Cold Fire

“It's adversarial journalism. It's the modern reporter's tone and theme. You don't question your subject and later explain him to readers, you attack him. You have an agenda, a version of the truth you want to report regardless of the full truth, and you fulfill it. I never approved of it, never indulged in it, which is why I was always losing out on stories and promotions to other reporters. Now, here, tonight, I'm all for the attack part. The big difference is, I do care about getting to the truth, not shaping it, and I just want to twist and yank some real facts out of this alien of ours.”

“Maybe he won't show up.”

“He said he would.”

Jim shook his head. “But why should he if you're going to be like this?”

“You're saying he might be afraid of me? What kind of higher power is that?”

The bells rang, and she jumped in alarm.

Jim got to his feet. “Just take it easy.”

The bells fell silent, rang again, fell silent. When they rang a third time, a sullen red light appeared at one point in the wall. It grew more intense, assumed a brighter shade, then suddenly burst across the domed room like a blazing fireworks display, after which the bells stopped ringing and the multitude of sparks coalesced into the pulsing, constantly moving amoeba-like forms that they had seen before.

“Very dramatic,” Holly said. As the light swiftly progressed from red through orange to amber, she seized the initiative. “We would like you to dispense with the cumbersome way you answered our questions previously and simply speak to us directly.”

The Friend did not reply.

“Will you speak to us directly?”

No response.

Consulting the tablet that she held in one hand, she read the first question. “Are you the higher power that has been sending Jim on life-saving missions?”

She waited.

Silence.

She tried again.

Silence.

Stubbornly, she repeated the question.

The Friend did not speak, but Jim said, “Holly, look at this.”

She turned and saw him examining the other tablet. He held it toward her, flipping through the first ten or twelve pages. The eerie and inconstant light from the stone was bright enough to show her that the pages were filled with The Friend's familiar printing.

Taking the tablet from him, she looked at the first line on the top page: YES. I AM THAT POWER.

Jim said, “He's already answered every one of the questions we've prepared.”

Holly threw the tablet across the room. It hit the far window without breaking the glass, and clattered to the floor.

'Holly, you can't—'

She cut him off with a sharp look.

The light moved through the transmuted limestone with greater agitation than before.

To The Friend, Holly said, “God gave Moses the Ten Commandments on tablets of stone, yeah, but He also had the courtesy to talk to him. If God can humble Himself to speak directly with human beings, then so can you.”

She did not look to see how Jim was reacting to her adversarial tack. All she cared about was that he not interrupt her.

When The Friend remained silent, she repeated the first question on her list. “Are you the higher power that has been sending Jim on life-saving missions?”

“Yes. I am that power.” The voice was a soft, mellifluous baritone. Like the ringing of the bells, it seemed to come from all sides of them. The Friend did not materialize out of the wall in human form, did not sculpt a face from the limestone, but merely produced its voice out of thin air.

She asked the second question on her list. “How can you know these people are about to die?”

“I am an entity that lives in all aspects of time.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Past, present, and future.”

“You can foresee the future?”

“I live in the future as well as in the past and present.”

The light was coruscating through the walls with less agitation now, as if the alien presence had accepted her conditions and was mellow again.

Jim moved to her side. He put a hand on her arm and squeezed gently, as if to say “good work.”

She decided not to ask for any more clarification on the issue of its ability to see the future, for fear they would be off on a tangent and never get back on track before the creature next announced that it was departing. She returned to the prepared questions. “Why do you want these particular people saved?”

“To help mankind,” it said sonorously. There might have been a note of pomposity in it, too, but that was hard to tell because the voice was so evenly modulated, almost machinelike.

“But when so many people are dying every day — and most of them are innocents — why have you singled out these particular people to be rescued?”

“They are special people. ”

“In what way are they special?”

“If allowed to live, each of them will make a major contribution to the betterment of mankind.”

Jim said, “I'll be damned.”

Holly had not been expecting that answer. It had the virtue of being fresh. But she was not sure she believed it. For one thing, she was bothered that The Friend's voice was increasingly familiar to her. She was sure she had heard it before, and in a context that undermined its credibility now, in spite of its deep and authoritative tone. “Are you saying you not only see the future as it will be but as it might have been?”

“Yes.”

“Aren't we back to your being God now?”

“No. I do not see as clearly as God. But I see.”

In his boyish best humor again, Jim smiled at the kaleidoscopic patterns of light, obviously excited and pleased by all that he was hearing.

Holly turned away from the wall, crossed the room, squatted beside her suitcase, and opened it.

Jim loomed over her. “What're you doing?”

“Looking for this,” she said, producing the notebook in which she had chronicled the discoveries she'd made while researching him. She got up, opened the notebook, and paged to the list of people whose lives he had saved prior to Flight 246. Addressing the entity throbbing through the limestone, she said, “May fifteenth. Atlanta, Georgia. Sam Newsome and his five-year-old daughter Emily. What are they going to contribute to humanity that makes them more important than all the other people who died that day?”

No answer was forthcoming.

“Well?” she demanded.

“Emily will become a great scientist and discover a cure for a major disease.” Definitely a note of pomposity this time.

“What disease?”

“Why do you not believe me, Miss Thorne?” The Friend spoke as formally as an English butler on duty, yet in that response, Holly felt she heard the subtle pouting tone of a child under the dignified, reserved surface.

She said, “Tell me what disease, and maybe I'll believe you.”

“Cancer.”

“Which cancer? There are all types of cancer.”