Kate Wilhelm - Let the Fire Fall

“It’s out of the question,” Lenny said, less smoothly, but smiling still.

“I won’t stay here tonight! I won’t!”

“What happened?” Lenny reentered the room all the way closing the door after him. “You tell me now what happened and I’ll see to it that you go home.”

“Tonight? ”

“Yes.”

Dee Dee held out her glass and Lenny took it from her and refilled it from a decanter on a side table. She drank deeply, then said, “You won’t believe it. None of you will. I’ve read about your denials of his power.”

Very patiently Lenny said, “Try me.”

“All right,” Dee Dee said, sipping now, watching the gin and ice. “I came in to ask Obie, Brother Cox, about supper. I was standing at the door. Suddenly I felt strange, not myself. I was terrified all at once. I pulled the door open and he appeared there, just appeared out of nothing. And I felt him trying to get my mind, my brain. He was there, but he was inside me too. It was so horrible! I couldn’t move, couldn’t speak, couldn’t do anything. It seemed to last for an eternity. Minutes, hours, I don’t know how long. Then I felt him shift, and I was able to move and scream. That’s all I know.”

Lenny continued to watch her without speaking. Dee Dee returned his gaze, her face smooth, untroubled, her eyes very clear. “So that’s to be the story?” he said finally.

“But that’s exactly what happened. I said you wouldn’t believe me.”

“Well you were right about that. I don’t.”

Dee Dee shrugged. “Perhaps you could explain it all a different way?”

Lenny started toward the door again. “No, I can’t explain it. I believe you planned the whole thing. I don’t think you really want to leave. I think this is the opening act of a charade that you plan to continue through the next two days, your planned stay with us. So, I will follow our agreement. I’ll call the pilot back. Be ready to leave within half an hour, please.”

“Please don’t throw me in that ole briar patch,” Dee Dee murmured.

Lenny’s expression didn’t change a fraction. He left them. Obie, still on his knees at Dee Dee’s side said, “What did happen to you? Are you all right now? You look strange.”

“I told him and you what happened, Obie. I was a perfect receiver for the Star Child. Obviously you aren’t, or you would have felt it too. I really can’t stay, because he’ll be successful the next time, and such a power isn’t confined by walls or time. But you must stay and go through your interview with him as you planned.”

Dee Dee wouldn’t add a word to that, and half an hour later, her bags still packed, never even opened, she left the estate as she had arrived there, by vertical take-off craft, heavily draped. This time she was the only passenger.

It was noon when Dee Dee watched the plane vanish into the blazing sky the next day. Several people were running toward her from the control shack. She left her suitcases on the ground and started to walk toward the men who managed the airstrip. Crisply she said, “Call the house and tell Merton I want to see him immediately. Tell him to drop everything and get up here. And get me a copter right now.”

Merton was there by the time she arrived. “Come on,” she said, leading him toward her suite in the mansion that topped the mountain. It was a three-storied house, with tall columns, wide porches, high ceilings, thick Persian carpets and antiques. Her suite, three rooms, office, bedroom, and sitting room, was all in jade and ivory with flaming pink pillows and draperies. She told Louise, her maid, that she wanted a bath, clean clothes, and lunch, all very fast. Louise nodded silently and vanished. Dee Dee started to discard the clothes she was wearing and Merton sat down and waited for her to begin the story. But Dee Dee remained silent until the maid said the bath was ready. “I’ll call you if I need you,” Dee Dee said. Louise nodded and left the suite.

“Now?” Merton said.

“They might have slipped me a bug,” she said.

Merton’s eyebrows peaked. He examined her clothing, purse, and suitcases very carefully, then shook his head.

Dee Dee motioned for him to follow her. She had pulled a flowing robe about her and she dropped it on her way to the bath. She caught up her long hair with a scarf twisting it all about her head, then stepped into the sunken bath of black and white ivory. Only then did she say, “The Star Child is Obie’s bastard.”

Merton sat down hard on an ornate bench before a dressing mirror. He stared at Dee Dee, visible from the neck up, the rest of her body hidden by rainbow-hued bubbles. Dee Dee was busy soaping herself, not watching his reaction at all. She turned on the spray then, and water spouted from dragons’ mouths on two sides of the rub, rinsing her as she stood up. Automatically Merton handed her a large towel that wrapped about her completely. His gaze was on her, but seeing nothing, as she let the towel drop, powdered herself, and left the bathroom to start dressing in the bedroom. Presently Merton followed. Dee Dee was brushing out her hair by then. She was wearing a white silk sari-like garment held at the shoulder by a cluster of pink rosebuds fashioned around a diamond pin.

“You’re sure?” Merton asked, as she led the way into the sitting room.

Dee Dee opened the draperies, revealing a window wall with a view of the mountains stretching to the horizon. Neither of them saw the autumn vista, which looked as unreal as a Saturday Evening Post cover. She nodded. “I couldn’t be more certain. I fainted when I saw him.” She poured coffee for both of them, and sipping hers, lifted the tops from various silver bowls and serving dishes. She told Merton what had happened.

“Okay, you covered it pretty well. But how about Obie? Does he know?”

“Of course not. I wouldn’t have left him there if he had seen it. The kid is exactly like Obie was in high school. It’s uncanny. But Obie has looked at that beard and all that hair for so long that he doesn’t know what he looked like before. No one else does either. Except possibly his mother, and she’s as crazy as a loon.”

Merton said nothing for several minutes and Dee Dee served herself stuffed mushrooms, asparagus vinaigrette, Boston lettuce with crab salad and tomato wedges, tiny hot rolls crisped on the outside, steamy and fragrant when she broke them open.

“You know what that means?” Merton said finally. “Blake is the alien. And he’s vanished. We’ve got to find him”

“I know,” Dee Dee said, between bites. “He’s the only one who can blow the whistle now.”

“And we’ve got to get the Star… the kid out of that place….”

“I thought of that, but why? Let them keep him under wraps for us. It’s Blake I’m worried about. What if he wakes up one day and says, ‘By golly, I think I’m an alien?’” She licked a drop of butter from her finger and her eyes were drawn to the fingers that had been mashed in the car door ten years ago. There was no scar, no trace of the accident. She said, “We know that Blake has something, power, whatever you want to call it. He’s got it. I wonder what else he has by now. He was a damn good-looking kid.”

“I’ll have to kill him,” Merton said.

“I know. More coffee?”

So they decided to renew the search, for Blake Daniels Co…. No, just Blake Daniels. Merton was a scowling man when he left Dee Dee. How to find a person who had vanished nine years ago without a trace in a world of nearly four billion, with over three hundred and seventy million of them in this one country? If Blake had gone to a doctor in the past three years his file would be in the medical computers. If he’d been in legal trouble in the past five years, the information would be in the legal computers. If ever he had registered for a credit card, or for a travel ID card, or for college, or military service, they would find him. It would mean money and a lot of it to buy such information, but it could be had. A new thought struck Merton and he stopped in his tracks. All that money! Grateful people, healed by Blake, had set up trusts, had made outright gifts, had donated money for his education. Untouched for more than ten years now it had grown, doubled, then doubled again…. A couple of million dollars? Billy knew. It must be a couple of million by now. Some of it could be collected any time by Blake, and the rest would be his at twenty-one.