Firestarter(30)

"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 anymore 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.