Let the Fire Fall Read online

  Let the Fire Fall

  Kate Wilhelm

  THE VOICE OF GOD

  The first man to reach the spaceship was Obie Cox. Until then Obie had been known only for the possession of one of the most beautiful male bodies in creation.

  After the spaceship, Obie Cox became known throughout the world. Obie was touched by the hand of God, and that hand lay heavy on him. But he knew his duty was to carry the message placed in his hands to the world… the strong message, the truthful message… the message of hate!

  Kate Wilhelm

  LET THE FIRE FALL

  Chapter One

  ON the Ohio River at the curve where Cincinnati, the Queen City, was allowed to sprawl up and down hills, and more specifically, on the Kentucky side, where Covington snaked along the one highway up the steep hill flanked by two-storied frame buildings with dirty windows and heterogeneous shops that ran together and merged: Whiskey by the drink; cleaners—while u wait; juvenile furniture; drugs and sundries; cafeteria; fish sandwiches; this is where it started.

  There was Florence Waters, no more than a child, with the immense belly of one about to give birth. She had gained forty-two pounds, and her mother was having her weekly cry over the sin of the daughter. Florence had sneaked from the home for unwed mothers in order to take the bus across the bridge to spend the day with her mother because she was not allowed in the house when her father was there.

  The father of the unborn bastard, Obie Cox, the Adonis of Covington, was at the same time trying his damnedest to knock up yet another of the town’s young ladies. Nineteen, still described by the middle-aged women as a beautiful child, he had light blue eyes, and gorgeous silver blond hair that was too long, but which couldn’t be faulted because it was such lovely hair, with just enough wave, a new curly beard that hid his acne scars, and teeth that were slightly out of line, so that those who might otherwise have been hostile to him because of his good looks were instead sympathetic. Obie was still the prize catch for the girls under eighteen. Older than that, they were starting to look for other things than a beautiful body, things like stability and a solid future and a less fickle disposition, but those under eighteen were properly dazzled by his appearance.

  Dee Dee MacLeish was less dazzled than she had been two months earlier; she was starting to act possessive, and beginning to talk about their future. Dee Dee’s father was a gentle preacher who had been born a century, or at least half a century too late. He never should have survived to this time; he had not heard that God is dead, and so still preached of God’s love and beneficence. Dee Dee sang in the choir and bought the Pill from a college friend. Dee Dee had read all of DeSade, had turned on twice with pot, smoked a pack a day, and could drink three martinis and still drive. She was pretty, as most eighteen-year-old girls are pretty, 35, 24, 35, which isn’t at all bad, dark brown hair, and gray eyes, with a dimple in her left cheek, deepened consciously with the tip of a pencil held there for hours daily through all her classes. That it was a dirty dimple didn’t matter, the black spot in the center accentuated it.

  One more character before we get on with the event. Matthew Daniels, a rather young M.D., just thirty, with a general practice in Cincinnati, and a home in Elmwood Heights across the river, out four miles from Covington. Matt was tall and almost rigidly erect, not for anything romantic like an old war injury, or a football mishap, but simply because he was like that. He was intense, inside and out, and relaxing was what he had to work at hardest. He was married, loved his wife, Lisa, and the two children, Derek, four, and Lorna, thirteen months. Matt was baby-sitting along with his housekeeper, Mrs. Murray, a Bible-belter born and bred. Lorna was the baby in question. Lisa and Derek had gone shopping and to see a movie in Cincinnati on his day off, while his patients griped that he had it easy, off Wednesdays, Saturdays, and Sundays, spending all his time on the golf course. He had tried that, and had become so tense with the effort of trying to hit the blasted ball with the club that just wouldn’t, with the ever present derisive grin on the face of the caddy, that he had realized he wasn’t meant for the game. He took up gardening and motorcycles instead.

  He was tending his tomatoes when the space ship screamed through the sky and landed in Busby’s cornfield three miles from his house.

  Too fast? A spaceship, outer-spaceship, not ours, unlike anything seen on Earth ever before, a big and silver and not terribly streamlined-looking thing, in fact, it looked a lot like a skinny pagoda, but very efficient-looking in spite of that, screamed through the perfect June sky, when if ever there come perfect days, they come then, and landed, came down with a decrease in the throbbing banshee scream, letting it—fade out like an offstage witch being dragged farther and farther from the mike, landed right in the middle of Cal Busby’s forty-five-and-one-half-acre cornfield in the bottomlands where the flood plain contained the richest soil in Kentucky, and where the corn was already knee high, and this in June, not July yet, forecasting a yield of two hundred fifty bushels per acre, scaring the hell out of the three-inch-long grasshoppers, or as Derek Insisted, hopgrassers, sending them aloft with shirring yellow and brown wings as stiff as paper.

  Matt Daniels with his almost new motorcycle under him, and him only three miles from the landing, was the first on the scene. Roaring on the highway, past a narrow, overgrown dirt road, he had added a second trauma to the other more lasting one made by the ship, and Dee Dee screamed, “Cops!”

  Obie was yanking on his jeans, paying no attention to her. “A by-God-real-live-spaceship,” he said over and over.

  Dee Dee dressed quickly. She didn’t even like sex in the daylight; it was nothing to her if it hadn’t been finished, but she didn’t want cops to come upon them and give her that kind of a look. She hated Obie Cox then.

  “You beat it back to your house,” he said, not looking at her. “I’m going to see what Doc Daniels is up to.”

  She walked back up the secluded dusty road that dead-ended at the river, a dirt road long since abandoned, grown over with blackberry bushes, and she decided to kill Obie Cox someday. When he passed her in his old car that was all his, paid for and insured and inspected and everything, and raised a cloud of dust that stuck to her sweating body from the crown of her head to her insteps, she knew that she would have to kill him someday, just to be able to stand living with herself.

  Matt had left his cycle and was climbing over a rail fence when Obie got to the scene. The silver ship was in the dead center of the field, and there was an open door, or hatch, or something. People were coming out. Doc Daniels was waving, and they were waving back and it was all like something out of a movie. If the contact had been permitted, with Obie witnessing it, and perhaps even participating in it, the event still would have changed history, but not as it was destined to do.

  The contact was not permitted. A state trooper’s car pulled up then and the troopers jumped out, one of them carrying a rifle. Obie heard a click as the safety was released. The astonishment and excitement he had been feeling changed to fear. Obie was like a weather puppy that reflects by turning to pink or blue what the humidity is and the chance of rain or clear weather. He felt and reflected the emotions of those closest to him, and he felt fear then.

  “Stop right there, Mac!” the man with the rifle yelled to Matt.

  Matt was halfway to the ship. He was running when he heard the call, and he slowed down enough to turn to see what was happening. He saw the rifle, saw it being raised and leveled at his chest, and he stopped.

  “Orders, Mac. No contact until the officials get here. They’re on their way.”

  Matt turned to look at the aliens again, close enough this time to see their faces, see the smiles and the friendliness of their greetings. He stopped and held out his hands in a
helpless gesture. One of them duplicated it and they returned to the interior of the ship. Then he turned and walked back to the road.

  He didn’t tell anyone then, or later, that high up on the ship, almost a hundred feet above the ground the first alien had stepped out, waving at him. The alien had stepped out on the air and had stood there, smiling and waving. When Matt had started to climb the fence, the alien had vanished into the ship, and the next time any of them appeared, it had been at ground level.

  And so it came about that the area was sealed off, and no one was permitted in or out, except the officials, who took several days to get there, and who turned out to be U.N. personnel, and F.B.I. and C.I.A., and medical teams, and translators. And the people of the area, the part of Covington included in the security area, and Elmwood Heights, and the surrounding farms and subdivisions, the people came and blocked the roads, and lined the woods at the periphery of the field, and they experienced the expected feelings of panic and fear and exhilaration and disbelief, and some of them fainted, and one suffered a minor heart flutter that he thought was It. And because Matt was the only doctor within the sealed area, he was swamped by patients, and his house was filled with them. Two women in labor came and were delivered. Florence came and labored for twelve hours, stopped and slept for twelve, then started again. And Winifred Harvey came to Matt’s house with her suitcase in hand and asked for a room.

  “No room at the inn,” she said.

  Matt knew of her. Everyone knew of her. Winifred was forty, gray-haired, and beautiful, with poise, grace, charm, and understanding. Three times married, now single again, she was one of the world’s foremost champions of causes and probably the best child psychiatrist living. Why she was included in the first batch of personnel to be sent to the scene was mysterious, except that experts in many fields were being sent, and she qualified. As it turned out, her presence was fortunate. She provided the link between Matt and the ship, and gave him news when there was no news being released at all.

  Then the aliens started to die. Before official contact could be made. Winifred wept bitterly at the stupidity of man, and she railed at Matt for not taking advantage of the opportunity he had had in the beginning to get to know them, possibly help them. Four of them died, then three more the next day, and panic swelled among the people still clogging the roads and nearly got out of control several times, and more soldiers were sent in to handle them.

  Obie sat with his rifle across his knees the afternoon he learned they were dying, and most of that night, hoping to get a shot at one of the monsters if they tried to run away from the ship and the plague they had brought with them. He came to realize during that time that what he had been taking for a catastrophe was in actuality the opportunity of a lifetime for someone like him. His voyeuristic tendencies had taken him to the Daniels’ windows hoping to see something between the lady doctor and Doc Daniels. Instead he had learned that the aliens were dying. Worth ten bucks as a news leak. But there had to be more than that in it for him. There had to be. A lousy ten bucks! The U.N. people would take everything away and the guys would stand around Midtown Drugs and talk about it, and then it would be all over. Obie listened to the tree frogs and the big bullfrogs in the Busby pond and it seemed to him that the frogs were jeering at him. “jer-rk, jer-rk, jer-rk.” Suddenly he smiled. He had received his inspiration. And this is the event that really changed the course of history, not the landing at all.

  Obie preached his first sermon the next Sunday. Obie had been the school’s best student in public speaking. He would have failed school entirely during his senior year if it hadn’t been for basketball and public speaking, but he had excelled in both and had graduated.

  Winifred was aboard the alien ship, along with two other doctors, when Obie preached. Matt was at home soothing Florence, who had become frightened at the off-again-on-again labor. Her parents were in the church, praying for her, but not confiding in one another that such was the case. Dee Dee, looking virginal in white robe, was in the choir, hoping that her father wouldn’t fall asleep before it was time for him to stand up and introduce Obie, hoping that be wouldn’t forget that he had promised her that he would introduce Obie. She kept her eyes off Obie, afraid the lurch in the depths of her stomach would be reflected on her face where others might see it and guess about her. She sang in a sweet soprano: “I will follow, follow all the way.” She opened her mouth for the high notes, but didn’t try to reach them. Only the choirmaster suspected, and he never had been able to pin down the exact source of the reduced volume when the notes got up there.

  There were half a dozen reporters among the congregation. They had got into the sealed area somehow, and found, with dismay, that they really were not being allowed back out. In lieu of any news from the officials, they attended church, hoping to pick up something there.

  Obie’s sermon is recorded elsewhere, but a few of his remarks follow. “Fear the stranger,” was his text. The lectern had a Simple flower arrangement of baby’s breath and pink roses and the inevitable glass of water, and the crumbling Bible belonging to the Reverend MacLeish. Obie used no notes, but he had plugged in a tape recorder himself on his way to the dais. One of the visiting reporters had grinned cynically at that gesture of egoism, but his grin changed during the talk, and he knew he was seeing the birth of something big. He didn’t know yet what it would lead to, but he made a note to follow it up from time to time.

  “Brothers and sisters,” Obie started, after looking them all over very deliberately, “I have sinned against the Lord and against my fellowman. I have broken all of the sacred commandments except the fifth, and I would have broken that one had not the Lord spoken to my heart in time.” He was looking over their heads now, his eyes fastened on a point that no one else could see. The light coming through stained glass made his hair look more silver than blond, and some swore later that there had been a halo about his head during part of his sermon.

  “I went to the woods hoping to kill the aliens,” Obie went on. “I carried a rifle and I desired to murder. Then the Lord come unto me where I sat on the ground and I heard Him. And the Lord said to me: ‘Look upon the stranger with fear, for he will come again. Look upon the stranger with fear, for he will come again.’”

  There was more, and it all spun off from that phrase, “for he will come again.” One of the reporters wrote: “There was fear here, of course, but it had not been voiced until this new evangelist voiced it. He voiced it and gave it direction and gave it substance.”

  Another reporter compared him to a microwave relay station, mysteriously able to gather myriad weak, dying signals and weave them to form a powerful, directional beam.

  Obie finished his sermon with a note of triumph, and a gamble. “And the Lord said unto me, ‘I will slay the stranger among you that you may prepare your house.’” Since the strangers were being slain, Obie was something of a prophet overnight.

  Winifred called Matt from the Busby house. “Do you have extra slides, and test tubes?” she asked. “We are going to run out before our supplies get here, and we have to keep trying to isolate this thing, whatever it is.”

  He said he did, and he would bring them himself, on his bike. Mrs. Murray was caring for Lorna, and would be on hand for Florence, if she needed anything. Florence was sleeping again. Matt collected all that he had in his lab, and took them to the Busby farm. The ship hadn’t Changed, big and silver still, awkward-looking compared to the sleek projectiles one had grown to expect from the covers of science fiction magazines, Everywhere along the edge of the woods, along the roads on two sides of the field, people stood silently and watched and waited.

  Matt wasn’t allowed inside the farm entrance, but had his supplies taken from him by an army captain Who wore the Medical Corps caduceus symbol. Matt stood staring at the ship for another moment, then remounted his bike and started back home. Halfway back on the dirt road that led to the highway, there was a roar and wordless scream from the crowds. He turned to see som
ething streak across the treetops. Two tiny crafts had left the mother ship, flashing through the sky in different directions; one toward the south and Elmwood Heights, where it landed and was found some time later, in a copse behind Matt’s house; and the other to vanish not to be found at all, at least not by those who searched at that time.

  Matt was crowded off the road by a people wave, and by the time he was allowed back on it, most of the watchers had gone, to search for the small boats. When he reached his house, and went straight to the infirmary to check on Florence, he saw that one of the small boats had brought him a visitor, a pregnant woman, as near delivery as Florence judging from her appearance.

  He slammed the door and locked it, then bedded her down and examined her, and almost forgot that she was an alien, and that hundreds of frightened people were then scouring the woods and fields for her.

  She was sick and weak and skim-milk white with gray lips, and Matt knew that she was dying. He put her tunic on a chair and something fell from it. She motioned that he was to keep it, and he dropped it into his pocket. It was a black disk, shiny and smooth on one side, dull on the other, half an inch thick, about two and a half inches in diameter. He thought it was a touchstone, and from time to time, he rubbed it and found that it was satisfying to touch. The woman was in second stage labor, almost ready, when the searchers burst into the house. Florence cried out then, and she too was suddenly ready. She woke up at the sound of the voices in the hall arguing with Mrs. Murray, who was trying to keep them from entering the infirmary.

  Matt left his patients and confronted the men in the hall, led by Obie, closely followed by Billy Warren Smith, Matt’s next door neighbor.

  They insisted that aliens had entered, and they demanded access to the infirmary, and while they argued about it, things happened inside the infirmary, and there was the first tentative wail of a newborn babe, and a silence during which none of the men moved. Obie pushed Matt aside then and went inside. And Florence sat up, holding a child against her breast, and smiled angelically at him and said, “I knew you’d come.” She lay back down and fell asleep again, and Obie swayed like a man caught in a hurricane.