David Drake - Balefires

"The money doesn't matter. Big Tom," said Smokie Joe. "You've got more money now than you could have dreamed of a year ago." He smoothed the front page and rotated it back to Mullens. "Nick probably means the headline," he said.

Big Tom mimed the words with his lips, then read aloud, " 'LSD Poisons Bloomington Reservoir; Hippie Terror-Plot Slays Scores; City Paralyzed.' What the Hell?"

"It's the diversion you told us to make," Smokie Joe explained with a smile. "Acid goes through the treatment plant without being filtered out. We backed it up with a letter to theDaily News saying that unless marijuana was legalized and the army was disbanded in three days, we'd do the same to every other city in the country. So now the drug boys-and just about everybody else-are not only in Bloomington and out of our hair, they've just about dropped hard drugs statewide to hassle hippies about pot. Slick, isn't it?"

Big Tom's mouth was open but no sounds were coming from it. His palms were flat on the table to support his weight, but his forearms were trembling.

The door opened. Big Tom spun around."Danny!" he cried. Then, "Hey, what in Hell happened to you?"

The boy wore a greasy sport coat and a pair of coordinated slacks from which most of the right cuff had been torn. While his father had gone to flesh in the past year, Danny was now almost as cadaverous as Angelo. He looked down at himself in mild surprise. "Hadn't paid much attention to how I look," he said. "Not since I went to the doctor." His hand clenched a sheet of slick paper which he thrust at his father. "Does this mean anything to you?" he demanded.

Big Tom scowled at the sheet, a page torn from a medical text. "I can't even read this crap," he said. "No, it don't mean anything."

"Then maybe this does."The tone would have snapped Big Tom's head around even if the movement of Danny's hand from beneath his coat had not. Smokie Joe was watching the boy with an expression of bored resignation, that remained unchanged at the sight of a. 45 automatic wavering in the thin fist.

"The men have business to take care of, boy," Smokie Joe drawled. His fingers drummed absently among the account books. "Why don't you take your little play toy out and close the door behind you?"

"Youbastard," the boy said, swinging the pistol full on the slim, seated figure.

"You're the real cause, aren't you? I ought to use this on you."

"Sure, kid," Smokie Joe agreed, tilting his chair back a little, "but you don't have the guts. You probably don't even have the guts to use it on yourself."

"Don't I?" Danny asked. He looked at the baffled rage in his father's eyes, then back to Smokie Joe's cold scorn. The pistol seemed to socket itself in his right ear of its own volition.

"Wait, Danny!" Big Tom cried. He threw his hands out as the gun blasted. The windows shuddered. Danny's eyeballs bulged and the ruin of his head squished sideways with the shot before his body slumped to the floor.

Big Tom more stumbled than knelt beside his son. Smokie Joe scooped up the torn page from where it had fallen. "Sure," he said, "he probably tried curing it himself with what his roommate had leftover from a dose of clap last year. When the doctor told him what he had and what his chances were of getting rid of it now, Danny wouldn't want to believe him-who would?-and picked up a book to check it out.'Lymphogranuloma venereum is a disease of viral origin, usually transmitted by sexual intercourse.' Well, the only important thing about LGV is that it's like freckles-it won't kill you, but you'll carry it till you die."

Mullens was squeezing his son's flaccid hands. "Normally just blacks get it," Smokie Joe went on. He squatted beside the wax-faced racketeer. "That isn't… shall we say, a law of God? Give her a chance and a white girl can catch it. And given a chance, she can pass it on to…" Joe's hand reached past Mullens to unhook Danny's belt."Funny thing-you wouldn't have expected Betty Jane to have been interested in a man for along time after Prince Rupert was done with her. Maybe she was too stoned to care, or maybe Danny-boy used a pretty-direct-approach. There's no real harm done by screwing a girl, is there?" He jerked down Danny's slacks.

The boy wore no underpants. His penis was distorted by three knotted sores slimed with yellow pus.

Big Tom choked and staggered upright. His right hand had wrapped itself around the butt of the automatic. Smokie Joe raised an eyebrow at it. "That's a mistake, Big Tom. Don't you hear that siren? When the police arrive, they're going to think you shot your own son. Better let me take care of it-just tell me to and I'll fix it so you won't be bothered. You don't carehow I take care of it, do you?" He stretched out his hand toward the pistol.

"I'll see you in Hell first!" Big Tom grated.

"Sure, Big Tom," said Smokie Joe. "If that's how you want it."

Big Tom crashed out the six shots still in the pistol's magazine. Amid the muzzle blasts rolled the peals of Smokie Joe's Satanic laughter.

Awakening

Many of the SF writers of the 1930s and '40s were fascinated by Charles Fort's collections of unexplained phenomena. My friend Manly Wade Wellman told me that F. Orlin Tremaine, the editor of Astounding from 1933 till John W. Campbell took over at the end of 1938, had bought the rights to Fort's collection Lo! to mine for story ideas. I'm not sure that's true, but Tremaine certainly did serialize the book. I didn't see a pulp magazine until one of my high school teachers loaned me a couple issues of Weird Tales, but as a teenager I read lots of SF from the period in anthologies.

Fort's technique was to go through scientific journals and note oddities which he then retailed in four volumes beginning with The Book of the Damned. He threw out a number of speculations on what caused the data he reported: "I think we're property,'' or "Perhaps somebody is collecting Ambroses,'' which are familiar even to people who don't have the faintest notion of where the phrases come from. Personally, I'm convinced that Fort was joking-that is, that he believed the items were as true as anything else you'd find reported in, say, Nature, but that he understood the causes of the phenomena he reported were unknowable on the available data.

Then again, maybe he was a humorless wacko who believed in wild conspiracies. Goodness knows, a lot of the people who've followed in his footsteps fit that category.

SF stories led me to Charles Fort, but then I read him for his own sake. As for what I myself believe: I believe that the world is a very strange place, certainly stranger than I can explain.

I haven't used much Fortean material in my fiction because I find attempting to explain the phenomena leads to very silly results. This is as true of fiction like Donald Wandrei's "Something from Above" as it is of Philip Klass' "scientific" explanations of all UFOs as plasma effects (a notion that plasma physicists find ludicrous). Once in a while I tried, though. "Awakening" is an example.

I'm not sure that I'd bother to include this little mood piece in Balefires were it not for one thing: this is the only story I sold while I was in Viet Nam. I wrote it in longhand and typed up a second draft on the orderly room typewriter one Sunday morning in Di An. While I sat typing the story, there was a bang behind me. I looked back over my shoulder and watched the ammo dump destroy itself in a series of increasingly loud explosions. Never a dull moment…

I sent my typescript to my wife Jo, at home in Chapel Hill. She retyped it and mailed it to Mr. August Derleth, the proprietor of Arkham House, who'd bought two previous stories from me. He took "Awakening" for $25. That's one of the few good things that happened to me in Southeast Asia.

They remained some time in silence in the shadowed parlor, alternately sipping their tea and staring idly at the dim trees to be seen beyond the gauze curtains. At last Mab cleared her throat, a little coughing sound. The man looked up. "Mab?" "Frank, I think it's time we try. We'll never see Missy's equal, you know."