Firestarter

  The feeling passed ... but not the headache. The headache would get worse and worse until it was a smashing weight, sending red pain through his head and neck with every pulsebeat. Bright lights would make his eyes water helplessly and send darts of agony into the flesh just behind his eyes. His sinuses would close and he would have to breathe through his mouth. Drill bits in his temples. Small noises magnified, ordinary noises as loud as jackhammers, loud noises insupportable. The headache would worsen until it felt as if his head were being crushed inside an inquisitor's lovecap. Then it would even off at that level for six hours, or eight, or maybe ten. This time he didn't know. He had never pushed it so far when he was so close to drained. For whatever length of time he was in the grip of the headache, he would be next to helpless. Charlie would have to take care of him. God knew she had done it before ... but they had been lucky. How many times could you be lucky?

  "Gee, mister, I don't know--"

  Which meant he thought it was law trouble.

  "The deal only goes as long as you don't mention it to my little girl," Andy said. "The last two weeks she's been with me. Has to be back with her mother tomorrow morning."

  "Visitation rights," the cabby said. "I know all about it."

  "You see, I was supposed to fly her up."

  "To Albany? Probably Ozark, am I right?"

  "Right. Now, the thing is, I'm scared to death of flying. I know how crazy that sounds, but it's true. Usually I drive her back up, but this time my ex-wife started in on me, and ... I don't know." In truth, Andy didn't. He had made up the story on the spur of the moment and now it seemed to be headed straight down a blind alley. Most of it was pure exhaustion.

  "So I drop you at the old Albany airport, and as far as Moms knows, you flew, right?"

  "Sure." His head was thudding.

  "Also, so far as Moms knows, you're no plucka-plucka-plucka, am I four-oh?"

  "Yes." Plucka-plucka-plucka? What was that supposed to mean? The pain was getting bad.

  "Five hundred bucks to skip a plane ride," the driver mused.

  "It's worth it to me," Andy said, and gave one last little shove. In a very quiet voice, speaking almost into the cabby's ear, he added, "And it ought to be worth it to you."

  "Listen," the driver said in a dreamy voice. "I ain't turning down no five hundred dollars. Don't tell me, I'll tell you."

  "Okay," Andy said, and settled back. The cab driver was satisfied. He wasn't wondering about Andy's half-baked story. He wasn't wondering what a seven-year-old girl was doing visiting her father for two weeks in October with school in. He wasn't wondering about the fact that neither of them had so much as an overnight bag. He wasn't worried about anything. He had been pushed.

  Now Andy would go ahead and pay the price.

  He put a hand on Charlie's leg. She was fast asleep. They had been on the go all afternoon--ever since Andy got to her school and pulled her out of her second-grade class with some half-remembered excuse ... grandmother's very ill ... called home ... sorry to have to take her in the middle of the day. And beneath all that a great, swelling relief. How he had dreaded looking into Mrs. Mishkin's room and seeing Charlie's seat empty, her books stacked neatly inside her desk: No, Mr. McGee... she went with your friends about two hours ago ... they had a note from you... wasn't that all right? Memories of Vicky coming back, the sudden terror of the empty house that day. His crazy chase after Charlie. Because they had had her once before, oh yes.

  But Charlie had been there. How close had it been? Had he beaten them by half an hour? Fifteen minutes? Less? He didn't like to think about it. He. had got them a late lunch at Nathan's and they had spent the rest of the afternoon just going--Andy could admit to himself now that he had been in a state of blind panic--riding subways, buses, but mostly just walking. And now she was worn out.

  He spared her a long, loving look. Her hair was shoulder length, prefect blond, and in her sleep she had a calm beauty. She looked so much like Vicky that it hurt. He closed his own eyes.

  In the front seat, the cab driver looked wonderingly at the five-hundred-dollar bill the guy had handed him. He tucked it away in the special belt pocket where he kept all of his tips. He didn't think it was strange that this fellow in the back had been walking around New York with a little girl and a five-hundred-dollar bill in his pocket. He didn't wonder how he was going to square this with his dispatcher. All he thought of was how excited his girlfriend, Glyn, was going to be. Glynis kept telling him that driving a taxi was a dismal, unexciting job. Well, wait until she saw his dismal, unexciting five-hundred-dollar bill.

  In the back seat, Andy sat with his head back and his eyes closed. The headache was coming, coming, as inexorable as a riderless black horse in a funeral cortege. He could hear the hoofbeats of that horse in his temples: thud...thud ... thud.

  On the run. He and Charlie. He was thirty-four years old and until last year he had been an instructor of English at Harrison State College in Ohio. Harrison was a sleepy little college town. Good old Harrison, the very heart of mid-America. Good old Andrew McGee, fine, upstanding young man. Remember the riddle? Why is a farmer the pillar of his community? Because he's always outstanding in his field.

  Thud, thud, thud, riderless black horse with red eyes coming down the halls of his mind, ironshod hooves digging up soft gray clods of brain tissue, leaving hoofprints to fill up with mystic crescents of blood.

  The cabby had been a pushover. Sure. An outstanding cab driver.

  He dozed and saw Charlie's face. And Charlie's face became Vicky's face.

  Andy McGee and his wife, pretty Vicky. They had pulled her fingernails out, one by one. They had pulled out four of them and then she had talked. That, at least, was his deduction. Thumb, index, second, ring. Then: Stop. I'll talk. I'll tell you anything you want to know. Just stop the hurting. Please. So she had told. And then... perhaps it had been an accident... then his wife had died. Well, some things are bigger than both of us, and other things are bigger than all of us.

  Things like the Shop, for instance.

  Thud, thud, thud, riderless black horse coming on, coming on, and coming on: behold, a black horse.

  Andy slept.

  And remembered.

  2

  The man in charge of the experiment was Dr. Wanless. He was fat and balding and had at least one rather bizarre habit.

  "We're going to give each of you twelve young ladies and gentlemen an injection," he said, shredding a cigarette into the ashtray in front of him. His small pink fingers plucked at the thin cigarette paper, spilling out neat little cones of golden-brown tobacco. "Six of these injections will be water. Six of them will be water mixed with a tiny amount of a chemical compound which we call Lot Six. The exact nature of this compound is classified, but it is essentially an hypnotic and mild hallucinogenic. Thus you understand that the compound will be administered by the double-blind method... which is to say, neither you nor we will know who has gotten a clear dose and who has not until later. The dozen of you will be under close supervision for forty-eight hours following the injection. Questions?"

  There were several, most having to do with the exact composition of Lot Six--that word classified was like putting bloodhounds on a convict's trail. Wanless slipped these questions quite adroitly. No one had asked the question twenty-two-year-old Andy McGee was most interested in. He considered raising his hand in the hiatus that fell upon the nearly deserted lecture hall in Harrison's combined Psychology /Sociology building and asking, Say, why are you ripping up perfectly good cigarettes like that? Better not to. Better to let the imagination run on a free rein while this boredom went on. He was trying to give up smoking. The oral retentive smokes them; the anal retentive shreds them. (This brought a slight grin to Andy's lips, which he covered with a hand.) Wanless's brother had died of lung cancer and the doctor was symbolically venting his aggressions on the cigarette industry. Or maybe it was just one of those flamboyant tics that college professors felt compelled to flaunt rathe
r than suppress. Andy had one English teacher his sophomore year at Harrison (the man was now mercifully retired) who sniffed his tie constantly while lecturing on William Dean Howells and the rise of realism.

  "If there are no more questions, I'll ask you to fill out these forms and will expect to see you promptly at nine next Tuesday."

  Two grad assistants passed out photocopies with twenty-five ridiculous questions to answer yes or no. Have you ever undergone psychiatric counseling?--#8. Do you believe you have ever had an authentic psychic experience?--#14.Have you ever used hallucinogenic drugs?--#18.After a slight pause, Andy checked "no" to that one, thinking, In this brave year 1969 who hasn't used them?

  He had been put on to this by Quincey Tremont, the let-low he had roomed with in college. Quincey knew that Andy's financial situation wasn't so hot. It was May of Andy's senior year; he was graduating fortieth in a class of five hundred and six, third in the English program. But that didn't buy no potatoes, as he had told Quincey, who was a psych major. Andy had a GA lined up for himself starting in the fall semester, along with a scholarship-loan package that would be just about enough to buy groceries and keep him in the Harrison grad program. But all of that was fall, and in the meantime there was the summer hiatus. The best he had been able to line up so far was a responsible, challenging position as an Arco gas jockey on the night shift.

  "How would you feel about a quick two hundred?" Quincey had asked.

  Andy brushed long, dark hair away from his green eyes and grinned. "Which men's room do I set up my concession in?"

  "No, it's a psych experiment," Quincey said. "Being run by the Mad Doctor, though. Be warned."

  "Who he?"

  "Him Wanless, Tonto. Heap big medicine man in-um Psych Department."

  "Why do they call him the Mad Doctor?"

  "Well," Quincey said, "he's a rat man and a Skinner man both. A behaviorist. The behaviorists are not exactly being overwhelmed with love these days."

  "Oh," Andy said, mystified.

  "Also, he wears very thick little rimless glasses, which makes him look quite a bit like the guy that shrank the people in Dr. Cyclops. You ever see that show?"

  Andy, who was a late-show addict, had seen it, and felt on safer ground. But he wasn't sure he wanted to participate in any experiments run by a prof who was classified as a.) a rat man and b.) a Mad Doctor.

  "They're not trying to shrink people, are they?" he asked.

  Quincey had laughed heartily. "No, that's strictly for the special-effects people who work on the B horror pictures," he said. "The Psych Department has been testing a series of low-grade hallucinogens. They're working with the U.S. Intelligence Service."

  "CIA?" Andy asked.

  "Not CIA, DIA, or NSA," Quincey said. "Lower profile than any of them. Have you ever heard of an outfit called the Shop?"

  "Maybe in a Sunday supplement or something. I'm not sure."

  Quincey lit his pipe. "These things work in about the same way all across the board," he said. "Psychology, chemistry, physics, biology... even the sociology boys get some of the folding green. Certain programs are subsidized by the government. Anything from the mating ritual of the tsetse fly to the possible disposal of used plutonium slugs. An outfit like the Shop has to spend all of its yearly budget to justify a like amount the following year."

  "That shit troubles me mightily," Andy said.

  "It troubles almost any thinking person," Quincey said with a calm, untroubled smile. "But the train just keeps rolling. What does our intelligence branch want with low-grade hallucinogens? Who knows? Not me. Not you. Probably they don't, either. But the reports look good in closed committees come budget-renewal time. They have their pets in every department. At Harrison, Wanless is their pet in the Psych Department."

  "The administration doesn't mind?"

  "Don't be naive, my boy." He had his pipe going to his satisfaction and was puffing great stinking clouds of smoke out into the ratty apartment living room. His voice accordingly became more rolling, more orotund, more Buckleyesque. "What's good for Wanless is good for the Harrison Psychology Department, which next year will have its very own building--no more slumming with those sociology types. And what's good for Psych is good for Harrison State College. And for Ohio. And all that blah-blah."

  "Do you think it's safe?"

  "They don't test it on student volunteers if it isn't safe," Quincey said. "If they have even the slightest question, they test it on rats and then on convicts. You can be sure that what they're putting into you has been put into roughly three hundred people before you, whose reactions have been carefully monitored."

  "I don't like this business about the CIA--"

  "The Shop."

  "What's the difference?" Andy asked morosely. He looked at Quincey's poster of Richard Nixon standing in front of a crunched-up used car. Nixon was grinning, and a stubby V-for-victory poked up out of each clenched fist. Andy could still hardly believe the man had been elected president less than a year ago.

  "Well, I thought maybe you could use the two hundred dollars, that's all."

  "Why are they paying so much?" Andy asked suspiciously.

  Quincey threw up his hands. "Andy, it is the government's treat! Can't you follow that? Two years ago the Shop paid something like three hundred thousand dollars for a feasibility study on a mass-produced exploding bicycle--and that was in the Sunday Times. Just another Vietnam thing, I guess, although probably nobody knows for sure. Like Fibber McGee used to say, 'It seemed like a good idea at the time.' " Quincey knocked out his pipe with quick, jittery movements. "To guys like that, every college campus in America is like one big Macy's. They buy a little here, do a little window-shopping there. Now if you don't want it--"

  "Well, maybe I do. Are you going in on it?"

  Quincey had to smile. His father ran a chain of extremely successful menswear stores in Ohio and Indiana. "Don't need two hundred that bad," he said. "Besides, I hate needles."

  "Oh."

  "Look, I'm not trying to sell it, for Chrissakes; you just looked sort of hungry. The chances are fifty-fifty you'll be in the control group, anyway. Two hundred bucks for taking on water. Not even tapwater, mind you. Distilled water."

  "You can fix it?"

  "I date one of Wanless's grad assistants," Quincey said. "They'll have maybe fifty applications, many of them brownnosers who want to make points with the Mad Doctor--"

  "I wish you'd stop calling him that."

  "Wanless, then," Quincey said, and laughed. "He'll see that the apple polishers are weeded out personally. My girl will see that your application goes into his 'in' basket. After that, dear man, you are on your own."

  So he had made out the application when the notice for volunteers went up on the Psych Department bulletin board. A week after turning it in, a young female GA (Quincey's girlfriend, for all Andy knew) had called on the phone to ask him some questions. He told her that his parents were dead; that his blood type was O; that he had never participated in a Psychology Department experiment before; that he was indeed currently enrolled in Harrison as an undergraduate, class of '69, in fact, and carrying more than the twelve credits needed to classify him as a full-time student. And yes, he was past the age of twenty-one and legally able to enter into any and all covenants, public and private.

  A week later he had received a letter via campus mail telling him he had been accepted and asking for his signature on a release form. Please bring the signed form to Room 100, Jason Gearneigh Hall, on May the 6th.

  And here he was, release form passed in, the cigarette-shredding Wanless departed (and he did indeed look a bit like the mad doctor in that Cyclops movie), answering questions about his religious experiences along with eleven other undergrads. Did he have epilepsy? No. His father had died suddenly of a heart attack when Andy was eleven. His mother had been killed in a car accident when Andy was seventeen--a nasty, traumatic thing. His only close family connection was his mother's sister, Aunt Cora, and she was gett
ing well along in years.

  He went down the column of questions, checking No, No, NO. He checked only one YES question: Have you ever suffered a fracture or serious sprain? If YES, specify. In the space provided, he scribbled the fact that he had broken his left ankle sliding into second base during a Little League game twelve years ago.

  He went back over his answers, trailing lightly upward with the tip of his Bic. That was when someone tapped him on the shoulder and a girl's voice, sweet and slightly husky, asked, "Could I borrow that if you're done with it? Mine went dry."

  "Sure," he said, turning to hand it to her. Pretty girl. Tall. Light-auburn hair, marvelously clear complexion. Wearing a powder-blue sweater and a short skirt. Good legs. No stockings. Casual appraisal of the future wife.

  He handed her his pen and she smiled her thanks. The overhead lights made copper glints in her hair, which had been casually tied back with a wide white ribbon, as she bent over her form again.

  He took his form up to the GA at the front of the room. "Thank you," the GA said, as programmed as Robbie the Robot. "Room Seventy, Saturday morning, nine A.M. Please be on time."

  "What's the countersign?" Andy whispered hoarsely.

  The grad assistant laughed politely.

  Andy left the lecture hall, started across the lobby toward the big double doors (outside, the quad was green with approaching summer, students passing desultorily back and forth), and then remembered his pen. He almost let it go; it was only a nineteen-cent Bic, and he still had his final round of prelims to study for. But the girl had been pretty, maybe worth chatting up, as the British said. He had no illusions about his looks or his line, which were both pretty nondescript, or about the girl's probable status (pinned or engaged), but it was a nice day and he was feeling good. He decided to wait. At the very least, he would get another look at those legs.

  She came out three or four minutes later, a few notebooks and a text under her arm. She was very pretty indeed, and Andy decided her legs had been worth waiting for. They were more than good; they were spectacular.

  "Oh, there you are," she said, smiling.