Firestarter

1

The violent storm passed. Time passed three weeks of it. Summer, humid and over bearing, still held sway over eastern Virginia, but school was back in session and lumbering yellow school buses trundled up and down the well-kept rural roads in the Longmont area. In not-too-distant Washington, D.C… another year of legislation, rumor, and innuendo was beginning, marked with the usual freak-show atmosphere engendered by national television, planned information leaks, and overmastering clouds of bourbon fumes.

None of that made much of an impression in the cool, environmentally controlled rooms of the two antebellum houses and the corridors and levels honeycombed beneath. The only correlative might have been that Charlie McGee was also going to school. It was Hockstetter’s idea that she be tutored, and Charlie had balked, but John Rainbird had talked her into it.

“What hurt’s it gonna do?” he asked. “There’s no sense in a smart girl like you getting way behind.

Shit-excuse me, Charlie-but I wish to God sometimes that I had more than an eighth-grade education. I wouldn’t be moppin floors now-you can bet your boots on that. Besides, it’ll pass the time.”

So she had done it-for John. The tutors came: the young man who taught English, the older woman who taught mathematics, the younger woman with the thick glasses who began to teach her French, the man in the wheelchair who taught science. She listened to them, and she supposed she learned, but she had done it for John.

On three occasions John had risked his job to pass her father notes, and she felt guilty about that and hence was more willing to do what she thought would please John. And he had brought her news of her dad-that he was well, that he was relieved to know Charlie was well too, and that he was cooperating with their tests. This had distressed her a little, but she was now old enough to understand-a little bit, anyway-that what was best for her might not always be best for her father. And lately she had begun to wonder more and more if John might know best about what was right for her. In his earnest, funny way (he was always swearing and then apologizing for it, which made her giggle), he was very persuasive.

He had not said anything about making fires for almost ten days after the blackout. Whenever they talked of these things, they did it in the kitchen, where he said there were no “bugs,” and they always talked in low voices.

On that day he had said, “You thought any more about that fire business, Charlie?” He always called her Charlie now instead of “kid.” She had asked him to.

She began to tremble. Just thinking about making fires had this effect on her since the Manders farm. She got cold and tense and trembly; on Hockstetter’s reports this was called a “mild phobic reaction.”

“I told you,” she said. “I can’t do that. I won’t do that.”

“Now, can’t and won’t aren’t the same thing,” John said. He was washing the floor-

but very slowly, so he could talk to her. His mop swished. He talked the way cons talked in prison, barely moving his lips. Charlie didn’t reply. “I just had a couple of thoughts on this,” he said. “But if you don’t want to hear them-if your head’s really set-I’ll just shut up.”

“No, that’s okay,” Charlie said politely, but she did really wish he would shut up, not talk about it, not even think about it, because it made her feel bad. But John had done so much for her… and she desperately didn’t want to offend him or hurt his feelings. She needed a friend:

“Well, I was just thinking that they must know how it got out of control at that farm,” he said. “They’d probably be really careful. I don’t think they’d be apt to test you in a room full of paper and oily rags, do.you?”

“No, but-”

He raised one hand a little way off his mop. “Hear me out, hear me out.”

“Okay.”

“And they sure know that was the only time you caused a real-what’s it?-a conflagration. Small fires, Charlie. That’s the ticket. Small fires. And if something did happen-which I doubt, cause I think you got better control over yourself than you think you do-but say something did happen. Who they gonna blame, huh? They gonna blame you? After the fuckheads spent half a year twisting your arm to do it? Oh hell, I’m sorry.”

The things he was saying scared her, but still she had to put her hands to her mouth and giggle at the woebegone expression on his face. John smiled a little too, then shrugged. “The other thing I was thinkin is that you can’t learn to control something unless you practice it and practice it.” “I don’t care if I ever control it or not, because I’m just not going to do it.”

“Maybe or maybe not,” John said stubbornly, wringing out his mop. He stood it in the corner, then dumped his soapy water down the sink. He began to run a bucket of fresh to rinse with. “You might get surprised into using it.”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Or suppose you got a bad fever sometime. From the flu or the croup or, hell, I dunno, some kind of infection.” This was one of the few profitable lines Hockstetter had given him to pursue. “You ever have your appendix out, Charlie?”

“No-ooo…”

John began to rinse the floor.

“My brother had his out, but it went bust first and he almost died. That was cause we were reservation Indians and nobody gave a-nobody cared much if we lived or died. He got a high fever, a hundred and five, I guess, and he went ravin right off his head, sayin horrible curses and talkin to people who weren’t there. Do you know he thought our father was the Angel of Death or somethin, come to carry him off, and he tried to stick im with a knife that was on his bedside table there? I told you this story, didn’t I?”

“No,” Charlie said, whispering now not to keep from being overheard but out of horrified fascination. “Really?” “Really,” John affirmed. He squeezed the mop out again. “It wasn’t his fault. It was the fever that did it. People are apt to say or do anything when they’re delirious. Anything.” Charlie understood what he was saying and felt a sinking fear. Here was something she had never even considered.

“But if you had control of this pyro-whatsis…”

“How could I have control of it if I was delirious?”

“Just because you do.” Rainbird went back to Wanless’s original metaphor, the one that had so disgusted Cap almost a year ago now. “It’s like toilet-training, Charlie. Once you get hold of your bowels and bladder, you’re in control for good. Delirious people sometimes get their beds all wet from sweat, but they rarely piss the bed.”

Hockstetter had pointed out that this was not invariably true, but Charlie wouldn’t know that.

“Well, anyway, all I mean is that if you got control, don’t you see, you wouldn’t have to worry about this anymore. You’d have it licked. But to get control you have to practice and practice. The same way you learned to tie your shoes, or to make your letters in kinnygarden.”

“I… I just don’t want to make fires! And I won’t! I won’t!” “There, I went and upset you,” John said, distressed. “I sure didn’t mean to do that. I’m sorry, Charlie. I won’t say no more. Me and my big fat mouth.” But the next time she brought it up herself.

It was three or four days later, and she had thought over the things he had said very carefully… and she believed that she had put her finger on the one flaw. “It would just never end,” she said. “They’d always want more and more and more. If you only knew the way they chased us, they never-give up. Once I started they’d want bigger fires and then even bigger ones and then bonfires and then… I don’t know… but I’m afraid.”

He admired her again. She had an intuition and a native wit that was incredibly sharp. He wondered what Hockstetter would think when he, Rainbird, told him that Charlie McGee had an extremely good idea what their top-secret master plan was. All of their reports on Charlie theorized that pyrokinesis was only the centerpiece of many related psionic talents, and Rainbird believed that her intuition was one of them. Her father had told them again and again that Charlie had known Al Steinowitz and the others were coming up to the Manders farm even before they had arrived. That was a scary thought. If she should ever get one of her funny intuitions about his authenticity… well, they said hell had no fury like a woman scorned, and if half of what he believed about Charlie was true, then she was perfectly capable of manufacturing hell, or a reasonable facsimile. He might suddenly find himself getting very hot. It added a certain spice to the proceedings… a spice that had been missing for too long.

“Charlie,” he said, “I’m not sayin you should do any of these things for free.”

She looked at him, puzzled.

John sighed. “I don’t hardly know how to put it to you,” he said. “I guess I love you a little. You’re like the daughter I never had. And the way they’re keeping you cooped up here, not letting you see your daddy and all, never getting to go out, missing all the things other little girls have… it just about makes me sick.”

Now he allowed his good eye to blaze out at her, scaring her a little. “You could get all kinds of things just by going along with them… and attaching a few strings.” “Strings,” Charlie said, utterly mystified. “Yeah! You could get them to let you go outside in the sun, I bet. Maybe even into Longmont to shop for things. You could get out of this goddam box and into a regular house. See other kids. And-”

“And see my father?”

“Sure, that, too.” But that was one thing that was never going to happen, because if the two of them put their information together they would realize that John the Friendly Orderly was just too good to be true. Rainbird had never passed along a single message to Andy McGee. Hockstetter thought it would be running a risk for no gain, and Rainbird, who thought Hockstetter a total bleeding asshole about most things, agreed.

It was one thing to fool an eight-year-old kid with fairy stories about there being no bugs in the kitchen and about how they could talk in low voices and riot be overheard, but it would be quite another thing to fool the girl’s father with the same fairy story, even though he was hooked through the bag and back. McGee might not be hooked enough to miss the fact that they were now doing little more than playing Nice Guy and Mean Guy with Charlie, a technique police departments have used to crack criminals for hundreds of years.

So he maintained the fiction that he was taking her messages to Andy just as he was maintaining so many other fictions. It was true that he saw Andy quite often, but he saw him only on the TV monitors. It was true that Andy was cooperating with their tests, but it was also true that he was tipped over, unable to push a kid into eating a Popsicle. He had turned into a big fat zero, concerned only with what was on the tube and when his next pill was going to arrive, and he never asked to see his daughter anymore. Meeting her father face to face and seeing what they had done to him might stiffen her resistance all over again, and he was very close to breaking her now; she wanted to be convinced now. No, all things were negotiable except that. Charlie McGee was never going to see her father again. Before too long, Rainbird surmised, Cap would have McGee on a Shop plane to the Maui compound. But the girl didn’t need to know that, either.

“You really think they’d let me see him?”

“No question about it,” he responded easily. “Not at first, of course; he’s their ace with you, and they know it. But if you went to a certain point and then said you were going to cut them off unless they let you see him-“He let it dangle there. The bait was out, a big sparkling lure dragged through the water. It was full of hooks and not good to eat anyway, but that was something else this tough little chick didn’t know.

She looked at him thoughtfully. No more was said about it. That day.

Now, about a week later, Rainbird abruptly reversed his field. He did this for no concrete reason, but his own intuition told him he could get no further by advocacy. It was time to beg, as Br'er Rabbit had begged Br'er Fox not to be thrown into that briar patch.

“You remember what we was talkin about?” He opened the conversation. He was waxing the kitchen floor. She was pretending to linger over her selection of a snack from the fridge. One clean, pink foot was cocked behind the other so he could see the sole-a pose that he found curiously evocative of mid-childhood. It was somehow pre-erotic, almost mystic. His heart went out to her again. Now she looked back over her shoulder at him doubtfully. Her hair, done up in a ponytail, lay over one shoulder.

“Yes,” she said, “I remember.”

“Well, I been thinkin, and I started to ask myself what makes me an expert on givin advice,” he said. “I can’t even float a thousand-dollar bank loan for a car.”,

“Oh, John, that doesn’t mean anything-”

“Yes it does. If I knew something, I’d be one of those guys like that Hockstetter. College-educated.” With great disdain she replied, “My daddy says any fool can buy a college education somewhere.” In his heart, he rejoiced.

2

Three days after that, the fish swallowed the lure.

Charlie told him that she had decided to let them make their tests. She would be careful, she said. And she would make them be careful, if they didn’t know how. Her face was thin and pinched and pale.

“Don’t you do it,” John said, “unless you’ve thought it all out.”

“I’ve tried,” she whispered.

“Are you doing it for them?”

“No!”

“Good! Are you doing it for you?”

“Yes. For me. And for my father.”

“All right,” he said. “And Charlie-make them play it your way. Understand me? You’ve shown them how tough you can be. Don’t let them see a weak streak now. If they see it, they’ll use it. Play tough. You know what I mean?”

“I… think so.”

“They get something, you get something. Every time. No freebies.” His shoulders slumped a bit. The fire went out of his eye. She hated to see him this way, looking depressed and defeated. “Don’t let them treat you like they treated me. I gave my country four years of my life and one eye. One of those years I spent in a hole in the ground eating bugs and running a fever and smelling my own shit all the time and picking lice out of my hair. And when I got out they said thanks a lot, John, and put a mop in my hand. They stole from me, Charlie. Get it? Don’t let them do that to you.”

“I get it,” she said solemnly. He brightened a little, then smiled. “So when’s the big day?” “I’m seeing Dr. Hockstetter tomorrow. I’ll tell him I’ve decided to cooperate,… a little. And I’ll… I’ll tell him what I want.” “Well, just don’t ask for too much at first. It’s just like the carny at the midway, Charlie.

You got to show em some flash before you take their cash.”

She nodded.

“But you show them who’s in the saddle, right? Show them who’s boss.”

“Right.”

He smiled more broadly. “Good kid!” he said.

3

Hockstetter was furious. “What the hell sort of game are you playing?” he shouted at Rainbird. They were in Cap’s office. He dared to shout, Rainbird thought, because Cap was here to play referee. Then he took a second look at Hockstetter’s hot blue eyes, his flushed cheeks, his white knuckles, and admitted that he was probably wrong. He had dared to make his way through the gates and into Hockstetter’s sacred garden of privilege. The shaking-out Rainbird had administered after the blackout ended was one thing; Hockstetter had lapsed dangerously and had known it. This was something else altogether. He thought.

Rainbird only stared at Hockstetter.

“You’ve carefully set it up around an impossibility! You know damned well she isn’t going to see her father! ‘They get something, you get something,'” Hockstetter mimicked furiously. “You fool!”

Rainbird continued to stare at Hockstetter. “Don’t call me a fool again,” he said in a perfectly neutral voice. Hockstetter flinched… but only a little.

“Please, gentlemen,” Cap said wearily. “Please.”

There was a tape recorder on his desk. They had just finished listening to the conversation Rainbird had had with Charlie that morning.

“Apparently Dr. Hockstetter had missed the point that he and his team are finally going to get something,” Rainbird said. “Which will improve their store of practical knowledge by one hundred percent, if my mathematics are correct.”

“As the result of a totally unforeseen accident,” Hockstetter said sullenly. “An accident you people were too shortsighted to manufacture for yourselves,” Rainbird countered. “Too busy playing with your rats, maybe.”

“Gentlemen, that’s enough!” Cap said. “We’re not here to indulge in a lot of recriminations; that is not the purpose of this meeting.” He looked at Hockstetter. “You’re going to get to play ball,” he said. “I must say you show remarkably little gratitude.” Hockstetter muttered.

Cap looked at Rainbird. “All the same, I also think you took your role of amicus curiae a little bit too far in the end.”

“Do you think so? Then you still don’t understand.” He looked from Cap to Hockstetter and then back to Cap again. “I think,'both of you have shown an almost paralyzing lack of understanding. You’ve got two child psychiatrists at your disposal, and if they are an accurate representation of the caliber of that field, there are a lot of disturbed kids out there who have got big-time trouble.”

“Easy to say,” Hockstetter said. “This-”

“You just don’t understand how smart she is,” Rainbird cut him off: “You don’t understand how… how adept she is at seeing the causes and effects of things. Working with her is like picking your way through a minefield. I pointed out the carrot-and stick idea to her because she would have thought of it herself. By thinking of it for her, I’ve shored up the trust she has in me… in effect, turned a disadvantage into an advantage.”

Hockstetter opened his mouth. Cap held up one hand and then turned to Rainbird. He spoke in a soft, placatory tone that he used with no one else… but then, no one else was John Rainbird. “That doesn’t alter the fact that you seem to have limited how far Hockstetter and his people can go. Sooner or later she’s going to understand that her ultimate request-to see her father-is not going to be granted. We’re all in agreement that to allow that might close off her usefulness to us forever.”

“Right on,” Hockstetter said.

“And if she’s as sharp as you say,” Cap said, “she’s apt to make the ungrantable request sooner rather than later.”

“She’ll make it,” Rainbird agreed, “and that will end it. For one thing, she’d realize as soon as she saw him that I was lying all along about his condition. That would lead her to the conclusion that I had been shilling for you guys all along. So it becomes entirely a question of how long you can keep her going.”

Rainbird leaned forward.

“A couple of points. First, you’ve both got to get used to the idea that she’s simply not going to light fires for you ad infinitum. She’s a human being, a little girl who wants to see her father. She’s not a lab rat.”

“We’ve already-“Hockstetter began impatiently.

“No. No, you haven’t. It goes back to the very basis of the reward system in experimentation. The carrot and the stick. By lighting fires, Charlie thinks she’s holding the carrot out to you and that she will eventually lead you-and herself-to her father. But we know differently. In truth, her father is the carrot, and we are leading her. Now a mule will plow the whole south forty trying to get that carrot dangling in front of his eyes, because a mule is stupid. But this little girl isn’t.”

He looked at Cap and Hockstetter.

“I keep saying that. It is like pounding a nail into oak-oak of the first cutting. Hard going, don’t you know; you both seem to keep forgetting. Sooner or later she’s going to wise up and tell you to stick it. Because she isn’t a mule. Or a white lab rat.”

And you want her to quit, Cap thought with slow loathing. You want her to quit so you can kill her.

“So you start with that one basic fact,” Rainbird continued. “That’s Go. Then you start thinking of ways to prolong her cooperation as long as possible. Then, when it’s over, you write your report. If you got enough data, you get rewarded with a big cash appropriation. You get to eat the carrot. Then you can start injecting a bunch of poor, ignorant slobs with your witch’s brew all over again.”

“You’re being insulting,” Hockstetter said in a shaking voice.

“It beats the terminal stupids,” Rainbird answered.

“How do you propose to prolong her cooperation?”

“You’ll get some mileage out of her just by granting small privileges,” Rainbird said. “A walk on the lawn. Or… every little girl loves horses. I’ll bet you. could get half a dozen fires out of her just by having a groom lead her around the bridle paths on one of those stable nags. That ought to be enough to keep a dozen paper pushers like Hockstetter dancing on the head of a pin for five years.”

Hockstetter pushed back from the table. “I don’t have to sit here and listen to this.”

“Sit down and shut up,” Cap said.

Hot blood slammed into Hockstetter’s face and he looked ready to fight; it left as suddenly as it had come and he looked ready to cry. Then he sat down again.

“You let her go into town and shop,” Rainbird said. “Maybe you arrange for her to go to Seven Flags over Georgia and ride the roller-coaster. Maybe even with her good friend John the orderly.”

“You seriously think just those things-“Cap began.

“No, I don’t. Not for long. Sooner or later it will get back to her father. But she’s only human. She wants, things for herself as well. She’ll go quite aways down the road you want her to go down just by rationalizing it to herself, telling herself she’s showing you the flash before grabbing the cash. But eventually it’s going to get back to dear old Dads, yes. She’s no sellout, that one. She’s tough.”

“And that’s the end of the trolley-car ride,” Cap said thoughtfully. “Everybody out. The project ends. This phase of it, anyway.” In many ways, the prospect of an end in sight relieved him tremendously.

“Not right there, no,” Rainbird said, smiling his mirthless smile. “We have one more card up our sleeve. One more very large carrot when the smaller ones play out. Not her father-not the grand prize-but something that will keep her going yet a while longer.”

“And what would that be?” Hockstetter asked.

“You figure it out,” Rainbird said, still smiling, and said no more. Cap might, in spite of how far he had come unraveled over the last half year or so. He had more smarts on half power than most of his employees (and all the pretenders to his throne) had on full power. As for Hockstetter, he would never see it. Hockstetter had risen several floors past his level of incompetency, a feat more possible in the federal bureaucracy than elsewhere. Hockstetter would have trouble following his nose to a shit-and cream-cheese sandwich.

Not that it mattered if any of them figured out what the final carrot (the Game Carrot, one might say) in this little contest was; the results would still be the same. It was going to put him comfortably in the driver’s seat one way or the other. He might have asked them: Who do you think her father is now that her father isn’t there?

Let them figure it out for themselves. If they could.

John Rainbird went on smiling.

4

Andy McGee sat in front of his television set. The little amber Home Box Office pilot light glowed in the square gadget on top of the TV. On the screen, Richard Dreyfuss was trying to build the Devil’s Butte in his living room. Andy watched with a calm and vapid expression of pleasure. Inside he was boiling with nervousness. Today was the day.

For Andy, the three weeks since the blackout had been a period of almost unbearable tension and strain interwoven with bright threads of guilty exhilaration. He could understand simultaneously how the Russian KGB could inspire such terror and how George Orwell’s Winston Smith must have enjoyed his brief period of crazy, furtive rebellion. He had a secret again. It gnawed and worked in him, as all grave secrets do within the minds of their keepers, but it also made him feel whole and potent again. He was putting one over on them. God knew how long he would be able to continue or if it would come to anything, but right now he was doing it.

It was almost ten in the morning and Pynchot, that eternally grinning man, was coming at ten. They would be going for a walk in the garden to “discuss his progress.” Andy intended to push him… or to at least try. He might have made the effort before this, except for the TV monitors and the endless bugging devices. And the wait had given him time to think out his line of attack and probe it again and again for weak spots. He had, in fact, rewritten parts of the scenario in his mind many times.

At night, lying in bed in the dark; he had thought over and over again: Big Brother is watching. Just keep telling yourself that, keep it foremost in your mind. They’ve got you locked up right in the forebrain of Big Brother, and if you really expect to help Charlie, you’ve got to keep on fooling them.

He was sleeping less than he ever had in his life, mostly because he was terrified of talking in his sleep. Some nights he lay wakeful for hours, afraid even to toss and turn in case they should wonder why a drugged man should be so restless. And when he did sleep it was thin, shot with strange dreams (often the Long John Silver figure, the one-eyed pirate with the pegleg, recurred in these) and easily broken.

Slipping the pills was the easiest part, because they believed he wanted them. The pills came four times a day now, and there had been no more tests since the blackout. He believed they had given up, and that was what Pynchot wanted to tell him today on his walk.

Sometimes he would cough the pills out of his mouth into his cupped hand and put them in food scraps he would later scrape down the garbage disposal. More went down the toilet. Still others he had pretended to take with ginger ale. He spat the pills into the half-empty cans to dissolve and then let them stand, as if forgotten. Later he would turn them down the sink.

God knew he was no professional at this, and presumably the people who were monitoring him were. But he didn’t think they were monitoring him very closely anymore. If they were, he would be caught. That was all.

Dreyfuss and the woman whose son had been taken for a ride by the saucer people were scaling the side of Devil’s Butte when the buzzer that marked the breaking of the door circuit went off briefly. Andy didn’t let himself jump.

This is it, he told himself again.

Herman Pynchot came into the living room. He was shorter than Andy but very slender; there was something about him that had always struck Andy as slightly effeminate, although it was nothing you could put your finger on. Today he was looking extremely reet and compleat in a thin gray turtleneck sweater and a summerweight jacket. And of course he was grinning.

“Good morning, Andy,” he said.

“Oh, “Andy said, and then paused, as if to think. “Hello, Dr. Pynchot.”

“Do you mind if I turn this off? We ought to go for our walk, you know.”

“Oh.” Andy’s brow furrowed, then cleared. “Sure. I’ve seen it three or four times already. But I like the ending. It’s pretty. The UFOs take him away, you know. To the stars.”

“Really,” Pynchot said, and turned off the TV. “Shall we go?”

“Where?” Andy asked.

“Our walk,” Herman Pynchot said patiently. “Remember?”

“Oh,” Andy said. “Sure.” He got up.

5

The hall outside Andy’s room was wide and tile-floored. The lighting was muted and indirect.

Somewhere not far away was a communications or computer center; people strolled in with keypunch cards, out with swatches of printouts, and there was the hum of light machinery.

A young man in an off-the-rack sport coat-the essence of government agent-lounged outside the door of Andy’s apartment. There was a bulge under his arm. The agent was a part of the standard operating procedure, but as he and Pynchot strolled, he would fall behind them, watching but out of earshot. Andy thought he would be no problem.

The agent fell in behind them now as he and Pynchot strolled to the elevator. Andy’s heartbeat was now so heavy it felt as if it were shaking his entire ribcage. But without seeming to, he was watching everything closely. There were perhaps a dozen unmarked doors. Some of them he had seen standing open on other walks up this corridor-a small, specialized library of some kind, a photocopying room in another-but about many of them he simply had no idea. Charlie might be behind any one of them right now… or in some other part of the installation entirely.

They got into the elevator, which was big enough to accommodate a hospital gurney. Pynchot produced his keys, twisted one of them in the keyway, and pushed one of the unmarked buttons. The doors closed and the elevator rose smoothly. The Shop agent lounged at the back of the car. Andy stood with his hands in the pockets of his Lee Riders, a slight, vapid smile on his face. The elevator door opened on what had once been a ballroom. The floor was polished oak, pegged together. Across the wide expanse of the room, a spiral staircase made a graceful double twist on its way to the upper levels. To the left, French doors gave on to a sunny terrace and the rock garden beyond it. From the right, where heavy oak doors stood half open, came the clacking sound of a typing pool, putting out that day’s two bales of paperwork.

And from everywhere came the smell of fresh flowers.

Pynchot led the way across the sunny ballroom, and as always Andy commented on the pegged together floor as if he had never noticed it before. They went through the French doors with their Shop-shadow behind them. It was very warm, very humid. Bees buzzed lazily through the air. Beyond the rock garden were hydrangea, forsythia, and rhododendron bushes. There was the sound of riding lawnmowers making their eternal rounds. Andy turned his face up to the sun with a gratitude that wasn’t feigned.

“How are you feeling, Andy?” Pynchot asked.

“Good. Good.”

“You know, you’ve been here almost half a year now,” Pynchot said in an isn’t-it-amazing-how-the-time-flies-when-you’re-having-a-good-time tone of mild surprise. They turned right, onto one of the graveled paths. The smell of honeysuckle and sweet sassafras hung in the still air. On the other side of the duckpond, near the other house, two horses cantered lazily along.

“That long,” Andy said. “Yes, it is a long time,” Pynchot said, grinning. “And we’ve decided that your power has… diminished, Andy. In fact, you know we’ve had no appreciable results at all.” “Well, you keep me drugged all the time,” Andy said reproachfully. “You can’t expect me to do my best if I’m stoned.” Pynchot cleared his throat but did not point out that Andy had been totally clean for the first three series of tests and all three had been fruitless. “I mean, I’ve done my best, Dr. Pynchot. I’ve tried.” “Yes, yes. Of course you have. And we thinkthat is, I think-that you deserve a rest. Now, the Shop has a small compound on Maui, in the Hawaii chain, Andy. And I have a six-month report to write very soon. How would you like it”-Pynchot’s grin broadened into a game-show host’s leer and his voice took on the tones of a man about to offer a child an incredible treat-“how would you like it if I recommended that you be sent there for the immediate future?”

And the immediate future might be two years, Andy thought. Maybe five. They would want to keep an eye on him in case the mental-domination ability recurred, and maybe as an ace in the hole in case some unforeseen difficulty with Charlie cropped up. But in the end, he had no doubt that there would be an accident or an overdose or a “suicide.” In Orwell’s parlance, he would become an unperson.

“Would I still get my medication?” Andy asked.

“Oh, of course,” Pynchot said.

“Hawaii…” Andy said dreamily. Then he looked around at Pynchot with what he hoped was an expression of rather stupid cunning. “Probably Dr. Hockstetter won’t let me go. Dr. Hockstetter doesn’t like me. I can tell.”

“Oh, he does,” Pynchot assured him. “He does like you, Andy. And in any case, you’re my baby, not Dr. Hockstetter’s. I assure you, he’ll go along with what I advise.”

“But you haven’t written your memorandum on the subject yet,” Andy said.

“No, I thought I’d talk to you first. But, really, Hockstetter’s approval is just a formality.”

“One more series of tests might be wise,” Andy said, and pushed out lightly at Pynchot. “Just for safety’s sake.”

Pynchot’s eyes suddenly fluttered in a strange way. His grin faltered, became puzzled, and then faded altogether. Now Pynchot was the one who looked drugged, and the thought gave Andy a vicious kind of satisfaction. Bees droned in the flowers. The scent of new-cut grass, heavy and cloying, hung in the air.

“When you write your report, suggest one more series of tests,” Andy repeated.

Pynchot’s eyes cleared. His grin came splendidly back. “Of course, this Hawaii thing is just between us for the time being,” he said. “When I write my report, I will be suggesting one more series of tests. I think it might be wise. Just for safety’s sake, you know.”

“But after that I might go to Hawaii?”

“Yes,” Pynchot said. “After that.”

“And another series of tests might take three months or so?”

“Yes, about three months.” Pynchot beamed on Andy as if he were a prize pupil.

They were nearing the pond now. Ducks sailed lazily across its mirror surface. The two men paused by it. Behind them, the young man in the sport coat was watching a middle-aged man and woman cantering along side by side on the far side of the pond. Their reflections were broken only by the long, smooth glide of one of the white ducks. Andy thought the couple looked eerily like an ad for mail-order insurance, the kind of ad that’s always falling out of your Sunday paper and into your lap-or your coffee.

There was a small pulse of pain in his head. Not bad at all. But in his nervousness he had come very close to pushing Pynchot much harder than he had to, and the young man might have noticed the results of that. He didn’t seem to be watching them, but Andy wasn’t fooled.

“Tell me a little about the roads and the countryside around here,” he said quietly to Pynchot, and pushed out lightly again. He knew from various snatches of conversation that they were not terribly far from Washington, D.C… but nowhere as close as the CIA’s base of operations in Langley. Beyond that he knew nothing.

“Very pretty here,” Pynchot said dreamily, “since they’ve filled the holes.”

“Yes, it is nice,” Andy said, and lapsed into silence. Sometimes a push triggered an almost hypnotic trace memory in the person being pushedusually through some obscure association-and it was unwise to interrupt whatever was going on. It could set up an echo effect, and the echo would become a ricochet, and the ricochet could lead to… well, to almost anything. It had happened to one of his Walter Mitty businessmen, and it had scared the bejesus out of Andy. It had turned out okay, but if friend Pynchot suddenly got a case of the screaming horrors, it would be anything but okay.

“My wife loves that thing,” Pynchot said in that same dreamy voice.

“What’s that?” Andy asked. “That she loves?”

“Her new garbage disposer. It’s very…”

He trailed off:

“Very pretty,” Andy suggested. The guy in the sport coat had drifted a little closer and Andy felt a fine sweat break on his upper lip. “Very pretty,” Pynchot agreed, and looked vaguely out at the pond. The Shop agent came closer still, and Andy decided he might have to risk another push… a very small one. Pynchot was standing beside him like a TV set with a blown tube. The shadow picked up a small chunk of wood and tossed it in the water. It struck lightly and ripples spread, shimmering. Pynchot’s eyes fluttered.

“The country is very pretty around here,” Pynchot said. “Quite hilly, you know. Good riding country. My wife and I ride here once a week, if we can get away. I guess Dawn’s the closest town going west… southwest, actually. Pretty small. Dawn’s on Highway Three-oh-one. Gether’s the closest town going east.”

“Is Gether on a highway?”

“Nope. Just on a little road.”

“Where does Highway Three-oh-one go? Besides Dawn?”

“Why, all the way up to D.C… if you go north. Most of the way to Richmond, if you go south.”

Andy wanted to ask about Charlie now, had planned to ask about Charlie, but Pynchot’s reaction had scared him a little. His association of wife, holes, pretty, and-very strange!-garbage disposer had been peculiar and somehow disquieting. It might be that Pynchot, although accessible, was nevertheless not a good subject. It might be that Pynchot was a disturbed personality of some sort, tightly corseted into an appearance of normality while God knew what forces might be delicately counterbalanced underneath. Pushing people who were mentally unstable could lead to all sorts of unforeseen results. If it hadn’t been for the shadow he might have tried anyway (after all that had happened to him, he had damn few compunctions about messing with Herman Pynchot’s head), but now he was afraid to. A psychiatrist with the push might be a great boon to mankind… but Andy McGee was no shrink.

Maybe it was foolish to assume so much from a single trace-memory reaction; he had got them before from a good many people and very few of them had freaked out. But he didn’t trust Pynchot. Pynchot smiled too much.

A sudden cold and murderous voice spoke from deep inside him, from some well sunk far into his subconscious: Tell him to go home and commit suicide. Then push him. Push him hard.

He thrust the thought away, horrified and a little sickened.

“Well,” Pynchot said, looking around, grinning. “Shall we returnez-vous?”

“Sure,” Andy said.

And so he had begun. But he was still in the dark about Charlie.

6

From

Herman Pynchot

To

Patrick Hockstetter

Date

September 12

Re

Andy McGee

I’ve been over all of my notes and most of the tapes in the last three days, and have spoken to McGee. There is no essential change in the situation since we last discussed it 9/5, but for the time being I’d like to put the Hawaii idea on hold if there is no big objection (as Captain Hollister himself says, “it’s only money'!).

The fact is, Pat, I believe that a final series of tests might be wise-just for safety’s sake. After that we might go ahead and send him to the Maui compound. I believe that a final series might take three months or so.

Please advise before I start the necessary paperwork.

Herm

7

From P. H.

To Herm Pynchot

Date September 13

Re Andy McGee

I don’t get it! The last time we all got together we agreed-you as much as any of us-that McGee was as dead as a used fuse. You can only hesitate so long at the bridge, you know!

If you want to schedule another series of tests-an abbreviated series, then be my guest. We’re starting with the girl next week, but thanks to a good deal of inept interference from a certain source, I think it likely that her cooperation may not last long.

While it does, it might not be a bad idea to have her father around… as a “fire-extinguisher”???

Oh yes-it may be “only money,” but it is the taxpayer’s money, and levity on that subject is rarely encouraged, Herm. Especially by Captain Hollister. Keep it in mind.

Plan on having him for 6 to 8 weeks at most, unless you get results… and if you do, I’ll personally eat your Hush Puppies.

Pat

8

“Son-of-a-fucking-bitch,” Herm Pynchot said aloud as he finished reading this memorandum. He reread the third paragraph: here was Hockstetter, Hockstetter who owned a completely restored 1958 Thunderbird, spanking him about money. He crumpled up the memo and threw it at the wastebasket and leaned back in his swivel chair. Two months at most! He didn’t like that. Three would have been more like it. He really felt that-

Unhidden and mysterious, a vision of the garbage-disposal unit he had installed at home rose in his mind. He didn’t like that, either. The disposal unit had somehow got into his mind lately, and he didn’t seem to be able to get it out. It came to the fore particularly when he tried to deal with the question of Andy McGee. The dark hole in the centre of the sink was guarded by a rubber diaphragm… vaginal, that.

He leaned farther back in his chair, dreaming. When he came out of it with a start, he was disturbed to see that almost twenty minutes had gone by. He drew a memo form toward him and scratched out a note to that dirty bird Hockstetter, eating the obligatory helping of crow about his illadvised “it’s only money” comment. He had to restrain himself from repeating his request for three months (and in his mind, the image of the disposer’s smooth dark hole rose again). If Hockstetter said two, it was two. But if he did get results with McGee, Hockstetter was going to find two size-nine Hush Puppies sitting on his desk blotter fifteen minutes later, along with a knife, a fork, and a bottle of Adolph’s Meat Tenderizer.

He finished the note, scrawled Herm across the bottom, and sat back, massaging his temples. He had a headache.

In high school and in college, Herm Pynchot had been a closet transvestite. He liked to dress up in women’s clothes because he thought they made him look…, well, very pretty. His junior year in college, as a member of Delta Tau Delta, he had been discovered by two of his fraternity brothers.

The price of their silence had been a ritual humiliation, not much different from the pledge hazing that Pynchot himself had participated in with high good humor.

At two o'clock in the morning, his discoverers had spread trash and garbage from one end of the fraternity kitchen to the other and had forced Pynchot, dressed only in ladies” panties, stockings and garter belt, and a bra stuffed with toilet paper, to clean it all up and then wash the floor, under constant threat of discovery: all it would have taken was another frat “brother” wandering down for an early-morning snack.

The incident had ended in mutual masturbation, which, Pynchot supposed, he should have been grateful for-it was probably the only thing that caused them to really keep their promise. But he had dropped out of the frat, terrified and disgusted with himself-most of all because he had found the entire incident somehow exciting. He had never “cross-dressed” since that time. He was not gay. He had a lovely wife and two fine children and that proved he was not gay. He hadn’t even thought of that humiliating, disgusting incident in years. And yet-

The image of the garbage disposal, that smooth black hole faced with rubber, remained. And his headache was worse.

The echo set off by Andy’s push had begun. It was lazy and slow-moving now; the image of the disposal, coupled with the idea of being very pretty, was still an intermittent thing.

But it would speed up. Begin to ricochet.

Until it became unbearable.

9

“No,” Charlie said. “It’s wrong.” And she turned around to march right out of the small room again. Her face was white and strained. There were dark, purplish dashes under her eyes.

“Hey, whoa, wait a minute,” Hockstetter said, putting out his hands. He laughed a little. “What’s wrong, Charlie?”

“Everything,” she said. “Everything’s wrong.”

Hockstetter looked at the room. In one corner, a Sony TV camera had been set up. Its cords led through the pressed-cork wall to a VCR in the observation room next door. On the table in the middle of the room was a steel tray loaded with woodchips. To the left of this was an electroencephalograph dripping wires. A young man in a white coat presided over this.

“That’s not much help,” Hockstetter said. He was still smiling paternally, but he was mad. You didn’t have to be a mind reader to know that; you had only to look in his eyes.

“You don’t listen,” she said shrilly. “None of you listen except-”

(except,john but you can’t say that)

“Tell us how to fix it,” Hockstetter said. She would not be placated. “If you listened, you’d know. That steel tray with the little pieces of wood, that’s all right, but that’s the only thing that is. The table’s wood, that wall stuff, that’s fluh-flammable… and so’s that guy’s clothes.” She pointed to the technician, who flinched a little.

“Charlie-”

“That camera is, too.”

“Charlie, that camera’s-”

“It’s plastic and if it gets hot enough it will explode and little pieces will go everywhere. And there’s no water! I told you, I have to push it at water once it gets started. My father and my mother told me so. I have to push it at water to put it out. Or… or…”

She burst into tears. She wanted John. She wanted her father. More than anything, oh, more than anything, she didn’t want to be here. She had not slept at all last night.

For his part, Hockstetter looked at her thoughtfully. The tears, the emotional upset… he thought those things made it as clear as anything that she was really prepared to go through with it.

“All right,” he said. “All right, Charlie. You tell us what to do and we’ll do it.”

“You’re right,” she said. “Or you don’t get nothing.”

Hockstetter thought: We’ll get plenty, you snotty little bitch.

As it turned out, he was absolutely right.

10

Late that afternoon they brought her into a different room. She had fallen asleep in front of the TV when they brought her back to her apartment-her body was still young enough to enforce its need on her worried, confused mind-and she’d slept for nearly six hours. As a result of that and a hamburger and fries for lunch, she felt much better, more in control of herself.

She looked carefully at the room for a long time. The tray of woodchips was on a metal table. The walls were gray industrial sheet steel, unadorned.

Hockstetter said, “The technician there is wearing an asbestos uniform and asbestos slippers.” He spoke down to her, still smiling his paternal smile. The EEG operator looked hot and uncomfortable. He was wearing a white cloth mask to avoid aspirating any asbestos fiber. Hockstetter pointed to a long, square pane of mirror glass set into the far wall. “That’s one-way glass. Our camera is behind it. And you see the tub.”

Charlie went over to it. It was an old-fashioned clawfoot tub and it looked decidedly out of place in these stark surroundings. It was full of water. She thought it would do.

“All right,” she said.

Hockstetter’s smile widened. “Fine.”

“Only you go in the other room there. I don’t want to have to look at you while I do it:” Charlie stared at Hockstetter inscrutably. “Something might happen.” Hockstetter’s paternal smile faltered a little.

11

“She was right, you know,” Rainbird said. “If you’d listened to her, you could have got it right the first time.”

Hockstetter looked at him and grunted.

“But you still don’t believe it, do you?”

Hockstetter, Rainbird, and Cap were standing in front of the one-way glass. Behind them the camera peered into the room and the Sony VCR hummed almost inaudibly. The glass was lightly polarized, making everything in the testing room look faintly blue, like scenery seen through the window of a Greyhound bus. The technician was hooking Charlie up to the EEG. A TV monitor in the observation room reproduced her brainwaves.

“Look at those alphas,” one of the technicians murmured. “She’s really jacked up.”

“Scared,” Rainbird said. “She’s really scared.”

“You believe it, don’t you?” Cap asked suddenly. “You didn’t at first, but now you do.”

“Yes,” Rainbird said. “I believe it.”

In the other room, the technician stepped away from Charlie. “Ready in here.”

Hockstetter flipped a toggle switch. “Go ahead, Charlie. When you’re ready.” Charlie glanced toward the one-way glass, and for an eerie moment she seemed to be looking right into Rainbird’s one eye. He looked back, smiling faintly.

12

Charlie McGee looked at the one-way glass and saw nothing save her own reflection… but the sense of eyes watching her was very strong. She wished John could be back there; that would have made her feel more at ease. But she had no feeling that he was.

She looked back at the tray of woodchips.

It wasn’t a push; it was a shove. She thought about doing it and was again disgusted and frightened to find herself wanting to do it. She thought about doing it the way a hot and hungry person might sit in front of a chocolate ice-cream soda and think about gobbling and slurping it down. That was okay, but first you wanted just a moment to… to savor it.

That wanting made her feel ashamed of herself, and then she shook her head almost angrily. Why shouldn’t I want to do it? If people are good at things, they always want to do them. Like Mommy with her double-crostics and Mr. Douray down the street in Port City, always making bread. When they had enough at his house, he’d make some for other people. If you’re good at something, you want to do it…

Woodchips, she thought a little contemptuously. They should have given me something hard.

13

The technician felt it first. He was hot and uncomfortable and sweaty in the asbestos clothing, and at first he thought that was all it was. Then he saw that the kid’s alpha waves had taken on the high spike rhythm that is the hallmark of extreme concentration, and also the brain’s signature of imagination.

The sense of heat grew-and suddenly he was scared.

14

“Something happening in there,” one of the technicians in the observation room said in a high, excited voice. “Temperature just jumped ten degrees. Her alpha pattern looks like the fucking Andes-”

“There it goes!” Cap exclaimed. “There it goes!” His voice vibrated with the shrill triumph of a man who has waited years for the one moment now at hand.

15

She shoved as hard as she could at the tray of woodchips. They did not so much burst into flames as explode. A moment later the tray itself flipped over twice, spraying chunks of burning wood, and clanged off the wall hard enough to leave a dimple in the sheet steel.

The technician who had been monitoring at the EEG cried out in fear and made a sudden, crazy dash for the door. The sound of his cry hurled Charlie suddenly back in time to the Albany airport. It was the cry of Eddie Delgardo, running for the ladies” bathroom with his army-issue shoes in flames.

She thought in sudden terror and exaltation, Oh God it’s gotten so much stronger!

The steel wall had developed a strange, dark ripple. The room had become explosively hot. In the other room, the digital thermometer, which had gone from seventy degrees to eighty and then paused, now climbed rapidly past ninety to ninetyfour before slowing down.

Charlie threw the firething at the tub; she was nearly panicked now. The water swirled, then broke into a fury of bubbles. In a space of five seconds, the contents of the tub went from cool to a rolling, steaming boil.

The technician had exited, leaving the testing room door heedlessly ajar. In the observation room there was a sudden, startled turmoil. Hockstetter was bellowing. Cap was standing gape-jawed at the window, watching the tubful of water boil. Clouds of steam rose from it and the one-way glass began to fog over. Only Rainbird was calm, smiling slightly, hands clasped behind his back. He looked like a teacher whose star pupil has used difficult postulates to solve a particularly aggravating problem.

(back off.)

Screaming in her mind.

(back off! back off! BACK OFF!)

And suddenly it was gone. Something disengaged, spun free for a second or two, and then simply stopped. Her concentration broke up and let the fire go. She could see the room again and feel the heat she had created bringing sweat to her skin. In the observation room, the thermometer crested at ninety-six and then dropped a degree. The wildly bubbling caldron began to simmer down-but at least half of its contents had boiled away. In spite of the open door, the little room was as hot and moist as a steam room.

16

Hockstetter was checking his instruments feverishly. His hair, usually combed back so neatly and tightly that it almost seemed to scream, had now come awry, sticking up in the back. He looked a bit like Alfalfa of The Little Rascals.

“Got it!” he panted. “Got it, we got it all… it’s on tape… the temperature gradient… did you see the water in that tub boil?… Jesus!… did we get the audio?… we did?… my God, did you see what she did?”

He passed one of his technicians, whirled back, and grabbed him roughly by the front of his smock. “Would you say there was any doubt that she made that happen?” he shouted.

The technician, nearly as excited as Hockstetter, shook his head. “No doubt at all, Chief. None.”

“Holy God,” Hockstetter said, whirling away, distracted again. “I would have thought… something… yes, something… but that tray… flew…”

He caught sight of Rainbird, who was still standing at the one-way glass with his hands crossed behind his back, that mild, bemused smile on his face. For Hockstetter, old animosities were forgotten. He rushed over to the big Indian, grabbed his hand, pumped it.

“We got it,” he told Rainbird with savage satisfaction. “We got it all, it would be good enough to stand up in court! Right up in the fucking Supreme Court!” “Yes, you got it,” Rainbird agreed mildly. “Now you better send somebody along to get her.” “Huh?” Hockstetter looked at him blankly.

“Well,” Rainbird said, still in his mildest tone, “the guy that was in there maybe had an appointment he forgot about, because he left in one hell of an ass-busting rush. He left the door open, and your firestarter just walked out.”

Hockstetter gaped at the glass. The steaming effect had got worse, but there was no doubt that the room was empty except for the tub, the EEG, the overturned steel tray, and the flaming scatter of woodchips.

“One of you men go get her!” Hockstetter cried, turning around. The five or six men stood by their instruments and didn’t move. Apparently no one but Rainbird had noticed that Cap had left as soon as the girl had.

Rainbird grinned at Hockstetter and then raised his eye to include the others, these men whose faces had suddenly gone almost as pale as their lab smocks. “Sure,” he said softly. “Which of you wants to go get the little girl?”

No one moved. It was amusing, really; it occurred to Rainbird that this was the way the politicians were going to look when they found out it was finally done, that the missiles were really in the air, the bombs raining down, the woods and cities on fire. It was so amusing he had to laugh… and laugh… and laugh.

17

“They’re so beautiful,” Charlie said softly. “It’s all so beautiful.”

They were standing near the duckpond, not far from where her father and Pynchot had stood only a few days previously. This day was much cooler than that one had been, and a few leaves had begun to show color. A light wind, just a little too stiff to be called a breeze, ruled the surface of the pond.

Charlie turned her face up to the sun and closed her eyes, smiling. John Rainbird, standing beside her, had spent six months on stockade duty at Camp Stewart in Arizona before going overseas, and he had seen the same expression on the faces of men coming out after a long hard bang inside.

“Would you like to walk over to the stables and look at the horses?”

“Oh yes, sure,” she said immediately, and then glanced shyly at him. “That is, if you don’t mind.”

“Mind? I’m glad to be outside, too. This is recess for me.”

“Did they assign you?”

“Naw,” he said. They began to walk along the edge of the pond toward the stables on the far side. “They asked for volunteers. I don’t think they got many, after what happened yesterday.”

“It scared them?” Charlie asked, just a little too sweetly.

“I guess it did,” Rainbird said, and he was speaking nothing but the truth. Cap had caught up with Charlie as she wandered down the hall and escorted her back to her apartment. The young man who had bolted his position at the EEG was now being processed for duty in Panama City. The staff meeting following the test had been a nutty affair, with the scientists at both their best and worst, blue-skying a hundred new ideas on one hand and worrying tiresomely-and considerably after the fact-about how to control her on the other hand.

It was suggested that her quarters be fireproofed, that a full-time guard be installed, that the drug series be started on her again. Rainbird had listened to as much of this as he could bear and then rapped hard on the edge of the conference table with the band of the heavy turquoise ring he wore. He rapped until he had the attention of everyone there. Because Hockstetter disliked him (and perhaps “hated” would not have been too strong a word), his cadre of scientists also disliked him, but Rainbird’s star had risen in spite of that. He had, after all, been spending a good part of each day with this human blowtorch.

“I suggest,” he had said, rising to his feet and glaring around at them benignly from the shattered lens of his face, “that we continue exactly as we have been. Up until today you have been proceeding on the premise that the girl probably didn’t have the ability which you all knew had been documented two dozen times over, and that if she did have it, it was a small ability, and if it wasn’t a small ability, she would probably never use it again anyway. Now you know differently, and you’d like to upset her all over again.”

“That’s not true,” Hockstetter said, annoyed. “That is simply-”

“It is true!” Rainbird thundered at him, and Hockstetter shrank back in his chair. Rainbird smiled again at the faces around the table. “Now. The girl is eating again. She has put on ten pounds and is no longer a scrawny shadow of what she should be. She is reading, talking, doing paint-by the-numbers kits; she has asked for a dollhouse, which her friend the orderly has promised to try and get for her. In short, her frame of mind is better than it has been since she came here. Gentlemen, we are not going to start monkeying around with a fruitful status quo, are we?”

The man who had been monitoring the videotape equipment earlier had said hesitantly, “But what if she sets that little suite of hers on fire?”

“If she was going to,” Rainbird said quietly, “she would have done it already.” To that there had been no response.

Now, as he and Charlie left the edge of the pond and crossed toward the dark-red stables with their fresh piping of white paint, Rainbird laughed out loud. “I guess you did scare them, Charlie.”

“But you’re not scared?” “Why should I be scared?” Rainbird said, and ruffled her hair. “I only turn into a baby when it’s dark and I can’t get out.” “Oh John, you don’t have to be ashamed of that.” “If you were going to light me up,” he said, rephrasing his comment of the night before, “I guess you would’ve by now.” She stiffened immediately. “I wish you wouldn’t… wouldn’t even say things like that.”

“Charlie, I’m sorry. Sometimes my mouth gets ahead of my brains.”

They went into the stables, which were dim and fragrant. Dusky sunlight slanted in, making mellow bars and stripes in which motes of hay chaff danced with dreamy slowness.

A groom was currying the mane of a black gelding with a white blaze on its forehead. Charlie stopped, looking at the horse with delighted wonder. The groom looked around at her and grinned. “You must be the young miss. They told me to be on the watch-out for you.”

“She’s so beautiful,” Charlie whispered. Her hands trembled to touch that silky coat. One look in the horse’s dark, calm, mellow eyes and she was in love. “Well, it’s a boy, actually,” the groom said, and tipped a wink at Rainbird, whom he had never seen before and didn’t know from Adam. “After a fashion, that is.”

“What’s his name?”

“Necromancer,” the groom said. “Want to pet him?”

Charlie drew hesitantly near. The horse lowered his head and she stroked him; after a few moments she spoke to him. It did not occur to her that she would light another half-dozen fires just to ride on him with John beside her… but Rainbird saw it in her eyes, and he smiled.

She looked around at him suddenly and saw the smile, and for a moment the hand she had been stroking the horse’s muzzle with paused. There was something in that smile she didn’t like, and she had thought she liked everything about John. She got feelings about most people and did not consider this much; it was part of her, like her blue eyes and her double-jointed thumb. She usually dealt with people on the basis of these feelings. She didn’t like Hockstetter, because she felt that he didn’t care for her anymore than he would care for a test tube. She was just an object to him.

But with John, her liking was based only on what he did, his kindness to her, and perhaps part of it was his disfigured face: she could identify and sympathize with him on that account. After all, why was she here if not because-she was also a freak? Yet beyond that, he was one of those rare people-like Mr. Raucher, the delicatessen owner in New York who often played chess with her daddy-who were for some reason completely closed to her. Mr. Raucher was old and wore a hearing aid and had a faded blue number tattooed on his forearm. Once Charlie had asked her father if that blue number meant anything, and her daddy had told her-after cautioning her never to mention it to Mr. Raucher-that he would explain it later. But he never had. Sometimes Mr. Raucher would bring her slices of kielbasa which she would eat while watching TV.

And now, looking at John’s smile, which seemed so strange and somehow disquieting, she wondered for the first time, What are you thinking?

Then such trifling thoughts were swept away by the wonder of the horse.

“John,” she said, “what does ‘Necromancer” mean?”

“Well,” he said, “so far as I know, it means something like ‘wizard,” or ‘sorcerer'.”

“Wizard. Sorcerer.” She spoke the words softly, tasting them as she stroked the dark silk of Necromancer’s muzzle.

18

Walking back with her, Rainbird said: “You ought to ask that Hockstetter to let you ride that horse, if you like him so much.”

“No… I couldn’t…” she said, looking at him wide-eyed and startled.

“Oh, sure you could,” he said, purposely misunderstanding. “I don’t know much about geldings, but I know they’re supposed to be gentle. He looks awful big, but I don’t think he’d run away with you, Charlie.”

“No-I don’t mean that. They just wouldn’t let me.”

He stopped her by putting his hands on her shoulders. “Charlie McGee, sometimes you’re really dumb,” he said. “You done me a good turn that time the lights went out, Charlie, and you kept it to yourself. So now you listen to me and I’ll do you one. You want to see your father again?”

She nodded quickly.

“Then you want to show them that you mean business. It’s like poker, Charlie. If you ain’t dealing from strength… why, you just ain’t dealin. Every time you light a fire for them, for one of their tests, you get something from them.” He gave her shoulders a soft shake: “This is your uncle John talking to you. Do you hear what I’m sayin?”

“Do you really think they’d let me? If I asked?” “If you asked? Maybe not. But if you told them, yeah. I hear them sometimes. You go in to empty their wastebaskets and ashtrays, they think you’re just another piece of the furniture. That Hockstetter’s just about wettin his pants.”

“Really?” She smiled a little. “Really.” They began to walk again. “What about you, Charlie? I know how scared of it you were before. How do you feel about it now?”

She was a long time answering. And when she did, it was in a more thoughtful and somehow adult tone than Rainbird had ever heard from her. “It’s different now,” she said. “It’s a lot stronger. But… I was more in control of it than I ever was before. That day at the farm”-she shivered a little and her voice dropped a little-“it just… just got away for a little while. It… it went everywhere.” Her eyes darkened. She looked inside memory and saw chickens exploding like horrible living fireworks. “But yesterday, when I told it to back off', it did. I said to myself, it’s just going to be a small fire. And it was. It was like I let it out in a single straight line.”

“And then you pulled it back into yourself?”

“God, no,” she said, looking at him. “I put it into the water. If I pulled it back into myself… I guess I’d burn up.”

They walked in silence for a while.

“Next time there has to be more water.”

“But you’re not scared now?”

“Not as scared as I was,” she said, making the careful distinction. “When do you think they’ll let me see my dad?”

He put an arm around her shoulders in rough good comradeship.

“Give them enough rope, Charlie,” he said.

19

It began to cloud up that afternoon and by evening a cold autumn rain had begun to fall.

In one house of a small and very exclusive suburb near the Shop complex-a suburb called Longmont Hills-Patrick Hockstetter was in his workshop, building a model boat (the boats and his restored T-bird were his only hobbies, and there were dozens of his whalers and frigates and packets about the house) and thinking about Charlie McGee. He was in an extremely good mood. He felt that if they could get another dozen tests out of her-even another ten-his future would be assured. He could spend the rest of his life investigating the properties of Lot Six… and at a substantial raise in pay. He carefully glued a mizzenmast in place and began to whistle.

In another house in Longmont Hills, Herman Pynchot was pulling a pair of his wife’s panties over a gigantic erection. His eyes were dark and trancelike. His wife was at a Tupperware party. One of his two fine children was at a Cub Scout meeting and the other fine child was at an intramural chess tourney at the junior high school. Pynchot carefully hooked one of his wife’s bras behind his back. It hung limply on his narrow chest. He looked at himself in the mirror and thought he looked… well, very pretty. He walked out into the kitchen, heedless of the unshaded windows. He walked like a man in a dream. He stood by the sink and looked down into the maw of the newly, installed WasteKing disposer. After a long, thoughtful time, he turned it on. And to the sound of its whirling, gnashing steel teeth, he took himself in hand and masturbated. When his orgasm had come and gone, he started and looked around. His eyes were full of blank terror, the eyes of a man waking from a nightmare. He shut off the garbage disposal and ran for the bedroom, crouching low as he passed the windows. His head ached and buzzed. What in the name of God was happening to him?

In yet a third Longmont Hills house-a house with a hillside view that the likes of Hockstetter and Pynchot could not hope to afford-Cap Hollister and John Rainbird sat drinking brandy from snifters in the living room. Vivaldi issued from Cap’s stereo system. Vivaldi had been one of his wife’s favorites. Poor Georgia.

“I agree with you,” Cap said slowly, wondering again why he had invited this man whom he hated and feared into his home. The girl’s power was extraordinary, and he supposed extraordinary power made for strange bedfellows. “The fact that she mentioned a ‘next time” in such an offhand way is extremely significant.”

“Yes,” Rainbird said. “It appears we do indeed have a string to play out.”

“But it won’t last forever.” Cap swirled his brandy, then forced himself to meet Rainbird’s one glittering eye. “I believe I understand how you intend to lengthen that string, even if Hockstetter does not.”

“Do you?”

“Yes,” Cap said, paused a moment, then added. “It’s dangerous to you.”

Rainbird smiled.

“If she finds out what side you’re really on,” Cap said, “you stand a good chance of finding out what a steak feels like in a microwave oven.”

Rainbird’s smile lengthened into an unfunny shark’s grin. “And would you shed a bitter tear, Captain Hollister?”

“No,” Cap said. “No sense lying to you about that. But for some time now-since before she actually went and did it-I’ve felt the ghost of Dr. Wanless drifting around in here. Sometimes as close as my own shoulder.” He looked at Rainbird over the rim of his glass. “Do you believe in ghosts, Rainbird?”

“Yes. I do.”

“Then you know what I mean. During the last meeting I had with him, he tried to warn me. He made a metaphor-let me see-John Milton at seven, struggling to write his name in letters that were legible, and that same human being growing up to write Paradise Lost. He talked about her… her potential for destruction.” “Yes,” Rainbird said, and his eye gleamed.

“He asked me what we’d do if we found we had a little girl who could progress from starting fires to causing nuclear explosions to cracking the very planet open. I thought he was funny, irritating, and almost certainly mad.”

“But now you think he may have been right.”

“Let us say that I find myself wondering sometimes at three in the morning. Don’t you?”

“Cap, when the Manhattan Project group exploded their first atomic device, no one was quite sure what would happen. There was a school of thought which felt that the chain reaction would never end-that we would have a miniature sun glowing in the desert out there even unto the end of the world.”

Cap nodded slowly.

“The Nazis were also horrible,” Rainbird said. “The Japs were horrible. Now the Germans and the Japanese are nice and the Russians are horrible. The Muslims are horrible. Who knows who may become horrible in the future?”

“She’s dangerous,” Cap said, rising restlessly. “Wanless was right about that. She’s a dead end.”

“Maybe.”

“Hockstetter says that the place where that tray hit the wall was rippled. It was sheet steel, but it rippled with the heat. The tray itself was twisted entirely out of shape. She smelted it. That little girl might have put out three thousand degrees of heat for a split second there.” He looked at Rainbird, but Rainbird was looking vaguely around the living room, as if he had lost interest. “What I’m saying is that what you plan to do is dangerous for all of us, not just for you.”

“Oh yes,” Rainbird agreed complacently. “There’s a risk. Maybe we won’t have to do it. Maybe Hockstetter will have what he needs before it becomes necessary to implement… uh, plan B.”

“Hockstetter’s a type,” Cap said curtly. “He’s an information junkie. He’ll never have enough. He could test her for two years and still scream we were too hasty when we… when we took her away. You know it and I know it, so let’s not play games.”

“We’ll know when it’s time,” Rainbird said. “I’ll know.”

“And then what will happen?”

“John the friendly orderly will come in,” Rainbird said, smiling a little. “He will greet her, and talk to her, and make her smile. John the friendly orderly will make her feel happy because he’s the only one who can. And when John feels she is at the moment of greatest happiness, he will strike her across the bridge of the nose, breaking it explosively and driving bone fragments into her brain. It will be quick… and I will be looking into her face when it happens.”

He smiled-nothing sharklike about it this time. The smile was gentle, kind… and fatherly. Cap drained his brandy. He needed it. He only hoped that Rainbird would indeed know the right time when it came, or they might all find out what a steak felt like in a microwave oven.

“You’re crazy,” Cap said. The words escaped before he could hold them back, but Rainbird did not seem offended.

“Oh yes,” he agreed, and drained his own brandy. He went on smiling…

20

Big Brother. Big Brother was the problem.

Andy moved from the living room of his apartment to the kitchen, forcing himself to walk slowly, to hold a slight smile on his face-the walk and expression of a man who is pleasantly stoned out of his gourd.

So far he had succeeded only in keeping himself here, near Charlie, and finding out that the nearest road was Highway 301 and that the countryside was fairly rural. All of that had been a week ago. It had been a month since the blackout, and he still knew nothing more about the layout of this installation than he had been able to observe when he and Pynchot went for their walks.

He didn’t want to push anyone down here in his quarters, because Big Brother was always watching and listening. And he didn’t want to push Pynchot anymore, because Pynchot was cracking up-Andy was sure of it. Since their little walk by the duckpond, Pynchot had lost weight. There were dark circles under his eyes, as if he were sleeping poorly.

He sometimes would begin speaking and then trail off, as if he had lost his train of thought… or as if it had been interrupted.

All of which made Andy’s own position that much more precarious.

How long before Pynchot’s colleagues noticed what was happening to him? They might think it nothing but nervous strain, but suppose they connected it with him? That would be the end of whatever slim chance Andy had of getting out of here with Charlie. And his feeling that Charlie was in big trouble had got stronger and stronger.

What in the name of Jesus Christ was he going to do about Big Brother?

He got a Welch’s Grape from the fridge, went back to the living room, and sat down in front of the TV without seeing it, his mind working restlessly, looking for some way out. But when that way out came, it was (like the power blackout) a complete surprise. In a way, it was Herman Pynchot who opened the door for him: he did it by killing himself.

21

Two men came and got him. He recognized one of them from Manders’s farm.

“Come on, big boy,” this one said. “Little walk.”

Andy smiled foolishly, but inside, the terror had begun. Something had happened. Something bad had happened; they didn’t send guys like this if it was something good. Perhaps he had been found out. In fact, that was the most likely thing. “Where t0?”

“Just come on.”

He was taken to the elevator, but when they got off in the ballroom, they went farther into the house instead of outside. They passed the secretarial pool, entered a. smaller room where a secretary ran off correspondence on an IBM typewriter.

“Go right in,” she said.

They passed her on the right and went through a door into a small study with a bay window that gave a view of the duckpond through a screen of low alders. Behind an old-fashioned roll-top desk sat an elderly man with a sharp, intelligent face; his cheeks were ruddy, but from sun and wind rather than liquor, Andy thought.

He looked up at Andy, then nodded at the two men who had brought him in. “Thank you. You can wait outside.”

They left.

The man behind the desk looked keenly at Andy, who looked back blandly, still smiling a bit. He hoped to God he wasn’t overdoing it. “Hello, who are you?” he asked.

“My name is Captain Hollister, Andy. You can call me Cap. They tell me I am in charge of this here rodeo.”

“Pleased to meet you,” Andy said. He let his smile widen a little. Inside, the tension screwed itself up another notch.

“I’ve some sad news for you, Andy.”

(oh God no it’s Charlie something’s happened to Charlie)

Cap was watching him steadily with those small, shrewd eyes, eyes caught so deeply in their pleasant nets of small wrinkles that you almost didn’t notice how cold and studious they were.

“Oh?”

“Yes,” Cap said, and fell silent for a moment. And the silence spun out agonizingly.

Cap had fallen into a study of his hands, which were neatly folded on the blotter in front of him. It was all Andy could do to keep from leaping across the desk and throttling him. Then Cap looked up.

“Dr. Pynchot is dead, Andy. He killed himself last night.”

Andy’s jaw dropped in unfeigned surprise. Alternating waves of relief and horror raced through him. And over it all, like a boiling sky over a confused sea, was the realization that this changed everything… but how? How?

Cap was watching him. He suspects. He suspects something. But are his suspicions serious or only a part of his job?

A hundred questions. He needed time to think and he had no time. He would have to do his thinking on his feet. “That surprises you?” Cap asked.

“He was my friend,” Andy said simply, and had to close his mouth to keep from saying more. This man would listen to him patiently; he would pause long after Andy’s every remark (as he was pausing now) to see if Andy would plunge on, the mouth outracing the mind. Standard interrogation technique. And there were man-pits in these woods; Andy felt it strongly. It had been an echo, of course. An echo that had turned into a ricochet. He had pushed Pynchot and started a ricochet and it had torn the man apart. And for all of that, Andy could not find it in his heart to be sorry. There was horror… and there was a caveman who capered and rejoiced.

“Are you sure it was… I mean, sometimes an accident can look like-”

“I’m afraid it was no accident.”

“He left a note?”

(naming me?)

“He dressed up in his wife’s underwear, went out into the kitchen, started up the garbage disposal, and stuck his arm into it.”

“Oh… my… God.” Andy sat down heavily. If there hadn’t been a chair handy he would have sat on the floor. All the strength” had left his legs. He stared at Cap Hollister with sick horror.

“You didn’t have anything to do with that, did you, Andy?” Cap asked. “You didn’t maybe push him into it?”

“No,” Andy said. “Even if I could still do it, why would I do a thing like that?”

“Maybe because he wanted to send you to the Hawaiians,” Cap said. “Maybe you didn’t want to go to Maui, because your daughter’s here. Maybe you’ve been fooling us all along, Andy.”

And although this Cap Hollister was crawling around on top of the truth, Andy felt a small loosening in his chest. If Cap really thought he had pushed Pynchot into doing that, this interview wouldn’t be going on between just the two of them. No, it was just doing things by the book; that was all. They probably had all they needed to justify suicide in Pynchot’s own file without looking for arcane methods of murder. Didn’t they say that psychiatrists had the highest suicide rate of any profession?

“No, that’s not true at all,” Andy said. He sounded afraid, confused, close to blubbering. “I wanted to go to Hawaii. I told him that. I think that’s why he wanted to make more tests, because I wanted to go. I don’t think he liked me in some ways. But I sure didn’t have anything to do with… with what happened to him.”

Cap looked at him thoughtfully. Their eyes met for a moment and then Andy dropped his gaze.

“Well, I believe you, Andy,” Cap said. “Herm Pynchot had been under a lot of pressure lately. It’s a part of this life we live, I suppose. Regrettable. Add this secret transvestism on top of that, and, well, it’s going to be hard on his wife. Very hard. But we take care of our own, Andy.” Andy could feel the man’s eyes boring into him. “Yes, we always take care of our own. That’s the most important thing.”

“Sure,” Andy said dully.

There was a lengthening moment of silence. After a little bit Andy looked up, expecting to see Cap looking at him. But Cap was staring out at the back lawn and the alders and his face looked saggy and confused and old, the face of a man who has been seduced into thinking of other, perhaps happier, times. He saw Andy looking at him and a small wrinkle of disgust passed over his face and was gone. Sudden sour hate flared inside Andy. Why shouldn’t this Hollister look disgusted? He saw a fat drug addict sitting in front of him-or that was what he thought he saw. But who gave the orders? And what are you doing to my daughter, you old monster?

“Well,” Cap said. “I’m happy to tell you you’ll be going to Maui anyway, Andy-it’san ill wind that doesn’t blow somebody good, or something like that, hmmm? I’ve started the paperwork already.”

“But… listen, you don’t really think I had anything to do with what happened to Dr. Pynchot, do you?”

“No, of course not.” That small and involuntary ripple of disgust again. And this time Andy felt the sick satisfaction that he imagined a black guy who has successfully tommed an unpleasant white must feel. But over this was the alarm brought on by that phrase I’ve started the paperwork already.

“Well, that’s good. Poor Dr. Pynchot.” He looked downcast for only a token instant and then said eagerly, “When am I going?”

“As soon as possible. By the end of next week at the latest.”

Nine days at the outside! It was like a battering ram in his stomach.

“I’ve enjoyed our talk, Andy. I’m sorry we had to meet under such sad and unpleasant circumstances.”

He was reaching for the intercom switch, and Andy suddenly realized he couldn’t let him do that. There was nothing he could do in his apartment with its cameras and listening devices. But if this guy really was the big cheese, this office would be as dead as a doornail: he would have the place washed regularly for bugs. Of course, he might have his own listening devices, but

“Put your hand down,” Andy said, and pushed.

Cap hesitated. His hand drew back and joined its mate on the blotter. He glanced out at the back lawn with that drifting, remembering expression on his face.

“Do you tape meetings in here?”

“No,” Cap said evenly. “For a long time I had a voice-activated Uher-Five thousand-like the one that got Nixon in trouble-but I had it taken out fourteen weeks ago.”

“Why?”

“Because it looked like I was going to lose my job.”

“Why did you think you were going to lose your job?”

Very rapidly, in a kind of litany, Cap said: “No production. No production. No production. Funds must be justified with results. Replace the man at the top. No tapes. No scandal.”

Andy tried to think it through. Was this taking him in a direction he wanted to go? He couldn’t tell, and time was short. He felt like the stupidest, slowest kid at the Easter-egg hunt. He decided he would go a bit further down this trail.

“Why weren’t you producing?”

“No mental-domination ability left in McGee. Permanently tipped over. Everyone in agreement on that. The girl wouldn’t light fires. Said she wouldn’t no matter what. People saying I was fixated on Lot Six. Shot my bolt.” He grinned. “Now it’s okay. Even Rainbird says so.”

Andy renewed the push, and a small pulse of pain began to beat in his forehead. “Why is it okay?”

“Three tests so far. Hockstetter’s ecstatic. Yesterday she flamed a piece of sheet metal. Spot temp over twenty thousand degrees for four seconds, Hockstetter says.”

Shock made the headache worse, made it harder to get a handle on his whirling thoughts. Charlie was lighting fires? What had they done to her? What, in the name of God?

He opened his mouth to ask and the intercom buzzed, jolting him into pushing much harder than he had to. For a moment, he gave Cap almost everything there was. Cap shuddered all over as if he had been whipped with an electric cattle prod. He made a low gagging sound and his ruddy face lost most of its color. Andy’s headache took a quantum leap and he cautioned himself uselessly to take it easy; having a stroke in this man’s office wouldn’t help Charlie.

“Don’t do that,” Cap whined. “Hurts-”

“Tell them no calls for the next ten minutes,” Andy said. Somewhere the black horse was kicking at its stable door, wanting to get out, wanting to run free. He could feel oily sweat running down his cheeks.

The intercom buzzed again. Cap leaned forward and pushed the toggle switch down. His face had aged fifteen years.

“Cap, Senator Thompson’s aide is here with those figures you asked for on Project Leap.”

“No calls for the next ten minutes,” Cap said, and clicked off:

Andy sat drenched in sweat. Would that hold them? Or would they smell a rat? It didn’t matter. As Willy Loman had been so wont to cry, the woods were burning. Christ, what was he thinking of Willy Loman for? He was going crazy. The black horse would be out soon and he could ride there. He almost giggled.

“Charlie’s been lighting fires?”

“Yes.”

“How did you get her to do that?”

“Carrot and stick. Rainbird’s idea. She got to take walks outside for the first two. Now she gets to ride the horse. Rainbird thinks that will hold her for the next couple of weeks.” And he repeated, “Hockstetter’s ecstatic.”

“Who is this Rainbird?” Andy asked, totally unaware that he had just asked the jackpot question.

Cap talked in short bursts for the next five minutes. He told Andy that Rainbird was a Shop hitter who had been horribly wounded in Vietnam, had lost an eye there (the one-eyed pirate in my dream, Andy thought numbly). He told Andy that it was Rainbird who had been in charge of the Shop operation that had finally netted Andy and Charlie at Tashmore Pond. He told him about the blackout and Rainbird’s inspired first step on the road to getting Charlie to start lighting fires under test conditions. Finally, he told Andy that Rainbird’s personal interest in all of this was Charlie’s life when the string of deception had finally run itself out. He spoke of these matters in a voice that was emotionless yet somehow urgent. Then he fell silent.

Andy listened in growing fury and horror. He was trembling all over when Cap’s recitation had concluded. Charlie, he thought. Oh, Charlie, Charlie.

His ten minutes were almost up, and there was still so much he needed to know. The two of them sat silent for perhaps forty seconds; an observer might have decided they were companionable older friends who no longer needed to speak to communicate. Andy’s mind raced.

“Captain Hollister,” he said.

“Yes?”

“When is Pynchot’s funeral?”

“The day after tomorrow,” Cap said calmly.

“We’re going. You and I. You understand?”

“Yes, I understand. We’re going to Pynchot’s funeral.”

“I asked to go. I broke down and cried when I heard he was dead.”

“Yes, you broke down and cried.”

“I was very upset.”

“Yes, you were.”

“We’re going to go in your private car, just the two of us. There can be Shop people in cars ahead and behind us, motorcycles on either side if that’s standard operating procedure, but we’re going alone. Do you understand?”

“Oh, yes. That’s perfectly clear. Just the two of us.”

“And we’re going to have a good talk. Do you also understand that?”

“Yes, a good talk.”

“Is your car bugged?”

“Not at all.”

Andy began to push again, a series of light taps. Each time he pushed, Cap flinched a little, and Andy knew there was an excellent chance that he might be starting an echo in there, but it had to be done.

“We’re going to talk about where Charlie is being kept. We’re going to talk about ways of throwing this whole place into confusion without locking all the doors the way the power blackout did. And we’re going to talk about ways that Charlie and I can get out of here. Do you understand?”

“You’re not supposed to escape,” Cap said in a hateful, childish voice. “That’s not in the scenario.” “It is now, “Andy said, and pushed again. “Owwwww!” Cap whined… “Do you understand that?” “Yes, I understand, don’t, don’t do that anymore, it hurts!” “This Hockstetter-will he question my going to the funeral?” “No, Hockstetter is all wrapped up in the little girl. He thinks of little else these days.”

“Good.” It wasn’t good at all. It was desperation. “Last thing, Captain Hollister. You’re going to forget that we had this little talk.” “Yes, I’m going to forget all about it.”

The black horse was loose. It was starting its run. Take me out of here, Andy thought dimly. Take me out of here; the horse is loose and the woods are burning. The headache came in a sickish cycle of thudding pain.

“Everything I’ve told you will occur naturally to you as your own idea.”

“Yes.”

Andy looked at Cap’s desk and saw a box of Kleenex there. He took one of them and began dabbing at his eyes with it. He was not crying, but the headache had caused his eyes to water and that was just as good.

“I’m ready to go now,” he said to Cap.

He let go. Cap looked out at the alders again, thoughtfully blank. Little by little, animation came back into his face, and he turned toward Andy, who was wiping at his eyes a bit and sniffing. There was no need to overact.

“How are you feeling now, Andy?”

“A little better,” Andy said. “But… you know… to hear it like that…”

“Yes, you were very upset,” Cap said. “Would you like to have a coffee or something?”

“No, thanks. I’d like to go back to my apartment please.”

“Of course. I’ll see you out.”

“Thank you.”

22

The two men who had seen him up to the office looked at Andy with doubtful suspicion-the Kleenex, the red and watering eyes, the paternal arm that Cap had put around his shoulders. Much the same expression came into the eyes of Cap’s secretary.

“He broke down and cried when he heard Pynchot was dead,” Cap said quietly. “He was very upset. I believe I’ll see if I can arrange for him to attend Herman’s funeral with me. Would you like to do that, Andy?”

“Yes,” Andy said. “Yes, please. If it can be arranged. Poor Dr. Pynchot.” And suddenly he burst into real tears. The two men led him past Senator Thompson’s bewildered, embarrassed aide, who had several blue-bound folders in his hands. They took Andy out, still weeping, each with a hand clasped lightly at his elbow. Each of them wore an expression of disgust that was very similar to Cap’s-disgust for this fat drug addict who had totally lost control of his emotions and any sense of perspective and gushed tears for the man who had been his captor.

Andy’s tears were real… but it was Charlie he wept for.

23

John always rode with her, but in her dreams Charlie rode alone. The head groom, Peter Drabble, had fitted her out with a small, neat English saddle, but in her dreams she rode bareback. She and John rode on the bridle paths that wove their way across the Shop grounds, moving in and out of the toy forest of sugarpines and skirting the duckpond, never doing more than an easy canter, but in her dreams she and Necromancer galloped together, faster and faster, through a real forest; they plunged at speed down a wild trail and the light was green through the interlaced branches overhead, and her hair streamed out behind her.

She could feel the ripple of Necromancer’s muscles under his silky hide, and she rode with her hands twisted in his mane and whispered in his ear that she wanted to go faster… faster… faster.

Necromancer responded. His hooves were thunder. The path through these tangled, green woods was a tunnel, and from somewhere behind her there came a faint crackling “and

(the woods are burning)

a whiff” of smoke. It was a fire, a fire she had started, but there was no guilt-only exhilaration. They could outrace it. Necromancer could go anywhere, do anything. They would escape the foresttunnel. She could sense brightness ahead.

“Faster. Faster.”

The exhilaration. The freedom. She could no longer tell where her thighs ended and Necromancer’s sides began. They were one, fused, as fused as the metals she welded with her power when she did their tests. Ahead of them was a huge deadfall, a blowdown of white wood like a tangled cairn of bones. Wild with lunatic joy, she kicked at Necromancer lightly with her bare heels and felt his hindquarters bunch.

They leaped it, for a moment floating in the air. Her head was back; her hands held horsehair and she screamed-not in fear but simply because not to scream, to hold in, might cause her to explode. Free, free, free… Necromancer, I love you.

They cleared the deadfall easily but now the smell of smoke was sharper, clearer-there was a popping sound from behind them and it was only when a spark spiraled down and briefly stung her flesh like a nettle before going out that she realized she was naked. Naked and

(but the woods are burning)

free, unfettered, loose-she and Necromancer, running for the light.

“Faster,” she whispered. “Faster, oh please.”

Somehow the big black gelding produced even more speed. The wind in Charlie’s ears was rushing thunder. She did not have to.breathe; air was scooped into her throat through her half-open mouth. Sun shone through these old trees in dusty bars like old copper.

And up ahead was the light-the end of the forest, open land, where she and Necromancer would run forever. The fire was behind them, the hateful smell of smoke, the feel of fear. The sun was ahead, and she would ride Necromancer all the way to the sea, where she would perhaps find her father and the two of them would live by pulling in nets full of shining, slippery fish.

“Faster!” she cried triumphantly. “Oh, Necromancer, go faster, go faster, go-”

And that was when the silhouette stepped into the widening funnel of light where the woods ended, blocking the light in its own shape, blocking the way out. At first, as always in this dream, she thought it was her father, was sure it was her father, and her joy became almost hurtful… before suddenly transforming into utter terror.

She just had time to register the fact that the man was too big, too tall-and yet somehow familiar, dreadfully familiar, even in silhouette-before Necromancer reared, screaming.

Can horses scream? I didn’t know they could scream-

Struggling to stay on, her thighs slipping as his hooves pawed at the air, and he wasn’t screaming, he was whinnying, but it was a scream and there were other screaming whinnies somewhere behind her, oh dear God, she thought, horses back there, horses back there and the woods are burning-

Up ahead, blocking the light, that silhouette, that dreadful shape. Now it began to come toward her; she had fallen onto the path and Necromancer touched her bare stomach gently with his muzzle.

“Don’t you hurt my horse!” she screamed at the advancing silhouette, the dream-father who was not her father. “Don’t you hurt the horses. Oh, please don’t hurt the horses!”

But the figure came on and it was drawing a gun and that was when she awoke, sometimes with a scream, sometimes only in a shuddery cold sweat, knowing that she had dreamed badly but unable to remember anything save the mad, exhilarating plunge down the wooded trail and the smell of fire… these things, and an almost sick feeling of betrayal…

And in the stable that day, she would touch Necromancer or perhaps put the side of her face against his warm shoulder and feel a dread for which she had no name.