Kate Wilhelm - Let the Fire Fall

He’d never see twenty-one, Merton promised himself. If he’d had a moustache he would have twirled it then, but he didn’t. He was smooth-faced, a hawk-faced man, with dark skin and straight black hair, probably Amerindian in his background. He couldn’t trace his lineage back beyond his mother. So he never knew his heritage.

He went to his office and made a list of those people he could contact, people he knew enough about to be able to rely on them for help. Suddenly he thought of the bastard’s mother. He couldn’t remember her name. He had found her once, and he would again. But then what? Was she a real threat? If the U.N. Science Advisory Board suddenly started to flash the kid’s picture around would she recognize him as Obie Cox’s son, and her own? He gnawed on his finger and pondered it. He added her name to the list of things he had to do.

He had to erase all evidence that could link Johnny to Obie Cox. He had to find Blake Daniels and erase him. Florence? That was her name, and she had married some jerk of a mechanic…. Peters? He didn’t know. But that was the simple part. He thought for another half hour then began calling people. He made many appointments for that night and the following day, so that by the time Obie returned from his conference with the Star Child, the wheels were in top speed, rolling soundlessly throughout the states, hopping oceans, covering other continents.

Obie returned with a distracted air. Expecting to find a devil he had found a boy filled with hatred, with dreams and fantasies, with insufferable egotism, the nimble fingers of a pickpocket, an avocation he practiced daily, with all the play skills known to man practically—swimming, skiing, skating, all forms of ball playing, chess, cards, skin diving, fishing…. He had been taught them all and liked none of them. Obie sat at table on the first night home and said almost unbelievingly, “I think he is converted! He couldn’t learn enough about the Church and my message.”

“What about him, the kid himself?” Wanda asked. “You like him?” She was unbelievably gross, and her fat was distributed equally on her frame so that she was no less fat through her shoulders than through her hips, so her stomach and her immense breasts were balanced, her arms and her legs were of a kind. She had to have all her clothes made for her, even her stockings and gloves, and that was the advantage of being rich and fat: she could have what she needed made to order. For all her fat there was no soft place on her, no sag, no loose muscles, her stride was brisk and purposeful, her hands quick. With her ropes of hair piled high on her head adding six inches to her height, she. appeared to be the queen of Amazons. She thought she was rather magnificent.

Obie was thinking about the question. Did he like the Star Child? Finally he shrugged. He really didn’t know how to express what he felt; what he could do was express what others felt. His emotions were mixed concerning the kid. He had liked him very much at first, then had wanted to shake him, or worse, thrash him, then had liked him better than in the beginning. And so on. It hadn’t stopped on like or dislike but had skittered from one to the other again and again.

Merton was going through Obie’s bags carefully and he grunted and began to work out a button that was wafer thin, stuck to the lining of the three-suiter. He got it loose and put it on the table before Obie, worked it open to show a tiny transmitter. Very carefully he detached wires, then cracked the “button” down the middle. No one in the room spoke. He flipped it a couple of times thoughtfully, then tossed it into the fireplace where logs were burning quietly. It got very cool in the mountains after dark. Presently there was a blue flame of copper; white smoke spiraled up, turned yellow-gray as a hissing sound of plastic boiling was heard, and finally the logs resumed burning quietly.

Dee Dee said, “Did you go through them all?”

“One more.”

She nodded and leaned back again, not willing to talk until Merton said it was clear. Wanda said, “Are you going back to see the Star Child again?”

“He wants me to. He has this number, and he is allowed to make approved calls. We’ll see.” Merton found another transmitter, this time an eraser had been replaced in a pencil, stuck in Obie’s shirt pocket along with two other pencils and pens. Merton fixed it also, then nodded. All clear.

“Obie,” Dee Dee said then, “I want to show you something.” She rose and crossed the room to a cabinet, opened it and removed a slender book. It opened to the middle and there were pictures of teenagers. She had covered one page so that nothing was visible except for the picture of one boy, very blond with light eyes. Obie looked at it without touching it, then reached for the book. Dee Dee backed up a step. “Familiar?”

“You know it. Me. School book: So?”

“Un-huh, Obie. Look again.” She handed him the book and crossed the room again, this time to mix a drink. She heard his strangled gasp and came back, holding out the glass to him. Obie took it and drank deeply.

“It’s that kid. Our class book,” he said. He turned accusingly to Merton. “Did you fix this?”

“Didn’t touch it,” Merton said.

Dee Dee took the glass and refilled it. Obie drank again. His hand was shaking. The scotch hit him hard. He hadn’t had a drink in ten years. “That lousy goddamn horse doctor! He switched them! Blake…” He drank again.

“Blake is the alien,” Dee Dee said complacently. “We have to find him and kill him, Obie.”

“My kid up there with all them atheists, with them U.N. monkeys, locked in day and night, year after year, hating them all, wanting out. And Blake… running around free, laughing, happy, getting rich…. Them trust? All that money in his name?” He turned furiously to Billy Warren Smith, who was drinking steadily. “He can’t have it!”

“I don’t know, Obie, It is in his name, you know. He never claimed to be your son. He denied it, as a matter, of fact. If it comes to a court case… I just don’t know.”

“Shut up,” Merton said then. “This isn’t going to come to a court case. Obie’s the boy’s legal guardian. If he dies, Obie inherits. I think he’s already dead, we can put in a claim. Seven years without a trace of him should be enough to satisfy a court….”

“We can’t do that,” Obie said. “I’ve hinted too often that he is studying and that we are in touch. I can’t come up now and say that he’s been dead all these years.”

“Use your head, Merton,” Dee Dee said smoothly. “What Obie really needs is a martyr. Blake’s young, beautiful, undefiled body to exhibit, to have come to life, ascend to heaven, issue proclamations to Obie, to the masses. You know the bit.”

Obie stared at her with narrowed eyes, nodding slightly. He smiled.

A new phase in the Voice of God Church was begun. Obie was relieved. He could drink again. He no longer feared his own kid, and he faced it now, he had been afraid of him. When Blake had looked directly at him, he had felt himself shrink, and had remembered how little he had read, and how little he knew about most things. He didn’t know where Auldand was, for example, once when Wanda had asked while doing a crossword puzzle. Blake had waited for him to supply the answer and when he couldn’t Obie had felt put down because the kid knew it. And him only six or seven then. A goddamn smart aleck. That’s what he’d been. Laughing at Obie for believing he was the father of the real alien, while his own boy, the boy of his flesh, with his hair and his eyes, was tortured daily by the atheists, Then when Blake had started to heal…. Obie shuddered. That had scared him. He had believed that he really was a God-child, and he, Obie, the father of God. That was a bad time. He thought of his mother, locked up in the sanatorium, calling herself the mother of God, screeching for him to come and make a miracle so the attendants would believe her, writing her weekly letters full of prayers, and wishes, and demands. The letters always started the same, addressed to him, headed, To My Son, God. Dee Dee laughed at them, but they made Obie very uneasy. What, he had wondered, if the old bat was right? Secretly at night, in his room with the door locked, he had tried to make a miracle sometimes. But he never had succeeded. The ashtray that he tried to float simply sat there. The window he tried to close or raise without touching it didn’t budge. When he tried to summon Dee Dee to him, she resisted. What was the good in being God if he couldn’t do simple things like that? So he had been forced to go along with the opinions of the doctors who said it was a psychotic delusion that his mother suffered. And when he had come to believe the same thing about his son that she had believed about him, he had worried. He had visions of being put in the same sanatorium along with her, and having her point him out to visitors: “See, my son God! Do a miracle, son God! Make a miracle! ”