Fire Pattern

by Bob Shaw

Genres: Science Fiction; Hard Science Fiction; Space Opera

Synopsis

When Ray Jerome, a crotchety journalist on the Whiteford Examiner, is asked to investigate a case of spontaneous human combustion, his first reation is to ridicule the idea - but he is not able to back out of doing the story. To his own surprise, he becomes fascinated by the phenomenon of people who burn up for no obvious reason. It is a fascination which will make 1996 the most unbelievable year of his life.

Release date: September 29, 2011

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 204

Sample

‘When you finally set yourself alight,’ Maeve Starzynski said, ‘don’t come crying to me.’

‘Very funny,’ her father replied, vigorously brushing flecks of glowing tobacco from the front of his cardigan. He had been smoking his oldest briar, the one with the green insulating tape around the stem, when a sudden cough had sent ash spouting from the bowl.

‘I’m not trying to be funny. Smoking is a disgusting habit. All the doctors say it’s bad for your health.’

‘They’re talking about cigarettes – the pipe is different.’ Art Starzynski smiled in his special infuriating way, lowering his eyelids to screen off any sign of opposition to his views. ‘The pipe is good for a man. People who smoke pipes live longer than people who don’t smoke at all.’

‘Yeah – because they poison the rest of us off.’

Her father’s eyes were almost closed, Buddha-smug. ‘Coffee,’ he said pleasantly. ‘Nice and hot, nice and fresh, and I don’t want instant.’

‘Oh, I wish you would burn to death,’ Maeve snapped, not hiding her exasperation as she strode out of the room and went through to the kitchen at the rear of the house. Her father was only sixty, but he assumed the attitudes and made the demands of somebody much older, seeming to revel in the infirmity which had overtaken him a month earlier.

Maeve was as quiet as possible when preparing the coffee and setting out two mugs – banging crockery around was too obvious a way of expressing resentment – and while the water was coming to the boil she stood at the window and breathed deeply, forcing herself to relax. The news from Doctor Pitman about her father’s X-ray tests had been unexpectedly good, suggesting that his abdominal pains resulted from nothing more than some vague colic. His medication was bound to conquer the problem in a day or two, then she would be able to get back to her job and resume a normal life.

Keep thinking about that side of it, she told herself. Be positive!

While she was waiting for the coffee to finish percolating she became aware of a sweetly heavy smell of burning drifting into the kitchen. She guessed that her father was, as occasionally happened, experimenting with an exotic new brand of tobacco. She poured the coffee, set the two mugs on a tray and carried it towards the front room. The sweetish odour grew overpowering as she moved along the hall and now she could actually see a light blue haze in the air – a first intimation that something out of the ordinary might be taking place.

‘Dad?’ Maeve opened the door to the sitting room and gasped with shock as she saw that it was filled with blue smoke. Dropping the tray, she ran into the room, fully expecting to see an armchair on fire. She had heard how quickly some modern furniture could burn and also knew how vital it was to get people clear of the fumes without delay.

There was no sign of a blaze, nor could she see her father anywhere.

It was difficult to make out anything through the billowings of the curious light blue smoke, but it seemed to Maeve that there was a blackened area of flooring near the television set. She went towards it, gagging on the sickening sweet stench in the air, and her hands fluttered nervously to her mouth as she saw that what she had taken to be a black patch was actually a large hole burned clear through the vinyl and underlying boards. Several floor joists were exposed, their upper surfaces charred into curvatures, but – strangely – there was no active flame. In the floor cavity, supported by the ceiling of the utilities room below, was a mound of fine grey ash.

‘Dad?’ Maeve looked about her uncertainly, fearfully, and her voice was barely audible. ‘Dad, what have you been …?’

At that instant her slippered foot touched a slightly yielding object on the floor. She glanced downwards – still an innocent, with thresholds of terror still to cross – and when she saw what was lying there she began to scream.

The object, easily recognizable by its signet ring, was her father’s left hand.

The Whiteford Examiner was much like any other small-town newspaper which had reached the year 1996 in a healthy condition.

It had survived the electronic revolution largely because it was impossible to take a television set out on the back porch, find in it enough small ads and local gossip to make a day’s reading, and drape it over one’s face when the summer heat and the drone of insects had finally induced sleep. The paper’s headquarters were in a narrow four-storey building in the main street, sandwiched between a modern department store and an even more modern bank. Its owners, the Kruger family, were proud that the Examiner building was listed as having historical and architectural interest, and each day a stat of the front page of fifty years earlier was posted in a glazed box by the front entrance.

Ray Jerome usually liked the working environment of the reporters’ room on the second floor. There was a feeling of vitality about it, a sense of being close to the living heart of the community, which helped to fill the gap at the centre of his own life. The loss of his wife through illness and of his engineering job through redundancy had almost broken him at one stage, but the newspaper work – a complete change of direction – had come along at the right time. He had taken to it with all the zeal of an intelligent, lonely, middle-aged man beginning a new life and, as often happens in such circumstances, had created problems both for himself and those around him.

The first difficulty of the new day arose when Hugh Cordwell, the young journalist at the adjoining desk, began to compose his report about a clash between two juvenile gangs in one of Whiteford’s most troublesome districts. Cordwell brooded for a moment, began typing rapidly with two fingers, and on his VDU there appeared the heading: POLICE CALLED TO GANGLAND FLASHPOINT.

Jerome leaned sideways to get a better look at the screen. ‘You’re not going to let that go through, are you?’

Cordwell stared at the words and then at Jerome. ‘What’s wrong with it?’

‘A flashpoint isn’t a geographical location – it’s a temperature.’

‘This isn’t one of your fancy technical journals,’ Cordwell said, his china blue eyes showing the first hint of resentment. ‘Plain American is good enough around here.’

‘But how can the police be called to a temperature?’ Jerome decided to go for absurdity. ‘It’s like saying there was an incident on thirty degrees Celsius, at the corner of ten degrees Fahrenheit.’

‘Bull,’ Cordwell commented. ‘You’ve got more shit than a Christmas turkey.’

‘There’s no need to be like that about it – I was only offering some friendly advice.’

‘Shove your advice!’

‘Charming attitude,’ Jerome said in injured tones, looking around for backing. ‘You try to guide someone’s faltering footsteps in the general direction of literacy, and all you get …’

He allowed the sentence to trail off as his roving gaze encountered the slim, elegantly tailored figure of Anne Kruger, the Examiner’s chief editor. She had paused on the way in to her office, apparently overhearing the exchange between Jerome and Cordwell. A slight lift of her head as she went through the doorway told Jerome she wanted to speak to him. He stood up, threaded his way through a cluster of desks and joined her in the spacious room which overlooked Mayflower Square.

Before speaking to him she took off her brocade jacket, put it on a hanger and smoothed down her white silk blouse – a series of actions which made it clear to Jerome’s watchful eye that she was one of those women who appear, in defiance of time and biology, to reach their physical best at the age of forty. She had black hair, high cheekbones and a touch of hauteur which often led Jerome to picture her in Spanish-style riding clothes.

‘Ray, what was going on out there?’ she said, sitting down at her desk.

Jerome took off his steel-rimmed glasses and began to polish the already brilliant lenses. ‘Who’s to know what goes on in the mind of a juvenile? I simply mentioned to Hugh that he had misused a word and he …’

‘That juvenile, as you call him, is a good reporter,’ Anne cut in. ‘He’s quick to get hold of the facts and quick to get them into print.’

Jerome recalled, belatedly, that Cordwell was in the same age group as the men in whose company Anne liked to go water-skiing and hang-gliding at weekends. It had been undiplomatic to describe him as a child, but there was such a thing as sticking to one’s guns.

‘But what about the language?’ he said. ‘Doesn’t that come into it?’

‘I’ve been over this with you before. Any slips in grammar or usage are picked up by the Leximat. Why do you think we installed it in the first place?’

The computer should be an adjunct to the human brain, not a replacement for it, Jerome replied inwardly, then decided there was such a thing as sticking to one’s guns too long. ‘I promise not to bother Hugh again. He’s only got a university degree in journalism – it isn’t fair to expect him to know the meanings of words.’

‘Drop it, Ray.’

‘Sorry. Sorry.’ Jerome was about to leave the office when he noticed that Anne had not given her customary dismissive flick of the head. ‘Was there anything else?’

‘Yes. You’re always telling me how good you’d be as a science correspondent – so I’m going to give you the chance to prove it.’ Anne handed him a scrap of paper on which she had written an address in a residential swath on the town’s south side. ‘Contact a woman called Maeve Starzynski. There was a fire at the house last week and her father got burned to death.’

‘I saw the …’ Jerome paused, gripped by an uneasy premonition. ‘What kind of a science story is that?’

‘I’ve just been talking to a friend in the coroner’s office and he tells me there were some very unusual aspects to this particular fire. It sounds to me like spontaneous human combustion.’

‘Oh, no!’ Jerome gave a scornful laugh, deliberately making it as explosive as possible to signal the strength of his feelings. ‘Don’t do this to me, Anne. Don’t do it to the paper. In the last few months we’ve been up to here in phony spiritualists, UFO nuts, telepathic twins and characters who foresaw airliner crashes but kept their mouths shut till afterwards. We’re going to lose all credibility with our readers.’

‘There’s a great deal of evidence …’

‘There’s no evidence! None at all! People who babble on about astrology and thought photographs and spoon-bending and telekinesis and card-guessing don’t even know what the word evidence means.’

‘If you call up our “Unexplained” file you’ll he able to find …’

‘Nothing that hasn’t been explained.’

‘Do you mind letting me finish just one sentence?’ Anne’s face darkened with aristocratic anger and for a moment Jerome could almost see it framed by a flat black sombrero. ‘If you look in the file you’ll find that people sometimes do burst into flames for no reason, and you’ll also find that the details are quite odd.’

‘No doubt I will,’ Jerome said sarcastically. ‘The human body has a built-in fire extinguisher which is otherwise known as blood. Four or five litres of it. Those people who combusted must have been a touch anaemic, or – better still – perhaps they had two strange punctures in their necks …’

‘If you would rather try earning your living as a comedian instead of reporting for this newspaper I’m sure I can arrange a quick release for you.’

A hard brightness in Anne’s eyes told Jerome she was in a dangerous mood and that he was not going to evade the unwelcome assignment. He clamped his lips and nodded as she gave her end-of-interview wave, a limp-fingered flick of the hand which might have been directed against a bothersome gnat. Ignoring the amused looks from the other journalists, he returned to his desk and pressed the REF key on terminal. He called up the ‘Unexplained’ file and ran his gaze down the list of headings which appeared on the screen. The list was extensive, reflecting the editor’s personal interest in the subject, but there was no mention of spontaneous human combustion.

Jerome’s sudden flickering of hope was doused as he backtracked and found ‘Auto-incendiarism’, a word to which he took a dislike on sight, classifying it as one of the pretentious labels which abound on the lunatic fringes of science. He stared at the screen in distaste, fingers hovering over the keys, experiencing a broody reluctance to involve himself any further with Anne Kruger’s foibles.

‘Did old Randy Kruger work you over?’ The question came from Julie Thornback, a petite and doll-like blonde who, in spite of being less than half Jerome’s age, had a couple more years experience in journalism and liked to give him advice as from an old hand.

‘No. We were having a nice little chat.’

Julie nodded in casual disbelief. ‘Don’t let her wind you up, Ray. You’ll never guess what she had the nerve to say to Hugh and I.’

‘Hugh and me,’ Jerome said, hoping the correction would be enough to show he did not want to be disturbed.

‘What?’

‘You should have said “to Hugh and me”.’

Julie’s lips moved silently as she tried the phrase out. ‘It doesn’t sound right.’

Jerome sighed. ‘Look at it this way – if Hugh hadn’t been there, if Anne had been talking to you alone, would you have said she was talking to “I”?’

‘No.’

‘That’s your answer then. Excellent fellow though Hugh undoubtedly is, we don’t change the rules of English simply because he appears on the scene.’

Hugh Cordwell, who had been deep in his gang war report, raised his head. ‘Are you sniping at me again, professor?’

Before Jerome could reply Anne Kruger came out of her office, instantly detected the charge in the atmosphere and accused him with a luminous stare. He blanked his VDU screen, stood up and walked out of the room, suddenly deciding that any kind of outdoor assignment was preferable to being in a psychological autoclave. Why should he elevate his blood pressure over the fact that youngsters whose job was communication cared little for the tools of their trade? What was it to him if the chief editor of an influential paper enthusiastically promoted belief in the paranormal? It was ironic that the first and only woman to stir any feelings in him since the death of his wife had to be Anne Kruger – the least compatible and least attainable of all – but that too was something he had to accept. To do otherwise was to invite hypertension.

Wincing a little from the arthritis in his left knee, Jerome went down the stairs and out past the front office. In the street he blinked to adjust his eyes to the morning sunlight, then crossed to where his car was parked in the shade of the trees lining Mayflower Square. He opened the trunk, took out a detergent spray and some paper towels and spent a few minutes cleaning bird droppings from the car’s paintwork. When it had been restored to a satisfactory condition he placed the towels in a litter bin, got into the car and edged it into the traffic flow.

The address he had been given was almost ten minutes away and he used the time to listen for news of the Mercury expedition which had been slung out of Earth orbit a week earlier. The three-man ship, Quicksilver, was the first ever to have been designed, built and launched by a private corporation, and coverage of its progress was the sort of thing Jerome had had in mind when pressing for the post of science correspondent. All he got on the radio, however, were reports of the Argentine-Chile war and of the Philippines continuing with atmospheric H-bomb tests in defiance of the UN injunction. Vietnam and Western Malaysia, the countries suffering most from Philippine fall-out, were gathering a joint invasion force in spite of having been warned off by every major power which had an interest in that theatre.

The reminder that his personal problems were microscopic compared to those facing humanity in general gave Jerome the idea that he should adopt a more relaxed attitude in life. He knew exactly the kind of story Anne wanted – so all he had to do to squelch the matter was to write the one she did not want to see. It had to be cold, factual, rational and – above all else – dull. He switched off the radio and began checking street numbers. The address he wanted was in the SE twenties and it turned out to be a framed bungalow of medium size, elevated from the street by a neatly tiered rock garden. Its masses of red, white and blue alpines might have been planted with a patriotic theme in mind. The house itself, Jerome noticed, bore no external signs of fire.

He parked, got out of the car and was locking the door when it occurred to him that he had been too preoccupied with logical arguments to think about the human tragedy involved. A woman had lost her father in particularly disturbing circumstances only a few days earlier, and there was no telling how she would react to finding a newsman on her doorstep. Now that he considered the matter, he should have telephoned for an appointment and perhaps have saved himself a journey. Maeve Starzynski could be staying els. . .