Let the Fire Fall

Chapter Twenty-one

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

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

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

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

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

Mueller looked pained but said nothing.

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

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

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

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

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

Merton shivered. He didn’t want to think about that possibility.

About this time Merton and Dee Dee had a brief violent argument. She found him pacing furiously in her room late one night. She stopped at the door for a moment, then swept past him toward her office. Merton caught her arm and swung her around.

“Where’ve you been?”

“What’s that to you? If you don’t mind, I have work to do.”

“You’ve been with him! The kid! Haven’t you?”

Dee Dee pulled free and stepped back from him. “You pulling the old squatter’s rights routine on me, for chrissakes! Get lost, Merton. Beat it, will you. What if I was?”

“He’s dangerous, Dee Dee. Keep away from him.”

“Dangerous! A kid, for chrissakes! What’s the matter with you? Jealous of a kid? Scared of him is more like it, isn’t it? You’re scared to death of him. You and Obie and Billy. Jesus, you men are all scared right down to your balls over this one kid.” Mockingly she started to pass him again, laughing, “Afraid it’s different, better with an alien, Merton darling?”

“Bitch!” Merton slapped her, and when she tried to hit back he caught her arm and forced it behind her back, twisting her wrist. She moaned. “What have you told him? What’ve you been up to?”

“Nothing,” she gasped. He jerked her hand and she screamed. “I wanted to lay him… he wouldn’t. That’s all. Stop! St—” Merton let go and she fell to the floor.

He sat down hard on a lounge. After a minute or two he asked, “Are you okay?”

Dee Dee had stopped gasping. She pulled herself up without looking at him.

“Did he try to get anything out of you?” Merton asked, almost pleading now.

“I told you,” she said dully. “I told you. Now get out of here and leave me alone.”

“You were gone over an hour,” Merton said. “What were you doing all that time, talking over old times?”

“Yeah,” she said tiredly. “Talking over old times.” She didn’t look at him. She was afraid that he would twist her arm again, and she knew that she still wouldn’t be able to tell him anything more than she had. She didn’t know what they had talked about for more than an hour; she hadn’t known she’d been with him that long.

The next day Merton was surprised when she didn’t seem angry with him. She acted, in fact, as if she had forgotten the whole thing.

A few days later Blake demonstrated to Merton his first miracle for Obie. He produced a clear plastic liner compound that, mixed with water, formed wine, or near enough to fool anyone but a connoisseur. He played with it for a few days, laughed when Merton, who hung about him like a loyal dog, inquired about it and tossed the thing to the detective. A toy, he said. A parlor trick.

He showed Merton how he could fit it into a container, glass, paper cup, plastic glass, anything, add water from the tap, wait a. second or two, and have ruby wine. Merton looked at it suspiciously. Blake laughed again and took it and drank it.

“You have any more of those things?”

“Sure. Over there.” Blake waved toward his desk and paid no more attention when Merton picked up a handful of the plastic disks and left with them. The chemists analyzed the substance and came up with a formula that did produce winelike liquid when mixed with water. It was harmless, although in quantities it could be intoxicating. Obie had his miracle.

Blake had a reprieve from some of the suspicion that had attached to him.

Four nights later he led an escape from the mountain citadel.

It was raining, a cold merciless rain that was steady for hour after hour. Blake went first to Obie’s office, where he ran his hands over the door, finding and disconnecting the alarm before he entered. Blake knew where the safe was, an old-fashioned one that used a combination of voice tones and finger pressure. He said, in Obie’s voice, “Three, ninety-four, eleven, and open now.” The door swung open soundlessly. He picked up his disk, the stone with the rose fire, and his coins. He touched nothing else.

The unrelenting rain was a black curtain through which he moved, heading back toward the hospital area, three miles away. Behind the main building was a cluster of small houses, one of which was Winifred’s. He opened the door and whispered her name. Winifred gasped just once, asked no questions, threw a mackintosh around her shoulders, and left with him.

“Lorna’s room,” he said and led the way. Lorna was more reluctant, but she too remained silent and followed. Blake led them past the guards who were huddled inside a building at the edge of the forest. He motioned for them to bend low now and again, and Winifred assumed that there were electronic devices of various sorts spotted throughout the property. When they were deep in the woods they had to hold hands; it was too dark to see each other. Blake let them stop to rest three times between midnight and dawn, but stopping was more miserable than continuing. The cold was penetrating when the motion ceased. Walking, slipping, sliding over the rough mountainside kept them warm.

When the sky paled, Blake stopped them again, this time in the shelter of a low spreading pine tree where the ground was relatively dry, and no rain beat down.

Lorna sank to the ground and her head on her arms folded across her knees. Winifred leaned back against the tree too tired to move or to speak even. Blake vanished and was gone for half an hour, then was back, with a rabbit and a small bag of nuts. He built a tiny fire in the shelter of the tree and roasted the rabbit and they ate it, and the nuts. Nothing had ever tasted so good before to Winifred.

“We won’t make it, Blake, but bless you for trying. I thought… I didn’t know what to think when you acted so compliant.”

He grinned at her. “I had to find out who was there, where we were, where Lorna was, all that.”

Lorna hadn’t said anything at all yet, but now she lifted her head and stared at him. “Why did you bring me out with you?”

“A precaution,” Blake said. “You keep getting me in trouble, so I decided to put you where you’d be quiet for a while.”

She stiffened and turned away from him. She looked very unhappy.

They rested for three hours, then started to walk again. They were walking north. Blake didn’t intend to lead them out of the mountains at all, but stay in them until they were clear of Obie’s domain. Winifred shuddered at the thought. She didn’t think she would last that long, but she knew that if they did descend, they’d surely be found in the lowlands that were virtually owned by Obie.

The days and nights became dreamlike. They walked. Blake produced food, or sometimes didn’t produce food; they ate or fasted, drank cold clear water from streams, and walked some more. They slept under pine trees whose branches swept the ground. They walked some more. They talked when they stopped to rest. Lorna said very little. Winifred and Blake talked a good deal.

“There’s a particular mentality permeating the land now,” Blake said once to Winifred. “The people don’t consider the land as theirs any longer. They have crowded together along the coasts, and they line the rivers, and all in between is a wilderness, except for the great stretches of cultivated fields. And they are a wilderness of another sort. You can fly over them for hours and hours and see nothing but fields. The roads have been obliterated, the towns razed, the farms vanished completely. The tractors roll day and night, controlled from the underground headquarters where they are dots moving in well-ordered lines. We aren’t likely to see anyone at all in the woods. Most people don’t believe anyone could live in the woods for more than a couple of days. They think the game is all gone, the streams polluted. Many of them are, but high as we will be staying the water is good. The only meat most people have seen has been canned, and mixed with other things. If they have seen vegetables at all, it’s been in packages of so many ounces, not growing out under the sun.” He tossed a walnut and caught it. “I bet not one in twenty has ever seen a nut.”

“God knows they flock to the woods in droves during vacations,” Winifred said. “Those who can afford it anyway.”

“Sure. They go to cities that are on the edge of the woods, with paved trails weaving in and out of the trees, with nothing growing along the trails on the floor of the woods because they have picked it all clean. Turn one of them loose fifty miles from his city, and he would probably die.”

Lorna looked at him then and said bitterly, “Are you pretending that we aren’t going to die in the woods?”

“We might,” Blake said easily. “I guarantee nothing. But everyone dies sooner or later, somewhere. Why not here in the woods rather than back in the camp?”

Lorna shivered. “I’m freezing. At least back there I was warm and full. Why don’t you ask me if I knew they were using me to lead them to you? Why don’t you ask if I still believe in Obie Cox and his Voice of God Church?”

Winifred sighed in satisfaction.

Blake laughed. “Lorna, I remember you as a pretty bratty kid, always talking, talking, full of importance, demanding attention. I thought you had reformed.”

It was teasing, but with such good humor that even Lorna grinned. “I give,” she said suddenly. “I’m sorry, Blake. I was stupid, stubborn. I should have known what the whole act was about, but I didn’t. When I saw you on New Year’s. Eve… I never had been so surprised in my life. Then they were there and I understood all of it all at once. I was so miserable. I wished they would simply shoot me, or hit me harder than they did, or “Something.”

“And the Church?” Winifred asked.

“Oh, you know. You told me all about it. I didn’t believe you. I went to the Listener’s Booth and found myself spilling everything. I didn’t want to. I really’ thought I wouldn’t, but there it all came….”

“Honey, I told you, they use a hypnotic gas in those damn tapers of theirs. You couldn’t help it.”

Blake laughed again, a happy, boyish sound. “Wait until they use the fake wine along with the tapers,” he said finally. “It’s an antidote.”

They all laughed almost hysterically, and afterward Lorna cracked nuts with gusto. They slept close together for warmth, and when Lorna awakened once during the night listening to a strange noise, she found that Blake’s arms were about her, her cheek against his chest. She fell asleep again instantly.

Blake paced them and demanded more of them than they would have thought they could give. But they were happy, and the days continued fairly mild. They had no more rain until the ninth day. They spent the entire day under a rock that formed a ledge over their heads. Winifred caught Blake eyeing her several times, and each time, she straightened up consciously, only to slump again as soon as he looked away. He had her lie down and he ran his hands over her back later in the day, pressing gently here and there. She relaxed under his hands and the pain that had tormented her was eased, but she knew that she could not hike through the mountains for the next six or eight weeks, the time he said it would take to get to a cabin in Pennsylvania.

That night Blake left them. Lorna woke to find him gone. She touched Winifred lightly on the arm and two women sat shivering for the next two hours until they heard the snort of a horse close by. Lorna screamed.

“It’s all right,” Blake’s voice called softly.

They could see nothing, but presently he was there with them again. “I thought we were fairly near a Cherokee village that I visited once,” he said. “I paid a visit to the chief and he loaned me a couple of horses. I’m going to leave you both with his people. They’ll take care of you.”

Over the morning fire Lorna protested. “I won’t stay,” she said. “I know I’ve been nothing but trouble, but I won’t stay here. I want to help you, Blake. You said Derek is with you, let me come too.”

Blake looked at her hard, then shrugged. He got the women up on the horses and led them through the trees. Lorna never had been on a horse before, and by the end of the first hour she was too sore to move.

“How did you get way over here in the middle of the night?” she asked Blake some time later. They were pausing briefly on a bluff, and in the distance they could see the gleam of white birch tents.

Blake shrugged. Winifred remembered the enlarged lungs and hearts of his people and knew that accounted for his stamina. She wished she shared it. She felt faint with fatigue.

They bypassed the tent village. Blake grinned and said, “That’s for the tourists. Show only. They don’t live like hat.” He continued to lead their horses, and finally they started down the cliffs. Suddenly, rounding a bend, they came within sight of the village. It was so well hidden that the appearance of the two dozen small cottages was almost like a conjurer’s trick. There were neat fields, not plowed yet, standing green with a winter wheat crop, and a windmill, and a group of children playing with a ball. It was a scene of timeless simplicity.

Chief Whitehorse met them. A tall strong man dressed in Levis and a plaid shirt, he greeted them warmly. “Dr. Harvey, you are welcome to be our guest as long as you like. We are very happy to receive you.” He clasped her hand. His knowing gaze passed from Lorna to Blake and there was a smile crinkling the skin about his eyes. “Miss Daniels, if you change your mind, please accept our hospitality, such as it is.”

Breakfast was ready, he told them. Coffee, eggs, bacon, fried potatoes, corn bread, wild honey…. Over coffee he explained that no outsider had stumbled across their village for forty years. Winifred asked mildly how Blake had found them, and he smiled and said that Blake was their brother. “We adopted him in order to keep our record clean,” the chief said.

The next day Blake and Lorna left again, this time on horseback, accompanied by one of Chief Whitehorse’s sons, who would ride with them for two days, and bring back the horses then.

Winifred watched them out of sight with tears on her cheeks. The chief stood silently by her side until she turned toward him. Then he said, “He has friends, many, many friends. If he has need of them they will materialize everywhere around him. He is a great chief among men and beasts.” His sharp eyes held hers and he added, “He is the alien, isn’t he?” Winifred nodded. “Yes, I suspected as much years ago when he came to us as a boy. Come now, Dr. Harvey, and let me explain to you the psychology of the tourists who want to believe that dried corn silk glued to pigskin and enclosed in duralite blocks are actually scalp locks for which they are willing to give much, much money.”