Let the Fire Fall

Chapter Three

THE world thought of him as the Star Child, although his name actually was Johannes Mann, chosen after a long debate in which once more shoes pounded tabletops, find delegations walked from the U.N. chamber, and Sunday supplements exhausted the readership with explanations for the hot tempers. In the end each delegation had agreed to select three given names and three surnames and deposit them in two drums and Miss Universe, dazzling in a silver paper gown, had pulled out Johannes. Mann had been on the third slip of paper to be pulled from the drum. The second had been someone’s idea of a joke with Jesus Christ on it, and it was dismissed out of hand. He had been named Johannes Mann, but he was called Johnny, and was thought of as the Star Child.

There had been many fights during the first five years: how much permissiveness, how much discipline; what kind of a diet, the American baby diet of commercially strained foods and cereals, or fresh scraped meats and vegetables, cheeses and sour milk, goat’s milk (lobbied for strenuously by the goat people), or cow’s milk, or a wet nurse, and if a wet nurse, of what race and religion and nationality; schooling to start at two in the modem method, or at seven or even eight in the Slavic tradition; weaning at what age; bladder and bowel control when (as it turned out he was still a bed wetter at five, so it had become an academic question by then); playmates, whose children, and what sort of children should be permitted in his presence? And so on.

There was a sharp division regarding his abilities and his progress. Some held that his people probably attained maturation later than Earth people, claiming that such a pattern followed a higher degree of intelligence, and they cited authorities to prove this. The Star Child was maturing rather later than his peers: he still wet his bed; he sucked two fingers when tired, or ill, or restless, or frustrated in any way; he hadn’t learned yet to write his name, or count, or give more than passive aid when being bathed and dressed. He cried often and easily and ate poorly and slept fitfully. He had been a colicky baby, and still caught every bug that got into the grounds, was always with a runny nose, and seemed always to be getting over or starting a bout of diarrhea. He was the sort of child that if parents have him first they tend to practice birth control assiduously, many times limiting the number of children to one. He was not pretty, but he was sometimes cute and often beguiling, but only with those few of the many who attended him that he liked. Winifred was one of them, a Negro doctor was another, a Japanese music teacher was a third. One or two of the nurses rated a spontaneous smile, and that was about it.

The other group held that he was simply not too bright, not retarded, but not bright. They rated his IQ at 105 on his good days, and 90 to 95 on his bad. He hated their tests and seldom did well on them. His personality profile claimed he was dependent, suspicious, selfish, ill tempered, timid, introverted, humorless. When the testing psychologist gave the study to Winifred for comments, she scrawled on it: Wouldn’t you be in his place?

Winifred reluctantly came to the conclusion that she agreed with the second group about his mental abilities. Johnny simply wasn’t the brightest kid in the world, but he was sweet, and with her, at any rate, he was biddable. Emotionally he was as stable as could be expected considering the conditions under which he lived. In appearance he was as human as any of the children who were allowed in to play with him; the differences they had discovered in the inside plumbing of the aliens was so slight and meaningless that they could be dismissed as totally inconsequential. No appendixes, for example, and a slight alteration of the arrangement of the spleen and kidneys, and slightly enlarged lungs and heart. It was assumed that some of those things resulted from living in a different environment; the Star Child, as far as could be determined from external examinations, and interior examination with barium and such had been forbidden, showed no real anomalies. Small, delicate, very blond with pale skin and almost white hair, light blue eyes, a natural clumsiness, and a slightly recessive chin, he could have passed for the son of any blond couple on Earth.

Winifred had packed her things for a vacation and was on her way to tell the Star Child good-by. He was having a swimming lesson then. She watched him floundering in the water, obviously afraid of it, and she knew that the decision she had been trying to reach had formed itself. She would quit here and go back to her practice in New York. The sense of relief was tempered by the knowledge that Johnny would miss her terribly. She would come back, she’d tell him. She’d come back every month or so and stay a week with him. If they’d let her. She bit her lip in vexation. She wouldn’t tell him anything yet. There would be time, she’d have to hand in her resignation six weeks before she wanted out. There would be time.

Johnny was permitted to leave the water, stood shivering while he was dried off, and continued to shiver while he took his sunbath. Winifred sat down next to him and told him she was going away for two weeks.

“What’s a vacation?” he asked. His lips were blue. Winifred rubbed his hands and pulled the heavy towel over his shoulders.

“It’s a trip, this time anyway. I’ll get in my car and drive across the country and visit friends. I’ll rest and get a lot of sleep and read.”

“Can I go with you?”

So Winifred was again where she had been before she made her decision; torn between wanting to get out of the mad security of the estate, and wanting to stay and protect one thin little boy who needed a friend. She kissed him and promised to bring presents back with her, but she knew that when she walked away from him, tears had already welled up into those pale eyes, and two fingers were in his mouth.

The next day Winifred drove up to Matt Daniels’ house in the new suburb of Cincinnati where she spent at least part of each vacation.

Matt and Lisa had been expecting her and were both delighted at her arrival. Lisa was a pretty thing, Winifred had decided at their first meeting, and she and Matt had something going for them. Considering herself a three-time loser in the marriage maze, Winifred was always astounded when two intelligent people could stand to live together more than a few months. It seemed perfectly natural to her that diversive influences would lead them apart after the first blaze was dampened by the rains of revelations that living together precipitated out of the rosy clouds of premarital bliss. She had written that to her third, no, her second, husband after filing suit, making him so angry that he gave all the linens, and her cutlery set, and blender to his mother and then filed a counter suit, charging her with unnatural cruelty. But the Daniels had managed to stay together and to give every appearance of happiness. With what was almost a sense of satisfaction followed swiftly by an analysis of the feeling, and the determination that it was the human and acceptable feeling of vindication of one’s own belief, Winifred realized that the bubble had burst. Or at least some of the air had seeped from it. Lisa looked strained and Matt was jumpy. This was in the brief time of giving hellos and kisses and handing out presents to the children, and eyeing the new dog with suspicion. It was a mop of no discernible breed that weighed one hundred pounds, simply dog with much gray hair and a wagging tail that swept the room from wall to wall.

“Blake’s dog,” Lisa said and pointed sternly toward the door. The dog whined, hung its head and slouched outside, obviously wounded and offended.

Blake grinned at Winifred and she felt better about the dog. Blake was a handsome kid, she decided, realizing with a start that he was the perfect control for her studies of the Star Child. Born on the same day, growing up in a normal family, owner of a dirty dog, a boy in sneakers that would give out in a couple of days, grimy knuckles, and deep sunburn that made his blond hair look whiter, he was the obvious opposite of what the Star Child was growing into.

Dinner with the Matt Daniels’ family was always an experience. The kids talked, Lisa talked, and Matt talked, and it was very nice if confusing. They all had things to say, down to Blake, who probably would have talked more than the others if allowed to.

Derek went to a special school for bright kids, and loved it, and had mountains of books with reports to be made, and special projects to complete, and field trips to plan and execute. His chief concern now was with fossils, and a trip to the fossil beds on the Ohio River in the Louisville area was his next project. Blake listened intently, and when Derek hesitated over a name, or classification, Blake supplied the right word. No one seemed to find this exceptional. When Lorna talked about her approaching piano recital and stumbled over Rachmaninoff, Blake murmured it, and Lorna continued at a whirlwind pace without a glance toward him. And Winifred felt a pang of jealousy that she examined minutely with great interest. How human of her, she thought, and how maternal! The Star Child was nothing to her, but here she was playing the role of a bitchy mother envying the three remarkable children of someone else, comparing them to her own disappointingly average child. She thought it was amusing of herself to take the Star Child that seriously.

After dinner was over and the children were in bed, she asked point blank what the trouble was with Matt and Lisa. Matt glanced at his wife, who shrugged slightly and then said, “Obie’s in town. He always makes us nervous when he shows up. And he was in the neighborhood last week.”

“Oh. Have you told Blake yet?”

Lisa shook her head miserably. “I know,” she said before Winifred could say anything. “I said soon, and I meant as soon as he was five or six. We’re going to, but not until Obie is gone again. There’s time.”

Winifred frowned. “There’s never as much time as you think,” she said. “You should have done it as soon as he could understand what you were saying.” She lighted a cigarette. “Where’s the mother?”

Matt lifted his hands helplessly. “I wish I knew. That’s what’s really held us up on telling him. We wanted to make it all legal and air-tight first, but we haven’t been able to find her. She left that summer, for Louisville, she said, to study at a beauty school. I had detectives trace her to Chicago, then she simply dropped out of sight, and that’s it.”

“Her family? Don’t they know?”

“If they do, they aren’t telling. They pretend that she never had a baby. Her father met me with a shotgun the last time I approached them and threatened to blow my head off if I didn’t stop smearing his daughter.”

Winifred blew smoke toward the ceiling and watched it “It seems that you’re safe enough, if she doesn’t show up. Obie has no claim on him. Probably just curious. What’s he up to these days?”

“You mean you haven’t heard about him?” Lisa asked. And they talked about Obie, “He preys on fear. It’s contemptible the way he fingers people and drags out their nastiest, meanest faults and then exploits them.”

“Vile,” Winifred agreed, “but in the end he’s relatively harmless. This church of his, the Voice of God Church…?” Matt nodded and she swept it away with one hand. “It’s one of thousands. He’ll make a pile of money naturally, but so what? Lots of people do.”

“I went to one of the revivals,” Lisa said, unconvinced. “It’s frightening to see how they respond to him.”

“Relax, honey,” Matt said. “It’s all a negative thing. He doesn’t have anything to offer. He’s an echo. That’s all. Now if he ever comes up with a new world plan, or a cosmological system, no matter how incoherent, or, even better, a self-help plan for health and/or sanity, then we’ll all start to worry about him.”

He did, and they did. But later.