Let the Fire Fall

Chapter Fifteen

MATT and Lisa turned up at Winifred’s apartment at dusk in mid-January. Lisa was as gray as the sky, and Matt had an accumulation of beard and dirt that didn’t quite hide the bruises and cuts that covered his face. He supported Lisa with one hand and banged on Winifred’s door with the other. When she opened it, on a chain, he almost collapsed inward.

“Oh, my God!” Winifred said, softly. She hurried them inside and bolted the door again.

Matt told the story while Lisa bathed and washed her hair and dressed in one of Winifred’s robes. Only after this would she have even a cup of coffee.

“We saw how it was going to be and left home,” Matt said, sipping his third cup of coffee, savoring it this time. He had not tasted any of the food, but had gulped it down, forgetting even to chew. “Before Christmas we went into town and got a room in a hotel. I was near the hospital and it was all right for a short time. We couldn’t afford it long. Two weeks ago, when things seemed quiet again we went back. They were there. We got all the way inside the house before we realized it. They had a Listener’s Booth set up in the living room, and they shoved Lisa inside it.” Winifred looked at her quickly and Lisa ducked her head, a scarlet flush coloring her cheeks, fading swiftly leaving them whiter than before.

“They wouldn’t let her out until she confessed.”

“Confessed?” Winifred poured more coffee, trying to forget that she had only two more pounds hoarded.

“I don’t know what they wanted,” Lisa said. “I didn’t care what I told them. I could hear them beating Matt outside and I kept talking, hoping to hit the right thing so they would let us go.” She looked ashamed.

There was silence and Lisa toyed with her spoon, not looking at Winifred or Matt. Winifred said, “Then what?”

“They stripped us,” Matt said slowly. “They took us to the bedroom and forced us to do… things. They had cameras.”

“Blackmail?” Winifred asked, mystified.

“More than that,” Matt said. “There are laws in forty-seven of the states forbidding what we did. The cure is pre-frontal lobotomy for the woman, castration and prefrontal for the man. We’re wanted now.”

Winifred stared at him unbelievingly. “But why…?”

“We don’t know why we did it,” Lisa said then. “We did what they told us to do. Like that. We don’t know why.” That wasn’t what Winifred had started to ask, but at the sound of Lisa’s voice, she turned and examined her carefully. Too tight, too determined not to break.

Winifred shrugged her question aside and stood up. “Okay. That’s enough for now. Off to bed with you.” She pushed them, protesting all the way into the bedroom. She paced the small living room afterward for hours before she finally lay down on the couch and fell into an uneasy sleep, dream-filled and horrendous.

Matt finished the story the following morning, leaving Lisa asleep in the bed, joining Winifred for coffee and eggs. There hadn’t been bacon in New York City for three years.

“I don’t know why they turned us loose after it was over,” he said. “They could have held us there in the house while they filed a complaint, and waited for the authorities to take over. But they ordered us to get dressed and told us to get what we could carry in two paper bags, and then shoved us out the door. Finis. We expected the arrival of a copter and arrest any minute. We had friends, but we were afraid to implicate them and we decided to come here. There’s some money in the bank, and a good general practitioner won’t be out of work very long.”

He was wrong about that. The secretary of the county medical association checked his credentials and told him frankly that they couldn’t use him. “In fact,” the man said, a flushed faced, harried, nervous, middle-aged Irishman, “before I leave today I’ll have to file a report on you and probably someone will call the authorities….”

He was holding the information card between his forefinger and thumb, as if offering it to Matt, who took it and tore it into small pieces. The secretary looked relieved. “It’ll be in the data bank, but someone will have to ask a direct question now,” he said, mopping his face. “I don’t remember a thing.” He went back to paper work on his desk and didn’t look up when Matt left.

Lisa said they should move to France until the madness subsided, but they knew they would be refused travel cards. There was no state from which they couldn’t be extradited, if the long hairs decided to make that move against them. After an all-night talk, they realized that they had no more than two alternatives. They could go to Florida and try to buy their way to the Bahamas, or they could permit Winifred to register them into the private hospital where she was a consultant and administer the cold sleep. The cold sleep made Lisa tremble, but they had to discuss it.

“You would be a number only,” Winifred said. “The security regarding who is being kept that way is extremely tight. I can promise you that no one would find you. And in your file, in the computer for automatic restimulation, would be all the necessary data about when to awaken you. You would be safe.”

“We’d he safe in the Bahamas,” Lisa said.

“Not if this mania continued to spread throughout England at the rate it is now,” Matt said thoughtfully. That didn’t concern him as much as financing the trip to the Bahamas. He knew, everyone knew, of the mass exodus taking place, and it was a good bet that few of those fleeing had proper identification and permits. The going rate of passage probably was more than his meager bank balance would bear. “But whatever we decide to do,” he said, “we have to do it soon. And we have to get out of Winifred’s apartment now.”

Very dryly Winifred said, “Too late. I’m already your accessory. The place has a man posted. He turned up when you did. The super tipped me off.”

Lisa looked miserable and Winifred grinned at her. “Honey, my name has been on that list for a long time. I was very close to Johnny, remember? Obie isn’t going to want any of us who knew the kid to be out running free when he gets his hands on the Star Child. What he’ll want is lots and lots of confirmation about the kid’s powers, about his telepathic tie to his people, and his link to Obie. Probably he’ll start producing miracles that’ll make his purification process look like primer stuff, and when that starts, he won’t want an elderly psychiatrist loose who might throw an IQ score into the works.” She lighted a contraband cigarette with real tobacco, payment from a grateful patient, and blew out clouds of smoke, then said, “I don’t think the kid invented anything at all. Not so goddamned clever.”

“It’s Blake’s work,” Matt said. He told about the rescue of Lorna. “As soon as Blake realized that they had his plans, he vanished again. Since then there’s been a better process for extracting water from rocks, patented by a J. M. Black. That’s his—” Suddenly he stopped and he stared ahead at nothing in particular. “That’s it! Of course! They want us to lead them to Blake!”

Lisa knocked over her cup. Fortunately it was empty. Coffee was too hard to find any longer to let it be spilled on a tabletop. For a long time she and Matt stared at one another, and finally Lisa said faintly, “We’ll have to do it. Take the cold sleep.” She looked at Winifred sharply, “Are you certain that they won’t find us, that no one can restimulate us before the time chosen?”

Winifred nodded. “It’s foolproof.”

Matt’s hand was hard on Lisa’s. Her hand was very steady now, no trace of the trembling the idea had brought about before.

“How long?” Winifred asked.

Matt thought, then said, “Ten years. The turn of the year, the millennium will have passed by then. Either Obie will be a memory, or so firmly entrenched that it won’t matter any longer.”

They agreed on the ten-year period of cold sleep and Winifred promised to make the arrangements on the following day. “We’ll have to give your tail the slip, but that shouldn’t be too hard. This is my territory here. I could lose my own shadow if I had to.”

After Lisa was sleeping Matt remembered the black disk the alien woman had given to him in his office. He had it in the paper bag that he had brought out of the house with him. He got it out and rubbed his fingers over the smooth side of it again, for the first time in many years. It should go to Blake, he decided. Derek would see that he got it. Blake had said he would be in touch with Derek eventually. Matt put the touchstone and a brief note together in an envelope and wrote Blake’s name on it. That was all he could do. Winifred would have to pass it on to Derek, who, sooner or later, would see Blake and hand it to him.

Two days later Matt and Lisa entered the low building where the cold sleep would protect them for the next ten years. The psychiatric division complex was almost a mile long, added to wing by wing as needed. There was a waiting list for admission of the hopeless whose relatives or doctors believed that in the future cures would be found for them. Because of her position in the hospital Winifred had been able to bypass the waiting list.

Winifred processed them personally, and when it was over, eight hours later, she wept quietly. She didn’t believe she would ever see either of them again. Obie would send his goons for her, and she would be waiting. There was no one else involved in her case, no Blake to lead them to, only herself. And just maybe, a chance so remote that she knew it was like trying to reap enough silk from one spider to make a gown, just maybe when Obie sent for her she would get to see Johnny. And maybe he would remember her, the only friend he had had for such a long time. And maybe there would be some of the old influence left, just maybe.