Let the Fire Fall Read online

  Obie never would have seen the other woman in the room, but one of the other men, one not touched by the turbulence of sudden fatherhood, did see her and he pushed into the room and stood over her. She was dead, and in the crook of her arm lay a second baby, and it too appeared to be dead. Everyone believed that Matt had delivered her, and he never told them otherwise.

  The alien baby didn’t die, of course. Matt labored over it, was relieved by specialists who took the child and did open heart surgery on it, and other things that saved its life. And the alien child became the ward of the United Nations.

  Because Florence was sixteen and because Obie denied the child, it was decided, had been decided long ago when pregnancy had been determined, that she would give it up for adoption at birth. Matt took it from her flaccid arms and gave it to Mrs. Murray to care for, and in the end, didn’t offer it to anyone, but talked his wife, whom he loved, and who loved him, into keeping it. Both babies had pale, almost white, hair, and both had the blue eyes of birth, and neither was any more or less human than the other. Staring at the child that had become his, Matt fingered the black touchstone and wondered.

  And that is the last element, the prince and the pauper bit.

  Chapter Two

  BILL Y WARREN SMITH was a fat lawyer. His wife was fat, and both of them detested other fat people. Neither considered himself to be in that category. Billy was thirty-five, pink, and afraid, because having lived half a lifetime, he was in debt, still had to work very hard simply to keep his cars running and his office rent paid, and lived in perpetual terror that the Internal Revenue Service would pull his file for an audit.

  Had he been crooked in big ways, involving millions of dollars, and important people much could have been forgiven of him, but he wasn’t. His thefts were of pennies, and his deals involved the manipulation of petty accident reports, and fixing an occasional ticket. If he had been taken into the law firm of a brilliant, imaginative attorney, he would have been successful, because he delighted in the detailed labor of searching for precedent, and locating little used loopholes and quirks. His talents had rested through the years, uncalled for, unsuspected, only because he didn’t have the large vision by himself.

  Billy poured gin and tonic for Obie and said, “You have quite a flair for speaking. Going to school?”

  Obie shook his head. “I was about to, but I don’t think I will.”

  “Oh,” Billy said, and the one dream he had entertained that year faded. “You’ll get drafted then.”

  “Don’t think so, Mr. Smith. You see, I. got the Call. And I aim to answer it. Yes siree, I aim to answer the Lord’s Call” He held out his glass and Billy automatically took it and refilled it.

  “A preacher? You going to be a preacher? That takes school, doesn’t it?”

  “An evangelist, Mr. Smith. Takes nothing but the Lord’s Call, which I got. I’m going up the mountain to fast and meditate for a week and next Sunday I’ll preach again, and the next and the next.”

  “What mountain? There aren’t any mountains here.”

  “Robb’s Hill will do fine.” Obie slugged down the rest of his drink, and they both were silent for several minutes, and the interlude was filled with June night sounds; crickets, tree frogs, cicadas, a low-voiced bird.

  “You could probably get some personal appearances, being the first man to see the aliens, and all,” Billy’s voice was subdued, as if he were deep in thought. As he was. He was trying to capture a dream that hadn’t happened yet, and it was fuzzy and almost without features, without details, but very important.

  Obie looked across the yard, across Matt Daniels’ yard at the lighted windows and nodded. “He’s been too busy to deny that I was there first, and by now it wouldn’t matter what he said. They all know I was the first man on earth to lay eyes on the strangers.”

  “Billy’s voice rose then and he leaned forward. “You could use a manager, Obie. A business manager to handle receipts and engagements and records. How about it?”

  And so, although his purpose in inviting Obie Cox to his house that night had been in order to nudge Obie into law school with the premise of a job afterward, Billy found himself being hired instead, and thought it an equitable arrangement.

  “You’ll need a cache of food up there, and a blanket, and clean clothes. You should come down looking hollow-eyed and hungry, but clean. We’ll keep it quiet that I’m your manager for the time being, and I’ll pass the word around that you’re up there fasting and praying.”

  Obie grinned and poured straight gin into his glass.

  Dr. Winifred Harvey was staring down at the child still hovering between giving up and making it, and she wondered if they should even try to keep it alive. Heart failure within the hour of birth, a complete transfusion during the surgery, possible brain damage…

  “Sure doesn’t look human, does it?” said the nurse checking the incubator temperature.

  “It looks human and sick,” Winifred snapped. But it was a lie. The child didn’t look human, but what newborn sick baby does? She left the helicopter outfitted as a hospital for the alien infant and stared at the spaceship. The doors were still closed. The ship stood dark and still, a dimly reflecting silver blob against the sky. She returned to Busby’s house where Busby and his wife were treated like lepers, always in the way, faintly unclean, to be endured simply because in the beginning no one had thought to tell them to leave, and by the time the thought had occurred, it seemed a trifle pointless and would have made for bad publicity. Cal Busby and his wife whispered, and pointed at the U.N. people and the army personnel, and shrank back from the white-coated medics, but mostly it was their whispering that rasped. Heads together, a sibilant bss, bss forever issuing from the double-headed entity, they were an unknown quantum. To be trusted, or not to be trusted? That was the problem. Unanswerable, it was decided that they should be ignored. Voices would stop when either of them entered a room, and where conversation had been low-pitched, it became a whisper, and where it had been in normal tones, it became low-pitched, so that the house was filled with murmuring voices and whispers and watchful eyes.

  Winifred paused when she saw the Busby couple in the living room, but she went on through to the kitchen and drank vile coffee with a sergeant. Mrs. Busby insisted on making the coffee, and doing some of the cooking, for her and her man, she said, but turning out hundreds of biscuits that were soggy in the middle, and dozens ‘of fried eggs, brown around the edges and tasting of lard, and iron kettles filled with green beans cooked to a dull olive color with no suggestion of the original shape left. She was being helpful, and no one could make her stop helping short of ordering her all the way out. Cal prodded her out of the way again and again to count the eggs and biscuits, then he made notations in a yellow pad. So he could bill the government.

  The sergeant drinking coffee had bloodshot eyes and his hands shook. “You look like you could use some sleep,” Winifred commented.

  “I don’t know, ma’am, but I don’t feel so hot.”

  On the contrary, he did feel hot, very hot. Winifred touched his forehead and drew back quickly. She called for a medic and the sergeant was put to bed. Three others followed, all with symptoms of food poisoning. Winifred decided to go back to Matt’s house and go to bed. Since she was one of the few to be allowed inside the ship, she was promised that if the aliens opened the doors again she would be called, no matter what the rime.

  Matt was pacing in his living room when she got there, and she filled him in with the latest. “They,” she said, indicating the town to the left of them, “won’t believe that miserable woman is poisoning the men with her cooking, but that’s about the truth of it. Ugh.”

  She ate a sandwich, and helped Matt pace for the next quarter of an hour. “How did that alien woman know the way to this house?” Matt asked. “Rhetorical. How did she know I could deliver a baby? Why me? They must have skilled doctors aboard.”

  “The last one’s easy,” Winifred said, meeting him in th
e center of the room where both stopped momentarily, then turned and walked back to the starting points. “They must have wanted the child born out of the ship for fear that whatever was killing them all was in the air, or at least they must have hoped that it could avoid contamination by getting itself born somewhere else. And it did, so they were right. But why in God’s name would they have sent pregnant women on a space flight?”

  “Conceived in space maybe?”

  “No. There were others, in cold storage, all dead now. Babies dead also. They started out pregnant.” This time when they met she looked at him accusingly. “Did you tell anyone that the aliens were dying?”

  Matt shook his head violently. “You know I didn’t.”

  “Okay, cool it, kid. But tell me, how did pretty little golden boy find out?”

  Matt stared at her blankly, and she told him about the sermon. “Obie Cox! I don’t believe it. He’s a two-bit, fast-talking lothario, but that’s all.”

  “Un-huh. He’s the up and coming evangelist. So says Conan Woosley. In his column for today.”

  Winifred went to bed, and Obie left his listening post at the window and went home. Matt continued to pace for a while, waiting for the baby to wake up for a feeding. It didn’t, and he finally fell asleep on the couch. The baby went on a four-meals-a-day schedule from the start, and at two months dropped one of those fee dings. It cried only immediately before a feeding; other times it stared about at its crib and beyond, and listened to noises, and was very content.

  Obie walked home slowly. He should vanish that night, simply drop out of sight for the coming week and let Billy handle the rumors for him. But if there was sickness… he stopped and narrowed his eyes and visualized himself before a congregation, all of them aware of the spread of the plague that the aliens had brought with them, all of them terrified, looking at him, the Lord’s emissary, for guidance. He let himself go out to the meeting and he felt the fear coming into him from them, and the thin echoes of fear magnified and became strong, and he knew what he would do. Obie, faced with a problem, was full of tension, uncomfortable, restless, irritable. He groped for solutions with no particular rationale, but rather visualized alternatives and if one of the alternatives eased his tense body, he accepted it as right. He could explain little of what he did, but if it felt right, he didn’t look for explanations.

  When the people awakened the next day, it was to the sound of church bells, although it was a Monday morning. Church bells on Monday morning were almost blasphemous. They went on and on. And eventually, cursing a bit, the people made their way to the church to find out why.

  The Reverend MacLeish, looking pale and senile and bewildered, stood behind the lectern, wishing he had had a son instead of Dee Dee with her imperious voice and her foot stamping and tears. He never held church on a Monday morning. Never. Once on a Thursday, after the fire that had destroyed the first Elmwood Baptist Church back in ’32, or was it ’23? But never on Monday. The bells were making his head hurt, and he wanted his breakfast. Never start a day without breakfast, he always said, and you’ll live to ripen in the sun…. That didn’t sound just right, but after all, he’d had no breakfast yet, not even coffee. The bells stopped, creating a very loud silence, and there was Dee Dee looking ugly at him and hissing, and he remembered. He was supposed to pray when the bells stopped. He bowed his head, but not very much, because he hadn’t really combed his hair that morning, had just run a comb through it while Dee Dee fumed and stormed about the time he was taking. He prayed briefly and inaudibly, and Dee Dee was motioning for him to get out from the pulpit. He blinked at her.

  Then Obie was striding up from the congregation and he knew that Obie was going to preach again. Although many were called he’d never expected Obie to be among them, and having been called, to have answered. God’s way was mysterious.

  Obie felt the fear when the people realized that he had called the service. It grew and swelled and made palms suddenly moist, and bodies cold. He gathered it in and flung it back at them. He told of a vision that bad come to him in the night, and in his vision the people he had loved since childhood were being taken sick, contaminated by the strangers. He had prayed to the Lord, and the Lord took off the curse, but said that those who aided the stranger would grow sick, and perhaps die. And the Lord slew the last of the strangers, all except the infant who was being left as a test of His people. If they could put their house in order and teach the Word to the strange child, then, when the strangers returned, the Lord would aid His people. And as a sign that He was with them, that He was watching them, he would smite with the alien disease those who aided the strangers.

  Then Obie prayed and the congregation prayed with him, and the terrible fear was lifted from them for a while.

  The reporters smiled pityingly at him in their stories, but when they went to the Busby farm and saw the hospital units set up, and saw the whispering Busby couple, drawn close together, bss, bss, and finally induced one corporal to talk to them, they weren’t laughing. Two of them rewrote their articles, this time hinting at fraud and deception, and the third one, Conan Woosley, wrote it straight, not slanting it at all. It was the hardest article he had ever attempted.

  The Busbys were finally escorted from their property, installed in a motel that was within the limited area, and there left to their own devices. They confirmed the story that there was sickness back on the farm, and Cal Busby said outright that the Lord had caused it. Else why didn’t he and his wife get sick? They ate the same food as the soldiers, drank the same water. Why didn’t they get sick too? Because the Lord knew they were good people, not helping the strangers who had come to their cornfield unasked, unwanted. The Lord spared them, which was more than the aliens did for his corn. As the day got on, Cal Busby was expanding, and by sundown, he had three of the soldiers dead and in secret graves, with many more, hundreds maybe, near death. But when the reporters got near them, and when the army men came to question them, the Busbys drew together again, and nothing but bss, bss came from them.

  Most of the personnel at the farm didn’t get sick, but some did, and the source was traced to contaminated water. “Thank God,” Winifred said, “I just drank the bitch’s coffee. And it boiled and boiled and boiled.”

  As the days dragged by with no new excitement, some of the people wished out loud that Obie would come down off the mountain and give them the word about what to expect next. Some laughed to exhaustion at the thought of Obie Cox praying up on Robb’s Hill. And still others trekked up the hill to see if Obie really was there fasting and praying like he said, and they brought back the word that he really was, and there was slightly more than a touch of awe in their voices when they said it, for none of them ever had seen a holy man fasting and praying only having heard of it in far-off places like India and Tibet. Obie looked real spiritual they said.

  Billy’s wife Wanda returned and demanded to know why he was Hill scratched up and sore, and he wouldn’t tell her that it was from hauling a week’s supply of food and clothing up Robb’s Hill in the dead of night, sliding most of the way up and down in the middle of blackberry bushes. Also he had got chiggers, and he was one continuous itching hive.

  Winifred left, promising to keep in touch with Matt, assuring him that she would get herself appointed to the special group assigned to the alien child. Lisa and Derek returned soon after her departure. Lisa wrinkled her nose and could have put markers on all the spots where Winifred had stood or sat or lain, but she didn’t, because she loved her husband and trusted him. She commiserated with him instead over the influx of patients and the probability that none of them would pay him anything unless they had been his regular patients before the landing, figuring that their own doctors came first and this had been a special case. They hadn’t wanted to go to him, but the government forced them. Let him bill the government. They discussed the landing for hours, and then got in the car, with Derek, who was four, and drove up Slater Hill to a point where they could look down on the ship a
nd the heavy cordon of guards surrounding the field, and construction workers who were fencing it all in. Derek was properly impressed and argued bitterly when he was denied permission to go down and enter the ship. He swore that he would run away and do it by himself when everyone else was sleeping.

  Still later Lisa held Lorna and listened intently while Lorna babbled and pried at her nose and tried to take off her ears. Lorna had learned a new word, baby, and she said it again and again, adding it to her permanent, stable vocabulary that endured along with the babbling that changed from day to day. Lorna could say dadda, momma, Dek, bye-bye, and baby. Lisa didn’t need a lot of talking into it after that. She seemed to assume, as Lorna did, that they had a new baby.

  And the new baby stared at her and smiled slowly and, Matt thought with a touch of wonder, deliberately. They named him Blake.

  INTERLUDE ONE

  Selected from Winifred Harvey’s Notes and Clippings

  So says Conan Woosley—

  Overhead planes with metal detection devices make a latticework pattern in the sky; in the dark woods men are stumbling and lurching and falling over each other as the search for the missing capsule continues. They are tired men, they have been searching for four days now…. And vituperation also continues…

  Excerpts from U.N. speeches, week of June 20….

  U.S.S.R.: …furthermore, this government must ponder the possibilities that the U.S., or one of the many branches of intelligence operating within the U.S. might have located the missing capsule, as suggested by the distinguished representative of the republic of France…