. I didn’t realize how short the visit was to be, I thought there was time. We always think there is enough time, and there never is. I can only hope that this will reach you soon, I can’t know for certain that it will. I have to gamble on it and say here what I didn’t say before.

“When the ship came, I was the first one to see the aliens. I have to start with that. Obie has lied about it and the lie is believed now, but I was there first. I stood at the side of the road and looked down on the ship, feeling awe, unlimited excitement, joy…. High on the ship a panel, or door, opened, and one of the aliens stepped out. He had no platform there, nothing. He simply stepped out on air and stood there. I started to climb over the fence and when I looked again, the panel was closed, and the door-hatch that we ill got to know was opening at ground level.

“That is the first thing.

“When the alien woman arrived at the office some days later, Florence was already in labor. I was not there when they both delivered. I believe the alien delivered Florence, then herself.

“One baby was dying, the other was well and healthy. I knew how it would be with the alien child, the suspicion, fear, extraordinary precautions that would imprison him. I don’t think I made a conscious decision. The alien had made the switch, if a switch had indeed been made. I let it stick. One dead baby to add to the many dead aliens, one live and healthy baby to be raised in a normal family as an Earth child, as my child.

“I had only that first minute in which to decide. After that it was out of my hands. No one would have believed me later even if I had decided to voice my suspicions. I didn’t decide to do that, of course, but later, when Obie took you, I was tempted. If Winifred hadn’t told us about the prison conditions surrounding Johnny I probably would have talked.: But I couldn’t risk exposing you to that.

“I don’t know what the disc is, what it does, why she gave it to me. When I took her tunic, the disc fell from it. She indicated that I should keep it. I can only hand it on and say, this may be from your mother. Love, Matt.”

Derek, like Blake, read it twice, the second time very slowly, stopping often, gazing into space, thinking furiously. He put it down numbly and paced in the cabin, not seeing anything there. It all fell into place now. And Obie knew. They had found out somehow. He remembered reading of the proposed visit by Obie Cox to the estate where the Star Child was kept. He shuddered; that might have been Blake, locked up on an estate somewhere all his life. So, Obie saw the Star Child and guessed that he was the father. If the Star Child was that much like him, why didn’t anyone else see it? And what of the stories of his great powers, which were only now being manifested? All lies? The longer he thought of it, the more confused Derek became. Hours passed before Blake returned.

He had washed the black from his hair, and it was the blond that Derek remembered. He was tall and broad-shouldered, very handsomely built, with the self-assurance that had been part of him ever since Derek could remember. There was a new thoughtfulness, a new maturity perhaps, a more distant attitude, a new curiosity…. Derek couldn’t put a finger on it, couldn’t put the concept into words at all, but felt it nonetheless.

Blake handed the black disk to him wordlessly. Derek turned it over and over, and could find nothing to it that suggested what it was. A black disk, shiny on one side, dull on the other. It fit his palm nicely, was slightly warm, but then Blake had been handling it and could have warmed it. Finally he handed it back with a shrug.

“I have to go to the ship,” Blake said. “This has to be a key of some sort.” He flipped the disk into the air and caught it a couple of times, and when he turned again to look at Derek there was an unholy gleam in his eyes. “It’s a damn shame the ship is In the shadow of the temple,” he said, grinning. “I just may have to be converted in order to get close enough to it to get inside.”

They knew that Obie had a round-the-clock guard at the ship, complementing the UNEF there already, who were mystified at this new development. Everyone who went into the ship was scrutinized, photographed, had his retinas checked. Weekly there were incidents in which men were summarily seized and taken to the temple, put inside a room there and left for five minutes, only to be released without a word about what had been done, why they had been taken, or what was expected. Many of them were believers and didn’t complain, but the non-believers complained bitterly to the authorities. Each time this happened the official temple security chief apologized and promised that it wouldn’t happen again.

The same thing was going on at the airports, and at the docks where the exodus was the most pronounced.

For the next several weeks Derek and Blake worked together in the cabin, and Derek was happier than he had been for a long time. During this period of time Blake changed. Before Derek’s eyes he changed. His hair became mud-colored, and his eyes adapted to contacts that made them brown and smaller-looking. His cheeks became sunken, and his chin seemed to recede slightly, the result of the way he held his head, half ducked so that he peered up from lowered eyes. A new expression of obsequious servility intermixed with repressed brutality changed him even more. He shuffled his left foot when he walked now, not enough to bring a close study, but enough to change his walk from that of a young man to that of a man in his mid years, tired and despairing. Very carefully he planted hair in his ears, and in the midst of the dirt and earwax was a transmitter and a receiver. He and Derek would be in touch.

As soon as it all was in place he started to mutter. He left the cabin muttering to himself, and Derek turned on his receiver and listened to the snatches of filthy verse, strings of curses, bits of… so I says and he says… narratives, ruminations about the good old days, and so on. Derek burst out laughing. The shuffling man looked about wildly and muttered darkly about voices from the sky.

His role was finished with that touch. His name would be James Teague until further nonce, And he left Derek alone in the mountain cabin, alone, but not lonely.

Several days later, in the middle of a spring that was cold and dry, promising another year of drought to a land already worn out with dryness and the despair of no crops worth harvesting, there appeared in Des Moines a derelict muttering about the weather, about the lack of work, about the rottenness of the system, about the old days when a man could get a drink…. He shuffled about the city for weeks, getting in the way here and there, sleeping in doorways, getting rolled once or twice, but left undamaged; aimless, harmless, penniless, hungry, he quickly became a fixture, recognized by the cops and the inhabitants alike, accepted by them all. He wasn’t in the way any more than the thousands like him were in the way, and if his muttering became wearisome after a time, the listener could leave him without another thought. Eventually he turned up in a Listener’s .Booth and stood fumbling a shapeless hat for several minutes saying nothing, but muttering furiously, until he turned and left without confessing anything. The following week he was back, and this time he talked haltingly. “M’name’s Teague,” he said. “James Teague, that’s it.” This time also, he raised his gaze from the filthy hat and looked about him in darting, suspicious glances. There was little enough to see. The room was small, ten by ten feet, heavily draperied and comfortable at 72 degrees. The air was clean and fresh-smelling, regardless of the condition of the confessors who appeared there. And there was the voice there. It whispered and murmured encouragement to the confessor, and welcomed him to return when he was ready. It understood, no matter what he said, the listener understood. On his fourth visit Teague confessed to murder, of his wife and their three children. In a trembling voice, with much hesitation, many pauses, in a fashion of almost total incoherency he confessed to having chopped them to pieces with an ax and having buried them in a common grave in the Missouri Hills. He said that she had mocked him for the voice he heard.

“I didn’t want to do it, I really didn’t want to, but the voice, it said that I had to and I couldn’t see no other way out but to go ahead and do it and get it done with. She warn’t no bad woman, but she never heard the voice like I did and she mocked at it all the time and told the children to mock at it and to laugh it outa my head, ‘James Teague, you’re a crazy old man,’ she said, and the voice said I gotta make them all stop, so I did it.”

That week a card was given to him. It came out of nowhere to appear on the table in front of him, and the card told him to go to the Voice of God Church three blocks away and talk to the Reverend Huston Avery there. He read it aloud, like a child mastering his first primer, and then he read it again, and when he left he was muttering to himself about not going to see no Reverend Avery and it didn’t matter what the card told him to do, he wasn’t about to tell nobody about what he done, and it had been a mistake to go to the booth….

That night he showed up at the church, still very suspicious, uncommunicative. He spoke to no one. He handled the card all the time however. He returned to the church half a dozen times before the Reverend Huston Avery approached him and took him to an interior office where he talked seriously to him about the call of God.

“Sometimes God has us do things which would horrify our neighbors and arouse the wrath of the non-believers. It is a test for us. I see by the card that you are holding that you are one of the chosen. One of the many Hands of God, chosen to do His will, spoken to, directly by Him. Is this not true?”

The old man nodded without speaking.

“Yes. I suspected that it was so. And you feel that by obeying God’s call you have committed a crime for which the authorities will punish you. Is that not so?”

“Warn’t no crime. Just done what I had to do.”

“Yes, brother. The Voice of God spoke to you and you obeyed. That makes you one of the chosen ones.”

Reverend Avery was in his thirties, open-faced, beaming at the derelict happily. He was a good-looking man, and very kind. “How old are you, sir?”

“Forty-two, forty-three, don’t rightly remember exactly:”

“Would you like a job? We have work you can do.”

So James Teague started to work for the Voice of God Church. He did handyman labor at first, but gradually came to be trusted enough to hang out with the MM’s who stood guard during the services and who accompanied the Reverend Avery when he held rallies. James Teague didn’t join the MM’s because he was too old to be eligible, but in spirit he was one of them and recognized as such. After six months of dutiful labor, spending his wages each week on booze and women, he became converted himself. It happened spontaneously. He had a cot in the Church dorm, where many of the MM’s stayed. Nightly the Voice talked to them, praising their work, extolling them to greater efforts in the service of God. Teague never had paid much attention to the Voice before, but continued his almost inaudible monologue while the Voice spoke, but this time he cocked his head suddenly and started to listen hard, even after the Voice had stopped speaking. He nodded, listened, nodded again. He sat silently then for half an hour, again assumed his listening attitude, this time rising to his feet and leaving the room as one who walks in his sleep. The MM corporal who was on duty alerted Reverend Avery, who intercepted Teague in the hall leading to the street.

“Where are you going, James?”

Teague stopped, but didn’t focus his eyes on Avery. He said nothing.

“James, can you hear me?”

Teague saw him then. “You gotta let me go, I gotta go outside. Gotta get away from it. Keeps on and on. On and on all the time now.”

“What is it saying to you, James? You can tell me.”

“Says that I gotta go to the temple and go into service there. I don’t know nothing about no temple. I don’t know.”

“James, come into the office with me.” Reverend Avery led him into the small, very private office where he seated the man and left him. After a moment Teague raised his head again and listened. This time there was a Voice there.

“James, you must go to the temple and offer yourself for service to the Lord. The Lord is calling you, James. You must answer His call.”

Teague listened closely and when the voice stopped, he clutched his head hard, looked about wildly for an escape and found only the door Avery had left by. It was locked. The Voice started again in a moment, and this time while it was speaking Teague sank to his knees and put his head down low between his hands. “Yes, yes, I’ll do it. I’ll do it! What do you want?”

When Avery returned he found Teague still on his knees, muttering incoherent prayers, promising obedience. Avery informed him that he was to be sent to the temple at Covington. Teague nodded dumbly.