Kate Wilhelm - Let the Fire Fall

It is nearing twelve. There is excitement, anticipation, and hands in pockets clutch rocks and bottles, and bricks and clubs, and even guns. Cocktails have been lovingly prepared, for the celebration. There is booze, God only knows from what source, from what ingredients. Probably lethal. There are the pills and the needles and the bits of sugared gum that can be chewed, stored, or shared, and chewed again, each time guaranteed to remove one from reality for a while.

Blake doesn’t let the crowds separate him from Lorna now. Tonight he and Derek plan to pick her up and take her to the mountain cabin. Derek is waiting for his signal. Derek is nearby with the ship that is as much at home under the bay as in the air. Nearby and waiting for the signal. Blake moves closer to the girl. Hell’s door bursts open at midnight, and Blake moves toward Lorna. There is a pitched battle going on all at once. Bricks are thrown, bottles, jagged and mean, are flashing, there are explosions here and there, and tramplings. Why frail people are always in such a crowd is a mystery that should be investigated. Suicides lacking the imagination to work out details? They are there, and they are trampled. Blake swings Lorna around and she recognizes him immediately in spite of the black hair and the clothes that are of the slums. The watchers pay little attention to the dark young man. They have been instructed to leave her strictly alone, not reveal that they were watching regardless of what happens, unless she is threatened with death. So they would have paid no attention at all to him, had not a pipe flashed out and laid open the side of his head. Blake is not immune to a pipe on the side of the head. He falls heavily bleeding, unconscious. Lorna drops to her knees instantly and it is this action that draws the attention of the watchers. She knows him! She is pushed back as they move in, and seconds later they know him also. Lorna and Blake are lifted, she is also unconscious now, her head swelling from a fistful of coins brought down just so, Blake still bleeding, very dead-looking.

Derek, waiting, hears nothing, and continues to wait. An hour later he does hear a voice, not Blake’s voice, and he knows Blake has been taken. The voice says, jubilantly, “My God, finally! Now we finish everything!” The voice belongs to Obie Cox.

ANYONE can be conditioned to do anything,” Obie said. “I’ve read a lot about conditioning.”

In the large living room of the mansion perched atop Mount Laurel he held the meeting with his lieutenants. Merton sat moving the objects that they had taken from Blake. There was a curious stone, opal-like, but not an opal. It was shot through with fire, was teardrop shaped, and had a blue background with rose lights. There were keys, five of them. Some coins from Malasia, from New Zealand, from Morocco. An almost flat black disk. A plastic notebook that had curious markings in it; the markings faded out when he opened the pages, and he snapped it shut cursing. That was for the lab boys to handle. He paid no more attention to the disk than to any of the other objects, perhaps less. The opal-like stone and the notebook held his attention longest.

Obie had been going on about Blake and his plans for the kid for an hour and Merton was getting bored. Mueller merely sat and stared at his hands. Finally Merton said, “What do you think, Dr. Mueller? How long will it take?”

Mueller shrugged. “I know nothing about the patient, The preliminary tests and evaluations will take a week, at the least. I have to discover his personality structure, his defense mechanisms, his ego manifestations… ”

“Shit,” Obie said. “March 10, that’s when I want him to be ready to go on stage with me. You hear that. Mueller? March 10.”

Mueller looked pained but said nothing.

Blake woke up in a narrow bed, in a narrow room without windows. He lay unmoving, remembering the events that had led to this. He had been cleaned up and bandaged. He could feel the absence of the hairs and the radio parts from his ears, so he didn’t even try to feel for them. Probably his every move would be filmed for study. He hoped they hadn’t found Derek, too. And he wondered about Lorna. She hadn’t been a willing plant, he was certain. The shock in her eyes and the pallor that had spread over her face on seeing him had been proof enough of her innocence. He hoped she was still alive. He closed his eyes and returned to sleep.

For the next week Mueller was the only person Blake saw. He cooperated willingly with the tests, faking every answer, but subtly, so that it would take many weeks of computer comparisons before the fakery was discovered. Blake agreed to cooperate with Obie as he had long ago, in exchange for laboratory privileges. Obie was buoyed, Merton was suspicious. Dee Dee was fascinated by the blond boy, and if her interest in him was sexual, she concealed the fact, sublimated it successfully into a maternal solicitude that fooled everyone but Blake and Winifred. Winifred was not permitted to see Blake at all. He never asked about Lorna.

Lorna was confined to a room in the hospital, a carrot on a stick, Obie said when he ordered her held there, ready to be dangled again, if they needed her.

Blake was almost pathetically happy to have his notebook returned. He paid little attention to any of the other pieces that had been taken from his pockets. Merton questioned him about the transmitter and receiver and about the notebook and Blake answered openly. Derek was at the other end of the radio, high in the Andes mountains. Blake repeated that story while conscious, and under drugs, so they had to believe him, although no trace of any cabin was found in the Andes at the coordinates he gave. He said Derek must have moved. Nothing more. Mueller assured Merton that the drugs were infallible. No one had ever been known to sustain a falsification under the influence. It was never learned how Blake managed this, but he told Winifred much later that in his auto-hypnosis training he had developed such absolute control of himself that his instructions overruled anything coming in from the outside. Also he had hypnotized Mueller rather easily, and there was some doubt what Mueller actually got into him in the way of drugs. About the notebook, Blake said, pointing to the various jottings, here were his preliminary thoughts about an anti-gravity device; here a system for transmission of energy; that was for a laser consisting of glass of any sort, old Coke bottles, for example. If Blake’s eyes twinkled as he detailed the many projects he had in mind, it didn’t show. Since most of his notes had been destroyed when Merton opened the notebook there was no way to prove or disprove what he said. Obie’s scientists muttered and drew their heads together over the salvaged portions, then vanished for the next few days, only to reappear in order to announce that everything in it was impossible, it all contradicted known laws, etc., etc. Merton scowled at them and ordered them to return to their consultations. Meanwhile Blake had gone to work in the lab, in a tiny office where he paced, sketched, scowled, made notations for hours at a time, went back to pacing, and finally leaned back with a happy smile on his face. If he was getting results using only his mind, the scientists with the best, most expensive equipment in the world could damn well get results also.

Merton was nor happy during those weeks. He was nervous, and his sleep was interrupted by dreams of monsters chasing him, eating him up, coughing him out again so that he could run some more. It would have been better if he had remained swallowed; to be coughed up again and again was disgusting. He began taking pills to help him sleep. He didn’t believe Blake was cooperating. He thought the kid planned to escape, to make monkeys out of all of them, him especially, and it made him uneasy that he hadn’t the slightest inkling as to how Blake would manage it. The guards were doubled, then tripled. Blake was calm, smiling, busy. He asked no questions, didn’t pry…. Merton couldn’t grasp that. Blake should be full of questions…. Unless he knew the answers already.