Firestarter(50)

"I have money," he whispered very fast. "Swiss bank account. Lots of money. All yours. Never open my mouth again. Swear before God."

"It's not your money that I want, Dr. Wanless," Rainbird said.

Wanless gazed up at him, the left side of his mouth sneering madly, his left eyelid drooping and quivering.

"If you would like to be alive when the sun comes up," Rainbird said, "you will talk to me, Dr. Wanless. You will lecture me. I will be a seminar of one. I will be attentive; a good pupil. And I will reward you with your life, which you will live far away from the view of Cap and the Shop. Do you understand?"

"Yes," Wanless said hoarsely.

"Do you agree?"

"Yes... but what-?"

Rainbird held two fingers to his lips and Dr. Wanless hushed immediately. His scrawny chest rose and fell rapidly.

"I am going to say two words," Rainbird said, "and then your lecture will begin. It will include everything that you know, everything you suspect, everything you theorize. Are you ready for those two words, Dr. Wanless?"

"Yes," Dr. Wanless said.

"Charlene McGee," Rainbird said, and Dr. Wanless began to speak. His words came slowly at first, and then he began to speed up. He talked. He gave Rainbird the complete history of the Lot Six tests and the climactic experiment. Much of what he said Rainbird already knew, but Wanless also filled in a number of blank spots. The professor went through the entire sermon he had given Cap that morning, and here it did not fall on deaf ears. Rainbird listened carefully, frowning sometimes, clapping softly and chuckling at Wanless's toilet training metaphor. This encouraged Wanless to speak even faster, and when he began to repeat himself, as old men will, Rainbird reached down again, pinched Wanless's nose shut with one hand again, and covered his mouth with the other again.

"Sorry," Rainbird said.

Wanless bucked and sunfished under Rainbird's weight. Rainbird applied more pressure, and when Wanless's struggles began to lessen, Rainbird abruptly removed the hand he had been using to pinch Wanless's nose shut. The sound of the good doctor's hissing breath was like air escaping from a tire with a big nail in it. His eyes were rolling wildly in their sockets, rolling like the eyes of a fear maddened horse... but they were still too hard to see.

Rainbird seized the collar of Dr. Wanless's pajama jacket and yanked him sideways on the, bed so that the cold white light from the bathroom shone directly across his face.

Then he pinched the doctor's nostrils closed again.

A man can sometimes survive for upward of nine minutes without permanent brain damage if his air is cut off and he remains completely quiet; a woman, with slightly greater lung capacity and a slightly more efficient carbon-dioxide-disposal system, may last ten or twelve. Of course, struggling and terror cuts that survival time a great deal.

Dr. Wanless struggled briskly for forty seconds, and then his efforts to save himself began to flag. His hands beat lightly at the twisted granite that was John Rainbird's face. His heels drummed a muffled retreat tattoo on the carpeting. He began to drool against Rainbird's callused palm.

This was the moment.

Rainbird leaned forward and studied Wanless's eyes with a childlike eagerness.

But it was the same, always the same. The eyes seemed to lose their fear and fill instead with a great puzzlement. Not wonder, not dawning comprehension or realization or awe, just puzzlement. For a moment those two puzzled eyes fixed on John Rainbird's one, and Rainbird knew he was being seen. Fuzzily, perhaps, fading back and back as the doctor went out and out, but he was being seen. Then there was nothing but glaze. Dr. Joseph Wanless was no longer staying at the Mayflower Hotel; Rainbird was sitting on this bed with a life size doll.

He sat still, one hand still over the doll's mouth, the other pinching the doll's nostrils tightly together. It was best to be sure. He would remain so for another ten minutes.

He thought about what Wanless had told him concerning Charlene McGee. Was it possible that a small child could have such a power? He supposed it might be. In Calcutta he had seen a man put knives into his body-his legs, his belly, his chest, his neck-and then pull them out, leaving no wounds. It might be possible. And it was certainly... interesting.

He thought about these things, and then found himself wondering what it would be like to kill a child. He had never knowingly done such a thing (although once he had placed a bomb on an airliner and the bomb had exploded, killing all sixty-seven aboard, and perhaps one or more of them had been children, but that was not the same thing; it was impersonal). It was not a business in which the death of children was often required. They were not, after all, some terrorist organization like the IRA or the PLO, no matter how much some people-some of the yellowbellies in the Congress, for instance-would like to believe they were.

They were, after all, a scientific organization.

Perhaps with a child the result would be different. There might be another expression in the eyes at the end, something besides the puzzlement that made him feel so empty and so-yes, it was true-so sad.

He might discover part of what he needed to know in the death of a child.

A child like this Charlene McGee.

"My life is like the straight roads in the desert," John Rainbird said softly. He looked absorbedly into the dull blue marbles that had been the eyes of Dr. Wanless. "But your life is no road at all, my friend... my good friend."