Episode Four: Fire From Space: A space-suited killer test tests the forensic skills of Dr. Danielle Taylor.
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Fire
From Space
(continued)
“You’re a woman.” The redhead sat in Dani’s passenger seat, staring out the window, smoking, her voice slurred by the tranquilizer. “What are you doing in the Guard?”
“All the nuclear tests have given the Southwest the highest mutation rate in the world. Well, except for Japan and a couple of spots behind the Iron Curtain. With all the deaths from the Invasion, the ant swarms, the other mutants and spacemen, they’re desperate for manpower, especially since the Guard wants full-time soldiers now.” Even so, most states refused to have female doctors even in the MASH units, but the exaggerated stories of her exploits against the Devilfish had caught Gen. Mayfair’s attention in California—and she’d wound up leaving Boston for the west coast and her “test case” job. “It’s really no different from World War II when they sent the women into the factories.”
“I did factory work,” the woman said. “For a while. Bad for my nails.”
“Oh. Well.” Dani fell silent; it wasn’t too much further to the apartment the woman—Lil, that was what Duggan called her on the phone—had told her husband she was staying at. Husband. Even if he’s a brute…I can see why that would make a sweet kid like Duggan appeal to her, but…husband. Married.
Cheating.
The rest of the drive passed in silence.
Wind Song was a poor substitute for Boston.
Dani gathered the hole-in-the-wall town had been dying before the government bases opened, and the Guard had taken over the abandoned, nearby town of Skink for combat training. Given the lack of decent restaurants, libraries, bars and stores, Wind Song still felt at least half-dead to her.
In addition, she’d yet to find a newspaper, including the LA Times, that she considered as good as the Boston Globe. Nevertheless, the morning after returning from the Gay Songbird, Dani sat at the window of her tiny one-bedroom on-base apartment and became totally absorbed in the morning’s papers.
The Times’ banner headline announced that the Russians had just launched something called “Sputnik” into orbit by combining their rocket research with technology from the Growing Men’s spaceship that the Russians had shot down over Leningrad last year. As proof they were serious about allying with the West against the spacemen and putting the days of Stalin and New America behind them, Khruschev had offered to share the technology and work with America on putting “cosmonauts” into orbit.
Eisenhower’s announcement that instead of running for a second term, he would step down and devote himself to organizing and leading his proposed World Defense Alliance came lower on the page.
The Arizonia Republic’s leading headline informed Dani that PHOENIX BUSINESSMAN SLAIN BY ALIEN AT SEEDY MOTEL. The TSC lab had helped the coroner identify the body as human; the motor court manager had identified him as Duncan Gregory of Star Science, one of the government contractors working to adapt alien technology for commercial use. The story quoted Duggan, demanded to know what the company had been working on that might have been seen as a threat, and hinted that since the alien had used a male disguise to meet Gregory at the motel, it was possible Gregory had been a “moral weakling.”
Well, I guess it’s no business of mine any more, unless the alien and his pals start an invasion. Dani flipped over to the movie listings; James Dean’s new film The Lonely Crowd was opening that weekend and Jason Barclay, a British military officer studying “how you Americans do things” had offered to take her out. Pulaski’s right, if I don’t learn to relax once the mission is over, I’ll never have any fun.
The next couple of weeks passed swiftly. Dinner—and afterwards—with Jason; dinner, no afterwards, with Rob Trueblood, a TSC Science Investigator; and, of course, the usual Guard jobs. A prehistoric sea serpent that ravaged the shores of the Salton Sea after rousing from suspended animation, a nest of 20-foot rattlesnakes, and an Anaheim scientist who’d turned himself into a 15 foot tall ape man with a taste for human flesh.
Then came a weeklong furlough she’d intended to spend flying back to Boston for a wedding, but a flying saucer was attacking planes in the Midwest so everything was grounded, and if she went by train, she’d have arrived too late, so she wound up spending the first day sitting in Tommy’s Tavern in Wind Song, fending off the occasional wolf and wishing there was a bookstore in town where she could find a copy of The Last Hurrah.
“So what do you think of this latest attack?” A bespectacled blond in a dark blouse and slacks—no hat, no gloves—sat down next to Dani at the bar, fitting a cigarette into a gold holder. After a second, Dani pegged her as the woman from the motel. “Wild, isn’t it? Like the aliens have their own Murder, Incorporated.”
“Attack?” Dani stared at her blankly. “By whom? On what?”
“It was yesterday’s paper, you haven’t heard?”
“The platoon was hunting ape men in Anaheim. And you would be—?”
“Claire White, TSC labs.” That surprised Dani; the women scientists she’d met didn’t dress this casually outside the laboratory. Claire ordered a martini, ignoring the wolf whistle from one of the men at the bar. Given the woman’s hourglass figure, Dani guessed she was used to the attention. “Have you heard how everyone went crazy after the alien killed Gregory?”
“Same as after we found out about the pod people—folks calling the cops saying their husband’s having an affair, their kids are smoking reefer—”
“So they have to be a carbon copy of the real person, right. Trust the squares to go around the bend when the heat is on.” Claire took a sip of her drink, nodded approvingly. “That’s actually my job with the TSC: I work on ways to figure out who’s real and who’s a copy in case more pods show up.”
“I heard that was impossible.”
“The ones we captured have the same features, scars, internal organs, memories as the originals,” Claire said, nodding, which set the smoke she exhaled wiggling through the air. “But they can’t fake it under psychoanalysis; it may take a few hours but the nonhuman thought patterns start to surface. Lysergic acid has a disorienting effect that makes it hard to keep up the pose. And it seems their DNA—the stuff those English scientists found inside our genes—differs in a few crucial ways—”
“So are you studying the genes or the psychology?”
“Both. I have doctorates in biology and psychology.” Dani stared; Claire barely looked 24. “I know, I’m young, but being a genius makes up for it.”
“Was that why you were at the motor court? To investigate—
“No, I was there for the same reason as everyone else. You know, sex?” She said it with so little embarrassment, Dani’s jaw dropped; reaching into her shoulder bag to pull out a paper, Claire didn’t notice. “Here you are. Front page in the Republic.”
Dani read. Anton Morodin, one of Arizona’s wealthiest men—she remembered the name in the context of a future gubernatorial bid—had burned to death in his home. Police said the brick walls had melted like the ones at the Gay Songbird, the work of some still unidentified ray weapon. Morodin’s right-hand man had called the police, describing the same disguised alien as Duggan, then his call had cut off; he’d been found in a phone booth that had melted around him.
“Jesus.” There were interviews with Morodin’s wife and business partners, but Dani only skimmed them, thinking of the burn victims she’d treated at Taylor General in Boston. “That’s a hell of a way to die.”
“Excuse me?” A plump woman caught Dani by the elbow and thrust a comic in her face. “Would you mind autographing this, please? For my daughter?”
“Uh, sure.” She found it slightly silly being asked to autograph the issue of Strange Adventures that dramatized her experiences with the Devilfish in Boston, but she’d gotten used to it. She turned to the page with her story on it, then realized it wasn’t Strange Adventures at all, it was an issue of Young Love with a picture of a woman in a Guard medic’s uniform on the cover:
“‘Introducing Dr. Laura Lyons,’” Dani read the cover blurb blankly. “‘Heartbreak and heroism in a story of today’s woman.’ I don’t see—”
“Oh, who else could have given them the idea?” the woman said. “My daughter Ellen pointed out it’s just like your life—”
“It is?”
“—and now she says she might want to be a doctor!”
“Well, that’s—wonderful.” Dani signed and handed the issue back, watched the woman scurry off. “Claire, why are you grinning?”
“You’d smile too if you saw the look on your face. The story’s actually pretty well drawn, you know.”
“Geniuses read romance comics?”
“No, but I flipped through it while I was picking up Tales From The—” She broke off, staring over Dani’s shoulder. “Isn’t that one of the guys from your platoon?”
“Doc!” Pulaski was at her side a second later. “It’s Duggan! The aliens got him too!”
“Doc Taylor.” It might have been a smile; it was hard to tell from what remained of his face. “How’s—tricks?”
“Never mind me, what happened?” She climbed into the ambulance before it rocketed off toward the base hospital—but one look had told her it couldn’t arrive fast enough to save him. “Pulaski said the spaceman—”
“I was meeting my girl for eats ...” He broke off and gave a small groan, despite the heavy dose of morphine. “She’d told me she was gonna leave him…it came for my car…like Sarge says, always be on the alert, you know? I saw it lu-lurking—”
“It killed the witness who reported it attacking Morodin.” Dani would have taken his hand, but there was nothing left to take. “It must have been afraid you saw something we could use against it.”
“Like that movie…” Duggan broke into something that might have been a laugh. Dani told herself she couldn’t want to cry; not when she’d seen so many deaths already. Just because it was a green kid she knew and liked, didn’t change that. “Guy gets poisoned to cover up something…he never saw…Doc, it’s not fair…tell Lily I…love…”
Dani managed not to cry until after she’d left the morgue. It wasn’t until she was back in her apartments that the tears turned to realization and rage.
“Murder.” Phoenix homicide detective Jimmy Jameson shook his head as he set his checkered coat on the back of his chair. “Claire, just because we had dinner a couple of times—”
“Duggan’s lover was called Lily,” Dani said impatiently. “When I got home, I remembered the newspaper interview with Mrs. Morodin after her husband’s death—I called Claire, and she confirmed it. Lily Morodin.”
“Lily’s not that rare a name.”
“We found a photo of her attending the funeral,” Claire said. “It’s her.”
Jimmy shook his head. The police station was a bustle of cops, prisoners, secretaries, occasional yells and stale tobacco smell, but as Dani waited for his response, it all faded into the background. “Coincidence. That’s what Captain Winthrop would say, anyway.”
“Duggan told me he didn’t see anything,” Dani said. “His dying words, along with telling Lily he loved her.” And if it’s true what I think, God that makes me sick! “What if she was the one who saw the spaceman, or told him she did? And begged him to be the witness so her husband wouldn’t find out she was at the Songbird? He was in love, she was beautiful, he’d have done it.”
“And that’s it?” Jameson stuffed his pipe mechanically. “That would be enough if I was Sam Spade or Mike Hammer, but—”
“Dani called me up to try and talk her out of it,” Claire said. “She told me it had to be some weird coincidence, but then we cast an eyeball over the facts and saw it differently.” She raised her fingers, ticking off points. “First, Star Science has been working with the Air Force on rocketry, adapting engines from downed spaceships, the same way the Russians did. Second, the company’s going to be worth millions if the joint space program goes through. Third, Morodin owned a third of the stock, and his widow inherits all of it.
“Fourth, the guy who assumed management of the company after Gregory died was Paul Hotchkiss. He joined the company last year to adapt the fuel from the Mt. Shasta spaceship crash into something we could use.”
“And you know this how?”
“I read the papers, I read the science journals, and I hear the gossip—science is a small community in this part of the country. And the gossip tells me Hotchkiss was about to get the axe because he couldn’t make a workable fuel out of the stuff from Mt. Shasta. It’s so volatile that when exposed to air, it melts through stone, brick, metal.” Jameson sat holding his pipe, forgetting to light it. “There was talk Gregory was going to cut his losses, close down the project and give Hotchkiss the boat.”
“If Hotchkiss is such a flop, why would they appoint him to be the new boss?”
“A recommendation from Morodin that arrived the morning after his death,” Claire said. “And the grieving widow who owns a third of the stock has said that of course she can’t question her poor dead hubby’s decision—”
Jameson lit his pipe, looking very, very thoughtful. Dani smiled.
“He said he’d take care of it!” Sitting in Claire’s rented corner room in Wind Song, Dani slammed her fist into the wall, heedless of how much it hurt. “Claire, how can he let that—that bitch—walk! That lousy, goddamn, murderous bitch!”
“She gave him enough to swear a warrant out on Hotchkiss,” Claire said. “That’s something, right? And don’t keep hitting the wall, you’ll break your hand.”
“She used Duggan, Claire, you know it. And probably Hotchkiss too. And if Star Science gets a share of the rocket research—”
“Lilian Morodin will be rich beyond the dreams of avarice, I dig what you’re saying. And I agree it’s a lousy deal for Private Duggan, but even if Hotchkiss accused her now, his word wouldn’t count for much. She’s rich, she’s respectable, someone gave the papers the story about Morodin beating her—”
“I should have examined the bruise. She could have used makeup.”
“She denies seeing the spaceman and paints Hotchkiss as an old boyfriend who never got over his jealousy about her husband. With the chemical traces on the walls matching the fuel, he looks guilty as sin.”
“But dammit!” Dani almost hit the wall again, kicked a stack of technical journals instead and stalked over to the window as they toppled behind her. “We’re in a war—us against all of outer space! A fight so big, they’re bringing down the Iron Curtain to win it! How can we be crazy enough to still be killing each other?”
“You think anything’s really changing? The Soviet Union’s still a dictatorship, even if Khruschev has denounced Stalin.” Claire grimaced. “Or look at the South: Some doctor in Mississippi claims he has X-rays that prove the Till boy they lynched last year was really a spaceman, and that the desegregation protests are the work of ‘alien agitators.’”
“And people believe it. Or say they do.” Dani stared out at the passers-by, wondering what dark secrets they might be hiding: The woman with the toddler heading for the bus stop, the old couple bickering and gesturing, the man emerging from an Oldsmobile in front of the house, clad in something like an asbestos firefighting suit—
“Claire! Run!”
“What?” Before she could glance out the window, Dani had her by the elbow, yanking her from her chair to the door, and swinging it open. “Dani, who is that—”
The front window and wall burst into a mix of wood and stone as Dani flung herself and Claire down the steps. She’d hoped to get away without Hotchkiss spotting them, but drops of melted glass caught the back of her arm, and she screamed.
“I hear you, bitch!” The voice within the flames was loud and angry. “You ruined everything you filthy tramp, and now you’re going to pay.”
Ignoring the pain, or trying to, Dani scrambled to her feet, crouched behind the garden wall and drew her revolver. “Dani,” Claire said, “shouldn’t we be running or calling—”
“The bastard’s killed his last goddamn victim.” If I’m lucky, I can get off a shot before he sees me. “You run. I’m ending this.”
The side of the burning house erupted out and the man stepped down the stairs. He saw Dani and aimed the nozzle of the weapon he carried, strapped to a tank on his back.
Dani fired fast, praying to God that the suit wasn’t bullet proof.
It wasn’t.
Unfortunately, neither was the fuel tank.
“Half the town wants to have you arrested for something, Private Taylor, they don’t care what.” Col. Ankrum, the commander of Dani’s Guard company, shook his head. Dani had never met anyone who could look as grave as the colonel. “We’re just lucky that the fire trucks were already on their way when he exploded or we’d be dealing with deaths instead of injuries and destroyed houses.”
“With all due respect, sir—”
“On the other hand, everyone in the company thinks you should have a medal for catching Duggan’s killer. And Morodin and Gregory had many influential friends who feel the same. On yet another hand, the people who opposed me recruiting a woman medic in the first place are painting your actions as hysterical and panicked, including some of our MASH doctors.”
“All of whom are men.” Until she’d left Boston, Dani hadn’t realized how much being the great Paul Taylor’s daughter had affected the way her colleagues treated her. “I’m quite sure some of them would have been happier if he’d burned me to death.”
“In that case they’d be lionizing your heroism in facing him down.” Ankrum leaned back in his chair and sighed. “You’re no hysteric, doctor. And you’re alive, Hotchkiss is dead, as far as I’m concerned the matter is closed, except for reparations for the houses. Just try not to do anything quite so ah, incendiary, for a while.”
“What about Lily Morodin, sir? She’s getting away scott-free for the murders.”
“There’s nothing you or I can do about that, doctor. At this point, nobody this side of God can touch her.” Ankrum sighed. “Take it from an old soldier, if you don’t learn to live with loss, it’ll eat you alive.”
“I can live with it when it’s a kaijin or a spaceman doing the killing. But one of our own kind?” Ankrum’s eyes fixed on hers; she nodded reluctantly. “The JAG already warned me about taking any actions or making statements that might be ‘misconstrued.’ You don’t need to worry about me on that score, sir.”
Leaving Ankrum’s office, she walked down to the edge of the base and stared out at the desert. I know what Duggan said. I know the bitch set it up. And I killed the last person who could tie her to it.
I’m sorry, Duggan. You deserved better.
Dani tried to think of a moral she could derive from everything that happened. Something that would give Duggan’s death at least a little meaning.
She couldn’t think of anything.
She walked back to her apartment and spent the evening getting quietly drunk, alone.