“You’d better not let on, kid. Especially about this. Heap-big Indian afraid of the dark. The guys’d laugh me right out of this place.” “They wouldn’t laugh if they knew-““Maybe not. Maybe so.” He chuckled a little. “But I’d just as soon they never found out. I just thank God you was here, kid.”

She was so touched that her eyes filled again and she had to struggle for control of herself. They reached the fridge, and she located the jug of icewater by feel. It wasn’t icy cold anymore, but it soothed her throat. She wondered with fresh unease just how long she had talked, and didn’t know. But she had told… everything. Even the parts she had meant to hold back, like what had happened at the Manders farm. Of course, the people like Hockstetter knew, but she didn’t care about them. She did care about John… and his opinion of her.

But she had told. He would ask a question that somehow pierced right to the heart of the matter, and… she had told, often with tears. And instead of more questions and cross-examination and mistrust, there had been only acceptance and calm sympathy. He seemed to understand the hell she had been through, maybe because he had been through hell himself.

“Here’s the water,” she said.

“Thanks.” She heard him drink, and then it was placed back in her hands. “Thanks a lot.”

She put it away.

“Let’s go back in the other room,” he said. “I wonder if they’ll ever get the lights back on.” He was, impatient for them to come on now. They had been off more than seven hours, he guessed. He wanted to get out of here and think about all of this. Not what she had told him-he knew all of that-but how to use it.

“I’m sure they’ll be on soon,” Charlie said.

They shuffled their way back to the sofa and sat down.

“They haven’t told you anything about your old man?”

“Just that he’s all right,” she said.

“I’ll bet I could get in to see him,” Rainbird said, as if this idea had just occurred to him.

“You could? You really think you could?”

“I could change with Herbie someday. See him. Tell him you’re okay. Well, not tell him but pass him a note or something” “Oh, wouldn’t that be dangerous?” “It would be dangerous to make a business of it, kid. But I owe you one. I’ll see how he is.”

She threw her arms around him in the dark and kissed him. Rainbird gave her an affectionate hug. In his own way, he loved her, now more than ever. She was his now, and he supposed he was hers. For a while.

They sat together, not talking much, and Charlie dozed. Then he said something that woke her up as suddenly as completely as a dash of cold water in the face.

“Shit, you ought to light their damn fires, if you can do it.”

Charlie sucked her breath in, shocked, as if he had suddenly hit her.

“I told you,” she said. “It’s like letting a… a wild animal out of a cage. I promised myself I’d never do it again. That soldier at the airport… and those men at that farm… I killed them… burned them up!” Her face was hot, burning, and she was on the verge of tears again.

“The way you told it, it sounded like selfdefense.”

“Yes, but that’s no excuse to-”

“It also sounded like maybe you saved your old man’s life.”

Silence from Charlie. But he could feel trouble and confusion and misery coming of her in waves. He hastened on, not wanting her to remember right now that she had come very close to killing her father as well.

“As for that guy Hockstetter, I’ve seen him around. I saw guys like him in the war. Every one of them a ninety-day wonder, King Shit of Turd Mountain. If he can’t get what he wants from you one way, he’ll try some other way.”

“That’s what scares me the most,” she admitted in a low voice.

“Besides, there’s one guy who could use a hotfoot.”

Charlie was shocked, but giggled hard-the way a dirty joke could sometimes make her laugh harder just because it was so bad to tell them. When she was over her giggles, she said: “No, I won’t light fires, I promised myself. It’s bad and I won’t.”

It was enough. It was time to stop. He felt that he could keep going on pure intuition, but he recognized that it might be a false feeling. He was tired now. Working on the girl had been every bit as exhausting as working on one of Rammaden’s safes.

It would be too easy to go on and make a mistake that could never be undone.

“Yeah, okay. I guess you’re right.”

“You really will see my dad?”

“I’ll try, kid.”

“I’m sorry you got stuck in here with me, John. But I’m awful glad, too.”

“Yeah.”

They talked of inconsequential things, and she put her head on his arm. He felt that she was dozing ofd” again-it was very late now-and when the lights went on about forty minutes later, she was fast asleep. The light in her face made her stir and turn her head into his darkness. He looked down thoughtfully at the slender willow stem of her neck, the tender curve of her skull. So much power in that small, delicate cradle of bone. Could it be true? His mind still rejected it, but his heart felt it was so. It was a strange and somehow wonderful feeling to find himself so divided. His heart felt it was true to an extent they wouldn’t believe, true perhaps to the extent of that mad Wanless’s ravings.

He picked her up, carried her to her bed, and slipped her between the sheets. As he pulled them up to her chin, she stired half awake.

He leaned over impulsively and kissed her. “Goodnight, kid.”

“Goodnight, Daddy,” she said in a thick, sleeping voice. Then she rolled over and became still.

He looked down at her for several minutes longer, then went back into the living room. Hockstetter himself came bustling in ten minutes later. “Power failure,” he said. “Storm. Dam electronic locks, all jammed. Is she-”

“She’ll be fine if you keep your goddam voice down,” Rainbird said in a low voice. His huge hands pistoned out, caught Hockstetter by the lapels of his white lab coat, and jerked him forward, so that Hockstetter’s suddenly terrified face was less than an inch from his own. “And if you ever behave as if you know me in here again, if you ever behave toward me as if I am anything but a D-clearance orderly, I’ll kill you, and then I’ll cut you into pieces, and Cuisinart you, and turn you into catmeat.”

Hockstetter spluttered impotently. Spit bubbled at the corner of his lips.

“Do you understand? I’ll kill you.” He shook Hockstetter twice.

“I-I-I un-un-understand.”

“Then let’s get out of here,” Rainbird said, and shoved Hockstetter, pale and wideeyed, out into the corridor.

He took one last look around and then wheeled his cart out and closed the selflocking door behind him. In the bedroom, Charlie slept on, more peacefully than she had in months. Perhaps years.

SMALL FIRES, BIG BROTHER