Firestarter

18

HELLO COMPUTER/QUERY STATUS JOHN RAINBIRD 14222/ANDREW AFB (DC) TO SAN DIEGO (CA) FINAL DESTINATION/Q9

HELLO CAP/STATUS JOHN RAINBIRD 14222/ ANDREWS (DC) TO SAN DIEGO (CA) FINAL DESTINATION/LEAVES ANDREWS AFB 0700HRS EST/STATUS OK/BREAK

Computers are children, Rainbird thought, reading this message. He had simply punched in Cap’s new code-which Cap would have been stu

FILE TOP SECRET

CODE PLEASE

CODE 19180, the computer returned. READY TO FILE TOP SECRET

Rainbird hesitated only briefly and then tapped

FILE/JOHN RAINBIRD 14222/ANDREWS (DC) TO SAN DIEGO (CA) FINAL DESTINATION/CANCEL/ CANCEL/CANCEL F9 (19180) FILED

Then, using the code book, Rainbird told the computer whom to inform of the cancellation: Victor Puckeridge and his aide, Richard Folsom. These new instructions would be in the midnight telex to Andrews, and the plane on which he was to hitch a ride would simply take off without him. No one would know a thing, including Cap. 

600 GOODBYE COMPUTER 600

604 GOODBYE CAP 604

Rainbird pushed back from the keyboard. It would be perfectly possible to put a stop to the whole thing tonight, of course. But that would not be conclusive. The computer would back him up to a certain degree, but computer probabilities do not butter any bread. Better to stop them after the thing had begun, with everything hanging out. More amusing, too.

The whole thing was amusing. While they had been watching the girl, the man had regained his ability or had successfully hidden it from them all along. He was likely ditching his medication. Now he was ru

He didn’t know exactly what McGee had pla

He had played briefly with the idea of not standing in their way at all. That would be amusing, too. He guessed that Cap would end up in a mental institution, raving about golf clubs and snakes in the grass, or dead by his own hand. As for the Shop: might as well imagine what would happen to an anthill with a quart jar of nitroglycerine planted beneath it. Rainbird guessed that no more than five months after the press got its first whiff” of the Strange Ordeal of the Andrew McGee Family, the Shop would cease to exist. He felt no fealty to the Shop and never had. He was his own man, crippled soldier of fortune, copper-ski

It was Charlie.

The two of them had an appointment. He was going to look into her eyes, and she was going to look into his… and it might well be that they would step out together, in flames. The fact that he might be saving the world from some almost unimaginable armageddon by killing her had not played a part in his calculations, either. He owed the world no more fealty than he did the Shop. It was the world as much as the Shop that had cast him rootless from a closed desert society that might have been his only salvation… or, lacking that, have turned him into a harmless Sterno-guzzling Injun Joe pumping gas at a 76 station or selling fake kachina dolls at a shitty little roadside stand somewhere along the highway between Flagstaff and Phoenix.

But Charlie, Charlie!

They had been locked in a long waltz of death since that endless night of darkness during the power blackout. What he had only suspected that early morning in Washington when he had done Wanless had developed into an irrefutable certainty: the girl was his. But it would be an act of love, not of destruction, because the converse was almost certainly true as well.

It was acceptable. In many ways he wanted to die. And to die at her hands, in her flames, would be an act of contrition… and possibly of absolution. Once she and her father were together again, she would become a loaded gun… no, a loaded flamethrower. He would watch her and he would let the two of them get together. What would happen then? Who knew? And wouldn’t knowing spoil the fun?

19

That night Rainbird went to Washington and found a hungry lawyer who worked late hours. To this lawyer he gave three hundred dollars in small bills. And in the lawyer’s office, John Rainbird neatened his few affairs in order to be ready for the next day.

FIRESTARTER

1

At six o'clock on Wednesday morning, Charlie McGee got up, took off” her nightgown, and stepped into the shower. She washed her body and her hair, then turned the water to cold and stood shivering under the spray for a minute more. She toweled dry and then dressed carefully-cotton underpants, silk slip, dark-blue knee socks, her denim jumper. She finished by putting on her scuffed and comfortable loafers.

She hadn’t thought she would be able to sleep at all last night; she had gone to bed full of fear and nervous excitement. But she had slept. And dreamed incessantly not of Necromancer and the run through the woods but of her mother. That was peculiar, because she didn’t think of her mother as often as she used to; at times her face seemed misty and distant in her memory, like a faded photograph. But in her dreams of last night, her mother’s faceher laughing eyes, her warm, generous mouth-had been so clear that Charlie might last have seen her just the day before.

Now, dressed and ready for the day, some of the u

“Yes, Charlie?”

She knew the owner of the voice only as Mike. At seven o'clock-about half an hour from now-Mike went off and Louis came on. “I want to go out to the stables this afternoon,” she said, “and see Necromancer. Will you tell someone?”

“I’ll leave a note for Dr. Hockstetter, Charlie.”

“Thank you.” She paused, just for a moment. You got to know their voices. Mike, Louis, Gary. You got pictures of how they must look in your mind, the way you got pictures of how the DJs you heard on the radio must look. You got to like them. She suddenly realized that she would almost certainly never talk to Mike again.

“Was there something else, Charlie?”

“No, Mike. Have… have a good day.”

“Why, thank you, Charlie.” Mike sounded both surprised and pleased. “You too.” She turned on the TV and tuned to a cartoon show that came on every morning over the cable. Popeye was inhaling spinach through his pipe and getting ready to beat the sauce out of Bluto. One o'clock seemed an age away.

What if Dr. Hockstetter said, she couldn’t go out? On the TV screen, they were showing a cutaway view of Popeye’s muscles. There were about sixteen turbine engines in each one.