1

The violent storm passed. Time passed three weeks of it. Summer, humid and over bearing, still held sway over eastern Virginia, but school was back in session and lumbering yellow school buses trundled up and down the well-kept rural roads in the Longmont area. In not-too-distant Washington, D.C… another year of legislation, rumor, and innuendo was beginning, marked with the usual freak-show atmosphere engendered by national television, planned information leaks, and overmastering clouds of bourbon fumes.

None of that made much of an impression in the cool, environmentally controlled rooms of the two antebellum houses and the corridors and levels honeycombed beneath. The only correlative might have been that Charlie McGee was also going to school. It was Hockstetter’s idea that she be tutored, and Charlie had balked, but John Rainbird had talked her into it.

“What hurt’s it gonna do?” he asked. “There’s no sense in a smart girl like you getting way behind.

Shit-excuse me, Charlie-but I wish to God sometimes that I had more than an eighth-grade education. I wouldn’t be moppin floors now-you can bet your boots on that. Besides, it’ll pass the time.”

So she had done it-for John. The tutors came: the young man who taught English, the older woman who taught mathematics, the younger woman with the thick glasses who began to teach her French, the man in the wheelchair who taught science. She listened to them, and she supposed she learned, but she had done it for John.

On three occasions John had risked his job to pass her father notes, and she felt guilty about that and hence was more willing to do what she thought would please John. And he had brought her news of her dad-that he was well, that he was relieved to know Charlie was well too, and that he was cooperating with their tests. This had distressed her a little, but she was now old enough to understand-a little bit, anyway-that what was best for her might not always be best for her father. And lately she had begun to wonder more and more if John might know best about what was right for her. In his earnest, funny way (he was always swearing and then apologizing for it, which made her giggle), he was very persuasive.

He had not said anything about making fires for almost ten days after the blackout. Whenever they talked of these things, they did it in the kitchen, where he said there were no “bugs,” and they always talked in low voices.

On that day he had said, “You thought any more about that fire business, Charlie?” He always called her Charlie now instead of “kid.” She had asked him to.

She began to tremble. Just thinking about making fires had this effect on her since the Manders farm. She got cold and tense and trembly; on Hockstetter’s reports this was called a “mild phobic reaction.”

“I told you,” she said. “I can’t do that. I won’t do that.”

“Now, can’t and won’t aren’t the same thing,” John said. He was washing the floor-

but very slowly, so he could talk to her. His mop swished. He talked the way cons talked in prison, barely moving his lips. Charlie didn’t reply. “I just had a couple of thoughts on this,” he said. “But if you don’t want to hear them-if your head’s really set-I’ll just shut up.”

“No, that’s okay,” Charlie said politely, but she did really wish he would shut up, not talk about it, not even think about it, because it made her feel bad. But John had done so much for her… and she desperately didn’t want to offend him or hurt his feelings. She needed a friend:

“Well, I was just thinking that they must know how it got out of control at that farm,” he said. “They’d probably be really careful. I don’t think they’d be apt to test you in a room full of paper and oily rags, do.you?”

“No, but-”

He raised one hand a little way off his mop. “Hear me out, hear me out.”

“Okay.”

“And they sure know that was the only time you caused a real-what’s it?-a conflagration. Small fires, Charlie. That’s the ticket. Small fires. And if something did happen-which I doubt, cause I think you got better control over yourself than you think you do-but say something did happen. Who they gonna blame, huh? They gonna blame you? After the fuckheads spent half a year twisting your arm to do it? Oh hell, I’m sorry.”

The things he was saying scared her, but still she had to put her hands to her mouth and giggle at the woebegone expression on his face. John smiled a little too, then shrugged. “The other thing I was thinkin is that you can’t learn to control something unless you practice it and practice it.” “I don’t care if I ever control it or not, because I’m just not going to do it.”

“Maybe or maybe not,” John said stubbornly, wringing out his mop. He stood it in the corner, then dumped his soapy water down the sink. He began to run a bucket of fresh to rinse with. “You might get surprised into using it.”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Or suppose you got a bad fever sometime. From the flu or the croup or, hell, I dunno, some kind of infection.” This was one of the few profitable lines Hockstetter had given him to pursue. “You ever have your appendix out, Charlie?”

“No-ooo…”

John began to rinse the floor.

“My brother had his out, but it went bust first and he almost died. That was cause we were reservation Indians and nobody gave a-nobody cared much if we lived or died. He got a high fever, a hundred and five, I guess, and he went ravin right off his head, sayin horrible curses and talkin to people who weren’t there. Do you know he thought our father was the Angel of Death or somethin, come to carry him off, and he tried to stick im with a knife that was on his bedside table there? I told you this story, didn’t I?”

“No,” Charlie said, whispering now not to keep from being overheard but out of horrified fascination. “Really?” “Really,” John affirmed. He squeezed the mop out again. “It wasn’t his fault. It was the fever that did it. People are apt to say or do anything when they’re delirious. Anything.” Charlie understood what he was saying and felt a sinking fear. Here was something she had never even considered.

“But if you had control of this pyro-whatsis…”

“How could I have control of it if I was delirious?”

“Just because you do.” Rainbird went back to Wanless’s original metaphor, the one that had so disgusted Cap almost a year ago now. “It’s like toilet-training, Charlie. Once you get hold of your bowels and bladder, you’re in control for good. Delirious people sometimes get their beds all wet from sweat, but they rarely piss the bed.”

Hockstetter had pointed out that this was not invariably true, but Charlie wouldn’t know that.

“Well, anyway, all I mean is that if you got control, don’t you see, you wouldn’t have to worry about this anymore. You’d have it licked. But to get control you have to practice and practice. The same way you learned to tie your shoes, or to make your letters in kinnygarden.”

“I… I just don’t want to make fires! And I won’t! I won’t!” “There, I went and upset you,” John said, distressed. “I sure didn’t mean to do that. I’m sorry, Charlie. I won’t say no more. Me and my big fat mouth.” But the next time she brought it up herself.

It was three or four days later, and she had thought over the things he had said very carefully… and she believed that she had put her finger on the one flaw. “It would just never end,” she said. “They’d always want more and more and more. If you only knew the way they chased us, they never-give up. Once I started they’d want bigger fires and then even bigger ones and then bonfires and then… I don’t know… but I’m afraid.”

He admired her again. She had an intuition and a native wit that was incredibly sharp. He wondered what Hockstetter would think when he, Rainbird, told him that Charlie McGee had an extremely good idea what their top-secret master plan was. All of their reports on Charlie theorized that pyrokinesis was only the centerpiece of many related psionic talents, and Rainbird believed that her intuition was one of them. Her father had told them again and again that Charlie had known Al Steinowitz and the others were coming up to the Manders farm even before they had arrived. That was a scary thought. If she should ever get one of her funny intuitions about his authenticity… well, they said hell had no fury like a woman scorned, and if half of what he believed about Charlie was true, then she was perfectly capable of manufacturing hell, or a reasonable facsimile. He might suddenly find himself getting very hot. It added a certain spice to the proceedings… a spice that had been missing for too long.