Kate Wilhelm - Let the Fire Fall

Lorna watched him out of sight, then smiled briefly at Derek, and at the same moment burst into tears. “For crying out loud!” Derek said helplessly. He put his arm about her awkwardly, then waited, not knowing what else to do.

“Dek, what’ll I do?”

“What do you mean, what will you do?”

“I love him and he’s not even human! He’s a monster from outer space, a stranger, an alien. And I love him!”

“Yeah, well if he has to keep rescuing you every month or two, he’s going to love you too, like poison ivy, or the mumps, or something. Come on, we’ve got work to do.”

That night James Teague stumbled into the one-room apartment he shared with Will Thomlinson.

“Teague! Jesus, man, where you been?”

Teague looked blank and mumbled and shuffled his feet and looked greedily at the can of fish’n’beans that Thomlinson was eating from. He mumbled on and on and Thomlinson caught every tenth word or so, enough to know that Teague had been locked up somewhere, that he hadn’t been fed, that he had no idea of how long he had been gone, or where he had been. Mostly the incoherent chatter concerned his stomach.

Thomlinson shoved the can and the spoon toward him and watched him wolf down the rest of the mess. He felt justified in not reporting his absence. At first he had been afraid he would be blamed, then more afraid of punishment for not making the report immediately, and so he never had made it. He beamed at his partner and even opened a second can of the fish mixture and pushed it toward him.

Teague belched three times, curled up on the floor, and muttering softly to himself, fell asleep. The next morning he said they had to go back to the temple.

“We ain’t got no orders to go back. They want us here, doing the work they assigned to us.”

“…mumble, buzz, called back… worship… mumble, mumble… every year renew faith… mumble, mumble… and she says, that ain’t god you fool that’s noise in your ears and I takes up the ax and I cuts even her fingers apart at every joint and the kids say that ain’t god’s voice you old fool and I take up the ax and I cuts them up like sausages and God says you gotta go back to the temple and he says we got no orders mumble mumble and I takes up the ax mumble mumble… ”

“Look, Teague, I’ll see if I can get us passes. We been out six months or more. You take it easy, you hear? Get some sleep. I’ll bring some fresh fish back with me if I can find some. You sleep a little bit, Teague. You hear? Don’t you go out now.”

“…’n he says don’t got no orders and I says gotta go back to. the temple and listen to. God again. God’s at the temple. I heard Him at the temple….”

Thomlinson left, locking the door after him, and he went straight to the church office where he made his weekly reports. The clerk on duty checked the record and said, “Fifteen fires, twenty-two beatings, three conversions… He do all that?” Thomlinson nodded fearfully. He had falsified the report every week, splitting it right down the middle, crediting Teague with exactly half of all he did. The clerk nodded and made a notation on the memo he had written. “I’ll see what I can do, Mr. Thomlinson. I’ll let you know tomorrow.”

“Look, uh… sir, I don’t know if I can keep him in until tomorrow, You look at his file again, will you. He’s crazy, takes it by spells, then he’s as normal as you or me. But right now he is crazy as a bedbug. Talking about taking up an ax, stuff like that. He aims to go back to the temple, and I don’t reckon I want to try to stop him none.”

So they were given passes to return to the temple for a pilgrimage, to start immediately, go by monorail, and report back to the New Orleans branch in ten days.

Teague accepted it as if he had done it all himself. That night they boarded the monorail and headed north and east, and Teague never stopped muttering and mumbling. Thomlinson was driven to. sleep on the floor at the far end of the car, abandoning his seat to a thin woman whose short hair and fanatical eyes made her fair game for Teague. The car was jammed to overflowing. It smelled foul, and there was no air conditioning: it had broken down and had not been repaired. The windows were sealed. Also the trip was slow. Designed to travel one hundred and fifty miles an hour, the monotrain averaged less than forty because of the uncertainty of the condition of the rail all along the route. Several times it stopped completely while men on foot inspected a suspicious stretch of rail, and once they had to replace a length that was rusted through. When the line had been built many contractors had become very rich, and had not used up much of the steel allotted to the project so that they continued to get rich by using the same stock several times before it was depleted. There had been some arrests, and some sentences passed, but no jail terms had been served since the last of the appeals had not yet been heard. When the courts went over to computers, it was estimated that the ensuing jam of back cases would take a century to clear up. The estimates proved to be low. The new justice did guarantee the same sentence now for similar crimes no matter where committed, so that was a bonus, it was argued. The trouble was that no human being could now understand the laws at all, and it was felt that the old guarantors of justice with mercy were dead. What computer could understand that eating an apple from a neighbor’s tree was not in the same category as taking at gun point the neighbor’s ration of meat? In the case of the monorail scandal the two words steal and steel had proven too much for the computers and the engineers had been called back in and the semanticists, and the case was pending. Meanwhile the train crawled along and men inspected the line for breaks and soft spots and the people inside sweated and hated each other thoroughly.

They stayed near enough the Mississippi for the first part of the trip not to leave civilization behind, but when the train headed east, the towns became ghost towns. Mile after mile of soybeans grew here, interplanted with corn, the two staples of the diet. Farther west wheat was the crop that stretched for hundreds of miles.

The thin woman next to Teague looked past him out the window and talked, and talked, and talked. “Beat us right back, it did, like they said it would; can’t tame wild land, can’t live on it, beats you back to the ocean, then drives you in the ocean and it wins every time.” She was thirty, she said later, and look at her. Tried to make a living in New Orleans, honest work, that’s all she ever wanted, and there wasn’t no honest work left, only for engineers and scientists and teachers of engineers and scientists.

“My strength is in Jesus Christ,” she said later after darkness lay over the land that she hated so passionately. “Sweet Jesus Christ, our redeemer and savior. And the meek shall inherit the earth, but they don’t want it. Scratch for corn, scratch for wheat, and a storm comes down and there it all goes and the stomach just gets flatter and the teeth fall out. Sweet Jesus, when will it end?” She sobbed noisily and finally fell asleep. Teague stopped his muttering and closed his eyes.

With a whimper, he thought. A self-pitying whimper.

All over the world the same thing. The people left the land for the cities and came to fear that which they had left behind. Technology fed the bellies, insufficiently, but that was a human fault, not a technological one. There were top many people in too small an area, pressing against each other, competing for jobs for half their number, and all going hungry most of the time. But even if technology could feed them all adequately, it they could all afford to eat well, they would be empty still. If only they could start over, take the people up like dots from material and distribute them again, spacing them out, giving them elbow-room, letting them see trees growing and flowers and stretches of grass and corn and blackberry bushes. Blake-Teague mused on this for the rest of the night.