Let the Fire Fall Page 10

  Chapter Ten

  HERE are some of the things Lisa Daniels never told Matt:

  1. She had to do all the shopping in downtown Cincinnati. The village grocery refused to trade with short hairs.

  2. There were seven new Listener’s Booths between the market and the bus stop.

  3. A long-haired bitch pushed her off the sidewalk and into the gutter.

  4. She had to walk four miles and shop six stores to find the things she needed for Derek’s birthday party.

  5. Someone in a cab (a long-short hairs were never picked up now) had thrown an apple core and hit her right between the shoulders.

  6. Every time she left the house during the day someone scrawled obscenities all over the first-floor windows.

  Matt was still straight and stiffly erect, graying slightly, and she thought, much better-looking than he had been when younger. They talked occasionally of moving far away, of going to one of the spots where the long hairs were either non-existent, or in a very small minority, but they didn’t go. And wouldn’t, unless forced out. There were too few doctors who would treat patients from the ranks of the short hairs for anyone of them to give up and leave now. Eventually, Matt said forcefully, the maniacs would come to their senses and everything would get back to normal. Meanwhile they’d just have to be careful.

  Lisa made dinner while Matt showered and she hummed thinking about the birthday party for Derek, and about Lorna’s first visit home since leaving for college almost a year ago. In the middle of dinner the view phone chimed and it was the chief surgeon at Matt’s hospital. He was bald and perspiring heavily. He was wearing his surgeon’s paper gown, paper mask dangling about his neck.

  “Another of those nights, Matt. Can you come back?”

  “Good God!” Matt said, but in resignation.

  The two words shook the surgeon, who glanced about quickly. “You’d better come in your copter. I wouldn’t want to drive anywhere in town tonight.”

  “Right,” Matt said. “National Guards out?”

  “Not yet, but any minute.”

  Lisa unclenched her hands before Matt turned to her. She smiled briefly. “Be careful, darling.” She would not start an argument. It was too hot. They would both get upset, she’d end up with a headache, and the weekend was too important to spoil that way.

  As soon as he was gone she turned on the news, but as usual they were not giving any riot facts while the riot was taking place. She turned the sound down and washed the few dishes, slamming them about until she broke a glass. Then she relaxed a little. The water pressure was too low to run the dishwasher. She read for a while, conscious of the flickering three dimensional figures across the room from her, apparently enacting in pantomime a tragic love affair. At eleven the Savers clustered at the gate to the Daniels’ yard and sang: The Lord is My Strength; the Lord is My Power and Find a Refuge in the House of the Lord. The tambourine was terrible, the bass fiddle had a loose string, the trumpeter must have been yanked from some junior high school Band 1 class, and the ensemble as a whole caricatured an old Salvation Army group. Lisa recited a list of curses, then stifled a laugh that sounded suspiciously like a sob, and checked her doors and windows. All locked. They never tried to get in, as far as she knew, but they might. They had an electronic hookup that brought the voice of the young Messenger inside the house, putting it at her elbow. He said: “There is no salvation outside the Church. There is no life outside the Church. All outside the Church are dead already. Accept salvation now and forever. Come to the Voice of God Church and be born again in the strength and the power and the might of the Lord.”

  Some people were so terrified at the sound of the voice so close, so intimate that it seemed almost to originate within them, that they opened their doors and invited the Savers inside and were converted on the spot, or they joined the roving band with fanatical zeal and henceforth became Savers also. Lisa held her hands over her ears until silence returned.

  She was left alone then until Matt returned. The riot had started, he told her, when one long hair pulled a handful of hair from another long hair in the mistaken belief that it was a wig. The rumor had started that the meeting at which this happened was crawling with ringers, women wearing wigs pretending to be believers. A hair-pulling fray ensued that erupted into the street and enmeshed twelve city blocks before the Guards arrived with antimob foam bombs and dispersed the rioters. Lisa sighed. It didn’t matter how it started, it always ended the same, with Matt being called to the hospital to treat short hairs who got the worst of it, and they always did.

  Derek arrived at noon the next day. He had become a six-footer, with broad shoulders, dark like his father, and as straight, but not giving the same impression of rigidity. He was doing his doctorate work in astrophysics that year, and his proudest possession, which he pulled from his pocket as soon as the kisses had been finished with, was his pass to gain him admittance to the spaceship whenever he chose that summer.

  Lisa hung back as Derek and Matt talked. She brushed tears away angrily as she stared at her tall son, and again and again she tore her gaze from him and tried to banish the smile she knew must be foolish-looking. Matt grinned at her sympathetically and didn’t comment.

  Lisa was thinking: my son will be in the convertible air car, skimming along the street flanked by honor guards, preceded by a mounted guard, with confetti and ticker tape and bands, five, ten bands, foreign dignitaries, the king of England, the Russian premier, our president. We’ll be on the review stand, next to the president, and the photographers will tell him please to move aside just a little, don’t obstruct the clear view of the doctor and his wife, if you don’t mind. The Nobel Prize, the Pulitzer Prize, the Einstein Medal, the U. N. Distinguished Gold Cup….

  “What?” she said to Matt, who had closed his hand over hers.

  “I said, are you doing anything about lunch?”

  She left to prepare lunch, thinking: there isn’t room any longer for so many of us, so different, the ones who don’t really care about going into space, and who don’t want to have anything to do with the Voice of God Church. No middle ground, and what’s left over anyway now? You have to belong to one or the other group, and we don’t. I don’t.

  Thinking: will Obie Cox stop Derek and the others? Day and night they keep pushing to learn the ship, and they don’t learn it, but there is so much they are doing now. Soon Derek says we’ll really be a space-sailing world. Soon? Will Obie Cox be sooner?

  She looked up as an air cab beat the air outside the garden and she shrieked to Matt and Derek, “Lorna! She’s here!”

  They rushed out to meet Lorna, who was still digging coins from a purse for a tip. The taxi driver was holding her credit card patiently. Lorna completed the transaction and he released the door so she could step out. Her bags had already been slid from the compartment ramp. Lorna was a blur of pink dress and golden hair as she sped to her mother and father, talking. laughing, kissing them and Derek.

  “You all look great. It’s so good to be home again! Let me tell you about school. I got A’s in everything! Everything! Can you believe it! And my job. I love it. I’m counselor to thirty girls, all under thirteen. It’s a great big camp up in the mountains, with laurel forests that smell divine in April, and are so dark and mysterious and cool. And there’s a waterfall where—”

  “Good God,” Matt broke in. “You haven’t changed a bit, Lorna! Chatter, chatter. Under this broiling sun. Get! Inside with you.”

  Lorna laughed and kissed him quickly, then looped her arm through Lisa’s and they walked together ahead of Matt and Derek. Derek was grinning broadly. “Boy, she’s worse if anything.”

  Suddenly Matt stopped, and her suitcase dropped from his hand. Quickly he grasped it again and continued before anyone even noticed. He had just realized what he was looking at: Lorna’s hair. Beautiful golden hair that caught the sun and reflected it in a thousand bursts of fiery red light, hair that bounced and was brilliant and loose and half way down he
r back.

  Chapter Eleven

  “WHY do you care what I believe? It’s none of your business!” That was Derek, to Lorna.

  “It’s everyone’s business now. When the aliens return we have to present them with a solid front. We have to be united in our own beliefs. We have to be prepared to destroy them all before they have a chance to overcome Earth.” Lorna to Derek.

  “You’ve gone right off your nut! You talk like a series of posters!”

  “What about the Star Child? What about him?”

  “What about him? I don’t know what you’re talking about. You hop around like a hungry flea in a litter of pups.”

  “We were warned that he had to be given a religious education, taught about our God, our beliefs, and what have we done? We have given him to the U.N., a bunch of Communists and atheists. We were warned and we did nothing!”

  “By whom? Your bearded illiterate? Good God, Lorna….”

  She gasped and blanched and quickly clamped her hand over her own mouth as if to deny the words.

  “Now what?” Derek was leaning across the dinner table staring at her, unmindful of the chicken and mushrooms in white wine sauce, unheeding of the salad bowl heaped with mixed greens and dotted lavishly with blue cheese.

  “You mustn’t say that. It’s blasphemy. If anyone hears you they’ll beat you….”

  “Good God! Good God! Good God! Good God….”

  Lorna fled, her food untasted on her plate. Derek pushed his own plate back and stared after her. “She’s gone crazy. What did they do to her?”

  Lisa, looking at the food. that she had struggled so hard to find and bring home, concentrated on not weeping.

  “Young man, you go fetch your sister back to the table and if either of you starts on the Voice of God Church again, I’ll do the beating. Now scat!”

  Lorna allowed herself to be brought back, but she refused to look at Derek, and she was silent through the main course. They talked of the weather, and Lorna started to speak, but bit her lips instead and picked at her salad. Obie had predicted another year of drought.

  “They’ve known for twenty years or more that the cities have caused the weather changes,” Derek said. “The cloud cover, seeding with dust particles, the great heat output of the cities, that’s what it takes, you know. Everything gets sucked up and dumped out again over the cooler oceans. It isn’t a question of how to alleviate it, but rather why don’t they take the steps.”

  “Break up the cities?” Lisa murmured.

  “What else?”

  “There was a time when we could do that, but now? I don’t think so,” Matt said. “No water inland, all crops, no industry….”

  “Brother Cox says—”

  “Oh, shut up,” Derek interrupted.

  The talk turned to the world situation and the heavy demands of the draft to maintain the forces throughout South America, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East. Matt was bitter about it, Derek resigned, and again Lorna looked as if she would like to explain, or comment, and again she didn’t. Obie had predicted an ever increasing need for men to patrol the world in order to keep the raw materials flowing into the bottomless pit that the space programs had created, and to keep the people from whose country they flowed quiet if not happy. Obie predicted also that it was futile, that those people were God-fearing people and the day was at hand when they would rise up and slay the non-believers stripping their lands for a project foredoomed to fail. The Voice of God Church sponsored, outfitted, and supplied guerrilla missionaries all over the world; outlawed by most governments, refused travel cards and credit cards, the Church provided its own credit, its own travel facilities, and no one knew how many of the zealots it had sent out, or where they had gone.

  “The trouble is,” Lisa had complained once to Matt, “that if you believe in anything that Obie had condoned, you are forced to doubt your own beliefs. Can I really believe in anything that the Voice of God Church believes in? It doesn’t seem possible.”

  They had cake and champagne, there were two bottles, so they all got rather giddy and happy and took their glasses to the living room where they laughed at old times and made elaborate toasts to Derek. It turned into a birthday party after all. Until the Savers arrived at eleven.”

  Lorna wanted to let them in, to prove to her family that they weren’t monsters. When she was refused, she said she would go out and join them, and Matt assumed the role that he had used only once or twice in his life, that of the heavy-handed father, lord, master of the house. He couldn’t permit her to leave. Lorna stood up and started for the door, and he got in front of it. She stopped and stared at him with unbelieving eyes.

  “You always said that we had to decide for ourselves. I decided. I believe in Brother Cox and what he is doing. I am a member of the Voice of God Church, I am working for it this summer and I’ll go to its school in the fall. Let me go out. They don’t know someone is inside who belongs. They’ll go away when they know your daughter is a member of the Church.”

  “Wait,” Matt said. “Listen first.”

  The hymn ended and the voice of the Messenger was there in the room with them. “There is no salvation outside the Church. There is no life outside the Church. All outside the Church are dead already. Accept salvation now and forever. Come to the Voice of God Church and be born again in the strength and the power and the might of the Lord.”

  Lorna’s head was cocked slightly to the left as she listened raptly with her eyes half closed. She smiled at Matt when the voice ceased. “Isn’t it exciting!” she said. “The Voice of God can go anywhere, be heard through any walls, over anything else. Brother Cox heard the Voice of God years ago, and now the gift has been given to all the members. We can hear the Voice of God anytime.”

  Derek snorted. “Gift! You pay an electronics expert enough and you too can become the Voice of God. Gift!”

  Lorna drifted away from the door. The Savers were gone now, there was no longer any issue of going out or staying in. She said, very serenely, “People like you always scoff. You can’t accept the transcendent. If you can’t weigh and measure it, tear it apart and put it together again, reproduce it at will, you refuse to accept it no matter how many witnesses there are. Like when Blake was with Brother Cox healing….” She stopped and looked quickly at Lisa, who had become very pale.

  “Have you seen him?”

  “No. I don’t know where he is. No one will say. But they have films and photographs, and there is a Blake Daniels Cox Meditation Room at the headquarters in Mount Laurel, where I work now. He is a healer, Dad. I saw the films and talked to some of the people he healed. They aren’t mistaken.”

  Matt shook his head. Ten years ago he thought this issue had been settled. But Lorna had been a child, eight, nine years old. She must remember the discussions they had had about this very thing. She and Derek had laughed at the idea of Blake’s having healing powers then. What had happened?

  He said, “It’s nearly midnight, honey. Let’s get some sleep. I have to be at my office by eight in the morning, but I’ll be home from noon on and I’m off the next day, and there’ll be time to talk. Okay?”

  In bed, not touching because of the heat; the electricity shortage wouldn’t permit them to run the air conditioners in all of the rooms (they had turned on the ones in Lorna’s and in Derek’s rooms, and the children didn’t know theirs was turned off), Lisa said wistfully, “I used to think that the problems would end when they were grown, you know, no more measles and scraped knees, no more school plays to agonize over, no more pajama parties that would keep everyone awake until morning… I wish those days were back again.”

  “I’m worried about her, Lisa. Listen, tomorrow after Derek leaves for the ship and you two are alone, try to find out what you can about this crazy conversion, will you?”

  “This must be how Paul’s family felt about it all. When he left home he was Saul, when he returned he was a fiery-eyed Paul.”

  “If she had a religious experi
ence anything like that I’d like to know under what conditions….”

  “You think he would use LSD, or SNO, or anything like that on youngsters?” Lisa sat straight up in the bed, naked, suddenly shivering in the heat of the room.

  “I don’t think so. I think Billy Warren Smith is too cagey to let him try that, but they might have something similar, or… I just don’t know. Get what you can from her.”

  Lorna had a copy of an essay she had done about her experience for it writing course, and she gave it to Lisa smiling. “I will turn it over to the Church in the fall. They like testimonials, firsthand reports, and such. I meant to before I left Chicago, but I couldn’t find it. I had packed it away already.” She finished canned peaches, long hoarded for such an occasion, and started on poached eggs and toast. She ate like a field laborer, and weighed a sleek one hundred ten pounds. Since Lisa topped that by only three pounds, there was no envy in her glance, just amusement.

  “Don’t they feed you at the mountain camp?”

  “Have you ever known any institutional food to be worth eating, Mother? Seriously? The cook is a tall, heavy woman, not fat, just big, broad shoulders and muscles, like that. She has orange hair and it is as straight and hard as… as the string of taffy you get from a spoon when it’s done. You know? It’s brittle. So every morning she has to wrestle with it, get it up and under a cook’s hat somehow. Within an hour it is out again, sticking out this way and that, short sharp ends of hair like a porcupine bristling. Back to the mirror to get it pinned up again. She uses a bushel of hairpins in it, and it won’t stay. So she never has time really to cook. And it’s a shame because the food itself is too good to be wasted by her. Potatoes not quite done, peas soft and mushy, steaks crisp, pork still pink, salad limp and either without dressing, or with something forgotten from the dressing. One day she left out the oil, another time she forgot the vinegar. Or salt. She has a real amnesiac strain when it comes to salt. Either she forgets that she used it already, or she just forgets to add any at all. Anyway we stock up on cheese and apples and things like that for eating in the dorms, and it isn’t too bad.”