Firestarter (34 page)

It was only one favor in an area that lives on favors and under-the-table information, and it was notable only because it was the first link in the chain that led to the final destruction and loss of life. The backup system had been used only piecemeal in all the years since it had been constructed. In its first major test, during the storm that knocked out the Briska power station, it failed completely. By then, of course, the electrical-engineering consultant had gone onward and upward; he was helping to build a multimillion-dollar beach resort at Coki Beach, on St. Thomas.

The Shop didn't get its power back until the Briska station came on line again … which is to say, at the same time the rest of eastern Virginia got its juice back—around midnight.

By then, the next links had already been forged. As a result of the storm and the blackout, something tremendous had happened to both Andy and Charlie McGee, although neither of them had the slightest idea of what had happened to the other.

After five months of stasis, things had begun to roll onward again.

When the power went off, Andy McGee was watching
The PTL Club
on TV. The PTL stood for “Praise the Lord.” On one of the Virginia stations,
The PTL Club
seemed to run continuously, twenty-four hours a day. This was probably not the case, but Andy's perceptions of time had become so screwed up it was hard to tell.

He had put on weight. Sometimes—more often when he was straight—he would catch a glimpse of himself in the mirror and think of Elvis Presley and the way the man had softly ballooned near the end of his life. At other times, he would think of the way a tomcat that had been “fixed” would sometimes get fat and lazy.

He wasn't fat yet, but he was getting there. In Hastings Glen, he had weighed himself on the bathroom scale in the Slumberland Motel and had come in at one-sixty-two. These days he was tipping the scales at about one-ninety. His cheeks
were fuller, and he had the suggestion of a double chin and what his old high-school gym teacher used to call (with utter contempt) “man-tits.” And more than a suggestion of a gut. There was not much exercise—or much urge to exercise while in the grip of a solid Thorazine high—and the food was very good.

He did not worry about his weight when he was high, and that was most of the time. When they were ready to make some more of their fruitless tests, they would iron him out over an eighteen-hour period, a doctor would test his physical reactions, an EEG would be taken to make sure his brainwaves were nice and sharp, and then he would be taken into a testing cubicle, which was a small white room with drilled-cork paneling.

They had begun, back in April, with human volunteers. They told him what to do and told him that if he did anything overenthusiastic—like striking someone blind, for instance—that he would be made to suffer. An undertone to this threat was that he might not suffer alone. This threat struck Andy as an empty one; he didn't believe that they would really harm Charlie. She was their prize pupil. He was very much the B feature on the program.

The doctor in charge of testing him was a man named Herman Pynchot. He was in his late thirties and perfectly ordinary except for the fact that he grinned too much. Sometimes all that grinning made Andy nervous. Occasionally an older doctor named Hockstetter would drop by, but mostly it was Pynchot.

Pynchot told him as they approached the first test that there was a table in the small testing room. On this table was a bottle of grape Kool-Aid, labeled
INK
, a fountain pen in a stand, a pad of notepaper, a pitcher of water, and two glasses. Pynchot told him that the volunteer would have no idea that there was anything other than ink in the ink bottle. Pynchot further told Andy that they would be grateful if he would “push” the volunteer into pouring himself a glass of water, then dumping a goodish quantity of the “ink” into it, and then quaffing the whole mess.

“Neat,” Andy said. He himself had not been feeling so neat. He missed his Thorazine and the peace that it brought.

“Very neat,” Pynchot said. “Will you do it?”

“Why should I?”

“You'll get something in return. Something nice.”

“Be a good rat and you get the cheese,” Andy said. “Right?”

Pynchot shrugged and grinned. His smock was screamingly neat; it looked as if it might have been tailored by Brooks Brothers.

“All right,” Andy said. “I give up. What's my prize for making this poor sucker drink ink?”

“Well, you can go back to taking your pills, for one thing.”

Suddenly it was a little hard to swallow, and he wondered if Thorazine was addicting, and if it was, if the addiction was psychological or physiological. “Tell me, Pynchot,” he said. “How does it feel to be a pusher? Is that in the Hippocratic oath?”

Pynchot shrugged and grinned. “You also get to go outdoors for a while,” he said. “I believe you've expressed an interest in that?”

Andy had. His quarters were nice—so nice you could sometimes almost forget they were nothing but a padded jail cell. There were three rooms plus a bath; there was a color TV equipped with Home Box Office, where a new choice of three recent films appeared each week. One of the munchkins—possibly it had been Pynchot—must have pointed out that there was no use taking away his belt and giving him only Crayolas to write with and plastic spoons to eat with. If he wanted to commit suicide, there was just no way they could stop him. If he pushed hard enough and long enough, he would simply blow his brain like an old tire.

So the place had all the amenities, even extending to a microwave oven in the kitchenette. It was all done in decorator colors, there was a thick shag rug on the living-room floor, the pictures were all good prints. But for all of that, a dog turd covered with frosting is not a wedding cake; it is simply a frosted dog turd, and none of the doors leading out of this tasteful little apartment had doorknobs on the inside. There were small glass loopholes scattered here and there around the apartment—the sort of loopholes you see in the doors of hotel rooms. There was even one in the bathroom, and Andy had calculated that they provided sightlines to just about anyplace in the apartment. TV monitoring devices was Andy's guess, and probably equipped with infrared as well, so you couldn't even jerk off in relative privacy.

He wasn't claustrophobic, but he didn't like being closed up for long periods of time. It made him nervous, even with the drugs. It was a low nervousness, usually evidenced by
long sighs and periods of apathy. He had indeed asked to go out. He wanted to see the sun again, and green grass.

“Yes,” he said softly to Pynchot. “I have expressed an interest in going out.”

But he didn't get to go out.

The volunteer was nervous at first, undoubtedly expecting Andy to make him stand on his head and cluck like a chicken or something equally ridiculous. He was a football fan. Andy got the man, whose name was Dick Albright, to bring him up to date on the previous season—who had made it to the playoffs and how they went, who had won the Super Bowl.

Albright kindled. He spent the next twenty minutes reliving the entire season, gradually losing his nervousness. He was up to the lousy reffing that had allowed the Pats to triumph over the Dolphins in the AFC championship game when Andy said, “Have a glass of water, if you want. You must be thirsty.”

Albright glanced up at him. “Yeah, I am kinda thirsty. Say … am I talkin too much? Is it screwin up their tests, do you think?”

“No, I don't think so,” Andy said. He watched Dick Albright pour himself a glass of water from the pitcher.

“You want some?” Albright asked.

“No, I'll pass,” Andy said, and suddenly gave a hard push. “Have some ink in it, why don't you?”

Albright looked up at him, then reached for the bottle of “ink.” He picked it up, looked at it, and put it back down again. “Put
ink
in it? You must be crazy.”

Pynchot grinned as much after the test as before it, but he was not pleased. Not pleased at all. Andy was not pleased either. When he had pushed out at Albright there had been none of that sideslipping sensation … that curious feeling of
doubling
that usually accompanied the push. And no headache. He had concentrated all of his will toward suggesting to Albright that putting ink in his water would be a perfectly reasonable thing to do, and Albright had made a perfectly reasonable reply: that Andy was nuts. In spite of all the pain it had caused him, he had felt a touch of panic at the thought the talent might have deserted him.

“Why do you want to keep it under wraps?” Pynchot asked him. He lit a Chesterfield and grinned. “I don't understand you, Andy. What
good
does it do you?”

“For the tenth time,” Andy had replied, “I wasn't holding
back. I wasn't faking. I pushed him as hard as I could. Nothing happened, that's all.” He wanted his pill. He felt depressed and nervous. All the colors seemed too bright, the light too strong, voices too loud. It was better with the pills. With the pills, his useless outrage over what had happened and his loneliness for Charlie and his worry over what might be happening to her—these things faded back and became manageable.

“I'm afraid I don't believe that,” Pynchot said, and grinned. “Think it over, Andy. We're not asking you to make someone walk off a cliff or shoot himself in the head. I guess you didn't want that walk as badly as you thought you did.”

He stood up as if to go.

“Listen,” Andy said, unable to keep the desperation entirely out of his voice, “I'd like one of those pills.”

“Would you?” Pynchot said. “Well, it might interest you to know that I'm lightening your dosage … just in case it's the Thorazine that's interfering with your ability.” His grin bloomed anew. “Of course, if your ability suddenly came back …”

“There are a couple of things you should know,” Andy told him. “First, the guy was nervous, expecting something. Second, he wasn't all that bright. It's a lot harder to push old people and people with low or low-normal IQs. Bright people go easier.”

“Is that so?” Pynchot said.

“Yes.”

“Then why don't you push me into giving you a pill right now? My tested IQ is one-fifty-five.”

Andy had tried—with no results at all.

Eventually he had got his walk outside, and eventually they had increased the dosage of his medication again as well—after they became convinced that he really wasn't faking, that he was, in fact, trying desperately hard to use the push, with no success at all. Quite independently of each other, both Andy and Dr. Pynchot began to wonder if he hadn't tipped himself over permanently in the run that had taken him and Charlie from New York to Albany County Airport to Hastings Glen, if he hadn't simply used the talent up. And both of them wondered if it wasn't some kind of psychological block. Andy himself came to believe that either the talent was really gone or it was simply a defense mechanism: his mind refusing to use the talent because it knew it might kill
him to do so. He hadn't forgotten the numb places on his cheek and neck, and the bloodshot eye.

Either way, it amounted to the same thing—a big goose-egg. Pynchot, his dreams of covering himself with glory as the first man to get provable, empirical data on psychic mental domination now flying away, came around less and less often.

The tests had continued through May and June—first more volunteers and then totally unsuspecting test subjects. Using the latter was not precisely ethical, as Pynchot was the first to admit, but some of the first tests with LSD hadn't been precisely ethical, either. Andy marveled that by equating these two wrongs in his mind, Pynchot seemed to come out the other side feeling that everything was okay. It didn't matter, because Andy had no success pushing any of them.

A month ago, just after the Fourth of July, they had begun testing him with animals. Andy protested that pushing an animal was even more impossible than trying to push a stupid person, but his protests cut zero ice with Pynchot and his team, who were really only going through the motions of a scientific investigation at this point. And so once a week Andy found himself sitting in a room with a dog or a cat or a monkey, feeling like a character from an absurdist novel. He remembered the cab driver who had looked at a dollar bill and had seen a five hundred. He remembered the timid executives he had managed to tip gently in the direction of more confidence and assertiveness. Before them, in Port City, Pennsylvania, there had been the Weight-Off program, the classes attended mostly by lonely fat housewives with an addiction to Snackin' Cakes, Pepsi-Cola, and anything between two slices of bread. These were things that filled up the emptiness of their lives a little. That had simply been a matter of pushing a little bit, because most of them had really wanted to lose weight. He had helped them do that. He thought also of what had happened to the two Shop ramrods who had taken Charlie.

He
had
been able to do it, but no more. It was hard even to remember exactly what it had felt like. So he sat in the room with dogs that lapped his hand and cats that purred and monkeys that moodily scratched their asses and sometimes showed their teeth in apocalyptic, fang-filled grins that were obscenely like Pynchot's grins, and of course none of the animals did anything unusual at all. And later on he would be taken back to his apartment
with no doorknobs on the doors and there would be a blue pill in a white dish on the counter in the kitchenette and in a little while he would stop feeling nervous and depressed. He would start feeling pretty much okay again. And he would watch one of the Home Box Office movies—something with Clint Eastwood, if he could get it—or perhaps
The PTL Club
. It didn't bother him so much that he had lost his talent and become a superfluous person.