The Winds of Limbo

CHAPTER NINE

"SO you did come here," Helen blurted out.

"I have no idea how you, deduced it." He grinned. "But I must praise your intelligence. I hope no one else on Earth thinks as you do."

Alan kept silent. They would be safer if they didn't tell the Fireclown how they had worked out his hiding place. He looked around. Corso and the woman were also there, lounging in their seats and staring amusedly at the rest.

He felt dwarfed by the Fireclown's bulk, not only physically-the man stood at least six foot six-but also psychologically. He could only stare stupidly, unable to say anything. Yet it was peculiar. Now that they were face to face he did not feel afraid any longer. The man's strange magnetism was tangible, and once again he found himself liking the Fireclown, unable to believe that he had committed an act of mass murder and plotted to blow up the Earth.

"So you are Alan Powys," mused the Fireclown, as if the name had some special meaning. His face was still heavily painted, with wide lips and exaggerated eyes, but Alan could make out the features under the paint a little clearer.

They seemed thoughtful.

"And why are you here, anyway?" Corso said, moving his repulsive red and glinting body in the chair.

"To ask questions," Helen said. She was pale and Alan could understand why-the skinless man took a lot of getting used to.

"Questions!" The Clown's body moved in a great shrug. He turned his back on them and paced towards his seated friends. "Questions! By the solar firmament! What questions can I answer?"

"They are simple-and demand only simple replies, if you are truthful with us."

The Fireclown whirled round and laughed richly. "I never lie. Didn't you know that? I never lie!"

"But perhaps you mislead," Alan said quietly. "May I sit down?"

"Of course."

They both sat down.

"We want to know if you planned to blow up the world," Helen said with a trace of nervousness in her voice.

"Why should I? I wanted to save it, not hurt it."

"You did a good job with the fire which swept Switzerland," Alan retorted.

"Am I to blame for that? I warned them not to tamper."

"Are you trying to tell us you weren't responsible for that fire?" Alan said grimly.

"I’ve been watching the lasercasts. I’m aware of what's being said of me now.

They are fickle, those people. If they had really listened to me this would not have happened. But nobody listened properly."

"I agree with that." Alan nodded. "I saw them-they were using you as a means of rousing their own latent emotions. But you should have known what you were doing and stopped P' "I never know what I am doing. I am…" The Fireclown paused and glared at him. "I was not responsible for the fire. Not directly, at any rate. Some of those policemen must have tampered with my fire machines. They are very delicate. I have been experimenting with means of controlling chemical and atomic fire. I produced that little artificial sun and could have produced more if I had not been interrupted by those meddlers."

"Why are you experimenting with fire? What's your purpose?" Helen leaned forward in her chair.

"Why? I have no reasons. I am the Fireclown. I have no purpose save to exist as the Fireclown. You do me too much honor, Miss Curtis, to expect action and plans from me. For a time I spoke to the people in Switzerland. Now that's over I shall do something else." He roared with laughter again, his grotesque body shaking.

"If you have no plans, no thought for the future, then why did you buy P-bombs from the arms dealers?"

"I know nothing of bombs or dealers! I had no inkling that those bombs were in my cavern!"

Either he was blinded by the Fireclown's overpowering presence or the man was telling the truth, Alan felt. He seemed to have a lusty disregard for all the things that concerned Helen and himself. He did not seem to exist in the time and space that Alan shared with the rest of the human race, seemed to tower over it, observing it with complete and amused detachment. But how far could he trust this impression? Alan wondered. Perhaps the Fireclown was the best actor in the world.

"You must know something of what's happening?' Helen exclaimed. "Your appearance at a time of acute crisis in society's development could not be mere coincidence."

"Society has had crises before, young lady." Again he shrugged. "It will have others. Crises are good for it!"

"I thought you ingenuous, then I changed my mind. I can't make you out at all."

She sank back into the chair.

"Why should you make me out? Why should you waste time trying to analyze others when you have never bothered to look within yourself? My own argument against machines and machine-living is that it hampers man from really looking into his own being. You have to take him away from it, put him in the wilderness for a short time, before you can see that I speak truth. In my way I worship the sun, as you know. Because the sun is the most tangible of nature's workings!"

"I thought you represented a new breakthrough in thought," Helen said quietly.

"I thought you knew where you were going. That is why I supported you, identified myself and my party with you."

"There is no need to seek salvation in others, young lady!" Again he became disconcertingly convulsed with that weird and enigmatic laughter.

She got up, bridling.

"Very well, I’ve learned my lesson. I believe you when you say you weren't planning destruction. I'm going back to Earth to tell them that!"

"I’m afraid Mr. Corso here, who advises me on such matters, has suggested that you stay for a while, until I am ready to leave."

Alan saw his logic. "When are you leaving?" he said.

"A few days, I expect. Perhaps less."

"You won't, of course, tell us where." Alan smiled at the Fireclown for the first time and when the man returned his smile, grotesquely exaggerated by the paint around his lips, he felt dazzled, almost petrified with warmth and happiness. It was the Fireclown's only answer.

Why did the Fireclown have this ability to attract and hold people just as if they were moths drawn to a flame?

Auditor Kurt had left the room while they were conversing. Now he returned with another man behind him.

"A visitor for you, Fireclown."

Both Alan and Helen turned their heads to look at the newcomer. He was a small, dark man with a moody face. A marijuana was between his lips.

"I commend you on your choice of rendezvous," he said somewhat mockingly. His hooded eyes glanced at the others in the room, stopped for a moment on Alan and Helen. He looked questioningly at the Fireclown. "I hope you haven't been indiscreet, my friend."

"No," said the Fireclown shortly. He chuckled. "Well, Mr. Bias, have you brought what I wanted?"

"Certainly. It is outside in the ship I came with. We must talk. Where?"

"Is this not private enough for you?" the Fireclown asked petulantly.

"No, it is not. I have to be over-cautious, you understand."

The Fireclown lumbered towards the door, ducking beneath it as he made his way out. "Corso," he shouted from the corridor, "you'd better come, too."

The skinless man got up and followed Bias from the room. The door closed.

"Bias," Helen said forlornly. "So the Fireclown has been lying to us."

"Who is he?"

"Suspected head of the arms syndicate." She sighed. "Damn! Oh, damn the Fireclown P'

The woman, a full-bodied brunette with a sensuously generous mouth, got up from her seat.

She stared down at Alan, regarding him closely. Helen glared at her.

"And what part do you play in this?" she asked.

"A very ordinary one," she said. "The Fireclown's my lover."

"Then your lover's a cunning liar," Helen snorted.

"I shouldn't condemn him until you know what he's doing," the woman said sharply.

The three of them were alone together now that Kurt had left too.

"You're disappointed, aren't you?" the woman said, looking candidly at Helen.

"You wanted the Fireclown to be some sort of savior, pointing the direction for the world to go. Well, you're wrong. And those who think he's a destroyer are wrong also. He is simply what he is-the Fire-clown. He acts according to some inner drive which I have never been able to fathom and which I don't think he understands or bothers about himself."

"How long have you known him?" Helen asked.

"Some years. We met on Mars. My name's Cornelia Fisher."

"I've heard of you." Helen stared at the woman in curiosity. "You were a famous beauty when I was quite young. You disappeared suddenly. So you went to Mars.

Hardly the place for a woman like you, was it? You must be over forty but you don't look thirty."

Cornelia Fisher smiled. "Thanks to the Fireclown, I suppose. Yes, I went to Mars. The life of a well-known 'beauty,' as you call me, is rather boring. I wasn't satisfied with it. I wasn't satisfied with anything. I decided that I was leading a shallow existence and thought I'd find a deeper one on Mars. Of course I was wrong. It was merely less comfortable"-she paused, seeming to think back- "though the peace and quiet helped, and the scenery. I don't know if you've seen it since the revitalization plan was completed, but it is very beautiful now.

But I never really lost my ennui until I met the Fireclown."

"He was a Martian, then?" Alan knew there were a few families of second and third generation colonists responsible for working on the revitalization project.

"No. He came to Mars after a space-ship accident. He's from Earth originally.

But I don't know much more about him than you do. Once you've been with the Fireclown for a short time, you learn that it doesn't matter who he is or what he does-he's just the Fireclown, and that's enough. It's enough for him, I think, too, though there are strange currents running beneath that greasepaint.

Whether he's in control of them or not, I couldn't say."

"His connection with Bias seems to disprove part of what you've said." Alan spoke levelly, unable to decide what to think now.

"I honestly don't know what he and Bias are doing." Cornelia Fisher folded her arms and walked towards her handbag which lay on the chair she'd vacated. She opened it and took out a packet of cigarettes. Alan tried to look unconcerned but he had never seen a nicotine addict before. She offered them defiantly. They both refused, with rapid shakes of their heads. She lit one and inhaled the smoke greedily. "I'd swear he's not buying arms. Why should he? He has no plans of the kind Earth condemns him for having."

"Maybe he doesn't tell you everything," Helen suggested.

"Maybe he doesn't tell me anything because he hasn't got anything to tell me. I don't know."

Alan went to the door and tested it. It was shut firmly.

"Judging by the evidence," he said, "I can only suppose that the accusations made by my grandfather against the Fireclown are basically correct. Those P-bombs were part of the arms syndicate's stock-and we have seen that the Fireclown already knows Bias, who you say, Helen, is the head of the syndicate."

"It's never been proved, of course," she said. "But I'm pretty sure I'm right."

"Then the world is in danger. I wonder if the Fireclown would listen to reason."

"His kind of reason is different from ours," said Cornelia Fisher.

"If I see him again, I’ll try. He's too good to get mixed up in this sordid business. He has a tremendous personality-he could use his talents to…"

Alan's voice trailed off. What could the Fireclown use his talents for?

Cornelia Fisher raised her eyebrows. "His talents to do what? What does safe little Terra want with men of talent and vision? Society doesn't need them any more."

"That's a foolish thing to say." Helen was angry. "A complex society like ours needs expert government and leaders more than ever before. We emerged from muddle and disorder over a hundred years ago. We're progressing in a definite direction now. We know what we want to do, and if Bias and his friends don't spoil it with their plots and schemings we'll do it eventually. The only argument today is how. Planned progress. It was a dream for ages and now it's a reality. Until this arms trouble blew up there were no random factors. We had turned politics into an exact science, at long last."

"Random factors have a habit of emerging sooner or later," Alan pointed out. "If it wasn't the nuclear stock-piles it would have been something else. And those random factors, if they don't throw us too far out of gear, are what we need to stop us from getting complacent and sterile."

"I’d rather not be blown to smithereens," Helen said.

"The Fireclown isn't a danger to you, I know." Cornelia Fisher sounded as if she was less convinced than earlier.

"We'll soon know if the ARP fails to get hold of those stock-piles." Helen's voice sounded a bit shaky. Alan went over to her and put his arm round her comfortingly.

A short time later the Fireclown returned, seemingly excited. Bias was not with him. Alan couldn't guess at Corso's expression. He could only see the red flesh of his face, looking like so much animated butcher's meat.

"Did you get some more P-bombs?" Helen asked mockingly.

The Fireclown ignored her.

Corso said: "What are you hinting at, Miss Curtis?"

"I know Bias is head of the arms syndicate."

"Well, that's more than we do. Bias is supplying us with materials for our ship, the Pi-meson, which we badly need. There has been no talk of armaments."

"Not a very convincing lie," Helen sneered.

Now Corso also ignored Helen. He watched the Fire-clown in a way that a mother cat might watch her young-warily yet tenderly. Corso seemed to play nursemaid to the clown in some ways.

"It will take time to fit," said the Fireclown suddenly. "But thank God we could get them. We couldn't possibly have made them ourselves."

His gaudy red and yellow costume swirled around him as he turned to grin at Alan.

"I wonder if you'd want to," he mused mysteriously.

"Want to what?" Alan asked.

"Come for a trip in the Pi-meson. I think it would do you good."

"Why me? And what kind of good?"

"You could only judge that for yourself."

"Then you could dispose of us in deep space, is that it?" Helen said. "We've seen too much, eh?"

The Fireclown heaved a gusty sigh. "Do as you like, young woman. I've no axe to grind. Whatever takes place on Earth has no importance for me now. I tried to tell the people something, but it's obvious I didn't get through to them. Let the darkness sweep down and engulf your hollow kind. I care not."

"It's no good." Helen shook her head. "I can't believe anything you say. Not now."

"If you had it wouldn't have made any difference." Corso's ghastly face grinned.

"The rest of the world lost faith in their idol, and the world hates nothing so much as an idol who turns out to have feet of clay! Not, of course, that the clown wished to be one in the first place."

"Then why did you start that set-up on the first level? Why did he make speeches to thousands? Why did he let them adore him at his 'audiences'?" Helen's voice was high, near-hysterical.

As Alan watched and listened, a mood of absolute detachment filled him. He didn't really care about the pros and cons any more. He only wondered what the Fireclown's reasons were for suggesting the trip.

"The Fireclown was originally living down there in secret. We were working on our machines. We needed help- scientists and technicians-so we asked for it, got it. But the scientists told their friends about the Fireclown. They began to ask him about things. He told them. All he did, in the final analysis, was supply an outlet for their emotional demands."

Helen fell silent.

Alan came to a decision.

"I'd like to take that trip," he said "-if Helen can come, too."

"Good!" The Fireclown's resonant voice seemed suddenly gay. "I should like to take you. I'm glad. Yes, glad."

Both Alan and Helen waited for the Fireclown to add to this statement, but they were disappointed. He went and leaned against a bulkhead, his great face bent towards his chest, his whole manner abstracted.

Was he thinking of the trip? Alan wondered. Or had he simply forgotten about them now that they had agreed to go?

Somehow, he felt the latter was the more likely answer.

The Fireclown seemed a peculiar mixture of idiot and intellectual. Alan decided that he was probably insane, but what this insanity might lead to-the destruction of Earth?-could not easily be assessed. He must wait. And perhaps he would learn from the trip, wherever it took them. Mars, possibly, or Ganymede.