Firestarter

1

It was a bigger room.

Until last week, in fact, it had been the Shop’s non-denominational chapel. The speed with which things were picking up could have been symbolized by the speed and ease with which Cap had rammed through Hockstetter’s requests. A new chapel-not an odd spare room but a real chapel-was to be built at the eastern end of the grounds. Meanwhile, the remainder of the tests on Charlie McGee would be held here.

The fake wood paneling and the pews had been ripped out. Both flooring and walls had been insulated with asbestos batting that looked like steel wool and then covered over with heavy-guage tempered sheet steel. The area that had been the altar and the nave had been partitioned off: Hockstetter’s monitoring instruments and a computer terminal had been installed. All of this had been done in a single week; work had begun just four days before Herman Pynchot ended his life in such grisly fashion.

Now, at two in the afternoon on an early October day, a cinderblock wall stood in the middle of the long room. To the left of it was a huge, low tank of water. Into this tank, which was six feet deep, had been dumped more than two thousand pounds of ice. In front of it stood Charlie McGee, looking small and neat in a blue denim jumper and red and black striped rugby socks. Blond pigtails tied off with small black velvet bows hung down to her shoulder blades.

“All right, Charlie,” Hockstetter’s voice said over the intercom. Like everything else, the intercom had been hastily installed, and its reproduction was tinny and poor. “We’re ready when you are.”

The cameras filmed it all in living color. In these films, the small girl’s head dips slightly, and for a few seconds nothing happens at all. Inset at the left of the film frame is a digital temperature readout. All at once it begins to move upward, from seventy to eighty to ninety. After that the figures jump up so rapidly that they are just a shifting reddish blur; the electronic temperature probe has been placed in the center of the cinderblock wall.

Now the film switches to slow motion; it is the only way that the entire action can be caught. To the men who watched it through the observation room’s leaded-glass viewing ports, it happened with the speed of a gunshot.

In extreme slow motion, the cinderblock wall begins to smoke; small particles of mortar and concrete begin to jump lazily upward like popping corn. Then the mortar holding the blocks together can be observed to be running, like warm molasses. Then the bricks begin to crumble, from the center outward. Showers of particles, then clouds of them, blow back as the blocks explode with the heat. Now the digital heat sensor implanted in the center of this wall freezes at a reading of over seven thousand degrees. It freezes not because the temperature has stopped climbing but because the sensor itself has been destroyed.

Set around this testing room that used to be a chapel are eight huge Kelvinator air conditioners, all running at high speed, all pumping freezing air into the testing room. All eight kicked into operation as soon as the room’s overall temperature passed ninety-five.

Charlie had got very good at directing the stream of heat that somehow came from her at a single point, but as anyone who has ever burned his or her hand on a hot skillet handle knows, even so-called nonconductable surfaces will conduct heat-if there is enough heat to conduct.

With all eight of the industrial Kelvinators running, the temperature in the testing room should have been minus fifteen degrees Fahrenheit, plus or minus five degrees. Instead, the records show a continued climb, up over a hundred degrees, then a hundred and five, then a hundred and seven. But all of the sweat running down the faces of the observers cannot be accounted for by the heat alone.

Now not even extreme slow motion will give a clear picture of what is happening, but one thing is clear: as the cinderblocks continue to explode outward and backward, there can be no doubt that they are burning; these blocks are burning as briskly as newspapers in a fireplace. Of course, an eighth-grade science book teaches that anything will burn if it gets hot enough. But it is one thing to read such information and quite another to see cinderblock blazing with blue and yellow flame.

Then everything is obscured by a furious blowback of disintegrating particles as the whole wall vaporizes. The little girl makes a slow-motion half turn and a moment later the calm surface of the icy water in the tank is convulsed and boiling. And the heat in the room, which has crested at a hundred twelve, (even with all eight air conditioners, it is as hot as a summer noontime in Death Valley), begins to go back.

There’s one for the sweeper.

2

From Bradford Hyuck

To Patrick Hockstetter

Date October 2

Re Telemetry, latest C. McGee Test (No. 4)

Pat-I’ve watched the films four times now and still can’t believe it isn’t some sort of special effects trick. Some unsolicited advice: When you get before the Senate subcommittee that’s going to deal with the Lot Six appropriations and renewal plans, have your ducks in a row and do more than cover your ass-armor-plate it! Human nature being what it is, those guys are going to look at those films and have a hard job believing it isn’t a flat-out shuckand-jive.

To business: The readouts are being delivered by special messenger, and this memo should beat them by no more than two or three hours. You can read them over for yourself, but I’ll briefly sum up our findings. Our conclusions can be summed up in two words: We’re stumped. She was wired up this time like an astronaut going into space. You will note: 1) Blood pressure within normal parameters for a child of eight, and there’s hardly a jog when that wall goes up like the Hiroshima bomb. 2) Abnormally high alpha wave readings; what we’d call her “imagination circuitry” is well engaged. You may or may not agree with Clapper and me that the waves are rather more even, suggesting a certain “controlled imaginative dexterity” (Clapper’s rather fulsome phrase, not mine). Could indicate she’s getting in control of it and can manipulate the ability with greater precision. Practice, as they say, makes perfect. Or it may mean nothing at all. 3) All metabolic telemetry is within normal parameters-nothing strange or out of place. It’s as if she was reading a good book or writing a class theme instead of creating what you say must have been upwards of 30,000 degrees of spot heat. To my mind the most fascinating (and frustrating!) information of all is the Beal-Searles CAT test. Next to no caloric burn! In case you’ve forgotten your physics-occupational hazard with you shrinks-a calorie is nothing but a unit of heat; the amount of heat necessary to raise a gram of water one degree centigrade, to be exact. She burned maybe 25 calories during that little exhibition, what we would burn doing half a dozen sit-ups or walking twice around the building. But calories measure heat, damn it, heat, and what she’s producing is heat… or is she? Is it coming from her or through her? And if it’s the latter, where is it coming from? Figure that one out and you’ve got the Nobel Prize in your hip pocket! I’ll tell you this: if our test series is as limited as you say it is, I’m positive we’ll never find out. Last word: Are you sure you want to continue these tests? Lately I just have to think about that kid and I start to get very antsy. I start thinking about things like pulsars and neutrinos and black holes and Christ knows what else. There are forces loose in this universe that we don’t even know about yet, and some we can observe only at a remove of millions of light-years… and breathe a sigh of relief because of it. The last time I looked at that film I began to think of the girl as a crack-a chink, if you like-in the very smelter of creation. I know how that sounds, but I feel I would be remiss not to say it. God forgive me for saying this, with three lovely girls of my own, but I personally will breathe a sigh of relief when she’s been neutralized.

If she can produce 30,000 degrees of spot heat without even trying, have you ever thought what might happen if she really set her mind to it?

Brad

3

“I want to see my father,” Charlie said when Hockstetter came in. She looked pale and wan. She had changed from her jumper into an old nightgown, and her hair was loose on her shoulders.

“Charlie-“he began, but anything he had been meaning to follow with was suddenly gone. He was deeply troubled by Brad Hyuck’s memo and by the supporting telemetry readouts. The fact that Brad had trusted those final two paragraphs to print said much, and suggested more.

Hockstetter himself was scared. In authorizing the changeover of chapel to testing room, Cap had also authorized the installation of more Kelvinator air conditioner around Charlie’s apartment-not eight but twenty. Only six had been installed so far, but after Test No.4, Hockstetter didn’t care if they were installed or not. He thought they could set up two hundred of the damned things and'not impede her power. It was no longer a question of whether or not she could kill herself; it was a question of whether or not she could destroy the entire Shop installation if she wanted to-and maybe all of eastern Virginia in the bargain. Hockstetter now thought that if she wanted to do those things, she could. And the last stop on that line of reasoning was even scarier: only John Rainbird had an effective checkrein on her now. And Rainbird was nuts.

“I want to see my father,” she repeated.

Her father was at the funeral of poor Herman Pynchot. He attended with Cap, at the latter’s request. Even Pynchot’s death, as unrelated to anything going on here as it was, seemed to have cast its own evil pall over Hockstetter’s mind.

“Well, I think that can be arranged,” Hockstetter said cautiously, “if you can show us a little more-““I’ve shown you enough,” she said. “I want to see my daddy.” Her lower lip trembled; her eyes had taken on a sheen of tears. “Your orderly;” Hockstetter said, “that Indian fellow, said you didn’t want to go for a ride on your horse this morning after the test. He seemed worried about you.”

“It’s not my horse,” Charlie said. Her voice was husky. “Nothing here is mine. Nothing except my daddy and I… want… to… see him!” Her voice rose to an angry, tearful shout.

“Don’t get excited, Charlie,” Hockstetter said, suddenly frightened. Was it suddenly getting hotter in here, or was it just his imagination? “Just… just don’t get excited.”

Rainbird. This should have been Rainbird’s job, god-dammit.

“Listen to me, Charlie.” He smiled a wide, friendly smile. “How would you like to go to Six Flags over Georgia? It’s just about the neatest amusement park in the whole South, except maybe for Disney World. We’d rent the whole park for a day, just for you. You could ride the Ferris wheel, go in the haunted mansion, the merry-go-round-”

“I don’t want to go to any amusement park, I just want to see my daddy. And I’m going to. I hope you hear me, because I’m going to!”

It was hotter.

“You’re sweating,” Charlie said.

He thought of the cinderblock wall, exploding so fast you could see the flames only in slow motion. He thought of the steel tray flipping over twice as it flew across the room, spraying burning chunks of wood. If she flicked that power out at him, he would be a pile of ashes and fused bone almost before he knew what was happening to him.

Oh God please-“Charlie, getting mad at me won’t accomplish anyth-““Yes,” she said with perfect truth. “Yes it will. And I’m mad at you, Dr. Hockstetter. I’m really mad at you.” “Charlie, please-”

“I want to see him,” she said again. “Now go away. You tell them I want to see my father and then they can test me some more if they want. I don’t mind. But if I don’t see him, I’ll make something happen. Tell them that.”

He left. He felt that he should say something more-something that would redeem his dignity a little, make up a little for the fear

(“you’re sweating”)

she had seen scrawled on his face-but nothing occurred. He left, and not even the steel door between him and her could completely ease his fear… or his anger at John Rainbird. Because Rainbird had foreseen this, and Rainbird had said nothing. And if he accused Rainbird of that, the Indian would only smile his chilling smile and ask who was the psychiatrist around here, anyway?

The tests had diminished her complex about starting fires until it was like an earthen dam that had sprung leaks in a dozen places. The tests had afforded her the practice necessary to refine a crude sledgehammer of power into something she could flick out with deadly precision, like a circus performer throwing a weighted knife.

And the tests had been the perfect object lesson. They had shown her, beyond a shadow of a doubt, who was in charge here.

She was.

4

When Hockstetter was gone, Charlie fell on the couch, her hands to her face, sobbing. Waves of conflicting emotion swept her-guilt and horror, indignation, even a kind of angry pleasure. But fear was the greatest of them all. Things had changed when she agreed to their tests; she feared things had changed forever. And now she didn’t just want to see her father, she needed him. She needed him to tell her what to do next.

At first there had been rewards-walks outside with John, currying Necromancer, then riding him. She loved John and she loved Necromancer… if that stupid man could only have known how badly he had hurt her by saying. Necromancer was hers when Charlie knew he never could be. The big gelding was only hers in her uneasy half-remembered dreams. But now… now… the tests themselves, the chance to use her power and feel it grow… that was starting to become the reward. It had become a terrible but compelling game. And she sensed she had barely scratched the surface. She was like a baby who has just learned how to walk.

She needed her father, she needed him to tell her what was right, what was wrong, whether to go on or to stop forever. If-“If I can stop,” she whispered through her fingers. That was the most frightening thing of all-no longer being sure that she could stop. And if she could not, what would that mean? Oh, what would that mean? She began to cry again. She had never felt so dreadfully alone.

5

The funeral was a bad scene.

Andy had thought he would be okay; his headache was gone, and, after all, the funeral was only an excuse to be alone with Cap. He hadn’t liked Pynchot, although in the end Pynchot had proved to be just a little too small to hate. His barely concealed arrogance and his unconcealed pleasure at being on top of a fellow human being-because of those things and because of his overriding concern for Charlie, Andy had felt little guilt about the ricochet that he had inadvertently set up in Pynchot’s mind. The ricochet that had finally torn the man apart.

The echo effect had happened before, but he had always had a chance to put things right again. It was something he had got pretty good at by the time he and Charlie had to run from New York City. There seemed to be land mines planted deep in almost every human brain, deep-seated fears and guilts, suicidal, schizophrenic, paranoid impulses-even murderous ones. A push caused a state of extreme suggestibility, and if a suggestion tended down one of those park paths, it could destroy. One of his housewives in the Weight-Off program had begun to suffer frightening catatonic lapses. One of his businessmen had confessed a morbid urge to take his service pistol down from the closet and play Russian roulette with it, an urge that was somehow connected in his mind with a story by Edgar Allan Poe, “William Wilson,” that he had read way back in high school. In both cases, Andy had been able to stop the echo before it sped up and turned into that lethal ricochet. In the case of the businessman, a quiet, sandy-haired, third-echelon bank officer, all it had taken was another push and the quiet suggestion that he had never read the Poe story at all. The connection-whatever it had been-was broken. The chance to break the echo had never come with Pynchot.

Cap talked restlessly of the man’s suicide as they drove to the funeral through a cold, swishing autumn rain; he seemed to be trying to come to terms with it. He said he wouldn’t have thought it possible for a man just to… to keep his arm in there once those blades had begun to chop and grind. But Pynchot had. Somehow Pynchot had. That was when the funeral started being bad for Andy.

The two of them attended only the graveside services, standing well back from the small group of friends and family, clustered under a bloom of black umbrellas. Andy discovered it was one thing to remember Pynchot’s arrogance, the little-Caesar, power-tripping of a small man who had no real power; to remember his endless and irritating nervous tic of a smile. It was quite another to look at his pallid, washed-out wife in her black suit and veiled hat, holding the hands of her two boys (the younger was about Charlie’s age, and they both looked utterly stunned and out of it, as if drugged), Knowing-as she must-that the friends and relatives must all know how her husband was found, dressed in her underwear, his right arm vaporized nearly to the elbow, sharpened like a living pencil, his blood splattered in the sink and on the Wood-Mode cabinets, chunks of his flesh-

Andy’s gorge rose helplessly. He bent forward in the cold rain, struggling with it. The minister’s voice rose and fell senselessly. “I want to go,” Andy said. “Can we go?” “Yes, of course,” Cap said. He looked pale himself, old and not particularly well. “I’ve been to quite enough funerals this year to hold me.”

They slipped away from the group standing around the fake grass, the flowers already drooping and spilling petals in this hard rain, the coffin on its runners over the hole in the ground. They walked side by side back toward the winding, graveled drive where Cap’s economy-sized Chevy was parked near the rear of the funeral cortege. They walked under willows that dripped and rustled mysteriously. Three or four other men, barely seen, moved around them. Andy thought that he must know now how the President of the United States feels.

“Very bad for the widow and the little boys,” Cap said. “The scandal, you know.”

“Will she… uh, will she be taken care of?”

“Very handsomely, in terms of money,” Cap said almost tonelessly. They were nearing the lane now. Andy could see Cap’s orange Vega, parked on the verge. Two men were getting quietly into a Biscayne in front of it. Two more got into a gray Plymouth behind it. “But nobody’s going to be able to buy of those two little boys. Did you see their faces?”

Andy said nothing. Now he felt guilt; it was like a sharp sawblade working in hisguts. Not even telling himself that his own position had been desperate would help. All he could do now was hold Charlie’s face in front of him… Charlie and a darkly ominous figure behind her, a one-eyed pirate named John Rainbird who had wormed his way into her confidence so he could hasten the day when

They got into the Vega and Cap started the engine. The Biscayne ahead pulled out and Cap followed. The Plymouth fell into place behind them.

Andy felt a sudden, almost eerie. certainty that the push had deserted him againthat when he tried there would be nothing. As if to pay for the expression on the faces of the two boys.

But what else was there to do but try?

“We’re going to have a little talk,” he said to Cap, and pushed. The push was there, and the headache settled in almost at once-the price he was going to have to pay for using it so soon after the last time. “It won’t interfere with your driving.”

Cap seemed to settle in his seat. His left hand, which had been moving toward his turnsignal, hesitated a moment and then went on. The Vega followed the lead car sedately between the big stone pillars and onto the main road.

“No, I don’t think our little talk will interfere with my driving at all,” Cap said.

They were twenty miles from the compound; Andy had checked the odometer upon leaving and again upon arriving at the cemetery. A lot of it was over the highway Pynchot had told him about, 301. It was a fast road. He guessed he had no more than twenty-five minutes to arrange everything. He had thought of little else over the last two days and thought he had everything pretty well mapped out… but there was one thing he badly needed to know.

“How long can you and Rainbird ensure Charlie’s cooperation, Captain Hollister?”

“Not much longer,” Cap said. “Rainbird arranged things very cleverly so that in your absence, he’s the only one really in control of her. The father surrogate.” In a low, almost chanting voice, he said, “He’s her father when her father isn’t there.”

“And when she stops, she’s to be killed?”

“Not immediately. Rainbird can keep her at it awhile longer.” Cap signaled his turn onto 301. “He’ll pretend we found out. Found out that they were talking. Found out that he was giving her advice on how to handle her… her problem. Found out he had passed notes to you.”

He fell silent, but Andy didn’t need any more. He felt sick. He wondered if they had congratulated each other on how easy it was to fool a little kid, to win her affections in a lonely place and then twist her to their own purposes once they had earned her trust. When nothing else would work, just tell her that her only friend, John the orderly, was going to lose his job and maybe be prosecuted under the Ofcial Secrets Act for presuming to be her friend. Charlie would do the rest on her own. Charlie would deal with them. She would continue to cooperate.

I hope I meet this guy soon. I really do.

But there was no time to think about that now… and if things went right, he would never have to meet Rainbird at all.

“I’m slated to go to Hawaii a week from today,” Andy said.

“Yes, that’s right.”

“How?”

“By army transport plane.”

“Who did you contact to arrange that?”

“Puck,” Cap said immediately.

“Who’s Puck, Captain Hollister?”

“Major Victor Puckeridge,” Cap said. “At Andrews.”

“Andrews Air Force Base?”

“Yes, of course.”

“He’s a friend?”

“We play golf.” Cap smiled vaguely. “He slices.” Wonderful news, Andy thought. His head was throbbing like a rotted tooth.

“Suppose you called him this afternoon and said you wanted to move that flight up by three days?”

“Yes?” Cap said doubtfully.

“Would that present a problem? A lot of paperwork?”

“Oh, no. Puck would slice right through the paperwork.” The smile reappeared, slightly odd and not really happy. “He slices. Did I tell you that?”

“Yes. Yes, you did.”

“Oh. Good.”

The car hummed along at a perfectly legal fifty-five. The rain had mellowed to a steady mist. The windshield wipers clicked back and forth.

“Call him this afternoon, Cap. As soon as you get back.”

“Call Puck, yes. I was just thinking I ought to do that.”

“Tell him I’ve got to be moved on Wednesday instead of Saturday.”

Four days was not much time to recuperate three weeks would have been more like it-but things were moving rapidly to a climax now. The endgame had begun. The fact was there, and Andy, out of necessity, recognized it. He wouldn’t-couldn’t-leave Charlie in the path of this Rainbird creature any longer than he had to.

“Wednesday instead of Saturday.”

“Yes. And then you tell Puck that you’ll be coming along.”

“Coming along? I can’t-”

Andy renewed the push. It hurt him, but he pushed hard. Cap jerked in his seat. The car swerved minutely on the road, and Andy thought again that he was practically begging to start up an echo in this guy’s head.

“Coming along, yes. I’m coming along.”

“That’s right,” Andy said grimly. “Now-what sort of arrangements have you made about security?”

“No particular security arrangements,” Cap said. “You’re pretty much incapacitated by Thorazine. Also, you’re tipped over and unable to use your mental-domination ability. It has become dormant.”

“Ah, yes,” Andy said, and put a slightly shaky hand to his forehead. “Do you mean I’ll be riding the plane alone?”

“No,” Cap said immediately, “I believe I’ll come along myself.”

“Yes, but other than the two of us?”

“There will be two Shop men along, partly to act as stewards and partly to keep an eye on you. SOP, you know. Protect the investment.”

“Only two operatives are scheduled to go with us? You’re sure?”

“Yes.”

“And the flight crew, of course.”

“Yes.”

Andy looked out the window. They were halfway back now. This was the crucial part, and his head was already aching so badly that he was afraid he might forget something. If he did, the whole cardhouse would come tumbling down.

Charlie, he thought, and tried to hold on.

“Hawaii’s a long way from Virginia, Captain Hollister. Will the plane make a refueling stop?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know where?”

“No.” Cap said serenely, and Andy could have punched him in the eye.

“When you speak to…” What was his name? He groped frantically in his tired, hurt mind and retrieved it. “When you speak to Puck, find out where the plane will set down for refueling.”

“Yes, all right.”

“Just work it naturally into your conversation with him.”

“Yes, I’ll find out where it’s going to refuel by working it naturally into our conversation.” He glanced at Andy with thoughtful, dreamy eyes, and Andy found himself wondering if this man had given the order that Vicky be killed. There was a sudden urge to tell him to floor the accelerator pedal and drive into that oncoming bridge abutment. Except for Charlie. Charlie! his mind said. Hold on for Charlie. “Did I tell you that Puck slices?” Cap said fondly.

“Yes. You did.” Think! Think, dammit! Somewhere near Chicago or Los Angeles seemed the most likely. But not at a civilian airport like O'Hare or L. A. International. The plane would refuel at an airbase. That in itself presented no problem to his rag of a plan-it was one of the few things that did not-as long as he could find out where in advance.

“We’d like to leave at three in the afternoon,” he told Cap.

“Three.”

“You’ll see that this John Rainbird is somewhere else.”

“Send him away?” Cap said hopefully, and it gave Andy a chill to realize that Cap was afraid of Rainbird-quite badly afraid.

“Yes. It doesn’t matter where.”

“San Diego?”

“All right.”

Now. Last lap. He was just going to make it; up ahead a green reflectorized sign pointed the way to the Longmont exit. Andy reached into the front pocket of his pants and pulled out a folded slip of paper. For the moment, he only held it in his lap, between first and second fingers.

“You’re going to tell the two Shop guys who are going to Hawaii with us to meet us at the airbase,” he said. “They’re to meet us at Andrews. You and I will go to Andrew just as we are now.”

“Yes.”

Andy drew in a deep breath. “But my daughter will be with us.”

“Her?” Cap showed real agitation for the first time. “Her?” She’s dangerous! She can’t-we can’t-”

“She wasn’t dangerous until you people started playing with her,” Andy said harshly. “Now she is coming with us and you are not to contradict me again, do you understand that?”

This time the car’s swerve was more pronounced, and Cap moaned. “She’ll be coming with us,” he agreed. “I won’t contradict you anymore. That hurts. That hurts.” But not as much as it hurts me.

Now his voice seemed to be coming from far away, through the blood-soaked net of pain that was pulling tighter and tighter around his brain. “You’re going to give her this,” Andy said, and passed the folded note to Cap. “Give it to her today, but do it carefully, so that no one suspects.”

Cap tucked the note into his breast pocket. Now they were approaching the Shop; on their left were the double runs of electrified fence. Warning signs flashed past every fifty yards or so.

“Repeat back the salient points,” Andy said.

Cap spoke quickly and concisely-the voice of a man who had been trained in the act of recall since the days of his military-academy boyhood.

“I will arrange for you to leave for Hawaii on an army transport plane on Wednesday instead of Saturday. I will be coming with you; your daughter will also accompany us. The two Shop agents who will also be coming will meet us at Andrews. I will find out from Puck where the plane will be refueling. I’ll do that when I call him to change the flight date. I have a note to give your daughter. I’ll give it to her after I finish talking to Puck, and I will do it in a way which will arouse no undue suspicion. And I will arrange to have John Rainbird in San Diego next Wednesday. I believe that covers the waterfront.”

“Yes,” Andy said, “I believe it does.” He leaned back against the seat and closed his eyes. Jumbled fragments of past and present flew through his mind, aimlessly, jackstraws blown in the high wind. Did this really have a chance to work, or was he only buying death for both of them? They knew what Charlie could do now; they’d had firsthand experience. If it went wrong, they would finish their trip in the cargo bay of that army transport plane. In two boxes.

Cap paused at the guardbooth, rolled down his window, and handed over a plastic card, which the man on duty slipped into a computer terminal.

“Go ahead, sir,” he said.

Cap drove on.

“One last thing, Captain Hollister. You’re going to forget all about this. You’ll do each of the things we’ve discussed perfectly spontaneously. You’ll discuss them with no one.” “All right.” Andy nodded. It wasn’t all right, but it would have to do. The chances of setting up an echo here were extraordinarily high because he had been forced to push the man terribly hard and also because the instructions he had given Cap would go completely against the grain. Cap might be able to bring everything off simply by virtue of his position here. He might not. Right now Andy was too tired and in too much pain to care much.

He was barely able to get out of the car; Cap had to take his arm to steady him. He was dimly aware that the cold autumn drizzle felt good against his face.

The two men from the Biscayne looked at him with a kind of cold disgust. One of them was Don Jules. Jules was wearing a blue sweatshirt that read

Get a good look at the stoned fat man, Andy thought groggily. He was close to tears again, and his breath began to catch and hitch in his throat. You get a good look now, because if the fat guy gets away this time, he’s going to blow this whole rotten cesspool right out of the swamp.

“There, there,” Cap said, and patted him on the shoulder with patronizing and perfunctory sympathy. Just do your job, Andy thought, holding on grimly against the tears; he would not cry in front of them again, none of them. Just do your job, you son of a bitch.

6

Back in his apartment, Andy stumbled to his bed, hardly aware of what he was doing, and fell asleep. He lay like a dead thing for the next six hours, while blood seeped from a minute rupture in his brain and a number of brain cells grew white and died.

When he woke up, it was ten o'clock in the evening. The headache was still raging. His hands went to his face. The numb spots-one below his left eye, one on his left cheekbone, and one just below the jawbone-were back. This time they were bigger.

I can’t push it much further without killing myself, he thought, and knew it was true. But he would hold on long enough to see this through, to give Charlie her chance, if he possibly could. Somehow he would hold on that long.

He went to the bathroom and got a glass of water. Then he lay down again, and after a long time, sleep returned. His last waking thought was that Charlie must have read his note by now.

7

Cap Hollister had had an extremely busy day since getting back from Herm Pynchot’s funeral. He had no more than got settled into his office when his secretary brought him an interdepartmental memo marked URGENT. It was from Pat Hockstetter. Cap told her to get him Vic Puckeridge on the phone and settled back to read the memo. I should get out more often, he thought; it aerates the brain cells or something. It had occurred to him on the ride back that there was really no sense waiting a whole week to ship McGee off to Maui; this Wednesday would be plenty late enough.

Then the memo captured his whole attention.

It was miles from Hockstetter’s usual cool and rather baroque style; in fact, it was couched in nearly hysterical purple prose, and Cap thought with some amusement that the kid must have really hit Hockstetter with the chicken-stick. Hit him hard.

What it came down to was that Charlie had dug in her heels. It had come sooner than they had expected, that was all. Maybe-no, probably-even sooner than Rainbird had expected. Well, they would let it lie for a few days and then… then…

His train of throught broke up. His eyes took on a faraway, slightly puzzled cast. In his mind he saw a golf club, a five iron, whistling down and connecting solidly with a Spalding ball. He could hear that low, whistling whhoooop sound. Then the ball was gone, high and white against the blue sky. But it was slicing… slicing…

His brow cleared. What had he been thinking of? It wasn’t like him to wander off the subject like that. Charlie had dug in her heels; that was what he had been thinking. Well, that was all right. Nothing to get bent out of shape about. They would let her alone for a while, until the weekend maybe, and then they could use Rainbird on her. She would light a lot of fires to keep Rainbird out of dutch.

His hand stole to his breast pocket and felt the small paper folded in there. In his mind he heard the soft swinging sound of a golf club again; it seemed to reverberate in the office. But now it was not a whhoooop sound. It was a quiet ssssssss, almost the sound of a… a snake. That was unpleasant. He had always found snakes unpleasant, ever since earliest childhood. With an effort, he swept all this. foolishness about snakes and golf clubs from his mind. Perhaps the funeral had upset him more than he had thought.

The intercom buzzed and his secretary told him Puck was on line one. Cap picked up the phone and after some small talk asked Puck if there would be a problem if they decided to move the Maui shipment up from Saturday to Wednesday. Puck checked and said he saw no problem there at all.

“Say, around three in the afternoon?” “No problem,” Puck repeated. “Just don’t move it up anymore, or we’ll be in the bucket. This place is getting worse than the freeway at rush hour.” “No, this is solid,” Cap said. “And here’s something else: I’m going along. But you keep that under your hat, okay?” Puck burst into hearty baritone laughter. “A little sun, fun, and grass skirts?”

“Why not?” Cap agreed. “I’m escorting a valuable piece of cargo. I could justify myself in front of a Senate committee if I had to, I think. And I haven’t had a real vacation since 1973. The goddamned Arabs and their oil bitched up the last week of that one.”

“I’ll keep it to myself,” Puck agreed. “You going to play some golf while you’re out there? I know of at least two great courses on Maui.” Cap fell silent. He looked thoughtfully at the top of his desk, through it. The phone sagged away from his ear slightly.

“Cap? You there?”

Low and definite and ominous in this small, cozy study: Sssssssssss

“Shit, I think we been cut off,” Puck muttered. “Cap? Ca-”

“You still slicing the ball, old buddy?” Cap asked.

Puck laughed. “You kidding? When I die, they’re going to bury me in the fucking rough. Thought I lost you for a minute there.” “I’m right here,” Cap said. “Puck, are there snakes in Hawaii?” Now it was Puck’s turn to pause. “Say again?” “Snakes. Poisonous snakes.”

“I… gee, damn if I know. I can check it for you if it’s important…” Puck’s dubious tone seemed to imply that Cap employed about five thousand spooks to check just such things.

“No, that’s okay,” Cap said. He held the telephone firmly against his ear again. “Just thinking out loud, I guess. Maybe I’m getting old.”

“Not you, Cap. There’s too much vampire in you.”

“Yeah, maybe. Thanks, goodbuddy.”

“No trouble at all. Glad you’re getting away for a bit. Nobody deserves it more than you, after the last year you’ve put in.” He meant Georgia, of course; he didn’t know about the McGees. Which meant, Cap thought wearily, that he didn’t know the half of it.

He started to say good-bye and then added, “By the way, Puck, where will that plane be stopping to refuel? Any idea?”

“Durban, Illinois,” Puck said promptly. “Outside Chicago.”

Cap thanked him, said good-bye, hung up. His fingers went to the note in his pocket again and touched it. His eye fell on Hockstetter’s memo. It sounded as if the girl had been pretty upset, too. Perhaps it wouldn’t hurt if he went down and spoke to her, stroked her a little.

He leaned forward and thumbed the intercom.

“Yes, Cap?”

“I’ll be going downstairs for a while,” he said. “I should be back in thirty minutes or so.”

“Very good.”

He got up and left the study. As he did so, his hand stole to his breast pocket and felt the note there again.

8

Charlie lay on her bed fifteen minutes after Cap left, her mind in a total whirl of dismay, fear, and confused speculation. She literally didn’t know what to think.

He had come at quarter of five, half an hour ago, and had introduced himself as Captain Hollister (“but please just call me Cap; everyone does”). He had a kindly, shrewd face that reminded her a little of the illustrations in The Wind in the Willows. It was a face she had seen somewhere recently, but she hadn’t been able to place it until Cap jogged her memory. It had been he who had taken her back to her rooms after the first test, when the man in the white suit had bolted, leaving the door open. She had been so much in a fog of shock, guilt, and-yes-exhilarated triumph that it was really no wonder she hadn’t been able to place his face. Probably she could have been escorted back to her apartment by Gene Simmons of Kiss without noticing it.

He talked in a smooth, convincing way that she immediately mistrusted.

He told her Hockstetter was concerned because she had declared the testing at an end until she saw her father. Charlie agreed that was so and would say no more, maintaining a stubborn silence… mostly out of fear. If you discussed your reasons for things with a smooth talker like this Cap, he would strip those reasons away one by one until it seemed that black was white and white black. The bare demand was better. Safer.

But he had surprised her.

“If that’s the way you feel, okay,” he had said. The expression of surprise on her face must have been slightly comical, because he chuckled. “It will take a bit of arranging, but-“At the words “a bit of arranging,” her face closed up again. “No more fires,” she said. “No more tests. Even if it takes you ten years to ‘arrange” it.”

“Oh, I don’t think it will take that long,” he had said, not offended. “It’s just that I have people to answer to, Charlie. And a place like this runs on paperwork. But you don’t have to light so much as a candle while I’m setting it up.”

“Good,” she said stonily, not believing him, not believing he was going to set anything up. “Because I won’t.” “I think I ought to be able to arrange it… by Wednesday. Yes, by Wednesday, for sure.”

He had fallen suddenly silent. His head cocked slightly, as if he were listening to something just a bit too high-pitched for her to hear. Charlie looked at him, puzzled, was about to ask if he was all right, and then closed her mouth with a snap. There was” something… something almost familiar about the way he was sitting.

“Do you really think I could see him on Wednesday?” she asked timidly.

“Yes, I think so,” Cap said. He shifted in his chair and sighed heavily. His eye caught hers and he smiled a puzzled little smile… also familiar. Apropos of nothing at all, he said: “Your dad plays a mean game of golf, I hear.”

Charlie blinked. So far as she knew, her father had never touched a golf club in his life. She got ready to say so… and then it came together in her mind and a dizzying burst of bewildered excitement ran through her.

(Mr. Merle! He’s like Mr. Merle!)

Mr. Merle had been one of Daddy’s executives when they were in New York. Just a little man with light-blond hair and pink-rimmed glasses and a sweet, shy smile. He had come to get more confidence, like the rest of them. He worked in an insurance company or a bank or something. And Daddy had been very worried about Mr. Merle for a while. It was a “rick-o-shay.” It came from using the push. It had something to do with a story Mr. Merle had read once. The push Daddy used to give Mr. Merle more confidence made him remember that story in a bad way, a way that was making him sick. Daddy said the “rick-o-shay” came from that story and it was bouncing around in Mr. Merle’s head like a tennis ball, only instead of finally stopping the way a bouncing tennis ball would, the memory of that story would get stronger and stronger until it made Mr. Merle very sick. Only Charlie had got the idea that Daddy was afraid it might do more than make Mr. Merle sick; he was afraid it might kill him. So he had kept Mr. Merle after the others left one night and pushed him into believing he had never read that story at all. And after that, Mr. Merle was all right. Daddy told her once that he hoped Mr. Merle would never go to see a movie called The Deer Hunter, but he didn’t explain why.

But before Daddy fixed him up, Mr. Merle had looked like Cap did now.

She was suddenly positive that her father had pushed this man, and the excitement in her was like a tornado. After hearing nothing about him except for the sort of general reports John sometimes brought her, after not seeing him or knowing where he was, it was in a strange way as if her father were suddenly in this room with her, telling her it was all right and that he was near.

Cap suddenly stood up. “Well, I’ll be going now. But I’ll be seeing you, Charlie. And don’t worry.”

She wanted to tell him not to go, to tell her about her dad, where he was, if he was okay… but her tongue was rooted to the bottom of her mouth.

Cap went to the door, then paused. “Oh, almost forgot.” He crossed the room to her, took a folded piece of paper from his breast pocket, and handed it to her. She took it numbly, looked at it, and put it in her robe pocket. “And when you’re out riding that horse, you watch out for snakes,” he said confidentially. “If a horse sees a snake, he is going to bolt. Every time. He’ll-”

He broke off, raised a hand to his temple, and rubbed it. For a moment, he looked old and distracted. Then he shook his head a little, as if dismissing the thought. He bid her good-bye and left.

Charlie stood there for a long moment after he was gone. Then she took out the note, unfolded it, read what was written there and everything changed.

9

Charlie, love-

First thing: When you finish reading this, flush it down the toilet, okay?

Second thing: If everything goes the way I’m planning-the way I hope-we’ll be out of here next Wednesday. The man who gave you this note is on our team, although he doesn’t know he is… get it?

Third thing: I want you to be in the stables on Wednesday afternoon at one o'clock. I don’t care how you do it-make another fire for them if that’s what it takes. But be there.

Fourth, most important thing: Don’t trust this man John Rainbird. This may upset you. I know you have trusted him. But he is a very dangerous man, Charlie. No way anyone’s going to blame you for your trust in him-Hollister says he has been convincing enough to win an Academy Award. But know this: he was in charge of the men who took us prisoner at Granther’s place. I hope this doesn’t upset you too much, but knowing how you are, it probably will. It’s no fun to find out that someone has been using you for his own purposes. Listen, Charlie: if Rainbird comes around-and he probably will-it is very important for him to think your feelings toward him haven’t changed. He will be out of our way on Wednesday afternoon.

We are going to Los Angeles or Chicago, Charlie, and I think I know a way to arrange a press conference for us. I have an old friend named Quincey I’m counting on to help us, and I believe-I must believe-that he will come through for us if I can get in touch with him. A press conference would mean that the whole country would know about us. They may still want to keep us someplace, but we can be together. I hope you still want that as much as I do.

This wouldn’t be so bad except that they want you to make fires for all the wrong reasons. If you have any doubts at all about running again, remember it is for the last time… and that it is what your mother would have wanted.

I miss you, Charlie, and love you lots. Dad.

10

John? John in charge of the men that shot her and her father with tranquilizer darts?

John?

She rolled her head from side to side. The feeling of desolation in her, the heartbreak, seemed too great to be contained. There was no answer to this cruel dilemma. If she believed her father, she had to believe that John had been tricking her all along only to get her to agree to their tests. If she continued to believe in John, then the note she had crumpled and flushed down the toilet was a lie with her father’s name signed to it. Either way, the hurt, the cost, was enormous. Was this what being grownup was about? Dealing with that hurt? That cost? If it was, she hoped she would die young.

She remembered looked up from Necromancer that first time and seeing John’s smile… something in that smile that she didn’t like. She remembered that she had never got any real feeling from him, as if he were closed off, or… or…

She tried to shunt the thought aside.

(or dead inside)

but it would not be shunted.

But he wasn’t like that. He wasn’t. His terror in the blackout. His story about what those Cong had done to him. Could that be a lie? Could it, with the ruined map of his face to back up the tale?

Her head went back and forth on the pillow, back and forth, back and forth, in an endless gesture of negation. She did not want to think about it, did not, did not.

But couldn’t help it.

Suppose… suppose they had made the blackout happen? Or suppose it had just happened… and he had used it? (NO! NO! NO! NO!)

And yet her mind was now out of her conscious control, and it circled this maddening, horrifying patch of nettles with a kind of inexorable, cold determination. She was a bright girl, and she handled her chain of logic carefully, one bead at a time, telling it as a bitter penitent must tell the terrible beads of utter confession and surrender.

She remembered a TV show she had seen once, it had been on Starsky and Hutch. They put this cop into jail in the same cell with this bad guy who knew all about a robbery. They had called the cop pretending to be a jailbird a “ringer.”

Was John Rainbird a ringer?

Her father said he was. And why would her father lie to her?

Who do you believe in? John or Daddy? Daddy or John?

No, no, no, her mind repeated steadily, monotonously… and to no effect. She was caught in a torture of doubt that no eight-year-old girl should have to stand, and when sleep came, the dream came with it. Only this time she saw the face of the silhouette, which stood to block the light.

11

“All right, what is it?” Hockstetter asked grumpily.

His tone indicated that it had better be pretty goddam good. He had been home watching James Bond on the Sunday Night Movie when the phone rang and a voice told him that they had a potential problem with the little girl. Over an open line, Hockstetter didn’t dare ask what the problem was. He just went as he was, in a pair of paint-splattered jeans and a tennis shirt.

He had come frightened, chewing a Rolaid to combat the boil of sour acid in his stomach. He had kissed his wife good-bye, answering her raised eyebrows by saying it was a slight problem with some of the equipment and he would be right back. He wondered what she would say if she knew the “slight problem” could kill him at any moment.

Standing here now, looking into the ghostly infrared monitor, they used to watch Charlie when the lights were out, he wished again that this was over and the little girl out of the way. He had never bargained for this when the whole thing was just an academic problem outlined in a series of blue folders. The truth was the burning cinderblock wall; the truth was spot temperatures of thirty thousand degrees or more; the truth was Brad Hyuck talking about whatever forces fired the engine of the universe; and the truth was that he was very scared. He felt as if he were sitting on top of an unstable nuclear reactor.

The man on duty, Neary, swung around when Hockstetter came in. “Cap came down to visit her around five,” he said. “She turned her nose up at supper. Went to bed early.” Hockstetter looked into the monitor. Charlie was tossing restlessly on top of her bed, fully dressed. “She looks like maybe she’s having a nightmare.” “One, or a whole series of them,” Neary said grimly. “I called because the temperature in there has gone up three degrees in the last hour.” “That’s not much.” “It is when a room’s temperature-controlled the way that one is. Not much doubt that she’s doing it. Hockstetter considered this, biting on a knuckle. “I think someone should go in there and wake her up,” Neary said, finally drifting down to the bottom line. “Is that what you got me down here for?” Hockstetter cried. “To wake up a kid and give her a glass of warm milk?” “I didn’t want to exceed my authority,” Neary said stonily.

“No.” Hockstetter said, and had to bite down on the rest of the words. The little girl would have to be wakened if the temperature went much higher, and there was always a chance that if she was frightened enough, she might strike out at the first person she saw upon waking. After all, they had been busy removing the checks and balances on her pyrokinetic ability and had been quite successful.

“Where’s Rainbird?” he asked. Neary shrugged. “Whipping his weasel in Winnipeg, for all I know. But as far as she’s concerned, he’s of duty. I think she’d be pretty suspicious if he showed up n-“The digital thermometer inset on Neary’s control board flicked over another degree, hesitated, and then flicked over two more in quick succession. “Somebody’s got to go in there,” Neary said, and now his voice was a bit unsteady. “It’s seventy-four in there now. What if she blows sky-high?” Hockstetter tried to think what to do, but his brain seemed frozen. He was sweating freely now, but his mouth had gone as dry as a woolly sock. He wanted to be back home, tipped back in his La-Z-Boy, watching James Bond go after SMERSH or whatever the hell it was. He didn’t want to be here. He didn’t want to be looking at the red numbers under the little square of glass, waiting for them to suddenly blur upwards in tens, thirties, hundreds, as they had when the cinderblock wall

Think! he screamed at himself. What do you do? What do you-

“She just woke up,” Neary said softly.

They both stared intently at the monitor. Charlie had swung her legs over onto the floor and was sitting with her head down, her palms on her cheeks, her hair obscuring her face. After a moment she got up and went into the bathroom, face blank, eyes mostly closed-more asleep than awake, Hockstetter guessed.

Neary flicked a switch and the bathroom monitor came on. Now the picture was clear and sharp in the light of the fluorescent bar. Hockstetter expected her to urinate, but Charlie just stood inside the door, looking at the toilet.

“Oh Mother of Mary, look at that,” Neary murmured.

The water in the toilet bowl had begun to steam slightly. This went on for more than a minute (one-twenty-one in Neary’s log), and then Charlie went to the toilet, flushed it, urinated, flushed it again, drank two glasses of water, and went back to bed. This time her sleep seemed easier, deeper. Hockstetter glanced at the thermometer and saw it had dropped four degrees. As he watched, it dropped another degree, to sixty-nine-just one degree above the suite’s normal temperature.

He remained with Neary until after midnight.

“I’m going home to bed. You’ll get this written up, won’t you?”

“That’s what I get paid for,” Neary said stolidly.

Hockstetter went home. The next day he wrote a memo suggesting that any further gains in knowledge that further testing might provide ought to be balanced against the potential hazards, which in his opinion were growing too fast for comfort.

12

Charlie remembered little of the night. She remembered being hot, getting up, getting rid of the heat. She remembered the dream but only vaguely-a sense of freedom.

(up ahead was the light-the end of the forest, open land where she and Necromancer would ride forever)

mingled with a sense of fear and a sense of loss. It had been his face, it had been John’s face, all along. And perhaps she had known it. Perhaps she had known that

(the woods are burning don’t hurt the horses o please don’t hurt the horses)

all along.

When she woke up the next morning, her fear, confusion, and desolation had begun their perhaps inevitable change into a bright, hard gem of anger.

He better be out of the way on Wednesday, she thought. He just better. If it’s true about what he did, he better not come near me or Daddy on Wednesday.

13

Late that morning Rainbird came in, rolling his wagon of cleaning products, mops, sponges, and rags. His white orderly’s uniform flapped softly around him.

“Hi, Charlie,” he said.

Charlie was on the sofa, looking at a picture book. She glanced up, her face pale and unsmiling in that first moment… cautious. The skin seemed stretched too tightly over her cheekbones. Then she smiled. But it was not, Rainbird thought, her usual smile.

“Hello, John.”

“You don’t look so great this morning, Charlie, you should forgive me for sayin.”

“I didn’t sleep very well.”

“Oh yeah?” He knew she hadn’t. That fool Hockstetter was almost foaming at the mouth because she’d popped the temperature five or six degrees in her sleep. “I’m sorry to hear that. Is it your dad?”

“I guess so.” She closed her book and stood up. “I think I’ll go and lie down for a while. I just don’t feel like talking or anything.”

“Sure. Gotcha.”

He watched her go, and when the bedroom door had clicked shut, he went into the kitchen to fill his floorbucket. Something about the way she had looked at him. The smile. He didn’t like it. She’d had a bad night, yes, okay. Everyone has them from time to time, and the next morning you snap at your wife or stare right through the paper or whatever. Sure. But… something inside had begun to jangle an alarm. It had been weeks since she had looked at him that way. She hadn’t come to him this morning, eager and glad to see him, and he didn’t like that, either. She had kept her own space today. It disturbed him. Maybe it was just the aftermath of a bad night, and maybe the bad dreams of the night before had just been caused by something she ate, but it disturbed him all the same.

And there was something else nibbling at him: Cap had been down to see her late yesterday afternoon. He had never done that before.

Rainbird set down his bucket and hooked the mop squeegee over its rim. He dunked the mop, wrung it out, and began to mop the floor in long, slow strokes. His mauled face was calm and at rest.

Have you been putting a knife in my back, Cap? Figure you’ve got enough? Or maybe you just went chickenshit on me.

If that last was true, then he had badly misjudged Cap. Hockstetter was one thing. Hockstetter’s experience with Senate committees and subcommittees was almost zilch; a piddle here and a piddle there. Corroborative stuff: He could allow himself the luxury of indulging his fear. Cap couldn’t. Cap would know there was no such thing as sufficient evidence, especially when you were dealing with something as potentially explosive (pun certainly intended) as Charlie McGee. And it wasn’t just funding Cap would be asking for; when he got before that closed session, the most dread and mystic of all bureaucratic phrases would fall from his lips: long-term funding. And in the background, lurking unspoken but potent, the implication of eugenics. Rainbird guessed that in the end, Cap would find it impossible to avoid having a group of senators down here to watch Charlie perform. Maybe they should be allowed to bring their kids, Rainbird thought, mopping and rinsing. Better than the trained dolphins at Sea World.

Cap would know he needed all the help he could get.

So why had he come to see her last night? Why was he rocking the boat?

Rainbird squeezed his mop and watched dirty gray water run back into the bucket. He looked through the open kitchen door at the closed door of Charlie’s bedroom. She had shut him out and he didn’t like that.

It made him very, very nervous.

14

On that early October Monday night, a moderate windstorm came up from the Deep South, sending black clouds flying raggedly across a full moon that lolled pregnantly just above the horizon. The first leaves fell, rattling across the neatly manicured lawns and grounds for the indefatigable corps of groundskeepers to remove in the morning. Some of them swirled into the duckpond, where they floated like small boats. Autumn had come to Virginia again.

In his quarters, Andy was watching TV and still getting over his headache. The numb spots on his face had diminished in size but had not disappeared. He could only hope he would be ready by Wednesday afternoon. If things worked as he had planned, he could keep the number of times he would have to actively push to a bare minimum. If Charlie had got his note, and if she was able to meet him at the stables across the way… then she would become his push, his lever, his weapon. Who was going to argue with him when he had the equivalent of a nuclear rifle in his possession?

Cap was at home in Longmont Hills. As on the night Rainbird had visited him, he had a snifter of brandy, and music was coming from the stereo at low volume. Chopin tonight. Cap was sitting on the couch. Across the room, leaning below a pair of van Gogh prints, was his old and scuffed golf bag. He had fetched it from the basement, where a rickrack of sports equipment had built up over the twelve years he had lived here with Georgia, while not on assignment somewhere else in the world. He had brought the golf bag into the living room because he couldn’t seem to get golf off his mind lately. Golf, or snakes.

He had brought the golf bag up meaning to take out each of the irons and his two putters and look them over, touch them, see if that wouldn’t ease his mind. And then one of the irons had seemed to… well, it was funny (ridiculous, in fact), but one of the irons had seemed to move. As if it wasn’t a golf club at all but a snake, a poison snake that had crawled in there-

Cap dropped the bag against the wall and scuttled away. Half a glass of brandy had stopped the minute shakes in his hands. By the time he finished the glass, he might be able to tell himself they had never trembled at all.

He started the glass on its way to his mouth and then halted. There it was again! Movement… or just a trick of his eyes?

Trick of his eyes, most definitely. There were no snakes in his damned golf bag. Just clubs he hadn’t been using enough lately. Too busy. And he was a pretty good golfer, too. No Nicklaus or Tom Watson, hell no, but he could keep it on the course. Not always slicing, like Puck. Cap didn’t like to slice the ball, because then you were in the rough, the tall grass, and sometimes there were-

Get hold of yourself. Just get hold of yourself. Is you still the Captain or is you ain’t?

The trembling was back in his fingers again. What had done this? What in God’s name had done this? Sometimes it seemed that there was an explanation, a perfectly reasonable one-something, perhaps, that someone had said and he just… couldn’t remember. But at other times

(like now Jesus Christ like now) it felt as if he were on the verge of a nervous breakdown. It felt as if his brain was being pulled apart like warm tafy by these alien thoughts he couldn’t get rid of.

(is you the Captain or is you ain’t?)

Cap suddenly threw his brandy glass into the fireplace, where it shattered like a bomb. A strangled sound-a sob-escaped his tight throat like something rotten that had to be sicked up whatever the miserable cost. Then he made himself cross the room (and he went at a drunken, stiltlike lurch), grab the strap of his golf bag (again something seemed to move and shift in there… to shiffffft… and hissssss) and slip it over his shoulder. He hauled it back into the shadow-draped cavern of the cellar, going on nothing but guts, drops of sweat perched huge and clear on his forehead. His face was frozen in a grimace of fear and determination.

Nothing there but golf clubs, nothing there but golf clubs, his mind chanted over and over again, and at every step of the way he expected something long and brown, something with beady black eyes and small sharp fangs dripping poison, to slither out of the bag and jab twin hypos of death into his neck.

Back in his own living room he felt much better. Except for a nagging headache, he felt much better.

He could think coherently again…

Almost.

He got drunk.

And in the morning he felt better again.

For a while.

15

Rainbird spent that windy Monday night gathering information. Disturbing information. First he went in and talked to Neary, the man who had been watching the monitors when Cap paid his visit to Charlie the night before.

“I want to see the videotapes,” Rainbird said.

Neary didn’t argue. He set Rainbird up in a small room down the hall with the Sunday tapes and a Sony deck complete with close-up and freeze-frame features. Neary was glad to be rid of him and only hoped that Rainbird wouldn’t be coming back and wanting something else. The girl was bad enough. Rainbird, in his own reptilian way, was somehow worse.

The tapes were three-hour Scotch jobs, marked from 0000 to 0300 and so on. Rainbird found the one with Cap on it and watched it four times, not moving except to rewind the tape at the point where Cap. said; “Well, I’ll be going now. But I’ll be seeing you, Charlie. And don’t worry.”

But there was plenty in that tape that worried John Rainbird. He. didn’t like the way Cap looked. He seemed to have got older; at times while he was talking to Charlie he seemed to lose the thread of what he was saying, like a man on the edge of senility. His eyes had a vague, bemused look that was uncannily similar to the look Rainbird associated with the onset of combat fatigue, which a comrade-in-arms had once aptly dubbed The Brain Squitters and Trots.

I think I ought to be able to arrange it… by Wednesday. Yes, by Wednesday, for sure.

Now why in the name of God had he said that?

Setting up an expectation like that in the kid’s mind was the surest way Rainbird could think of to blow further testing right out of the water. The obvious conclusion was that Cap was playing his own little game-intriguing in the best Shop tradition.

But Rainbird didn’t believe it. Cap didn’t look like a man engaged in an intrigue. He looked like a man who was profoundly fucked up. That remark about Charlie’s father playing golf, for instance. That had come right out of left field. It bore on nothing they had said before and nothing they said afterward. Rainbird toyed briefly with the idea that it was some sort of code phrase, but that was patently ridiculous. Cap knew that everything that went on in Charlie’s rooms was monitored and recorded, subject to almost constant review. He was capable of disguising a trip phrase better than that. A remark about golf. It just hung there, irrelevant and puzzling.

And then there was the last thing. Rainbird played it over and over. Cap pauses. Oh, almost forgot. And then he hands her something that she looks at curiously and then puts away in the pocket of her robe.

With Rainbird’s finger on the buttons of the Sony VCR, Cap said Oh, almost forgot half a dozen times. He passed the thing to her half a dozen times. At first Rainbird thought it was a stick of gum, and then he used the freeze-frame and zoom gadgets. That convinced him that it was, very likely, a note.

Cap, what the fuck are you up to?

16

He spent the rest of that night and the early hours of Tuesday morning at a computer console, calling up every scrap of information he could think of on Charlie McGee, trying to make out some kind of pattern. And there was nothing. His head began to ache from eyestrain.

He was getting up to shut of the lights when a sudden thought, a totally off-the-wall connection, occurred to him. It had to do not with Charlie but with the portly, drugged-out cipher that was her father.

Pynchot. Pynchot had been in charge of Andy McGee, and last week Herman Pynchot had killed himself in one of the most grisly ways Rainbird could imagine. Obviously unbalanced. Crackers. Toys in the attic. Cap takes Andy to the funeralmaybe a little strange when you really stopped to think about it, but in no way remarkable.

The Cap starts to act a little weird-talking about golf and passing notes.

That’s ridiculous. He’s tipped over.

Rainbird stood with his hand on the light switches. The computer-console screen glowed a dull green, the color of a freshly dug emerald.

Who says he’s tipped over? Him?

There was another strange thing here as well, Rainbird suddenly realized. Pynchot had given up on Andy, had decided to send him to the Maui compound. If there was nothing Andy could do that would demonstrate what Lot Six was capable of, there was no reason to keep him around at all… and it would be safer to separate him from Charlie. Fine. But then Pynchot abruptly changes his mind and decides to schedule another run of tests.

Then Pynchot decides to clean out the garbage disposal… while it’s still running.

Rainbird walked back to the computer console. He paused, thinking, than tapped HELLO COMPUTER/QUERY STATUS ANDREW MCGEE 14112/FURTHER TESTING/MAUI INSTALLATION/Q4

PROCESS, the computer flashed. And a moment later: HELLO RAINBIRD/ANDREW MCGEE 14112 NO FURTHER TESTING/AUTHORIZATION/ “STARLING'/SCHEDULED DEPARTURE FOR MAUI 1500 HOURS OCTOBER 9/AUTHORIZATION “STARLING'/ANDREWS AFB-DURBAN (ILL) AFBKALAMI AIRFIELD (HI)/BREAK

Rainbird glanced at his watch. October 9 was Wednesday. Andy was leaving Longmont for Hawaii tomorrow afternoon. Who said so? Authorization Starling said so, and that was Cap himself. But this was the first Rainbird knew of it.

His fingers danced over the keys again.

QUERY PROBABILITY ANDREW MCGEE 14112/SUPPOSED MENTAL DOMINATION ABILITY/CROSS-REF HERMON PYNCHOT

He had to pause to look up Pynchot’s code number in the battered and sweat-stained code book he had folded into his back pocket before coming down here.

14409 Q4

PROCESS, the computer replied, and then remained blank so long that Rainbird began to think that he had mis-programmed and would end up with nothing but a “609” for his trouble.

Then the computer flashed ANDREW MCGEE 14112/MENTAL DOMINATION PROBABILITY 35%/CROSS-REF HERMAN PYNCHOT/BREAK

Thirty-five percent?

How was that possible?

All right, Rainbird thought. Let’s leave Pynchot out of the goddam equation and see what happens.

He tapped out QUERY PROBABILITY ANDREW MCGEE 14112/SUPPOSED MENTAL DOMINATION ABILITY Q4

PROCESS, the computer flashed, and this time its response came within a space of fifteen seconds. ANDREW MCGEE 14112/MENTAL DOMINATION PROBABILITY 2%/ BREAK

Rainbird leaned back and closed his good eye and felt a kind of triumph through the sour thud in his head. He had asked the important questions backward, but that was the price humans paid for their intuitive leaps, leaps a computer knew nothing about, even though it had been programmed to say “Hello,” “Good-bye,” “I am sorry [programmer’s] name,” “That is too bad,” and “Oh shit.”

The computer didn’t believe there was much of a probability Andy had retained his mentaldomination ability… until you added in the Pynchot factor. Then the percent jumped halfway to the moon.

He tapped QUERY WHY SUPPOSED MENTAL DOMINATION ABILITY ANDREW MCGEE 14112 (PROBABILITY) RISES FROM 2% to 35% WHEN CROSS-REFERENCED W/HERMAN PYNCHOT 14409 Q4

PROCESS, the computer answered, and then: HERMAN PYNCHOT 14409 ADJUDGED SUICIDE/ PROBABILITY TAKES INTO ACCOUNT ANDREW MCGEE 14112 MAY HAVE CAUSED SUICIDE/ MENTAL DOMINATION/BREAK

There it was, right here in the banks of the biggest and most sophisticated computer in the Western Hemisphere. Only waiting for someone to ask it the right questions.

Suppose I feed it what I suspect about Cap as a certainty? Rainbird wondered, and decided to go ahead and do it. He dragged out his code book again and looked up Cap’s number.

FILE, he tapped. CAPTAIN JAMES HOLLISTER 16040/ATTENDED FUNERAL

OF HERMAN PYNCHOT 14409 W/ANDREW MCGEE 14112 F4

FILED, the computer returned.

FILE, Rainbird tapped back. CAPTAIN JAMES HOLLISTER 16040/CURRENTLY SHOWING SIGNS OF GREAT MENTAL STRESS F4

609, the computer returned. It apparently didn’t know “mental stress” from “Shinola.”

“Bite my bag,” Rainbird muttered, and tried again.

FILE/CAPTAIN JAMES HOLLISTER 16040/CURRENTLY BEHAVING COUNTER TO DIRECTIVES REF CHARLENE MCGEE 14111 F4 FILED

“File it, you whore,” Rainbird said. “Let’s see about this.” His fingers went back to the keys.

QUERY PROBABILITY ANDREW MCGEE 14112/ SUPPOSED MENTAL DOMINATION ABILITY/ CROSS-REF HERMAN PYNCHOT 14409/CROSS-REF CAPTAIN JAMES HOLLISTER 16040 Q4

PROCESS, the computer showed, and Rainbird sat back to wait, watching the screen. Two percent was too low. Thirty-five percent was still not betting odds. But-

The computer now flashed this: ANDREW MCGEE 14112/MENTAL DOMINATION PROBABILITY 90%/CROSS-REF HERMAN PYNCHOT 14409/CROSS-REF CAPTAIN JAMES HOLLISTER 16040 BREAK

Now it was up to ninety percent. And those were betting odds.

And two other things that John Rainbird would have bet on were, one, that what Cap handed to the girl was indeed a note to Charlie from her father and, two, that it contained some sort of escape plan.

“You dirty old son of a bitch,” John Rainbird murmured-not without admiration.

Pulling himself to the computer again, Rainbird tapped

600 GOODBYE COMPUTER 600

604 GOODBYE RAINBIRD 604

Rainbird turned off the keyboard and began to chuckle.

17

Rainbird went back to the house where he was staying and fell asleep with his clothes on. He woke up just after noon on Tuesday and called Cap to tell him he wouldn’t be in that afternoon. He had come down with a bad cold, possibly the onset of the grippe, and he didn’t want to chance passing it on to Charlie.

“Hope that won’t keep you from going to San Diego tomorrow,” Cap said briskly.

“San Diego?” “Three files,” Cap said. “Top secret. I need a courier. You’re it. Your plane leaves from Andrews at oh-seven-hundred tomorrow.”

Rainbird thought fast. This was more of Andy McGee’s work. McGee knew about him. Of course he did. That had been in the note to Charlie, along with whatever crazy escape plan McGee had concocted. And that explained why the girl had acted so strangely yesterday. Either going to Herman Pynchot’s funeral or coming back, Andy had given Cap a good hard shove and Cap had spilled his guts about everything. McGee was scheduled to fly out of Andrews tomorrow afternoon; now Cap told him that he, Rainbird was going tomorrow morning. McGee was using Cap to get him safely out of the way first. He was-

“Rainbird? Are you there?”

“I’m here,” he said. “Can you send someone else? I feel pretty punky, Cap.”

“No one I trust as well as you,” Cap replied. “This stuff is dynamite. We wouldn’t want… any snake in the grass to… to get it.”

“Did you say ‘snakes'?” Rainbird asked.

“Yes! Snakes!” Cap fairly screamed.

McGee had pushed him, all right, and some sort of slow-motion avalanche was going on inside of Cap Hollister. Rainbird suddenly had the feeling-no, the intuitive certainty-that if he refused Cap and just kept hammering away, Cap would blow up… the way

Pynchot had blown up.

Did he want to do that?

He decided he did not.

“All right,” he said. “I’ll be on the plane. Oh-seven-hundred. And all the goddam antibiotics I can swallow. You’re a bastard, Cap.”

“I can prove my parentage beyond a shadow of a doubt,” Cap said, but the badinage was forced and hollow. He sounded relieved and shaky.

“Yeah, I’ll bet.”

“Maybe you’ll get in a round of golf while you’re out there.”

“I don’t play-“Golf. He had mentioned golf to Charlie as well-golf and snakes. Somehow those two things were part of the weird merry-go-round McGee had set in motion in Cap’s brain. “Yes, maybe I will,” he said.

“Get to Andrews by oh-six-thirty,” Cap said, “and ask for Dick Folsom. He’s Major Puckeridge’s aide.” “All right,” Rainbird said. He had no intention of being anywhere near Andrews Air Force Base tomorrow. “Good-bye, Cap.” He hung up, then sat on the bed. He pulled on his old desert boots and started planning.

18

HELLO COMPUTER/QUERY STATUS JOHN RAINBIRD 14222/ANDREW AFB (DC) TO SAN DIEGO (CA) FINAL DESTINATION/Q9

HELLO CAP/STATUS JOHN RAINBIRD 14222/ ANDREWS (DC) TO SAN DIEGO (CA) FINAL DESTINATION/LEAVES ANDREWS AFB 0700HRS EST/STATUS OK/BREAK

Computers are children, Rainbird thought, reading this message. He had simply punched in Cap’s new code-which Cap would have been stunned to know he had and as far as the computer was concerned, he was Cap. He began to whistle tunelessly. It was just after sunset, and the Shop moved somnolently along the channels of routine.

FILE TOP SECRET

CODE PLEASE

CODE 19180, the computer returned. READY TO FILE TOP SECRET

Rainbird hesitated only briefly and then tapped

FILE/JOHN RAINBIRD 14222/ANDREWS (DC) TO SAN DIEGO (CA) FINAL DESTINATION/CANCEL/ CANCEL/CANCEL F9 (19180) FILED

Then, using the code book, Rainbird told the computer whom to inform of the cancellation: Victor Puckeridge and his aide, Richard Folsom. These new instructions would be in the midnight telex to Andrews, and the plane on which he was to hitch a ride would simply take off without him. No one would know a thing, including Cap.

600 GOODBYE COMPUTER 600

604 GOODBYE CAP 604

Rainbird pushed back from the keyboard. It would be perfectly possible to put a stop to the whole thing tonight, of course. But that would not be conclusive. The computer would back him up to a certain degree, but computer probabilities do not butter any bread. Better to stop them after the thing had begun, with everything hanging out. More amusing, too.

The whole thing was amusing. While they had been watching the girl, the man had regained his ability or had successfully hidden it from them all along. He was likely ditching his medication. Now he was running Cap as well, which means that he was only one step away from running the organization that had taken him prisoner in the first place. It really was quite funny; Rainbird had learned that endgames often were.

He didn’t know exactly what McGee had planned, but he could guess. They would go to Andrews, all right, only Charlie would be with them. Cap could get her off the Shop grounds without much trouble-Cap and probably no one else on earth. They would go to Andrews, but not to Hawaii. It might be that Andy had planned for them to disappear into Washington, D.C. Or maybe they would get off the plane at Durban and Cap would be programmed to ask for a staff car. In that case it would be Shytown they would disappear into-only to reappear in screaming Chicago Tribune headlines a few days later.

He had played briefly with the idea of not standing in their way at all. That would be amusing, too. He guessed that Cap would end up in a mental institution, raving about golf clubs and snakes in the grass, or dead by his own hand. As for the Shop: might as well imagine what would happen to an anthill with a quart jar of nitroglycerine planted beneath it. Rainbird guessed that no more than five months after the press got its first whiff” of the Strange Ordeal of the Andrew McGee Family, the Shop would cease to exist. He felt no fealty to the Shop and never had. He was his own man, crippled soldier of fortune, copper-skinned angel of death, and the status quo here didn’t mean bullrag in a pasture to him. It was not the Shop that owned his loyalty at this point.

It was Charlie.

The two of them had an appointment. He was going to look into her eyes, and she was going to look into his… and it might well be that they would step out together, in flames. The fact that he might be saving the world from some almost unimaginable armageddon by killing her had not played a part in his calculations, either. He owed the world no more fealty than he did the Shop. It was the world as much as the Shop that had cast him rootless from a closed desert society that might have been his only salvation… or, lacking that, have turned him into a harmless Sterno-guzzling Injun Joe pumping gas at a 76 station or selling fake kachina dolls at a shitty little roadside stand somewhere along the highway between Flagstaff and Phoenix.

But Charlie, Charlie!

They had been locked in a long waltz of death since that endless night of darkness during the power blackout. What he had only suspected that early morning in Washington when he had done Wanless had developed into an irrefutable certainty: the girl was his. But it would be an act of love, not of destruction, because the converse was almost certainly true as well.

It was acceptable. In many ways he wanted to die. And to die at her hands, in her flames, would be an act of contrition… and possibly of absolution. Once she and her father were together again, she would become a loaded gun… no, a loaded flamethrower. He would watch her and he would let the two of them get together. What would happen then? Who knew? And wouldn’t knowing spoil the fun?

19

That night Rainbird went to Washington and found a hungry lawyer who worked late hours. To this lawyer he gave three hundred dollars in small bills. And in the lawyer’s office, John Rainbird neatened his few affairs in order to be ready for the next day.