Kate Wilhelm: Let the Fire Fall

ON the Ohio River at the curve where Cincinnati, the Queen City, was allowed to sprawl up and down hills, and more specifically, on the Kentucky side, where Covington snaked along the one highway up the steep hill flanked by two-storied frame buildings with dirty windows and heterogeneous shops that ran together and merged: Whiskey by the drink; cleaners—while u wait; juvenile furniture; drugs and sundries; cafeteria; fish sandwiches; this is where it started.

There was Florence Waters, no more than a child, with the immense belly of one about to give birth. She had gained forty-two pounds, and her mother was having her weekly cry over the sin of the daughter. Florence had sneaked from the home for unwed mothers in order to take the bus across the bridge to spend the day with her mother because she was not allowed in the house when her father was there.

The father of the unborn bastard, Obie Cox, the Adonis of Covington, was at the same time trying his damnedest to knock up yet another of the town’s young ladies. Nineteen, still described by the middle-aged women as a beautiful child, he had light blue eyes, and gorgeous silver blond hair that was too long, but which couldn’t be faulted because it was such lovely hair, with just enough wave, a new curly beard that hid his acne scars, and teeth that were slightly out of line, so that those who might otherwise have been hostile to him because of his good looks were instead sympathetic. Obie was still the prize catch for the girls under eighteen. Older than that, they were starting to look for other things than a beautiful body, things like stability and a solid future and a less fickle disposition, but those under eighteen were properly dazzled by his appearance.

Dee Dee MacLeish was less dazzled than she had been two months earlier; she was starting to act possessive, and beginning to talk about their future. Dee Dee’s father was a gentle preacher who had been born a century, or at least half a century too late. He never should have survived to this time; he had not heard that God is dead, and so still preached of God’s love and beneficence. Dee Dee sang in the choir and bought the Pill from a college friend. Dee Dee had read all of DeSade, had turned on twice with pot, smoked a pack a day, and could drink three martinis and still drive. She was pretty, as most eighteen-year-old girls are pretty, 35, 24, 35, which isn’t at all bad, dark brown hair, and gray eyes, with a dimple in her left cheek, deepened consciously with the tip of a pencil held there for hours daily through all her classes. That it was a dirty dimple didn’t matter, the black spot in the center accentuated it.

One more character before we get on with the event. Matthew Daniels, a rather young M.D., just thirty, with a general practice in Cincinnati, and a home in Elmwood Heights across the river, out four miles from Covington. Matt was tall and almost rigidly erect, not for anything romantic like an old war injury, or a football mishap, but simply because he was like that. He was intense, inside and out, and relaxing was what he had to work at hardest. He was married, loved his wife, Lisa, and the two children, Derek, four, and Lorna, thirteen months. Matt was baby-sitting along with his housekeeper, Mrs. Murray, a Bible-belter born and bred. Lorna was the baby in question. Lisa and Derek had gone shopping and to see a movie in Cincinnati on his day off, while his patients griped that he had it easy, off Wednesdays, Saturdays, and Sundays, spending all his time on the golf course. He had tried that, and had become so tense with the effort of trying to hit the blasted ball with the club that just wouldn’t, with the ever present derisive grin on the face of the caddy, that he had realized he wasn’t meant for the game. He took up gardening and motorcycles instead.

He was tending his tomatoes when the space ship screamed through the sky and landed in Busby’s cornfield three miles from his house.

Too fast? A spaceship, outer-spaceship, not ours, unlike anything seen on Earth ever before, a big and silver and not terribly streamlined-looking thing, in fact, it looked a lot like a skinny pagoda, but very efficient-looking in spite of that, screamed through the perfect June sky, when if ever there come perfect days, they come then, and landed, came down with a decrease in the throbbing banshee scream, letting it—fade out like an offstage witch being dragged farther and farther from the mike, landed right in the middle of Cal Busby’s forty-five-and-one-half-acre cornfield in the bottomlands where the flood plain contained the richest soil in Kentucky, and where the corn was already knee high, and this in June, not July yet, forecasting a yield of two hundred fifty bushels per acre, scaring the hell out of the three-inch-long grasshoppers, or as Derek Insisted, hopgrassers, sending them aloft with shirring yellow and brown wings as stiff as paper.

Matt Daniels with his almost new motorcycle under him, and him only three miles from the landing, was the first on the scene. Roaring on the highway, past a narrow, overgrown dirt road, he had added a second trauma to the other more lasting one made by the ship, and Dee Dee screamed, “Cops!”

Obie was yanking on his jeans, paying no attention to her. “A by-God-real-live-spaceship,” he said over and over.

Dee Dee dressed quickly. She didn’t even like sex in the daylight; it was nothing to her if it hadn’t been finished, but she didn’t want cops to come upon them and give her that kind of a look. She hated Obie Cox then.

“You beat it back to your house,” he said, not looking at her. “I’m going to see what Doc Daniels is up to.”

She walked back up the secluded dusty road that dead-ended at the river, a dirt road long since abandoned, grown over with blackberry bushes, and she decided to kill Obie Cox someday. When he passed her in his old car that was all his, paid for and insured and inspected and everything, and raised a cloud of dust that stuck to her sweating body from the crown of her head to her insteps, she knew that she would have to kill him someday, just to be able to stand living with herself.

Matt had left his cycle and was climbing over a rail fence when Obie got to the scene. The silver ship was in the dead center of the field, and there was an open door, or hatch, or something. People were coming out. Doc Daniels was waving, and they were waving back and it was all like something out of a movie. If the contact had been permitted, with Obie witnessing it, and perhaps even participating in it, the event still would have changed history, but not as it was destined to do.

The contact was not permitted. A state trooper’s car pulled up then and the troopers jumped out, one of them carrying a rifle. Obie heard a click as the safety was released. The astonishment and excitement he had been feeling changed to fear. Obie was like a weather puppy that reflects by turning to pink or blue what the humidity is and the chance of rain or clear weather. He felt and reflected the emotions of those closest to him, and he felt fear then.

“Stop right there, Mac!” the man with the rifle yelled to Matt.

Matt was halfway to the ship. He was running when he heard the call, and he slowed down enough to turn to see what was happening. He saw the rifle, saw it being raised and leveled at his chest, and he stopped.

“Orders, Mac. No contact until the officials get here. They’re on their way.”

Matt turned to look at the aliens again, close enough this time to see their faces, see the smiles and the friendliness of their greetings. He stopped and held out his hands in a helpless gesture. One of them duplicated it and they returned to the interior of the ship. Then he turned and walked back to the road.