Firechild by Jack Williamson

to him. After the bullets that left Hector torn and screaming on the prison wall. After Deputy Harris and the Enfield county jail. After too much of too many gringos.
    They hated and despised him, hated and despised all his people—humble, hungry people who had to break their cruel laws to sneak into their ugly country and slave for little pay at the hard and dirty and dangerous jobs they were too good to touch. A rotten race, rotted with too much money and too much ease and too much pride in their own stuffy righteousness. A ruthless race, defying the world with their frightful nukes and corrupting his own misused people with the billions they paid for illegal drugs they needed to endure their rottenness.
    He couldn’t really care, not even what happened to him. For he was the trapped coyote. Even if he gnawed off his foot and somehow got back to San Rosario—
    “Nada. Todo por nada.”
    Nothing to hope for anywhere. Nothing whatever. His father dead of want and toil, his mother of some illness the curandera couldn’t cure. He had sent money to Jose and Estrella when he had money, but they hadn’t even written since he went to prison. Eduardo, the fat haciendero now, Eduardo would probably alert la policia if he ever did get back.
    He had no reason to run. Not just yet. Whatever demon had escaped from hell to kill Enfield, it was no worse than Enfield had earned for itself, no worse for him than the jail and the chair upstate, surely no worse for anybody than the nukes sitting in their pits, ready to kill the world when a computer went wrong or some loco punched a button. He went back inside to open another beer and watch that empty desk on the TV screen.

14
    To Sting the
    Glavni Vrag
     
     
    A nya Ostrov’s reports brought Boris Shuvalov from Moscow to take command of the KGB response. Traveling as Tass correspondent Yuri Yerokhin, he was accredited to the Soviet Mission at the United Nations and assigned to cover debate on a proposed U.N. resolution for international control of all genetic research.
    A driver waited at Kennedy to take him straight to the Manhattan headquarters of Roman-World-Mart, Inc. Arrangements had been made for Anya to meet him there. He found the office suite deserted while attorneys for the company and for Julia Roman battled over the liquidation of World-Mart and funding for the new Soviet-American foundation. A security man escorted him down empty corridors to the top-floor boardroom and asked uneasily if he had heard anything new about “the Enfield holocaust.” He hadn’t.
    Anya was late. He swept the room for hidden bugs, using an electronic detector built into the small tape recorder he carried in a black attaché case. Finding none, he sat down to scan the New York Times for anything about the disaster. He found long columns of alarmed editorial speculation and hollow-sounding appeals for public calm, but no more facts than Tass had reported.
    He looked at his watch and walked the floor and stood at a window, looking far down on Fifth Avenue and across at the sunlit towers beyond it, wondering how soon the genetic monster might come to empty the buildings and stop the racing traffic forever. Unless it could be tamed—
    He shook his head and walked the floor again.
    An ugly assignment. He hadn’t asked for it, or really been persuaded by Bogdanov’s assurances that the Center would remember his service to the party and the people. The risks were too enormous.
    The CIA and the FBI and military intelligence were swarming everywhere like dug-up ants. The American immigration officers had grilled him too skeptically about his background in biology and his experience in journalism, as if they already suspected his true mission. His U.N. cover was flimsy, and he was sweating before the guard brought Anya in.
    Her long-limbed allure had always tempted him, but now she looked travel-worn, her greenish eyes hollow, her face pinched and pale. She offered her hand and tried to smile, but he