Kate Wilhelm - Let the Fire Fall

Scallopini: Oh, him. Yeah. I seen him around.

Mr. Jackson: And what was he doing when you saw him?

Scallopini: Nothin’. Just talkin’ to nuts who’d stop and listen.

Mr. Jackson: Did you stop to listen?

Scallopini: Yeah, sometimes I’d listen to him.

Mr. Jackson: And did you approve of what he hod to say?

Scallopini: Me? Now. I thought he was some kind of nut.

Mr. Jackson: Was he talking about the Voice of God Church?

Lloyd: Object. That’s irrelevant.

Judge Bledsoe: Sustained.

Mr. Jackson: Are you a member of the Voice of God Church?

Scallopini: Yeah….

Summary of the day’s testimony:

Through long and arduous cross-examination repeatedly interrupted by the prosecutor, Mr. Jackson today tried to establish that those men charged with the murder of three and the castration of thirteen members of the Voice of God Church had in fact nothing to do with the inception of the crimes, or the execution of them. At no time did Mr. Jackson mention the defendants, but concentrated instead on the character of those who did the actual operations in alleyways and in basements of the lower South Side. In spite of his efforts to shake the story given yesterday by Harry Scallopini, the witness for the State continued to maintain that the idea had been hatched in the basement of the Church of the Sacred Heart, that all of the men who participated were at that time practicing Catholics, and that he became converted to the Voice of God Church only six weeks ago.

Tomorrow the State will present its third star witness, a self-confessed participant in the castrations that resulted in death for three. And so the grisly story continues to unwind.

Transcript from a tape made of the news flash that interrupted the 3D program Rainbow’s End :

We interrupt this program to bring you the following special report. Tonight Monsignor Bellamy succumbed to what his doctors call a massive heart failure. Monsignor Bellamy was found by his housekeeper, Mrs. Louella Day, who could make no immediate statement due to what doctors call a condition of deep shock. Mrs. Day has been hospitalized at Sts. Mary’s and Magdalene’s Hospital where she is under sedation….

HIGH on a mountain in Pennsylvania Blake inspected the hunter’s shack that he had appropriated for his own use. He didn’t want it to look inhabited. Not that it mattered. There hadn’t been any game in this area for twenty years or longer, and the shack hadn’t been used for fifteen. Once a dirt road had wound up the mountain to the rough building, but it was covered now with new growth and fallen trees and shale slides so that the only way up was on foot, horse, or by air. Blake used all three on occasion. The gray frame three-room house leaned crazily against the stone of the mountain behind it, dependent on the stone for support apparently, but only apparently. Blake had done things to the shack. Still unpainted splintery wood on the outside, there was a thin layer of insulation on the inside that served as a practical building material, conserving heat in the winter, keeping it out in the summer, and was in itself very nice to look at, soft, with a deep finish that changed from blue to a warm rosy yellow depending on the temperature. Too, the view through the windows of the shack was deceptive. All one could see from outside was shadowy interior filled with cobwebs and dirt, and no one ever suspected that the view was in the window only. Actually the inside was a quite large, very neat and well-stocked laboratory-house. Blake lived in one of the rooms and worked in the other two. For his work he needed quantities of electricity and running water, and he provided both from the land beyond his doors. There was a small brook that fell through a mountain gorge twenty feet away and it served admirably as a power source, even though nothing showed to a casual observer.

For a year and a half Blake had been working in the shack sporadically. He had come across it accidentally, and he had returned with equipment in his copter, some of it stolen, some bought and paid for, all of it necessary. That year he had invented a filter that would pass only pure H20 through a permeable membrane, regardless of the source of the water. Equally interesting to him had been the idea of the direct manufacture of electricity from the molecular excitation of various alloys spun out into wires. He had accomplished this also. At the bottom of the swift brook there were half a dozen long wires being whipped continually. Anchored upstream the loose ends danced against a plate with a feeder line that vanished into art insulated cable in a tree trunk that housed a storage battery; the wires shimmied and twisted and made electricity. But he hadn’t finished with this yet. The wires wore out too fast.

There had been other things that he had tried, some he had been able to bring off, some would take more hard work, some probably never could be done. His work was taking him into all fields of science, and he had many ideas drawn up ready for patenting. He had been biding his time until he knew Obie Cox couldn’t touch him again, but when that time had come around, he had been busy, and had forgotten to pack up until he realized that the leaves had fallen and the air had the bite of frost and the smell of snow. So he packed his copter with notebooks and sketches and schematics of those things that he knew were ready for a patent search, and he locked up all else in the shack. He knew that barring a landslide that would bury the shack completely, it was impervious to any outside interference. The material he had lined it with would withstand flames and heat up to four thousand degrees, and would deflect any kind of explosives. The snows would come and cover it for him, hiding it until his return. He left in his single-seater copter and headed south.

Blake was a fugitive on several accounts. His copter was stolen. In a credit card economy anyone without a proper credit card is automatically suspect, and it is illegal to sell a copter or plane, or hovercraft, or underwater craft, or spacecraft or the atomic engine, or turbine motor, or jet pack, or rocket cluster to run any of the foregoing to a minor. Although Blake had several different sets of papers, all forged, none of them would have stood up for the sort of investigation that buying a copter entailed. So he had stolen one several years ago. Too, most of the big equipment he had in the shack was stolen, for much the same reasons. He could have paid cash for anything he had wanted or needed, had tried hard to buy equipment with cash, but it had drawn unwanted attention to him, so he had been forced to steal. Also, there were a lot of policemen scattered from city to city who remembered the golden-haired boy who could jump a General, or goose a vehicle of any make into running. He was something of a legend in those cities. Never booked, never picked up for anything, never identified in any way, except as the well-built blond boy with the books, he was suspected of being the gang leader in any town where he showed up. None of those who got to know him ever put the finger on him, but there were others, the ones on the fringes who knew him by sight only, and they were the ones who added to the myth of the boy with the golden hair. He could leap from building to building; he could outrun a cop car; he could make people do things they didn’t want to do, and he could do things to them from a distance; he could heal….

This last was the elusive spoor that Merton’s men kept running across and following. Those who got fixed up by him never talked about it, so that it was hard to track them down. But there were the rumors that were like ripples on a pond; everyone knew someone who knew someone who had been taken care of by the kid.