Firestarter Read online

  "You bad baby!" Wanless cried. "Look what you've done! It's nasty, baby, see how nasty it is? It's nasty to do it in your pants! Do grown-ups do it in their pants? Do it on the pot, baby, on the pot."

  "Please," Cap said, pained.

  "It is the making of a complex," Wanless said. "Toilet-training is accomplished by focusing the child's attention on his own eliminatory processes in a way we would consider unhealthy if the object of fixation were something different. How strong is the complex inculcated in the child, you might ask? Richard Damon of the University of Washington asked himself this question and made an experiment to find out. He advertised for fifty student volunteers. He filled them up with water and soda and milk until they all badly needed to urinate. After a certain set time had passed, he told them they could go . . . if they went in their pants."

  "That's disgusting!" Cap said loudly. He was shocked and sickened. That wasn't an experiment; it was an exercise in degeneracy.

  "See how well the complex has set in your own psyche," Wanless said quietly. "You did not think it was so disgusting when you were twenty months old. Then, when you had to go, you went. You would have gone sitting on the pope's lap if someone had set you there and you had to go. The point of the Damon experiment, Captain Hollister, is this: most of them couldn't. They understood that the ordinary rules of behavior had been set aside, at least for the course of the experiment ; they were each alone in quarters at least as private as the ordinary bathroom . . . but fully eighty-eight percent of them just couldn't. No matter how strong the physical need was, the complex instilled by their parents was stronger."

  "This is nothing but pointless wandering," Cap said curtly.

  "No, it isn't. I want you to consider the parallels between toilet-training and fire-training . . . and the one significant difference, which is the quantum leap between the urgency of accomplishing the former and the latter. If the child toilet-trains slowly, what are the consequences? Minor unpleasantness. His room smells if not constantly aired. The mamma is chained to her washing machine. The cleaners may have to be called in to shampoo the carpet after the job is finally done. At the very worst, the baby may have a constant diaper rash, and that will only happen if the baby's skin is very sensitive or if the mamma is a sloven about keeping him clean. But the consequences to a child who can make fire . . ."

  His eyes glittered. The left aide of his mouth sneered.

  "My estimation of the McGees as parents is very high," Wanless said. "Somehow they got her through it. I would imagine they began the job long before parents usually begin the toilet-training process; perhaps even before she was able to crawL 'Baby mustn't! Baby hurt herself! No, no, no! Bad girl! Bad girl ! Ba-ad girl!'

  "But your own computer suggests by its readouts that she is overcoming her complex, Captain Hollister. She is in an enviable position to do it. She is young, and the complex has not had a chance to set in a bed of years until it becomes like cement. And she has her father with her! Do you realize the significance of that simple fact? No, you do not. The father is the authority figure. He holds the psychic reins of every fixation in the female child. Oral, anal, genital; behind each, like a shadowy figure standing behind a curtain, is, the father-authority figure. To the girl-child he is Moses; the laws are his laws, handed down she knows not how, but his to enforce. He is perhaps the only person on earth who can remove this block. Our complexes, Captain Hollister, always give us the most agony and psychic distress when those who have inculcated them die and pass beyond argument . . . and mercy."

  Cap glanced at his watch and saw that Wanless had been in here almost forty minutes. It felt like hours. "Are you almost done? I have another appointment--"

  "When complexes go, they go like dams bursting after torrential rains," Wanless said softly. "We have a promiscuous girl who is nineteen years old. Already she has had three hundred lovers. Her body is as hot with sexual infection as that of a forty-year-old prostitute. But until she was seventeen she was a virgin. Her father was a minister who told her again and again as a little girl that sex inside marriage was a necessary evil, that sex outside marriage was hell and damnation, that sex was the apple of original sin. When a complex like that goes, it goes like a breaking dam. First there is a crack or two, little trickling rills of water so small as to escape notice. And according to your computer's information, that is where we are now with this little girl Suggestions that she has used her ability to help her father, at her father's urging. And then it all goes at once, spewing out millions of gallons of water, destroying everything in its path, drowning everyone caught in its way, changing the landscape forever!"

  Wanless's croaking voice had risen from its original soft pitch to a broken-voiced old man's shout--but it was more peevish than magnificent.

  "Listen," he said to Cap. "For once, listen to me. Drop the blinders from your eyes. The man is not dangerous in and of himself. He has a little power, a toy, a plaything. He understands that. He has not been able to use it to make a million dollars. He does not rule men and nations. He has used his power to help fat women lose weight. He has used it to help timid executives gain confidence. He is unable to use the power often or well . . . some inner physiological factor limits him. But the girl is incredibly dangerous. She is on the run with her daddy, faced with a survival situation. She is badly frightened. And he is frightened as well, which is what makes him dangerous. Not in and of himself, but because you are forcing him to reeducate the little girl. You are forcing him to change her conceptions about the power inside her. You are forcing him to force her to use it."

  Wanless was breathing hard.

  Playing out the scenario--the end was now in sight--Cap said calmly, "What do you suggest?"

  "The man must be killed. Quickly. Before he can do any more pick-and-shovel work on the complex he and his wife built into the little girl. And the girl must also be killed, I believe. In case the damage has already been done."

  "She's only a little girl, Wanless, after all. She can light fires, yes. Pyrokinesis, we call it. But you're making it sound like armageddon."

  "Perhaps it will be," Wanless said. "You mustn't let her age and size fool you into forgetting the Z factor . . . which is exactly what you are doing, of course. Suppose lighting fires is only the tip of this iceberg? Suppose the talent grows? She is seven. When John Milton was seven, he was perhaps a small boy grasping a stick of charcoal and laboring to write his own name in letters his mamma and daddy could understand. He was a baby. John Milton grew up to write Paradise Lost."

  "I don't know what the hell you're talking about," Cap said flatly.

  "I am talking about the potential for destruction. I am talking about a talent which is linked to the pituitary gland, a gland which is nearly dormant in a child Charlene McGee's age. What happens when she becomes an adolescent and that gland awakes from its sleep and becomes for twenty months the most powerful force in the human body, ordering everything from the sudden maturation of the primary and secondary sex characteristics to an increased production of visual purple in the eye? Suppose you have a child capable of eventually creating a nuclear explosion simply by the force of her will?"

  "That's the most insane thing I've ever heard."

  "Is it? Then let me progress from insanity to utter lunacy, Captain Hollister. Suppose there is a little girl out there someplace this morning who has within her, lying dormant only for the time being, the power to someday crack the very planet in two like a china plate in a shooting gallery?"

  They looked at each other in silence. And suddenly the intercom buzzed.

  After a moment, Cap leaned over and thumbed it. "Yes, Rachel?" Goddamned if the old man hadn't had him there, for just a moment. He was like some awful gore-crow, and that was another reason Cap didn't like him. He was a go-getter himself, and if there was one thing he couldn't stand, it was a pessimist.

  "You have a call on the scrambler," Rachel said. "From the service area."

  "All right, dear. Thanks. Hold it for
a couple of minutes, okay?"

  "Yes, sir."

  He sat back in his chair. "I have to terminate this interview, Dr. Wanless. You may be sure that I'll consider everything you've said very carefully."

  "Will you?" Wanless asked. The frozen side of his mouth seemed to sneer cynically.

  "Yes."

  Wanless said: "The girl ... McGee . . . and this fellow Richardson ... they are the last three marks of a dead equation, Captain Hollister. Erase them. Start over. The girl is very dangerous."

  "I'll consider everything you've said," Cap repeated.

  "Do so." And Wanless finally began to struggle to his feet, propping himself on his cane. It took him a long time. At last he was up.

  "Winter is coming," he said to Cap. "These old bones dread it."

  "Are you staying in Longmont tonight?"

  "No, Washington."

  Cap hesitated and then said, "Stay at the Mayflower. I may want to get in touch with you."

  Something in the old man's eyes--gratitude? Yes, almost certainly that. "Very good, Captain Hollister," he said, and worked his way back to the door on his cane--an old man who had once opened Pandora's box and now wanted to shoot all of the things that had flown out instead of putting them to work.

  When the door had snicked closed behind him, Cap breathed a sigh of relief and picked up the scrambler phone.

  7

  "Who am I talking to?"

  "Orv Jamieson, sir."

  "Have you got them, Jamieson?"

  "Not yet, sir, but we found something interesting at the airport."

  "What's that?"

  "All the pay phones are empty. We found a few quarters and dimes on the floors of some of them."

  "Jimmied?"

  "No, sir. That's why I called you. They haven't been jimmied, they're just empty. Phone company's going crazy."

  "All right, Jamieson."

  "It speeds things up. We've been figuring that maybe the guy hid the girl outside and only checked himself in. But either way, we figure now that we're looking for a guy who paid with a lot of change."

  "If they are at a motel and not shacked up at a summer camp somewhere."

  "Yes, sir."

  "Carry on, OJ."

  "Yes, sir. Thank you." He sounded absurdly pleased that his nickname had been remembered.

  Cap hung up. He sat with his eyes half closed for five minutes, thinking. The mellow autumn light fell through the bay window and lit the office, warmed it. Then he leaned forward and got Rachel again.

  "Is John Rainbird there?"

  "Yes he is, Cap."

  "Give me another five minutes and then send him in. I want to talk to Norville Bates out in the service area. He's the head honcho until Al gets there."

  "Yes, sir," Rachel said, a little doubtfully. "It will have to be an open line. Walkie-talkie link-up. Not very--"

  "Yes, that's fine," he said impatiently.

  It took two minutes. Bates's voice was thin and crackling. He was a good man--not very imaginative, but a plugger. The kind of man Cap wanted to have holding the fort until Albert Steinowitz could get there. At last Norville came on the line and told Cap they were beginning to spread out into the surrounding towns--Oakville, Tremont, Messalonsett, Hastings Glen, Looton.

  "All right, Norville, that's good," Cap said. He thought of Wanless saying You are forcing him to reeducate the little girl. He thought of Jamieson telling him all the phones were empty. McGee hadn't done that. The girl had done it. And then, because she was still up, she had burned that soldier's shoes off, probably by accident. Wanless would be pleased to know that Cap was going to take fifty percent of his advice after all--the old turd had been amazingly eloquent this morning.

  "Things have changed," Cap said. "We've got to have the big boy sanctioned. Extreme sanction. You follow?"

  "Extreme sanction," Norville said flatly. "Yes, sir."

  "Very good, Norville," Cap said softly. He put the phone down and waited for John Rainbird to come in.

  The door opened a moment later and there he stood, as big as life and twice as ugly. He was so naturally quiet, this half Cherokee, that if you had been looking down at your desk, reading or answering correspondence, you wouldn't have been aware that anyone was in the room with you at all. Cap knew how rare that was. Most people could sense another person in the room: Wanless had once called that ability not a sixth sense but a bottom-of-the-barrel sense, a knowledge born of infinitesimal input from the five normal senses. But with Rainbird, you didn't know. Not one of the whisker-thin sensory tripwires so much as vibrated. Al Steinowitz had said a strange thing about Rainbird once over glasses of port in Cap's living room: "He's the one human being I ever met who doesn't push air in front of him when he walks." And Cap was glad Rainbird was on their side, because he was the only human he had ever met who completely terrified him.

  Rainbird was a troll, an ore, a balrog of a man. He stood two inches shy of seven feet tall, and he wore his glossy hair drawn back and tied in a curt ponytail. Ten years before, a Claymore had blown up in his face during his second tour of Vietnam, and now his countenance was a horrorshow of scar tissue with runneled flesh. His left eye was gone. There was nothing where it had been but a ravine. He would not have plastic surgery or an artificial eye because, he said, when he got to the happy hunting ground beyond, he would be asked to show his battlescars. When he said such things, you did not know whether to believe him or not; you did not know if he was serious or leading you on for reasons of his own.

  Over the years, Rainbird had been a surprisingly good agent--partially because the last thing on earth he looked like was an agent, mostly because there was an apt, ferociously bright mind behind that mask of flesh. He spoke four languages fluently and had an understanding of three others. He was taking a sleep course in Russian. When he spoke, his voice was low, musical, and civilized.

  "Good afternoon, Cap."

  "Is it afternoon?" Cap asked, surprised.

  Rainbird smiled, showing a big set of perfectly white teeth--shark's teeth, Cap thought. "By fourteen minutes," he said. "I picked up a Seiko digital watch on the black market in Venice. It is fascinating. Little black numbers that change constantly. A feat of technology. I often think, Cap, that we fought the war in Vietnam not to win but to perform feats of technology. We fought it in order to create the cheap digital wristwatch, the home Ping-Pong game that hooks up to one's TV, the pocket calculator. I look at my new wristwatch in the dark of night. It tells me I am closer to my death, second by second. That is good news."

  "Sit down, old friend," Cap said. As always when he talked to Rainbird, his mouth was dry and he had to restrain his hands, which wanted to twine and knot together on the polished surface of his desk. All of that, and he believed that Rainbird liked him--if Rainbird could be said to like anyone.

  Rainbird sat down. He was wearing old bluejeans and a faded chambray shirt.

  "How was Venice?" Cap asked.

  "Sinking," Rainbird said.

  "I have a job for you, if you want it. It is a small one, but it may lead to an assignment you'll find considerably more interesting."

  "Tell me."

  "Strictly volunteer," Cap persisted. "You're still on R and R."

  "Tell me," Rainbird repeated gently, and Cap told him. He was with Rainbird for only fifteen minutes, but it seemed an hour. When the big Indian left, Cap breathed a long sigh. Both Wanless and Rainbird in one morning--that would take the snap out of anyone's day. But the morning was over now, a lot had been accomplished, and who knew what might lie ahead this afternoon? He buzzed RacheL

  "Yes, Cap?"

  "I'll be eating in, darling. Would you get me something from the cafeteria? It doesn't matter what. Anything. Thank you, Rachel."

  Alone at last. The scrambler phone lay silent on its thick base, filled with microcircuits and memory chips and God alone knew what else. When it buzzed again, it would probably be Albert or Norville to tell him that it was over in New York--the girl taken,
her father dead. That would be good news.

  Cap closed his eyes again. Thoughts and phrases floated through his mind like large, lazy kites. Mental domination. Their think-tank boys said the possibilities were enormous. Imagine someone like McGee close to Castro, or the Ayatollah Khomeini. Imagine him getting close enough to that pinko Ted Kennedy to suggest in the low voice of utter conviction that suicide was the best answer. Imagine a man like that sicced on the leaders of the various communist guerrilla groups. It was a shame they had to lose him. But ... what could be made to happen once could be made to happen again.

  The little girl. Wanless saying The power to someday crack the very planet in two like a china plate in a shooting gallery . . . ridiculous, of course. Wanless had gone as crazy as the little boy in the D. H. Lawrence story, the one who could pick the winners at the racetrack. Lot Six had turned into battery acid for Wanless; it had eaten a number of large, gaping holes in the man's good sense. She was a little girl, not a doomsday weapon. And they had to hang on to her at least long enough to document what she was and to chart what she could be. That alone would be enough to reactivate the Lot Six testing program. If she could be persuaded to use her powers for the good of the country, so much the better.

  So much the better, Cap thought.

  The scrambler phone suddenly uttered its long, hoarse cry. His pulse suddenly leaping, Cap grabbed it.

  The Incident at the Manders Farm

  1

  While Cap discussed her future with A1 Steinowitz in Longmont, Charlie McGee was sitting on the edge of the motel bed in Unit Sixteen of the Slumberland, yawning and stretching. Bright morning sunlight fell aslant through the window, out of a sky that was a deep and blameless autumn blue. Things seemed so much better in the good daylight.

  She looked at her daddy, who was nothing but a motionless hump under the blankets. A fluff of black hair stuck out--that was all. She smiled. He always did his best. If he was hungry and she was hungry and there was only an apple, he would take one bite and make her eat the test. When he was awake, he always did his best.