Kate Wilhelm: Let the Fire Fall

“It looks human and sick,” Winifred snapped. But it was a lie. The child didn’t look human, but what newborn sick baby does? She left the helicopter outfitted as a hospital for the alien infant and stared at the spaceship. The doors were still closed. The ship stood dark and still, a dimly reflecting silver blob against the sky. She returned to Busby’s house where Busby and his wife were treated like lepers, always in the way, faintly unclean, to be endured simply because in the beginning no one had thought to tell them to leave, and by the time the thought had occurred, it seemed a trifle pointless and would have made for bad publicity. Cal Busby and his wife whispered, and pointed at the U.N. people and the army personnel, and shrank back from the white-coated medics, but mostly it was their whispering that rasped. Heads together, a sibilant bss , bss forever issuing from the double-headed entity, they were an unknown quantum. To be trusted, or not to be trusted? That was the problem. Unanswerable, it was decided that they should be ignored. Voices would stop when either of them entered a room, and where conversation had been low-pitched, it became a whisper, and where it had been in normal tones, it became low-pitched, so that the house was filled with murmuring voices and whispers and watchful eyes.

Winifred paused when she saw the Busby couple in the living room, but she went on through to the kitchen and drank vile coffee with a sergeant. Mrs. Busby insisted on making the coffee, and doing some of the cooking, for her and her man, she said, but turning out hundreds of biscuits that were soggy in the middle, and dozens ‘of fried eggs, brown around the edges and tasting of lard, and iron kettles filled with green beans cooked to a dull olive color with no suggestion of the original shape left. She was being helpful, and no one could make her stop helping short of ordering her all the way out. Cal prodded her out of the way again and again to count the eggs and biscuits, then he made notations in a yellow pad. So he could bill the government.

The sergeant drinking coffee had bloodshot eyes and his hands shook. “You look like you could use some sleep,” Winifred commented.

“I don’t know, ma’am, but I don’t feel so hot.”

On the contrary, he did feel hot, very hot. Winifred touched his forehead and drew back quickly. She called for a medic and the sergeant was put to bed. Three others followed, all with symptoms of food poisoning. Winifred decided to go back to Matt’s house and go to bed. Since she was one of the few to be allowed inside the ship, she was promised that if the aliens opened the doors again she would be called, no matter what the rime.

Matt was pacing in his living room when she got there, and she filled him in with the latest. “They,” she said, indicating the town to the left of them, “won’t believe that miserable woman is poisoning the men with her cooking, but that’s about the truth of it. Ugh.”

She ate a sandwich, and helped Matt pace for the next quarter of an hour. “How did that alien woman know the way to this house?” Matt asked. “Rhetorical. How did she know I could deliver a baby? Why me? They must have skilled doctors aboard.”

“The last one’s easy,” Winifred said, meeting him in the center of the room where both stopped momentarily, then turned and walked back to the starting points. “They must have wanted the child born out of the ship for fear that whatever was killing them all was in the air, or at least they must have hoped that it could avoid contamination by getting itself born somewhere else. And it did, so they were right. But why in God’s name would they have sent pregnant women on a space flight?”

“Conceived in space maybe?”

“No. There were others, in cold storage, all dead now. Babies dead also. They started out pregnant.” This time when they met she looked at him accusingly. “Did you tell anyone that the aliens were dying?”

Matt shook his head violently. “You know I didn’t.”

“Okay, cool it, kid. But tell me, how did pretty little golden boy find out?”

Matt stared at her blankly, and she told him about the sermon. “Obie Cox! I don’t believe it. He’s a two-bit, fast-talking lothario, but that’s all.”

“Un-huh. He’s the up and coming evangelist. So says Conan Woosley. In his column for today.”

Winifred went to bed, and Obie left his listening post at the window and went home. Matt continued to pace for a while, waiting for the baby to wake up for a feeding. It didn’t, and he finally fell asleep on the couch. The baby went on a four-meals-a-day schedule from the start, and at two months dropped one of those fee dings. It cried only immediately before a feeding; other times it stared about at its crib and beyond, and listened to noises, and was very content.

Obie walked home slowly. He should vanish that night, simply drop out of sight for the coming week and let Billy handle the rumors for him. But if there was sickness… he stopped and narrowed his eyes and visualized himself before a congregation, all of them aware of the spread of the plague that the aliens had brought with them, all of them terrified, looking at him, the Lord’s emissary, for guidance. He let himself go out to the meeting and he felt the fear coming into him from them, and the thin echoes of fear magnified and became strong, and he knew what he would do. Obie, faced with a problem, was full of tension, uncomfortable, restless, irritable. He groped for solutions with no particular rationale, but rather visualized alternatives and if one of the alternatives eased his tense body, he accepted it as right. He could explain little of what he did, but if it felt right, he didn’t look for explanations.

When the people awakened the next day, it was to the sound of church bells, although it was a Monday morning. Church bells on Monday morning were almost blasphemous. They went on and on. And eventually, cursing a bit, the people made their way to the church to find out why.

The Reverend MacLeish, looking pale and senile and bewildered, stood behind the lectern, wishing he had had a son instead of Dee Dee with her imperious voice and her foot stamping and tears. He never held church on a Monday morning. Never. Once on a Thursday, after the fire that had destroyed the first Elmwood Baptist Church back in ’32, or was it ’23? But never on Monday. The bells were making his head hurt, and he wanted his breakfast. Never start a day without breakfast, he always said, and you’ll live to ripen in the sun…. That didn’t sound just right, but after all, he’d had no breakfast yet, not even coffee. The bells stopped, creating a very loud silence, and there was Dee Dee looking ugly at him and hissing, and he remembered. He was supposed to pray when the bells stopped. He bowed his head, but not very much, because he hadn’t really combed his hair that morning, had just run a comb through it while Dee Dee fumed and stormed about the time he was taking. He prayed briefly and inaudibly, and Dee Dee was motioning for him to get out from the pulpit. He blinked at her.

Then Obie was striding up from the congregation and he knew that Obie was going to preach again. Although many were called he’d never expected Obie to be among them, and having been called, to have answered. God’s way was mysterious.

Obie felt the fear when the people realized that he had called the service. It grew and swelled and made palms suddenly moist, and bodies cold. He gathered it in and flung it back at them. He told of a vision that bad come to him in the night, and in his vision the people he had loved since childhood were being taken sick, contaminated by the strangers. He had prayed to the Lord, and the Lord took off the curse, but said that those who aided the stranger would grow sick, and perhaps die. And the Lord slew the last of the strangers, all except the infant who was being left as a test of His people. If they could put their house in order and teach the Word to the strange child, then, when the strangers returned, the Lord would aid His people. And as a sign that He was with them, that He was watching them, he would smite with the alien disease those who aided the strangers.