Let the Fire Fall Page 15

  Some of them were going to make it inside the temple. The original band of fighters was now midway up the incline, fighting on the second terrace. The temple was on raised ground approached by tiers of broad steps and wide terraces with recessed lights set in them. The temple was of gleaming white marble, with black marble floors along a colonnade that ran around the entire structure. The columns were polished, snow white, and completely unadorned. It had been designed by Straton-Rubichek, and a replica of it was on display in the Museum of Modern Art. It was very beautiful. The mortar picked off another light. Suddenly appearing between the columns of the colonnade were figures, each holding a massive candle, girls, women, children. They came out of the temple singing, the same hymn that had so startled the short hairs earlier. There were hundreds of the figures, and now Blake could see that most of them were teen-aged girls; all were dressed in long white robes. The scene became a tableau, and even the mortar was quieted.

  “The crazy fools!” Blake muttered, watching the descending figures. He raised binoculars and studied them; all seemed unaware of the fighting, unaware of the hordes of maddened people on the road and lurking behind bushes and trees. They sang triumphantly, looking neither to right nor left and the breeze hardly stirred the flames of the candles they carried. Each face was lighted; and all of the faces appeared entranced. Suddenly Blake gasped.

  “Lisa!”

  He knew almost immediately that it couldn’t be Lisa. It was Lisa as he remembered her from years ago. He was looking at Lorna. He kept the binoculars on her as she went down the steps to stop on the bottom tier. One of the damaged lights came” on again. There was frenzy among the mob not yet on the grounds. They could hear the singing and were enraged beyond endurance by it. They shoved harder and some of these in the front were knocked down and trampled.

  The mortar came to life again. It was a very good shot, not hitting any of the choir members, but knocking them down by the shock in spite of that. The others continued to stand unmoving, singing.

  Then the band of attackers broke through the long hairs defending the temple and raced up the steps, knocking the girls out of their way as they went. Most of the short hairs fell on the steps, not shot, not hit by anything that Blake could see. A few others made it to the top and vanished inside. Blake had grown more and more tense since the choir had appeared, and now he found himself starting the engine of his copter and leaving the branch it had rested on to hover free of the tree. He couldn’t leave Lorna standing down there unprotected like a somnambulist.

  Among the invaders there must have been some who were familiar with the temple interior. In a very short time the lights went out and the area was in total darkness relieved only by the candles of the choir, and these now seemed pitiably weak. The mob coming in by road swelled and swept over those on the ground as if released by magic from magic.

  Blake swooped down also. He aimed toward Lorna. At the same moment he saw the National Guard aircraft coming in finally. The fighting at the temple had increased in intensity, there were hundreds or perhaps thousands from each side engaged in hand to hand battle now, and the choir was being swept aside, their candles smashed. Blake landed left of the temple, two hundred yards from Lorna. There was very little activity here; most of it was at the front where the temple faced the road, and at the side where the attackers had launched the flanking move. The lights came on suddenly, and went off again. There was a momentary lull in the fighting when they came on. The tempo picked up as soon as darkness returned. Blake pushed and fought his way through fighting men and women, indiscriminately hitting out, or using his own stun gun on them. He finally got to the steps where he had last seen Lorna. She was not there. Her candle was flattened, as if by a heavy boot. Blake searched the grass and bushes for her and he saw a team of men setting up a portable laser, aiming it at the columns. They were going to cut through them, collapse the roof of the temple. He yelled for Lorna. He had worked his way to the top of the incline, looking at white-robed bodies, alive and dead, that littered the stairs all the way up. There were some of them going inside the temple at that moment and he raced for the group and spun the last one around.

  “Lorna? Where is she?”

  A glassy-eyed pre-adolescent pointed wordlessly, wrenched away from him and entered the temple.

  Blake ran inside and yanked the arm of a long-haired girl. She turned and he breathed in relief. “Come on! I’m getting you out of here!”

  She shook her head, tried to pull free, and he clipped her once gently at the side of her neck. He caught her when she fell, swung her over his shoulder, and headed for the door through which he had entered. It was crowded now with short hairs. They tried to snatch Lorna from him, hands yanking at her hair, and her robes. He turned and ran to his left. As he ran through the temple the sounds of battle grew nearer. He darted out the first door he came to, continued to run along the colonnade until he spotted his copter and he groaned. The short hairs and long hairs were fighting over it. They had pulled out all the boxes of plans and notes. He stopped, resting Lorna’s weight against a wall, and adjusted the force of his gun. He went on then and when he got within range of the copter he sprayed a charge over everyone in the area. It was too weak to kill, but they fell back before it, those who were able to walk. He pushed Lorna inside, dumping her unceremoniously on the floor where the boxes had been. The National Guard copters were starting to spray the area With anti-mob gas. Behind them there was an explosion within the temple and a geyser of smoke and rubble climbed into the sky. A roar came from the crowd. Blake started the engine and had to pause long enough to spray the area once more. He took off, straight up. A National Guard copter came down to intercept him and he accelerated, shooting off northeast into the darkness.

  In the headquarters communications room on Mount Laurel Obie watched the scene with Dee Dee and Billy Warren Smith. Six cameras covered all of the battle from different vantage points, and the engineers continually switched from one to another so that the viewers were shown more of the action than they would have been able to see on the spot. There was only one clear shot of Blake, and none of. them recognized him.

  Merton returned after a lengthy view phone conversation with the governor of Kentucky. He looked grim. “The bastard couldn’t be reached in time to activate the Guards earlier,” he said. “I say the time for a showdown is now.”

  Obie nodded. Now. Merton left again to contact the lieutenant governor, one of their men, and they knew that by morning there would be a new administration in Kentucky.

  “Somebody talked,” Obie said then. “They knew about the lights and the gas. They went straight for it, using the mobs out front as decoys.”

  Dee Dee’s face was thoughtful. “But, by God, it was effective until they got to it! I never would have believed it.”

  They talked on into the night, with Merton appearing and disappearing again and again, tallying the wounded and dead, receiving reports, and finally leaving to inspect the damage personally. He returned within two hours and got Obie out of bed. He had been given the box of plans and drawings abandoned by Blake.

  “Where did they come from?” Obie asked. His face was swollen and ugly with sleep and he hated Merton intensely then, as he did every so often.

  “No one seems to know. Simpson gathered them up after the mob was dispersed, and he had enough sense to realize their importance.”

  During the next three days the plans were analyzed and recognized as the work of genius. On the fourth day Merton had found the tape with Blake’s appearance on it, and his rescue of one of the temple girls. By the fifth day they knew that Blake had been there and was gone again. Also on the fifth day they had found the card belonging to Lorna Daniels among the computer membership cards. She had been home on vacation for Thanksgiving and a pilgrimage to the temple, but was now back at the Voice of Unity College, where she was a sophomore. Obie called for another council of war.

  They studied a map of the neighborhood where the Daniels�
�� house was a speck in a sea of believers. Surrounded by members or supporters of the Voice of God Church, each one marked by an X so that the entire area looked like a diagonally hashed cross-stitched pattern transfer, the one very small white speck looked totally indefensible, as it was.

  Billy smirked fatly. His face was all but vanishing in the folds of fat, as if his features were dwindling while everything else swelled. Looks simple enough,” he said. “How about a fire?”

  Dee Dee said sharply, “Don’t be a fool! We have to have Blake alive for a year or longer, alive and under control.”

  Billy looked blank and Merton said patiently, “It’s going to take time for the buildup, and then we have to stage his death very carefully. Dee Dee’s right, we’ve got to grab him. He vanished once, he can again until we’re ready to spring him.”

  “In the hospital,” Obie said slowly. “I’d like that.”

  The hospital was a heavily guarded building on the property on Mount Laurel, three miles from the main house. Occasionally a new minister to the Church reacted violently to the indoctrination process, and in the beginning this had caused such a stir of interest among research psychologists that Merton had suggested providing for them on the same grounds where they rounded the bend too abruptly. Some of them recovered, most did not, and the hospital did a lively business. It was every bit as secure as the estate where the Star Child, Obie’s son, was being held. And it had the added advantage of being nearby so that Obie could observe personally this stranger on Earth. They agreed that it was the place.

  “Another thing,” Merton said, “I think we should patent those things in your name, Obie. And you announce that you were inspired by telepathic communication with the kid, Johnny.”

  And that is what they did. They didn’t capture Blake at that time because when the special group of Savers appeared at the Daniels’ residence he was already gone again, but they did begin to apply for patents on the purification process, and the manufacture of electricity from wires in water, and several other things that threatened to revolutionize the world, all admittedly the original ideas of the alien, all controlled by Obie Cox.

  And Obie preached the sermon that broke completely with the past and started a new era for the Church and for the world.

  INTERLUDE EIGHT

  From Winifred Harvey’s memoirs

  I’m in the one place on earth that I think is truly safe. My office in the Cold Sleep Institute. This material is accumulating at a fantastic rate. One day an attendant will mistakenly open the door marked 09-TRI-274-A. and he will gasp with amazement at finding the box full of papers, scrapbooks, diaries, clippings. I’m putting everything on ice until some day….

  I am so restless, and tired, and apprehensive. What is Obie planning? There is on ominous smell in the air that I have to attribute to his insanity. You smell it when you see a group of long hairs together, you feel it when a group of short hairs gather. I went to study Obie lost week, again. He was playing at the Garden again, to a full house, like always.

  He is so goddamned clever. Not intelligent, but slick. He does by instinct what we in the business have to concede was exactly right every time. He gets immense crowds, uses lights so dramatically that it makes a good director want to cry. Then those damnable topers that give strobe effects. Do they emit a vapor that is a hypnotic? Do they? DO THEY? Why doesn’t someone find out and publish results? He builds tension on tension as if he were stacking blocks; he leads the congregation higher and higher into fear and wild expectations, and then knocks away their props and lets them flounder, and then offers a hand. They can’t resist it. They need a. hand by then. It’s madness but it is so goddamned effective! Not only does he get the sheep, he holds them, and they get more. Civilization hod laid down such a thin veneer over that desire to be allowed to hate freely, effectively, and Obie Cox has peeled the veneer away. May he drop dead of suffocation suffered from slipping and sinking in his own mountains of word-excreta!

  I am afraid.

  There I said it. What has happened this winter is enough to make anyone afraid. That bastard has started a civil war. Dress rehearsal for civil war. Let the government call it demonstrations, and the papers call it riots, but what it is is the prelude to civil war.

  Just last week he stood in that goddamn light and glowed. He said: 1, He is in touch telepathically with the Star Child. Lie!; 2. The Star Child is responsible for the patents he has taken out. Lie! Johnny?; 3. The Star Child is a convert to the Church and wants to tell through it about the plot of his people directed against Earth! JOHNNY? My Johnny? I could cry and gnash teeth.

  Why don’t they let Johnny refute him?

  And that idiot book! Armageddon Now. Illiterate. Drivel. Childish. Nonsense: A school boy’s dream of getting even. The philosophy of a nine-year-old. Insurrection of a street gong. I’ll put the book on ice also and someone someday will read it and think what a marvelous sense of humor Americans had back in their dark ages after all.

  So why do the idiot people respond to him?

  That’s why I am afraid. They are fighting everywhere right now. Long hairs who believe in Obie Cox, the pretty little golden boy!, versus the short hairs. Toke a scissors to them and then what would happen? Ah, the sweet smells of civilization: burning cities, riot gases, stench bombs….

  I must put down that scene from 3D, as well as I can remember it:

  A rally, speaker on a platform, dressed in gray, tapers everywhere.

  “Do you believe in God?”

  “I believe!” From a thousand throats, from fifty thousand, from hundreds of thousands. They hold tapers. A choir sings hymns of praise to Obie Cox. They scream: “I believe! I believe! I believe!”

  “The Earth is the Lord’s, and the fullness therein. I shall deliver My Children from the stranger! I shall deliver the believers from the stranger who would smite them down. Do you believe?”

  “I believe! I believe! I believe!”

  But you can see how it goes. For hours the rallies continue and when they end the crowds are turned into mobs with madness in their eyes, burned by an unquenchable fire to save Earth from the fearsome strangers, wrench it from the hands of the atheists, and the agnostics, and the fainthearted who profess belief and do not act on it.

  Obie Cox, please drop dead. Please!

  And the president. That fatheaded slob of a president. We never had it so good. The future belongs to us now. Progress has created wealth beyond the wildest dreams. You fool! They are burning down your country, and your progress, and your material wealth. There is no food in Detroit, no food in Denver…. But he’s afraid he’ll go in the history books as the president who started a religious war, and so he does nothing.

  Tomorrow perhaps I can get home again. I wonder if I have an apartment left. Getting so used to the floor here that I’ll miss it.

  Chapter Fifteen

  MATT and Lisa turned up at Winifred’s apartment at dusk in mid-January. Lisa was as gray as the sky, and Matt had an accumulation of beard and dirt that didn’t quite hide the bruises and cuts that covered his face. He supported Lisa with one hand and banged on Winifred’s door with the other. When she opened it, on a chain, he almost collapsed inward.

  “Oh, my God!” Winifred said, softly. She hurried them inside and bolted the door again.

  Matt told the story while Lisa bathed and washed her hair and dressed in one of Winifred’s robes. Only after this would she have even a cup of coffee.

  “We saw how it was going to be and left home,” Matt said, sipping his third cup of coffee, savoring it this time. He had not tasted any of the food, but had gulped it down, forgetting even to chew. “Before Christmas we went into town and got a room in a hotel. I was near the hospital and it was all right for a short time. We couldn’t afford it long. Two weeks ago, when things seemed quiet again we went back. They were there. We got all the way inside the house before we realized it. They had a Listener’s Booth set up in the living room, and they shoved Lisa inside it.” Wi
nifred looked at her quickly and Lisa ducked her head, a scarlet flush coloring her cheeks, fading swiftly leaving them whiter than before.

  “They wouldn’t let her out until she confessed.”

  “Confessed?” Winifred poured more coffee, trying to forget that she had only two more pounds hoarded.

  “I don’t know what they wanted,” Lisa said. “I didn’t care what I told them. I could hear them beating Matt outside and I kept talking, hoping to hit the right thing so they would let us go.” She looked ashamed.

  There was silence and Lisa toyed with her spoon, not looking at Winifred or Matt. Winifred said, “Then what?”

  “They stripped us,” Matt said slowly. “They took us to the bedroom and forced us to do… things. They had cameras.”

  “Blackmail?” Winifred asked, mystified.

  “More than that,” Matt said. “There are laws in forty-seven of the states forbidding what we did. The cure is pre-frontal lobotomy for the woman, castration and prefrontal for the man. We’re wanted now.”

  Winifred stared at him unbelievingly. “But why…?”

  “We don’t know why we did it,” Lisa said then. “We did what they told us to do. Like that. We don’t know why.” That wasn’t what Winifred had started to ask, but at the sound of Lisa’s voice, she turned and examined her carefully. Too tight, too determined not to break.

  Winifred shrugged her question aside and stood up. “Okay. That’s enough for now. Off to bed with you.” She pushed them, protesting all the way into the bedroom. She paced the small living room afterward for hours before she finally lay down on the couch and fell into an uneasy sleep, dream-filled and horrendous.