Firestarter (30 page)

Now the two of them were in a box. Cap had had the entire winter to consider options. Even at his wife's funeral he had been running through his options. Gradually he had settled upon a plan of action and now he was prepared to tip that plan into motion. Payson, their man in Bradford, said that the ice was getting ready to go out on Tashmore Pond. And McGee had finally mailed his letters. Already he would be getting impatient for a response—and perhaps beginning to suspect his letters had never arrived at their intended sources. They might be getting ready to move, and Cap liked them right where they were.

Beneath the photos was a thick typed report—better than
three hundred pages—bound in a blue
TOP SECRET
cover. Eleven doctors and psychologists had put the combination report and prospectus together under the overall direction of Dr. Patrick Hockstetter, a clinical psychologist and psychotherapist. He was, in Cap's opinion, one of the ten or twelve most astute minds at the Shop's disposal. At the eight hundred thousand dollars it had cost the taxpayer to put the report together, he ought to have been. Thumbing through the report now, Cap wondered what Wanless, that old doomsayer, would have made of it.

His own intuition that they needed Andy alive was confirmed in here. The postulate Hockstetter's crew had based their own chain of logic on was the idea that all the powers they were interested in were exercised voluntarily, having their first cause in the willingness of the possessor to use them … and the key word was
will
.

The girl's powers, of which pyrokinesis was only the cornerstone, had a way of getting out of control, of jumping nimbly over the barriers of her will, but this study, which incorporated all the available information, indicated that it was the girl herself who elected whether or not to set things in motion—as she had done at the Manders farm when she realized that the Shop agents were trying to kill her father.

He riffled through the recap of the original Lot Six experiment. All the graphs and computer readouts boiled down to the same thing: will as the first cause.

Using will as the basis for everything, Hockstetter and his colleagues had gone through an amazing catalogue of drugs before deciding on Thorazine for Andy and a new drug called Orasin for the girl. Seventy pages of gobbledygook in the report came down to the fact that the drugs would make them feel high, dreamy, floaty. Neither of them would be able to exercise enough will to choose between chocolate milk and white, let alone enough to start fires or convince people they were blind, or whatever.

They could keep Andy McGee drugged constantly. They had no real use for him; both the report and Cap's own intuition suggested that he was a dead end, a burned-out case. It was the girl who interested them. Give me six months, Cap thought, and we'll have enough. Just long enough to map the terrain inside that amazing little head. No House or Senate subcommittee would be able to resist the promise of chemically induced psi powers and the enormous implications it
would have on the arms race if that little girl was even half of what Wanless suspected.

And there were other possibilities. They were not in the blue-backed report, because they were too explosive for even a
TOP SECRET
heading. Hockstetter, who had become progressively more excited as the picture took shape before him and his committee of experts, had mentioned one of these possibilities to Cap only a week ago.

“This Z factor,” Hockstetter said. “Have you considered any of the ramifications if it turns out that the child isn't a mule but a genuine mutation?”

Cap had, although he did not tell Hockstetter that. It raised the interesting question of eugenics … the potentially explosive question of eugenics, with its lingering connotations of Nazism and superraces—all the things Americans had fought World War II to put an end to. But it was one thing to sink a philosophical well and produce a gusher of bullshit about usurping the power of God and quite another to produce laboratory evidence that the offspring of Lot Six parents might be human torches, levitators, tele- or telempaths, or God only knew what else. Ideals were cheap things to hold as long as there were no solid arguments for their overthrow. If there were, what then? Human breeding farms? As crazy as it sounded, Cap could visualize it. It could be the key to everything. World peace, or world domination, and when you got rid of the trick mirrors of rhetoric and bombast, weren't they really the same thing?

It was a whole can of worms. The possibilities stretched a dozen years into the future. Cap knew the best he himself could realistically hope for was six months, but it might be enough to set policy—to survey the land on which the tracks would be laid and the railroad would run. It would be his legacy to the country and to the world. Measured against this, the lives of a runaway college instructor and his ragamuffin daughter were less than dust in the wind.

The girl could not be tested and observed with any degree of validity if she was constantly drugged, but her father would be their hostage to fortune. And on the few occasions they wanted to run tests on him, the reverse would hold. It was a simple system of levers. And as Archimedes had observed, a lever long enough would move the world.

The intercom buzzed.

“John Rainbird is here,” the new girl said. Her usual bland
receptionist's tone was threadbare enough to show the fear beneath.

On that one I don't blame you, babe,
Cap thought.

“Send him in, please.”

Same old Rainbird.

He came in slowly, dressed in a brown and balding leather jacket over a faded plaid shirt. Old and scuffed Dingos peeked out from beneath the cuffs of his faded straight-leg jeans. The top of his huge head seemed almost to brush the ceiling. The gored ruin of his empty eyesocket made Cap shudder inwardly.

“Cap,” he said, and sat down. “I have been in the desert too long.”

“I've heard about your Flagstaff house,” Cap said. “And your shoe collection.”

John Rainbird only stared at him unblinkingly with his good eye.

“How come I never see you in anything but those old shitkickers?” Cap asked.

Rainbird smiled thinly and said nothing. The old unease filled Cap and he found himself wondering again how much Rainbird knew, and why it bothered him so much.

“I have a job for you,” he said.

“Good. Is it the one I want?”

Cap looked at him, surprised, considering, and then said, “I think it is.”

“Then tell me, Cap.”

Cap outlined the plan that would bring Andy and Charlie McGee to Longmont. It didn't take long.

“Can you use the gun?” he asked when he was finished.

“I can use any gun. And your plan is a good one. It will succeed.”

“How nice of you to give it your stamp of approval,” Cap said. He tried for light irony and only succeeded in sounding petulant. God damn the man anyway.

“And I will fire the gun,” Rainbird said. “On one condition.”

Cap stood up, planted his hands on his desk, which was
littered with components about the McGee file, and leaned toward Rainbird.

“No,” he said. “You don't make conditions with me.”

“I do this time,” Rainbird said. “But you will find it an easy one to fulfill, I think.”

“No,” Cap repeated. Suddenly his heart was hammering in his chest, although with fear or anger he was not sure. “You misunderstand. I am in charge of this agency and this facility. I am your superior. I believe you spent enough time in the army to understand the concept of a superior officer.”

“Yes,” Rainbird said, smiling, “I scragged one or two in my time. Once directly on Shop orders.
Your
orders, Cap.”

“Is that a threat?” Cap cried. Some part of him was aware that he was overreacting, but he seemed unable to help himself. “God damn you, is that a threat? If it is, I think you've lost your senses completely! If I decide I don't want you to leave this building, all I have to do is press a button! There are thirty men who can fire that rifle—”

“But none can fire it with such assurance as this one-eyed red nigger,” Rainbird said. His gentle tone had not changed. “You think you have them now, Cap, but they are will-o'-the-wisps. Whatever gods there are may not want you to have them. They may not want you to set them down in your rooms of deviltry and emptiness. You have thought you had them before.” He pointed to the file material heaped on the library trolley and then to the blue-backed folder. “I've read the material. And I've read your Dr. Hockstetter's report.”

“The devil you have!” Cap exclaimed, but he could see the truth in Rainbird's face. He had. Somehow he had. Who gave it to him? he raged. Who?

“Oh yes,” Rainbird said. “I have what I want, when I want it. People give it to me. I think … it must be my pretty face.” His smile widened and became suddenly, horribly predatory. His good eye rolled in its socket.

“What are you saying to me?” Cap asked. He wanted a glass of water.

“Just that I have had a long time in Arizona to walk and smell the winds that blow … and for you, Cap, it smells bitter, like the wind off an alkali flat. I had time to do a lot of reading and a lot of thinking. And what I think is that I may be the only man in all
the world who can surely bring those two here. And it may be that I am the only man in all the world who can do something with the little girl once she's here. Your fat report, your Thorazine and your Orasin—there may be more here than drugs can cope with. More dangers than you can understand.”

Hearing Rainbird was like hearing the ghost of Wanless, and Cap was now in the grip of such fear and such fury that he couldn't speak.

“I will do all this,” Rainbird said kindly. “I will bring them here and you will do all your tests.” He was like a father giving a child permission to play with some new toy. “On the condition that you give the girl to me for disposal when you are finished with her.”

“You're mad,” Cap whispered.

“How right you are,” Rainbird said, and laughed. “So are you. Mad as a hatter. You sit here and make your plans for controlling a force beyond your comprehension. A force that belongs only to the gods themselves … and to this one little girl.”

“And what's to stop me from having you erased? Right here and now?”

“My word,” Rainbird said, “that if I disappear, such a shockwave of revulsion and indignation will run through this country within the month that Watergate will look like the filching of penny candy in comparison. My word that if I disappear, the Shop will cease to exist within six weeks, and that within six months you will stand before a judge for sentencing on crimes serious enough to keep you behind bars for the rest of your life.” He smiled again, showing crooked tombstone teeth. “Do not doubt me, Cap. My days in this reeking, putrescent vineyard have been long, and the vintage would be a bitter one indeed.”

Cap tried to laugh. What came out was a choked snarl.

“For over ten years I have been putting my nuts and forage by,” Rainbird said serenely, “like any animal that has known winter and remembers it. I have such a potpourri, Cap—photos, tapes, Xerox copies of documents that would make the blood of our good friend John Q. Public run cold.”

“None of that is possible,” Cap said, but he knew Rainbird was not bluffing, and he felt as if a cold, invisible hand were pressing down on his chest.

“Oh, very possible,” Rainbird said. “For the last three years I've been in a state of information passing-gear, because for the last three years I've been able to tap into your
computer whenever I liked. On a time-sharing basis, of course, which makes it expensive, but I have been able to pay. My wages have been very fine, and with investment they have grown. I stand before you, Cap—or sit, which is the truth, but less poetic—as a triumphant example of American free enterprise in action.”

“No,” Cap said.

“Yes,” Rainbird replied. “I am John Rainbird, but I am also the U.S. Bureau for Geological Understudies. Check, if you like. My computer code is
AXON
. Check the time-sharing codes in your main terminal. Take the elevator. I'll wait.” Rainbird crossed his legs and the cuff of his right pantsleg pulled up, revealing a rip and a bulge in the seam of one of his boots. He looked like a man who could wait out the age, if that were necessary.

Cap's mind was whirling. “Access to the computer on a time-sharing basis, perhaps. That still doesn't tap you into—”

“Go see Dr. Noftzieger,” Rainbird said kindly. “Ask him how many ways there are to tap into a computer once you have access on a time-sharing basis. Two years ago, a bright twelve-year-old tapped into the USC computer. And by the way, I know
your
access code, Cap. It's
BROW
this year. Last year it was
RASP
. I thought that was much more appropriate.”

Cap sat and looked at Rainbird. His mind had divided, it seemed, had become a three-ring circus. Part of it was marveling that he had never heard John Rainbird say so much at one time. Part of it was trying to grapple with the idea that this maniac knew all of the Shop's business. A third part was remembering a Chinese curse, a curse that sounded deceptively pleasant until you sat down and really thought about it.
May you live in interesting times.
For the last year and a half he had lived in extremely interesting times. He felt that just one more interesting thing would drive him totally insane.

And then he thought of Wanless again—with dragging, dawning horror. He felt almost as if … as if … he were turning into Wanless. Beset with demons on every side but helpless to fight them off or even to enlist help.

“What do you want, Rainbird?”

“I've told you already, Cap. I want nothing but your word that my involvement with this girl Charlene McGee will not end with the rifle but begin there. I want to”—Rainbird's eye darkened and became thoughtful, moody, introspective—“I want to know her intimately.”