Firestarter

is responsible in some way for the occasional flashes of psi ability that nearly all human beings demonstrate from time to time. A surprisingly wide range of phenomena: precognition, telekinesis, mental domination, bursts of superhuman strength, temporary control over the sympathetic nervous system. Did you know that the pituitary gland becomes suddenly overactive in nearly all biofeedback experiments?”

Cap did. Wanless had told him this and all the rest times without number. But there was no need to answer; Wanless’s rhetoric was in full fine flower this morning, the sermon well-launched. And Cap was disposed to listen… this one last time. Let the old man have his turn at bat. For Wanless, it was the bottom of the ninth.

“Yes, this is true,” Wanless answered himself. “It’s active in biofeedback, it’s active in REM sleep, and people with damaged pituitaries rarely dream normally. People with damaged pituitaries have a tremendously high incidence of brain tumours and leukemia. The pituitary gland, Captain Hollister. It is, speaking in terms of evolution, the oldest endocrine gland in the human body. During early adolescence it dumps many times its own weight in glandular secretions into the bloodstream. It’s a terribly important gland, a terribly mysterious gland. If I believed in the human soul, Captain Hollister, I would say it resides within the pituitary gland.”

Cap grunted.

“We know these things,” Wanless said, “and we know that Lot Six somehow changed the physical composition of the pituitary glands of those who participated in the experiment. Even that of your so-called “quiet one,” James Richardson. Most importantly, we can deduce from the girl that it also changes the chromosome structure in some way… and that the change in the pituitary gland may be a genuine mutation.”

“The X factor was passed on.”

“No,” Wanless said. “That is one of the many things you fail to grasp, Captain Hollister. Andrew McGee became an X factor in his post experiment life. Victoria Tomlinson became a Y factor-also affected, but not in the same way as her husband. The woman retained a low-threshold telekinetic power. The man retained a mid-level mental dominance ability. The little girl, though… the little girl, Captain Hollister… what is she? We don’t really know. She is the Z factor.”

“We intend to find out,” Cap said softly.

Now both sides of Wanless’s mouth sneered. “You intend to find out,” he echoed. “Yes, if you persist, you certainly may… you blind, obsessive fools.” He closed his eyes for a moment and put one hand over them. Cap watched him calmly.

Wanless said: “One thing you know already. She lights fires.” “Yes.” “You assume that she has inherited her mother’s telekinetic ability. In fact, you strongly suspect it.” “Yes.” “As a very small child, she was totally unable to control these… these talents, for want of a better word…” “A small child is unable to control its bowels,” Cap said, using one of the examples set forth in the extracta. “But as the child grows older-”

“Yes, yes, I am familiar with the analogy. But an older child may still have accidents.”

Smiling, Cap answered, “We’re going to keep her in a fireproof room.”

“A cell.”

Still smiling, Cap said, “If you prefer.”

“I offer you this deduction,” Wanless said. “She does not like to use this ability she has. She has been frightened of it, and this fright has been instilled in her quite deliberately. I will give you a parallel example. My brother’s child. There were matches in the house. Freddy wanted to play with them. Light them and then shake them out. ‘Pretty, pretty,” he would say. And so my brother set out to make a complex. To frighten him so badly he would never play with the matches again. He told Freddy that the heads of the matches were sulfur and that they would make his teeth rot and fall out. That looking at struck matches would eventually blind him. And finally, he held Freddy’s hand momentarily over a lit match and singed him with it.

“Your brother,” Cap murmured, “sounds like a true prince among men.”

“Better a small red place on the boy’s hand than a child in the burn unit, wetpacked, with third-degree burns over sixty percent of his body,” Wanless said grimly.

“Better still to put the matches out of the child’s reach.”

“Can you put Charlene McGee’s matches out of her reach?” Wanless asked.

Cap nodded slowly. “You have a point of a sort, but-”

“Ask yourself this, Captain Hollister: how must it have been for Andrew and Victoria McGee when this child was an infant? After they begin to make the necessary connection? The bottle is late. The baby cries. At the same time, one of the stuffed animals right there in the crib with her bursts into smoky flame. There is a mess in the diaper. The baby cries. A moment later the dirty clothes in the hamper begin to burn spontaneously. You have the records, Captain Hollister; you know how it was in that house. A fire extinguisher and a smoke detector in every single room. And once it was her hair, Captain Hollister; they came into her room and found her standing in her crib and screaming and her hair was on fire.”

“Yes,” Cap said, “it must have made them goddam nervous.”

“So,” Wanless said, “they toilet-trained her… and they fire-trained her.”

“Fire-training,” Cap mused.

“Which is only to say that, like my brother and his boy Freddy, they made a complex. You have quoted me that analogy, Captain Hollister, so let us examine it for a moment. What is toilet-training? It is making a complex, pure and simple.” And suddenly astonishingly, the old man’s voice climbed to a high, wavering treble, the voice of a woman scolding a baby. Cap looked on with disgusted astonishment.

“You bad baby!” Wanless cried. “Look what you’ve done! It’s nasty, baby, see how nasty it is? It’s nasty to do it in your pants! Do grown-ups do it in their pants? Do it on the pot, baby, on the pot.”

“Please,” Cap said, pained.

“It is the making of a complex,” Wanless said. “Toilet-training is accomplished by focusing the child’s attention on his own eliminatory processes in a way we would consider unhealthy if the object of fixation were something different. How strong is the complex inculcated in the child, you might ask? Richard Damon of the University of Washington asked himself this question and made an experiment to find out. He advertised for fifty student volunteers. He filled them up with water and soda and milk until they all badly needed to urinate. After a certain set time had passed, he told them they could go… if they went in their pants.”

“That’s disgusting!” Cap said loudly. He was shocked and sickened. That wasn’t an experiment; it was an exercise in degeneracy.

“See how well the complex has set in your own psyche,” Wanless said quietly. “You did not think it was so disgusting when you were twenty months old. Then, when you had to go, you went. You would have gone sitting on the pope’s lap if someone had set you there and you had to go. The point of the Damon experiment, Captain Hollister, is this: most of them couldn’t. They understood that the ordinary rules of behavior had been set aside, at least for the course of the experiment; they were each alone in quarters at least as private as the ordinary bathroom… but fully eighty-eight percent of them just couldn’t. No matter how strong the physical need was, the complex instilled by their parents was stronger.”

“This is nothing but pointless wandering,” Cap said curtly.

“No, it isn’t. I want you to consider the parallels between toilet-training and fire-training… and the one significant difference, which is the quantum leap between the urgency of accomplishing the former and the latter. If the child toilet-trains slowly, what are the consequences? Minor unpleasantness. His rooms smells if not constantly aired. The mamma is chained to her washing machine. The cleaners may have to be called in to shampoo the carpet after the job is finally done. At the very worst, the baby may have a constant diaper rash, and that will only happen if the baby’s skin is very sensitive or if the mamma is a sloven about keeping him clean. But the consequences to a child who can make fire…”

His eyes glittered. The left side of his mouth sneered. “My estimation of the McGees as parents is very high,” Wanless said. “Somehow they got her through it. I would imagine they began the job long before parents usually begin the toilet-training process; perhaps even before she was able to crawl. ‘Baby mustn’t! Baby hurt herself! No, no, no! Bad girl! Bad girl! Ba-ad girl!'”

“But your own computer suggests by its readouts that she is overcoming her complex, Captain Hollister. She is in an enviable position to do it. She is young, and the complex has not had a chance to set in a bed of years until it becomes like cement. And she has her father with her! Do you realize the significance of that simple fact? No, you do not. The father is the authority figure. He holds the psychic reins of every fixation in the female child. Oral, anal, genital; behind each, like a shadowy figure standing behind a curtain, is the father authority figure. To the girl-child he is Moses; the laws are his laws, handed down she knows not how, but his to enforce. He is perhaps the only person on earth who can remove this block. Our complexes, Captain Hollister, always give us the most agony and psychic distress when those who have inculcated them die and pass beyond argument… and mercy.”

Cap glanced at his watch and saw that Wanless had been in here almost forty minutes. It felt like hours. “Are you almost done? I have another appointment-”

“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