“You’re sure?” Merton asked, as she led the way into the sitting room.
Dee Dee opened the draperies, revealing a window wall with a view of the mountains stretching to the horizon. Neither of them saw the autumn vista, which looked as unreal as a Saturday Evening Post cover. She nodded. “I couldn’t be more certain. I fainted when I saw him.” She poured coffee for both of them, and sipping hers, lifted the tops from various silver bowls and serving dishes. She told Merton what had happened.
“Okay, you covered it pretty well. But how about Obie? Does he know?”
“Of course not. I wouldn’t have left him there if he had seen it. The kid is exactly like Obie was in high school. It’s uncanny. But Obie has looked at that beard and all that hair for so long that he doesn’t know what he looked like before. No one else does either. Except possibly his mother, and she’s as crazy as a loon.”
Merton said nothing for several minutes and Dee Dee served herself stuffed mushrooms, asparagus vinaigrette, Boston lettuce with crab salad and tomato wedges, tiny hot rolls crisped on the outside, steamy and fragrant when she broke them open.
“You know what that means?” Merton said finally. “Blake is the alien. And he’s vanished. We’ve got to find him”
“I know,” Dee Dee said, between bites. “He’s the only one who can blow the whistle now.”
“And we’ve got to get the Star… the kid out of that place….”
“I thought of that, but why? Let them keep him under wraps for us. It’s Blake I’m worried about. What if he wakes up one day and says, ‘By golly, I think I’m an alien?’” She licked a drop of butter from her finger and her eyes were drawn to the fingers that had been mashed in the car door ten years ago. There was no scar, no trace of the accident. She said, “We know that Blake has something, power, whatever you want to call it. He’s got it. I wonder what else he has by now. He was a damn good-looking kid.”
“I’ll have to kill him,” Merton said.
“I know. More coffee?”
So they decided to renew the search, for Blake Daniels Co…. No, just Blake Daniels. Merton was a scowling man when he left Dee Dee. How to find a person who had vanished nine years ago without a trace in a world of nearly four billion, with over three hundred and seventy million of them in this one country? If Blake had gone to a doctor in the past three years his file would be in the medical computers. If he’d been in legal trouble in the past five years, the information would be in the legal computers. If ever he had registered for a credit card, or for a travel ID card, or for college, or military service, they would find him. It would mean money and a lot of it to buy such information, but it could be had. A new thought struck Merton and he stopped in his tracks. All that money! Grateful people, healed by Blake, had set up trusts, had made outright gifts, had donated money for his education. Untouched for more than ten years now it had grown, doubled, then doubled again…. A couple of million dollars? Billy knew. It must be a couple of million by now. Some of it could be collected any time by Blake, and the rest would be his at twenty-one.
He’d never see twenty-one, Merton promised himself. If he’d had a moustache he would have twirled it then, but he didn’t. He was smooth-faced, a hawk-faced man, with dark skin and straight black hair, probably Amerindian in his background. He couldn’t trace his lineage back beyond his mother. So he never knew his heritage.
He went to his office and made a list of those people he could contact, people he knew enough about to be able to rely on them for help. Suddenly he thought of the bastard’s mother. He couldn’t remember her name. He had found her once, and he would again. But then what? Was she a real threat? If the U.N. Science Advisory Board suddenly started to flash the kid’s picture around would she recognize him as Obie Cox’s son, and her own? He gnawed on his finger and pondered it. He added her name to the list of things he had to do.
He had to erase all evidence that could link Johnny to Obie Cox. He had to find Blake Daniels and erase him. Florence? That was her name, and she had married some jerk of a mechanic…. Peters? He didn’t know. But that was the simple part. He thought for another half hour then began calling people. He made many appointments for that night and the following day, so that by the time Obie returned from his conference with the Star Child, the wheels were in top speed, rolling soundlessly throughout the states, hopping oceans, covering other continents.
Obie returned with a distracted air. Expecting to find a devil he had found a boy filled with hatred, with dreams and fantasies, with insufferable egotism, the nimble fingers of a pickpocket, an avocation he practiced daily, with all the play skills known to man practically—swimming, skiing, skating, all forms of ball playing, chess, cards, skin diving, fishing…. He had been taught them all and liked none of them. Obie sat at table on the first night home and said almost unbelievingly, “I think he is converted! He couldn’t learn enough about the Church and my message.”
“What about him, the kid himself?” Wanda asked. “You like him?” She was unbelievably gross, and her fat was distributed equally on her frame so that she was no less fat through her shoulders than through her hips, so her stomach and her immense breasts were balanced, her arms and her legs were of a kind. She had to have all her clothes made for her, even her stockings and gloves, and that was the advantage of being rich and fat: she could have what she needed made to order. For all her fat there was no soft place on her, no sag, no loose muscles, her stride was brisk and purposeful, her hands quick. With her ropes of hair piled high on her head adding six inches to her height, she. appeared to be the queen of Amazons. She thought she was rather magnificent.
Obie was thinking about the question. Did he like the Star Child? Finally he shrugged. He really didn’t know how to express what he felt; what he could do was express what others felt. His emotions were mixed concerning the kid. He had liked him very much at first, then had wanted to shake him, or worse, thrash him, then had liked him better than in the beginning. And so on. It hadn’t stopped on like or dislike but had skittered from one to the other again and again.
Merton was going through Obie’s bags carefully and he grunted and began to work out a button that was wafer thin, stuck to the lining of the three-suiter. He got it loose and put it on the table before Obie, worked it open to show a tiny transmitter. Very carefully he detached wires, then cracked the “button” down the middle. No one in the room spoke. He flipped it a couple of times thoughtfully, then tossed it into the fireplace where logs were burning quietly. It got very cool in the mountains after dark. Presently there was a blue flame of copper; white smoke spiraled up, turned yellow-gray as a hissing sound of plastic boiling was heard, and finally the logs resumed burning quietly.
Dee Dee said, “Did you go through them all?”
“One more.”
She nodded and leaned back again, not willing to talk until Merton said it was clear. Wanda said, “Are you going back to see the Star Child again?”
“He wants me to. He has this number, and he is allowed to make approved calls. We’ll see.” Merton found another transmitter, this time an eraser had been replaced in a pencil, stuck in Obie’s shirt pocket along with two other pencils and pens. Merton fixed it also, then nodded. All clear.
“Obie,” Dee Dee said then, “I want to show you something.” She rose and crossed the room to a cabinet, opened it and removed a slender book. It opened to the middle and there were pictures of teenagers. She had covered one page so that nothing was visible except for the picture of one boy, very blond with light eyes. Obie looked at it without touching it, then reached for the book. Dee Dee backed up a step. “Familiar?”