Kate Wilhelm - Let the Fire Fall

Armaggedon Now goes into seventeenth printing!

ALMOST a year after the visit of Matt and Lisa, Winifred had another visitor. Derek. He was thin; he looked haunted.

“Harvard has gone over,” he said. “We weren’t surprised. None of the universities will be able to hold our;”

He looked like he wanted to cry, very much like a little boy who has had his laboratory dismantled by an angry parent after one too many vile odors penetrated to the living quarters of the house. Winifred resisted the impulse to hug him and tell him it would be all right. She wasn’t at all sure that it would be.

“I think the apartment is bugged,” she said clearly. “So don’t say anything now.” Later she took him to the hospital where she had a room that she knew was safe, and she told him the details of why Matt and Lisa had taken the cold sleep. Winifred had written him a note saying only that they were safe and out of touch. He turned very pale at her words now. “Blake will get in touch with you somehow, sometime,” she said. “This is for him when he does.”

Derek examined the envelope, then stuffed it into his pocket. “It would be safer with you, probably,” he said.

“I don’t think so. They’ve been patient, but I don’t think it will last. Have you read of those new patents that are in direct competition with Obie’s tricks? Blake’s work certainly. I think the Church will become more and more harassed and begin to haul in those who might lead them to him.” .

“That means me too,” Derek said.

“You’ve got to keep out of their hands,” Winifred said simply. “I don’t know how, but you have to.”

“I could write to him in care of the name he uses for the patents, send it to the brokerage firm that handles his affairs,” Derek said after a long pause. “He must have a method worked out so he can keep in touch with the world.”

He wrote the note, and Winifred put it through her personal tube. The note was whisked to the central sorter department, dropped into another tube, and was sucked to the Wall Street division of the Post Office, where it was sorted from other mail once more, and put into the tube that led to the firm of Watkins Brokerage. Robert L. Kaufman pursed his lips when he saw the envelope. All letters addressed to his mysterious client, J. M. Black, were sent directly to him. No one else in the firm knew what he did with them, and he had resisted offers of bribes and threats alike to keep the secret that he had sworn to keep. He readdressed the envelope, sent it to Heffleman’s News Store in Cleveland, and leaned back wondering what was in it, how it was picked up at the other end, and most of all, who J. M. Black really was. He was a multi-millionaire, that was for sure, but who was he?

A few weeks later a black-haired young man in slovenly, baggy pants, a coat salvaged from a rag pile, shoes that didn’t match but were whole, slouched along East 23rd Street in New York City. No one paid any attention to him as he elbowed his way through others who were dressed much as he was. No one raised his eyes high enough to see the steady gray eyes that were bright and inquisitive and not at all dulled by hunger and hopelessness.

It was Blake of course. He had learned that his golden mop of hair was a dead giveaway when he didn’t want to be recognized, and as good as a banner on a staff when he did. He chose on this trip to remain unrecognized. He knew that Obie was after him seriously now. Heffleman’s was under surveillance suddenly. He had eluded three men staked out there, but there had been a fight, and two of them would no longer be of any use to the MM’s. That had been a surprise. They must be covering every place that he had been in the past. If they had been certain of his appearance at Heffleman’s they would have had a dozen men there, not the three who had been as startled as he was when the confrontation took place. He shuffled along, grinning at the sidewalk, remembering the fight. It had been a good one, the first one he’d had in three or four years. He was still in shape.

At the corner he paused and glanced at the store across the street, a used clothing store. The meeting place. A tall thin man was standing in front of it, trying to look at home here in the slums, and failing. Blake grinned again. Derek was Matt made over. He crossed the street, to all appearances oblivious of the official traffic, but getting through it unscathed, so obviously his unconcern was not real. The traffic was made up of taxis, buses, trucks, no private cars at all, and the professional drivers were mean, considering pedestrians their natural enemy, to be cancelled out whenever the opportunity arose.

Blake was pushed roughly by three boys under fourteen, who were sizing up Derek. He snarled at them under his breath and made a hand sign that no kid in the slum who wanted to stay alive failed to learn by the time he was six. The boys held their ground for less than a second, then turned and shoved their way through the crowds, mouthing’ asterisks. Blake waited fifteen feet from Derek, examining the crowds carefully for the sign of a tail. There was none, he was certain. Give Derek credit for that anyway. Blake knew the shadows could be posted in any of the buildings about them, using scopes and telltale devices to keep Derek in check, but unless they were down on the streets, they could be shaken easily enough.

It was a cold day, drizzly, not quite freezing, but so near that the fine mist glazed what it touched before It melted away. People were out, as they always were, day and night, in order to line up for food rations, for water, for unemployment benefits, for medical care, simply to get out of the cramped rooms where eight or more of them lived together in the crumbling tenements. Many of the rooms were occupied on a staggered basis. A family could have the room for half of the day only, departing when the other family arrived for its occupancy. So they were on the streets. Mothers wrapped in blankets, holding squirming babies; kids who were old enough to walk were out walking; school-age kids were, thankfully, out of sight, packed into the schools where little learning took place, but where. there was heat and free lunch consisting of meal and water, and fish crackers. They were the lucky ones. By fourteen, or twelve, if the kid looked older, they were allowed to drop out, and they were on the streets after that.

Derek looked frozen, he had been waiting for an hour, and had almost given up hope when the unkempt youth touched his arm roughly and muttered. “Start walking, Dek, I’ll tag along.”

Derek didn’t look at the stranger a second time, but jerked away from the building front and got into the masses shuffling up the street. He didn’t see Blake again for almost half an hour. Then he was there at his side, his hand hard on Derek’s arm, guiding him down an alley. It was worse here because of the people sleeping on and under newspapers and rags. Derek shivered not this time from the cold, and Blake hurried him on. They entered a basement and stopped.

“Strip,” Blake said. He put a small light on the floor. It was blue and made his lips look purple.

Derek looked around. “Why?”

“Just do it,” Blake said.

Derek stared at him for a moment, then very slowly started to take off his clothes. Blake examined each item, then Derek got dressed again. Blake looked at the envelope with his name on it curiously, but didn’t open it yet. He put it in an inside pocket.

“I came prepared to take you with me, if you want, to.”

Derek hesitated only a moment, then nodded. They picked their way through the darkness to a door on the other side of the basement. For the next half hour this was the pattern. Blake knew his way through the basements and the alleys like a rat finding his way through a familiar maze. Suddenly they were at the riverfront.