The Alien Years

SEVEN YEARS FROM NOW

Carmichael might have been the only person west of the Rocky Mountains that morning who didn’t know what was going on. What was going on was the end of the world, more or less, but Carmichael—his name was Myron, though everybody called him Mike—had been away for a while, reveling in a week of lovely solitude and inner retuning in the bleak beautiful wasteland that was northwestern New Mexico, not paying close attention to current events.

On this crisp, clear autumn morning he had taken off long before dawn from a bumpy rural airstrip, heading westward, homeward, in his little Cessna 104-FG. The flight was rough and wild all the way, a fierce wind out of the heart of the continent pushing his plane around, giving it a scary clobbering practically from the moment he was aloft.

That wasn’t so good, the wind. An east wind as strong as this one, Carmichael knew, could mean trouble for coastal California—particularly at this time of year. It was late October, the height of Southern California’s brush-fire season. The last time there had been rain along the coast was the fifth of April, so the whole region was one big tinderbox, and this hard hot dry wind blowing out of the desert was capable of fanning any little spark it might encounter into a devastating conflagration of blowtorch ferocity. It happened just about every year. So he wasn’t surprised to see a thin, blurry line of brown smoke far ahead of him on the horizon by the time he was in the vicinity of San Bernardino.

The line thickened and darkened as he came up over the crest of the San Gabriels into Los Angeles proper, and there seemed to be lesser zones of brown sky-stain off to the north and south now, as well as that long east-west line somewhere out near the ocean. Evidently there were several fires at once. Perhaps a little bigger than usual, too. That was scary. This time of year in Los Angeles, everything was always at risk. With a wind as strong as this blowing, the whole crazy town could go in one big firestorm.

The air traffic controller’s voice sounded hoarse and ragged as he guided Carmichael toward his landing at Burbank Airport, which might have been an indication that something special was happening. Those guys always sounded hoarse and ragged, though. Carmichael took a little comfort from that thought.

He felt the smoke stabbing at his nostrils the moment he stepped out of the plane: the familiar old acrid stink, the sour prickly reek of a bad October. Another instant and his eyes were stinging. You could almost draw pictures in the dirty air with the tip of your finger. This one must indeed be a lulu, Carmichael realized.

A long, skinny guy in mechanic’s overalls went trotting past him on the field. “Hey, guy,” Carmichael called. “Where’s it burning?”

The man stopped, gaped, gave him a strange look, a disbelieving blink, as though Carmichael had just come down from six months in a space satellite. “You don’t know?”

“If I knew, I wouldn’t have asked.”

“Hell, it’s everywhere. All over the goddamn L.A. basin.”

“Everywhere?”

The mechanic nodded. He looked half crazed. Again the sagging jaw, again that dopey bozo blink. “Wow, you actually mean to say you haven’t heard about—”

“No. I haven’t heard.” Carmichael wanted to shake him. He ran into this kind of cloddish stupidity all the time, and he hated it. He gestured impatiently toward the smoke-fouled sky. “Is it as bad as it looks?”

“Oh, it’s bad, man, real bad! The worst ever, for damn sure. Like I say, burning all over the place. They’ve called out every general aviation plane there is for firefighting duty. You better get with your warden right away.”

“Yeah,” Carmichael said, already in motion. “I guess I’d better.”

He sprinted into the main airport building. People got out of his way as he ran through. Carmichael was a sturdily built man, not particularly tall but wide through the shoulders and deep through the chest, and like all the Carmichaels he had fierce blue eyes that seemed to cast a searchlight beam before him. When he moved fast, as he was doing now, people got out of his way.

You could smell the bitter aroma of the smoke even inside the terminal. The place was a madhouse of panicky commuters running back and forth and yelling at each other, waving briefcases around. Somehow Carmichael jostled his way to an open data terminal. It was the old-fashioned kind, no newfangled biochip-implant stuff. He put a call through to the district warden on the emergency net, and the district warden said, as soon as he heard who was talking, “Get your ass out here on the line double fast, Mike.”

“Where do you want me?”

“The nastiest one’s a little way northwest of Chatsworth. We’ve got planes loaded and ready to go out of Van Nuys Airport.”

“I need time to pee and phone my wife, okay?” Carmichael said. “I’ll be in Van Nuys in fifteen.”

He was so tired that he could feel it in his teeth. It was nine in the morning and he’d been flying since half past four, and battling that bastardly east wind, the same wind that was threatening now to fan the flames in L.A., had been miserable work every single mile. He was fifty-six years old, no kid any more, the old juices flowing more sluggishly every year. At this moment all he wanted was home and shower and Cindy and bed. But Carmichael didn’t regard firefighting work as optional. Not with the possibility of a firestorm always hanging over the city.

There were times when he almost wished that it would happen, one great purging fire to wipe the whole damned place out.

That wasn’t a catastrophe he really wanted to see, not even remotely; but Carmichael hated this giant smoggy tawdry Babylon of a city, its endless tangle of clotted freeways, the peculiar-looking houses, the filthy polluted air, the thick choking glossy exotic foliage everywhere, the drugs, the booze, the divorces, the laziness, the sleaziness, the street bums, the street crime, the shyster lawyers and their loathsome clients, the whips and chains, the porno shops and the naked encounter parlors and the massage joints, the virtual-reality chopshops, the weird people speaking their weird trendy lingo and wearing their weird clothes and driving their weird cars and cutting their hair in weird ways and sticking bones through their noses like the savages they really were. There was a cheapness, a trashiness, about everything here, Carmichael thought. Even the grand mansions and the fancy restaurants were that way: hollow, like slick movie sets.

He sometimes felt that he was bothered more by the petty trashiness of almost everything than by the out-and-out evil that lurked in the truly dark corners. If you watched where you were going you could stay out of reach of the evil most or even all of the time, but the trashiness slipped up sneakily around you no matter how well you kept sight of your own values, and there was no doing battle with it: it infiltrated your soul without your even knowing it. He hoped that his sojourn in Los Angeles was not doing that to him.

There had been Carmichaels living in Southern California ever since General Fremont’s time, but never any in Los Angeles itself, not one. He was the first of his tribe that had managed somehow to wind up there. The family came from the Valley, and what Carmichaels meant when they spoke of “the Valley” was the great flat agricultural San Joaquin, out behind Bakersfield and stretching off far to the north, and not the miserable congested string of hideous suburbs just over the hills from Beverly Hills and Santa Monica that Angelenos understood the term to connote. As for Los Angeles itself, they ignored it: it was the cinder in the eye, the unspeakable blotch on the Southern California landscape.

But L.A. was Cindy’s city and Cindy loved L.A. and Mike Carmichael loved Cindy, everything about her, the contrast of her slim pixy daintiness against his big blunt burly potato-nosed self, her warmth, her intensity, her playful quirky sense of fun, her dark lively eyes and glossy curling jet-black bangs, even the strange goofy philosophies that were the air of life to her. She was everything he had never been and had never even wanted to be, and he had fallen for her as he had never fallen before; and for Cindy’s sake he had become the family Angeleno, much as he detested the place, because she could not and would not live anywhere else.

So Mike Carmichael had been living there the past seven years, in a little wooden house up in Laurel Canyon amidst the lush green shrubbery, and for seven Octobers in a row he had dutifully gone out to dump chemical retardants on the annual brush fires, to save the locals from their own idiotic carelessness. One thing that just about every Carmichael grew up believing was that you had to accept your responsibilities, no complaining, no questions asked. Even Mike, who was as near to being a rebel as the family had ever produced, understood that.

There would be fires. That was a given. Qualified pilots were needed to go up there and drop retardants on them and put them out. Mike Carmichael was a qualified pilot. He was needed, and he would go. It was as simple as that.

The phone rang seven times at the home number before Carmichael hung up. Cindy had never liked answering machines or call forwarding or screen-mail or anything like that. Things like that were dehumanizing, mechanistic, she said. Which made them practically the last people in the world without such gadgets; but so be it, Carmichael figured. That was the way Cindy wanted it to be.

Next he tried the little studio just off Colfax where she made her jewelry, but she didn’t answer there either. Probably she was on her way to the gallery, which was out in Santa Monica, but she wouldn’t be there yet—the freeways would be worse even than on a normal day, what with all these fires going—and so there was no sense even trying her there.

That bothered him, not being able to say hello to her right away after his six-day absence, and no likely chance for it now for another eight or ten hours. But there was nothing he could do about that.

He took off from Burbank on emergency clearance, firefighting authorization. As soon as he was aloft again he could see the fire not far to the northwest. It was denser now, a greasy black column against the pale sky. And when he stepped from his plane a few minutes later at Van Nuys Airport he felt an immediate blast of sudden unthinkable heat. The temperature had been in the low eighties at Burbank, damned well hot enough for nine in the morning, but here it was over a hundred. The air itself was sweating. He could see the congealed heat, like droplets of fat. It seemed to him that he heard the distant roar of flames, the popping and crackling of burning underbrush, the troublesome whistling sound of dry grass catching fire. It was just as though the fire was two miles away. Maybe it was, he thought.

The airport looked like a combat center. Planes were coming and going with lunatic frenzy, and they were lunatic planes, too. The fire was so serious, apparently, that the regular fleet of conventional airborne tankers had been supplemented with antiques of every sort, planes forty and fifty years old and even older, converted B-iy Flying Fortresses and DC-3S and a Douglas Invader and, to Carmichael’s astonishment, a Ford Trimotor from the 19305 that had been hauled, maybe, out of some movie studio’s collection. Some were equipped with tanks that held fire-retardant chemicals, some were water-pumpers, some were mappers with infrared and electronic scanning equipment glistening on their snouts. Harried-looking men and women were in frantic motion everywhere, making wild gestures to each other across great distances or shouting into CB handsets as they tried to keep the loading process orderly. It didn’t seem very orderly.

Carmichael found his way to Operations HQ, which was full of haggard people peering into computer screens. He knew most of them from other fire seasons. They knew him.

He waited for a break in the frenzy and tapped one of the dispatchers on the shoulder. She looked up, nodded in a goggly-eyed way, then grinned in recognition and said, “Mike. Good. We’ve got a DC-3 waiting for you.” She traced a line with her finger across the screen in front of her. “You’ll dump retardants along this arc, from Ybarra Canyon eastward to Horse Flats. The fire’s in the Santa Susana foothills and so far the wind is from the east, but if it shifts to northerly it’s going to take out everything from Chatsworth to Granada Hills, right on down to Ventura Boulevard. And that’s only this fire.”

“Holy shit! How many are there?”

The dispatcher gave her mouse a couple of clicks. The map of the San Fernando Valley that had been showing on the screen went swirling into oblivion and was replaced by one of the entire Los Angeles basin. Carmichael stared, aghast. Three great scarlet streaks indicated fire zones: this one out at the western end of things along the Santa Susanas, another nearly as big way off to the east in the grasslands north of the 210 Freeway around Glendora or San Dimas, and a third down in eastern Orange County, back of Anaheim Hills. “Ours is the big one so far,” the dispatcher said. “But these other two are only about forty miles apart, and if they should join up somehow—”

“Yeah,” Carmichael said. A single wall of fire running along the whole eastern rim of the basin, maybe—with ferocious Santa Ana winds blowing, carrying airborne rivers of sparks westward across Pasadena, across downtown L.A., across Hollywood, across Beverly Hills, all the way to the coast, to Venice, Santa Monica, Malibu. He shivered. Laurel Canyon would go. The house, the studio. Hell, everything would go. Worse than Sodom and Gomorrah, worse than the fall of Nineveh. Nothing but ashes for hundreds of miles. “Jesus,” he said. “Everybody scared silly of terrorist nukes, and three carloads of dumb kids tossing cigarettes can do the job just as easily.”

“But this time it wasn’t cigarettes, Mike,” the dispatcher said.

“No? What then, arson?”

Again that strange stare and blink, much like the one the field mechanic had given him. “You serious? You haven’t heard?”

“I’ve been in New Mexico the last six days. Way off in the outback.”

“You’re the only one in the world who hasn’t heard, then. Hey, don’t you ever tune in the radio news when you drive?”

“I flew there and back. The Cessna. Listening to the radio is one of the things that I go to New Mexico to get away from having to do.—For Christ’s sake, heard what’?”

“About the E-Ts,” said the dispatcher wearily. “They started the fires. Three spaceships landing at five this morning in three different corners of the L.A. basin. The heat of their engines ignited the dry grass.”

Carmichael did not smile. “E-Ts, yeah. You’ve got one weird sense of humor, kiddo.”

The dispatcher said, “You think it’s a joke?”

“Spaceships? From another world?”

“With critters fifteen feet high on board,” the dispatcher at the next computer said. “Linda’s not kidding. They’re out walking around on the freeways right this minute. Big purple squids fifteen feet high, Mike.”

“Men from Mars?”

“Nobody knows where the hell they’re from.”

“Jesus,” Carmichael said. “Jesus Christ God.”

Half past nine in the morning, and Mike Carmichael’s older brother, Colonel Anson Carmichael III, whom everyone usually spoke of simply as “the Colonel,” was standing in front of his television set, gaping in disbelief. His daughter Rosalie had phoned fifteen minutes before from Newport Beach to tell him to turn it on. That would not have occurred to him, otherwise. The television was here for the grandchildren, not for him. But there he was, now, a lean, long-legged, resolutely straight-backed and stiff-necked retired army officer in his early sixties with piercing blue eyes and a full head of white hair, gaping like a kindergarten kid at his television set in the middle of the morning.

On the huge state-of-the-art screen, set flush into the pink ashlar facing of the Colonel’s recreation-room wall, the same two stupefying scenes had been alternating on every channel, over and over and over again, for the entire fifteen minutes that he had been watching.

One was the aerial shot of the big fire on the northwestern flank of the Los Angeles basin: black billowing clouds, vivid red tongues of flame, an occasional glimpse of a house on fire, or a whole row of houses. The other was the grotesque, unbelievable, even absurd sight of half a dozen titanic alien beings moving solemnly around in the half-empty parking lot of a huge shopping mall in a place called Porter Ranch, with the sleek slender shaft of what he supposed was an alien ground vehicle of some sort rearing up like a shining needle behind them out of a tumbled cluster of charred cars, nose tilted upward at a 45-degree angle.

The camera angles varied from time to time, but the scenes were always the same. A shot of the fire, and then cut to the aliens at the shopping mall. The fire again, looking worse than before; and then cut again to the aliens in the mall. Over and over and over.

And, over and over and over, the same string of words kept running through the Colonel’s mind:

This is an invasion. We are at war. This is an invasion. We are at war.

His mind could handle the fire part of it readily enough. He had seen houses burning before. Huge catastrophic fires were an ugly part of California life, but they were inevitable in a place where thirty-odd million people had decided to settle in a region that had, as an absolutely normal feature of the climate, a dry season lasting from April to November every year. October was the fire month, when the grassy hills were bone-dry and the diabolical Santa Ana winds came roaring up out of the desert to the east. There was never a year without its batch of fires, and every five or ten years there was a really monstrous one—the Hollywood Hills fire of 1961, when he had been in his late teens, and that one right down below here in Santa Barbara in 1990, and the huge Bay Area blaze that wiped out so much of Oakland a year or two after that, and that Pasadena fire on Thanksgiving Day, and on and on.

But this other thing—alien spaceships landing in Los Angeles, and, so they seemed to be saying on the tube now, touching down also in at least a dozen other places around the world—bizarre visitors, very likely hostile and belligerent, coming without warning—intruding, for God only knew what reason, on the generally peaceful and prosperous place that was the planet Earth in the early years of the twenty-first century—

That was movie stuff. That was science fiction. It hammered at your sense of the orderly structure of the world, of the predictable flow of the events of life.

The Colonel had read only one science fiction book in his life, The War of the Worlds, by H. G. Wells, long ago. He hadn’t been the Colonel, then, but just a tall, skinny high-school kid diligently making himself ready for the life that he already knew he was going to lead. It was an intelligent, entertaining novel, but ultimately the book had annoyed him, because it asked an interesting question—What do you do when you find yourself up against an utterly unbeatable enemy?—and then had supplied no useful answer. The Martian conquest of Earth had been thwarted not by any kind of clever military strategy but only by the merest of fortuitous flukes, a convenient biological accident.

He didn’t mind tough questions, but he believed in trying to find good answers for them, and he had been expecting Wells to supply something more satisfying than having the invincible Martian conquerors succumb to unfamiliar Earthly disease bacteria even as the armies of Earth lay flattened and helpless before their advance. That was ingenious of Wells, but it wasn’t the right kind of ingenuity, because it left no scope for human mental ability or courage; it was simply a case of one external event canceling out another, like a tremendous downpour suddenly showing up to extinguish a raging forest fire while all the firefighters stood around sucking their thumbs.

Well, here, strange to say, was Wells’s book come to life. The Martians actually had landed, real ones, though surely not from Mars. Descending out of nowhere—what had happened to our orbital early warning systems, he wondered, the space-based telescopes that were supposed to be scanning for incoming asteroids and other little cosmic surprises?—and, if what he was seeing on the teevee was any fair sample, they were already strutting around very much like conquerors. Willy-nilly, the world seemed to be at war, and with creatures of a superior technology, evidently, since they had managed to get here from some other star and that was something we could not have achieved.

It remained to be seen, of course, what these invaders wanted. Maybe this wasn’t even an invasion, but just an embassy that had arrived in a singularly clumsy way. But if it was war, the Colonel thought, and these creatures had weapons and abilities beyond our fathoming, then we were about to get our chance to deal squarely with the problem that H. G. Wells a hundred years ago had preferred to finesse with an expedient nick-of-time gimmick.

Already the Colonel’s mind was beginning to tick through a litany of options, wondering about which people he needed to call in Washington, wondering whether any of them would call him. If indeed there was going to be war against these aliens, and he was intuitively certain that there would be, he intended to play a part in it.

The Colonel had no love for war and very little eagerness to become involved in it, and not just because he had been retired from the armed services for close to a dozen years. He had never glamorized war. War was a nasty, stupid, ugly business, usually signifying nothing more than the failure of rational policy. His father, Anson II, the Old Colonel, had fought—and fought plenty, and had the scars to show for it—in the Second World War, and nevertheless had raised his three sons to be soldiers. The Old Colonel had liked to say, “People like us go into the military in order to see to it that nobody will ever have to fight again.” His eldest son Anson had never ceased to believe that.

Sometimes, though, you simply had war thrust upon you without any choice, and then it was necessary to fight or be obliterated, and this looked like one of those times. In that case, retired though he was, he might have something to offer. The psychology of alien cultures, after all, had been his big specialty from his Vietnam days onward, although he had never imagined having to deal with a culture as alien as this. But still, there were certain general principles that probably would apply, even in this case—

Abruptly the idiot repetitiousness of the stuff they were showing on the screen began to irritate and anger him. He went back outside.

Wild updrafts from the blaze buffeted Carmichael’s plane as he took it aloft. That gave him a few bad moments. But he moved easily and automatically to gain control, pulling the moves out of the underground territories of his nervous system. It was essential, he believed, to have the moves in your fingers, your shoulders, your thighs, rather than in the conscious realms of your brain. Consciousness could get you a long way, but ultimately you had to work out of the underground territories or you were dead.

This was nothing, after all, compared with the stuff he had had to deal with in Vietnam. At least today nobody would be shooting at him from below. Vietnam was where he had learned all he knew about flying through thermal updrafts, too.

The dry season in the swampy south of that unhappy land was the time of year when the farmers burned the stubble from their fields, and things were all smoke and heat down on the ground, with visibility maybe a thousand yards, tops. That was in daytime. More than half of his combat missions had been at night. A lot of the time he flew during the monsoon season, notable for thick sideways gusts of rain, a time that was nearly as bad for flying in as the field-burning season was. The Viet Cong folks and their buddies of the North Vietnamese Army battalions generally preferred carrying out troop movements mostly during bad weather, when nobody in their right minds would be flying. So that was when Carmichael had been up there above them, of course.

The war was thirty-plus years behind him, and it was still as fresh and vivid in his life as though it had been Saigon and not New Mexico where he had just spent the past six days. Because he was too much the family bad boy to have gone docilely into the Army as he had been expected to do, and nevertheless was enough of a Carmichael so that he would never have dreamed of shirking his obligation to help his country defend its security perimeter, he had been a Navy pilot during the war, flying twin-engine turbo-prop OV-10s as a member of Light Attack Squadron 4, operating out of Binh Thuy.

His tour of duty had been twelve months, July 1971 through June 1972. That had been enough. The OV-10s were supposed to be observation planes, but in Vietnam they flew close support for an air-cavalry pack and went out with equipped with rockets, Gatling guns, 20-millimeter cannons, strapped-on clusters of cluster bombs, and all sorts of other stuff. Carrying a full load, they could barely make it up higher than 3500 feet. Most of the time they flew below the clouds, sometimes down around treetop level, no more than a hundred feet up, seven days a week, mostly at night. Carmichael figured he had fulfilled his military obligation to his nation, and then some.

But the obligation to go out and fight these fires—you never finished fulfilling that.

He felt the plane responding now, and managed a grin. DC-3S were tough old birds. He loved flying them, though the newest of them had been manufactured before he was born. He loved flying anything. Flying wasn’t what Carmichael did for a living—he didn’t actually do anything for a living, not any more—but flying was what he did. There were months when he spent more time in the air than on the ground, or so it seemed to him, because the hours he spent on the ground often slid by unnoticed, while time in the air was heightened, intensified, magnified.

He swung south over Encino and Tarzana before heading up across Chatsworth and Canoga Park into the fire zone. A fine haze of ash masked the sun. Looking down, he could see the tiny houses, the tiny blue swimming pools, the tiny people scurrying about with berserk fervor, trying to hose down their roofs before the flames arrived. So many houses, so many people, great human swarms filling every inch of space between the sea and the desert, and now it was all in jeopardy.

The southbound lanes of Topanga Canyon Boulevard were as jammed with cars, here in mid-morning, as the Hollywood Freeway at rush hour. No, it was worse than that. They were even driving on the shoulders of the road, and here and there were gnarly tangles where there had been accidents, cars overturned, cars slewed around sideways. The others just kept on going, fighting their way right around them.

Where were they all going? Anywhere. Anywhere that was away from the fire, at least. With big pieces of furniture strapped to the tops of their cars, baby cribs, footlockers, dressers, chairs, tables, even beds. He could imagine what was within those cars, too—mounds of family photographs, computer disks, television sets, toys, clothing, whatever they prized the most, or however much of it they had been able to stash before the panicky urge to flee overtook them.

They were heading toward the beaches, it seemed. Maybe some television preacher had told them there was an ark sitting out there in the Pacific, waiting to carry them to safety while God rained brimstone down on Los Angeles. And maybe there really was one out there, too. In Los Angeles anything was possible. Invaders from space walking around on the freeways, even. Jesus. Jesus. Carmichael hardly knew how to begin thinking about that.

He wondered where Cindy was, what she was thinking about it. Most likely she found it very funny. Cindy had a wonderful ability to be amused by things. There was a line of poetry she liked to quote, from that old Roman, Virgil: a storm is rising, the ship has sprung a leak, there’s a whirlpool to one side and sea-monsters on the other, and the captain turns to his men and says, “One day perhaps we’ll look back and laugh even at all this.”

That was Cindy’s way, Carmichael thought. The Santa Anas are blowing and three horrendous brush fires are burning all around the town and invaders from space have arrived at the same time, and one day perhaps we’ll look back and laugh even at all this.

His heart overflowed with love for her, and longing.

Carmichael had never known anything about poetry before he had met her. He closed his eyes a moment and brought her onto the screen of his mind. Thick cascades of jet-black hair, quick dazzling smile, little slender tanned body all aglitter with those amazing rings and bead necklaces and pendants she designed and fashioned. And her eyes. No one else he knew had eyes like hers, bright with strange mischief, with that altogether original way of vision that was the thing he most loved about her. Damn this fire, getting between them now, just when he’d been away almost a whole week! Damn the stupid men from Mars! Damn them! Damn them!

As the Colonel emerged onto the patio he felt the wind coming hard out of the east, a hot one, and stronger than it had been earlier that morning, with a real edge on it. He could hear the ominous whooshing sound of fallen leaves, dry and brittle, whipping along the hillside trails that began just below the main house. East winds always meant trouble. And this one was bringing it for sure: already there was a faint taste of smoke in the air.

The ranch was situated on gently sloping land well up on the south side of the Santa Ynez Mountains back of Santa Barbara, a majestic site sprawling over many acres, looking down on the city and the ocean beyond. It was too high up for growing avocado or citrus, but very nice for such crops as walnuts and almonds. The air here was almost always clear and pure, the big dome of the sky extended a million miles in every direction, the sight lines were spectacular. The land had been in the Colonel’s wife’s family for a hundred years; but she was gone now, leaving him to look after it by himself, and so, by an odd succession of events, one of the military Carmichaels found himself transformed into a farming Carmichael also, here in the seventh decade of his life. He had lived here alone in this big, imposing country house for the past five years, though he had a resident staff of five to help him with the work.

There was some irony in that, that the Colonel should be finishing his days as a farmer. It was the other branch of the Carmichael family, the senior branch, that had always been the farmers. The junior branch—the Colonel’s branch, Mike Carmichael’s branch—had customarily gone in for professional soldiering.

The Colonel’s father’s cousin Clyde, dead almost thirty years now, had been the last of the farming Carmichaels. The family farm now was a 3OO-home subdivision, slick and shiny. Most of Clyde’s sons and daughters and their families still lived scattered up and down the Valley cities from Fresno and Visalia to Bakersfield, selling insurance or tractors or mutual funds. The Colonel hadn’t had contact with any of them in years.

As for the other branch, the military branch, it had long ago drifted away from its Valley roots. The Colonel’s late father Anson II, the Old Colonel, had settled in a San Diego suburb after his retirement from the Service. One of his three sons, Mike, who had wanted to be a Navy pilot, Lord love him, had wound up in L.A., right there in the belly of the beast. Another son, Lee, the baby of the family—he was dead now, killed ten years back while testing an experimental fighter plane—had lived out in Mojave, near Edwards Air Force Base. And here he was, the oldest of the three boys, Anson III, stern and straight and righteous, once called the Young Colonel to distinguish him from his father but now no longer young, dwelling in more or less placid retirement on a pretty ranch high up on a mountain back of Santa Barbara. Strange, very strange, all of it.

From the wraparound porch of the main house Colonel Carmichael had unimpeded views for vast distances. The front aspect allowed him to look straight out over the series of hills that descended toward the south, down to the red-tile roofs of the city of Santa Barbara and the dark ocean beyond, and on a clear day like this he could see all the way to the Channel Islands. From the side patio he had a tremendous angle eastward over the irregular summits of the low mountains of the coastal range at least to Ventura and Oxnard, and sometimes he even caught a hint of the grayish-white edge of the smog wall that came boiling up into the sky out of Los Angeles itself, ninety miles away.

The air off in that direction wasn’t grayish-white today. A great brownish-black column was climbing toward the stratosphere out of the fire zone—rising from Moorpark, he guessed, or Simi Valley or Calabasas, one of those mushrooming suburban towns strung out along Highway 101 on the way into Los Angeles. As it hit some obstruction of the upper air it turned blunt and spread laterally, forming a dismal horizontal dirty smear across the middle of the sky.

At this distance the Colonel was unable to see the fire itself, not even with the field glasses. He imagined that he could—persuaded himself that he could make out six or eight vermilion spires of flame ascending vertically in the center of that awful filthy pall—but he knew it was only a trick of his mind, that there was no way he could see a blaze that was more than sixty miles down the coast. The smoke, yes. Not the fire.

But the smoke was enough to get his pulse racing. A plume that big—whole towns must be going up in flames! He wondered about his brother Mike, living right there in the middle of the city: whether he was okay, whether the fire was threatening his neighborhood at all. The Colonel reached tentatively for the phone at his hip. But Mike had gone to New Mexico last week, hadn’t he? Hiking around by himself in some desolate back corner of the Navajo reservation, getting his head clear, as he seemed to need to do two or three times a year. And in any case Mike usually was part of the volunteer airborne firefighting crew that went up to dump chemicals on fires like this. If he was back from New Mexico, he was in all likelihood up there right now fluttering around in some rickety little plane.

I really should call him anyway, the Colonel thought. But I’d probably just get Cindy on the phone.

The Colonel didn’t enjoy talking to his brother Mike’s wife Cindy. She was too aggressively perky, too emotional, too goddamned strange. She spoke and acted and dressed and thought like some hippie living thirty years out of her proper era. The Colonel didn’t like the whole idea of having someone like Cindy being part of the family, and he had never concealed his dislike of her from Mike. It was a problem between them.

In all probability Cindy wouldn’t be there either, he decided. No doubt a panicky evacuation was in progress, hundreds of thousands of people heading for the freeways, racing off in all directions. A lot of them would come this way, the Colonel supposed, up the Pacific Coast Highway or the Ventura Freeway. Unless they were cut off from Santa Barbara County by a stray arm of the fire and were forced to go the other way, into the chaotic maelstrom of Los Angeles proper. God pity them if that was so. He could imagine what it must be like in the central city now, what with so much craziness going on at the edges of the basin.

He found himself tapping the keys for Mike’s number, all the same. He simply had to call, whether or not anybody was home. Or even if it was Cindy who answered. He had to.

Where the neat rows and circles of suburban streets ended there was a great open stretch of grassy land, parched by the long dry summer to the color of a lion’s hide, and beyond that were the mountains, and between the grassland and the mountains lay the fire, an enormous lateral red crest topped by a plume of foul black smoke. It seemed already to cover hundreds of acres, maybe thousands. A hundred acres of burning brush, Carmichael had heard once, creates as much heat energy as the original atomic bomb that they had dropped on Hiroshima.

Through the crackle of radio static came the voice of the line boss, directing operations from a bubble-domed helicopter hovering at about four o’clock:

“DC-3, who are you?”

“Carmichael.”

“We’re trying to contain it on three sides, Carmichael. You work on the east, Limekiln Canyon, down the flank of Porter Ranch Park. Got it?”

“Got it,” Carmichael said.

He flew low, less than a thousand feet. That gave him a good view of all the action: sawyers in hard hats and orange shirts cutting burning trees to make them fall toward the fire, bulldozer crews clearing brush ahead of the blaze, shovelers carving firebreaks, helicopters pumping water into isolated outbursts of flame.

He climbed five hundred feet to avoid a single-engine observer plane, then went up five hundred more to avoid the smoke and air turbulence of the fire itself. From that altitude he had a clear picture of it, running like a bloody gash from west to east, wider at its western end.

Just east of the fire’s far tip he saw a circular zone of grassland perhaps a hundred acres in diameter that had already burned out, and precisely at the center of that zone stood a massive gray something that looked vaguely like an aluminum silo, the size of a ten-story building, surrounded at a considerable distance by a cordon of military vehicles.

Carmichael felt a wave of dizziness go rocking through his mind.

That thing, he realized, had to be the E-T spaceship.

It had come out of the west in the night, they said, floating over the ocean like a tremendous meteor over Oxnard and Camarillo, sliding toward the western end of the San Fernando Valley, kissing the grass with its searing exhaust and leaving a trail of flame behind it. And then it had gently set itself down over there and extinguished its own brush fire in a neat little circle about itself, not caring at all about the blaze it had kindled farther back, and God knows what kind of creatures had come forth from it to inspect Los Angeles.

It figured, didn’t it, that when the UFOs finally did make a landing out in the open, it would be in L.A.? Probably they had chosen to land there because they had seen the place so often on television—didn’t all the stories say that UFO people always monitored our TV transmissions? So they saw L.A. on every other show and they probably figured it was the capital of the world, the perfect place for the first landing. But why, Carmichael wondered, had the bastards needed to pick the height of the fire season to put their ships down here?

He thought of Cindy again, how fascinated she was by all this UFO and E-T stuff, those books she read, the ideas she had, the way she had looked toward the stars one night when they were camping in the high country of Kings Canyon and talked of the beings that must live up there. “I’d love to see them,” she said. “I’d love to get to know them and find out what their heads are like.”

She believed in them, all right.

She knew, knew, that they would be coming one day.

They would come, not from Mars—any kid could tell you that, there were no living beings on Mars—but from a planet called HESTEGHON. That was how she always wrote it, in capital letters, in the little poetic fragments he sometimes found around the house. Even when she spoke the name aloud that was how it seemed to come out, with extra-special emphasis. HESTEGHON was on a different vibratory plane from Earth, and the people of HESTEGHON were intellectually and morally superior beings, and one day they would materialize right out of the blue in our midst to set everything to rights on our poor sorry world.

Carmichael had never asked her whether HESTEGHON was her own invention, or something that she had heard about from a West Hollywood guru or read about in one of the cheaply printed books of spiritual teachings that she liked to buy. He preferred not to get into any kind of discussion with her about it.

And yet he had never thought she was insane. Los Angeles was full of nutcases who wanted to ride in flying saucers, or claimed they already had, but it didn’t sound nutty to Carmichael when Cindy talked that way. She had the innate Angeleno love of the exotic and the bizarre, yes, but he felt certain that her soul had never been touched by the crazy corruption here, that she was untainted by the prevailing craving for the weird and irrational that made him loathe the place so much. If she turned her imagination toward the stars, it was out of wonder, not out of madness: it was simply part of her nature, that curiosity, that hunger for what lay outside her experience, to embrace the unknowable.

Carmichael had had no more belief in E-Ts than he did in the tooth fairy, but for her sake he had told her that he hoped she’d get her wish. And now the UFO people were really here. He could imagine her, eyes shining, standing at the edge of that cordon staring lovingly at the spaceship.

He almost hoped she was. It was a pity he couldn’t be with her now, feeling all that excitement surging through her, the joy, the wonder, the magic.

But he had work to do. Swinging the DC-3 back around toward the west, he swooped down as close as he dared to the edge of the fire and hit the release button on his dump lines. Behind him, a great crimson cloud spread out: a slurry of ammonium sulphate and water, thick as paint, with a red dye mixed into it so they could tell which areas had been sprayed. The retardant clung in globs to anything, and would keep it damp for hours.

Emptying his four 500-gallon tanks quickly, he headed back to Van Nuys to reload. His eyes were throbbing with fatigue and the bitter stink of the wet charred earth below was filtering through every plate of the old plane. It was not quite noon. He had been up all night.

The Colonel stood holding the phone while it rang and rang and rang, but there was no answer at his brother’s house, and no way to leave a message, either. A backup number came up on the phone’s little screen: Cindy’s jewelry studio. What the hell, the Colonel thought. He was committed to this thing now; he could keep on going. He hit the key for the studio. But no one answered there either.

A second backup number appeared. This one was the gallery in Santa Monica where she had her retail shop. Unhesitatingly, now, the Colonel hit that one. A clerk answered, a boy who by the sound of his high scratchy voice was probably about sixteen, and the Colonel asked for Mrs. Carmichael. Hasn’t been in yet today, the clerk said. Should have been in by now, but somehow she wasn’t. The kid didn’t sound very concerned. He made it seem as if he was doing the Colonel a favor by answering the telephone at all. Nobody under twenty-five had any respect for telephones. They were all getting biochips implanted, the Colonel had heard. That was the hottest thing now, passing data around with your forearm pressed against an X-plate. Or so his nephew Paul had said. Paul was twenty-seven, or so: young enough to know about these things. Telephones, Paul had said, were for dinosaurs.

“I’m Mrs. Carmichael’s brother-in-law,” the Colonel said. It was a phrase he could not remember having used before. “Ask her to call me when she comes in, will you, please?” he told the boy, and hung up.

Then he realized that a more detailed message might have been useful. He hit the redial key and when the boy came back on the line he said, “It’s Colonel Carmichael again, Mrs. Carmichael’s brother-in-law. I should have told you that I’m actually trying to find my brother, who’s been out of town all week. I thought perhaps Mrs. Carmichael might know when he’s due back.”

“She said last night that he was supposed to be coming back today,” the boy said. “But like I told you, I haven’t spoken to her yet today. Is there some problem?”

“I don’t know if there is or not. I’m up in Santa Barbara, and I was wondering whether—the fire, you know—their house—”

“Oh. Right. The fire. It’s, like, out by Simi Valley somewhere, right?” The kid spoke as though that were in some other country. “The Carmichaels live, like, in L.A., you know, the hills just above Sunset. I wouldn’t worry about them if I were you. But I’ll have her phone you if she checks in with me. Does she have your implant access code?”

“I just use the regular data web.” I’m a dinosaur, the Colonel thought. I come from a long line of them. “She knows the number. Tell her to call right away. Please.”

As soon as he clipped the cell phone back in his waistband it made the little bleeping sound of an incoming call. He yanked it out again and flipped it open.

“Yes?” he said, a little too eagerly.

“It’s Anse, Dad.” His older son’s deep baritone. The Colonel had three children, Rosalie and the two boys. Anse—Anson Carmichael IV—was the good son, decent family man, sober, steady, predictable. The other one, Ronald, hadn’t worked out quite as expected. “Have you heard what’s going on?” Anse asked.

“The fire? The critters from Mars? Yes. Rosalie called me about it about half an hour ago. I’ve been watching the teevee. I can see the smoke from out here on the porch.”

“Dad, are you going to be all right?” There was an unmistakable undertone of tension in Anse’s voice. “The wind’s blowing east to west, straight toward you. They say the Santa Susana fire’s moving into Ventura County already.”

“That’s a whole county away from me,” the Colonel said. “It would have to get to Camarillo and Ventura and a lot of other places first. Somehow I don’t think that’s going to happen.—How are things down your way, Anse?”

“Here? We’re getting Santa Anas, sure, but the nearest fire’s up back of Anaheim. Not a chance it’ll move down toward us. Ronnie and Paul and Helena are okay too.” Mike Carmichael had never gone in for parenthood at all, but the Colonel’s baby brother Lee had managed to sire two kids in his short life. All of the Colonel’s immediate kin—his two sons and his daughter, and his niece and nephew Paul and Helena, who were in their late twenties now and married—lived in nice respectable suburban places along the lower coast, places like Costa Mesa and Huntington Beach and Newport Beach and La Jolla. Even Anse’s brother Ronald, who was not so nice and not so respectable, was down there. “It’s you I’m worried about, Dad.”

“Don’t. Fire comes anywhere within thirty miles of here, I’ll get in the car and drive up to Monterey, San Francisco, Oregon, someplace like that. But it won’t happen. We know how to cope with fires in this state. I’m more interested in these E-Ts. What the devil do you suppose they are? This isn’t all just some kind of movie stunt, is it?”

“I don’t think so, Dad.”

“No. Neither do I, really. Nobody’s that dumb, to set half of L.A. on fire for a publicity event. I hear that they’re in New York and London and a lot of other places too.”

“Washington?” Anse asked.

“Haven’t heard anything about Washington,” said the Colonel. “Haven’t heard anything from Washington, either. Odd that the President hasn’t been on the air yet.”

“You don’t think they’ve captured him, do you, Dad?”

He didn’t sound serious. The Colonel laughed. “This is all so crazy, isn’t it? Men from Mars marching through our cities.—No, I don’t suppose they’ve captured him. I figure he must be stashed away somewhere very deep, having an extremely lively meeting with the National Security Council. Wouldn’t you say so?”

“We don’t have any kind of contingency plans for alien invasions, so far as I know,” Anse said. “But I’m not up on that sort of stuff these days.” Anse had been an officer in the Army’s materiel-procurement arm, but he had left the Service about two years back, tempted away by a goodly aerospace-industry paycheck. The Colonel hadn’t been too pleased about that. After a moment Anse said, sounding a little uncomfortable, as he always did when he said something he didn’t really believe for no other reason than that he suspected the Colonel wanted to hear it, “Well, if it’s war with Mars, or wherever it is they come from, so be it. I’m ready to go back in, if I’m needed.”

“So am I. I’m not too old. If I spoke Martian, I’d volunteer my services as an interpreter. But I don’t, and nobody’s been calling me for my advice so far, either.”

“They should,” Anse said.

“Yes,” the Colonel said, perhaps a little too vehemently. “They really should.”

There was silence at the other end for a moment. They were treading on dangerous territory. The Colonel had been reluctant to leave the Service, even after putting in his thirty years, and had never ceased regretting his retirement; Anse had scarcely hesitated, the moment he was eligible to claim his own.

Anse said, finally, “You want to hear one more crazy thing, Dad? I think I caught a glimpse of Cindy on the news this morning, in the crowd at the Porter Ranch mall.”

“Cindy?”

“Or her twin sister, if she has one. Looked just like her, that was for sure. There were five, six hundred people standing outside the entrance of the Wal-Mart watching the E-Ts go walking by, and for a second the camera zoomed down and I was sure I saw Cindy right in the front row. With her eyes as bright as a kid’s on Christmas morning. I was certain it was her.”

“Porter Ranch, that’s up beyond Northridge, isn’t it? What would she have been doing out there early in the morning when she lives way to hell and gone east of there and south, the other side of Mulholland?”

“The hair was just like hers, dark, cut in bangs. And big earrings, the hoops she always wears.—Well, maybe not. But I wouldn’t put it past her, going up to that mall to look at the E-Ts.”

“It would have been cordoned off right away, the moment the critters arrived,” the Colonel said, while the thought went through his mind that she should have been at her gallery in Santa Monica by this time of morning, and hadn’t been there. “Not likely that the police would have been letting rubberneckers in. You must have been mistaken. Someone else, similar appearance.”

“Maybe so.—Mike’s out of town, right? The back end of New Mexico, again?”

“Yes,” said the Colonel. “Supposed to be getting back today. I called his house but I got no answer. If he’s back already, I suspect he’s gone out on volunteer fire duty the way he does every year. Right in the thick of things, I imagine.”

“I imagine so. That’s exactly what he would be doing.” Anse laughed. “Old Mike would have a fit if it turned out that that really was Cindy out there at the mall with the E-Ts, wouldn’t he, Dad?”

“I suppose he would. But that wasn’t Cindy out there.—Listen, Anse, I do appreciate your calling, okay? Stay in touch. Give my love to Carole.”

“You know I will, Dad.”

The Colonel clapped the phone shut, and then, as it rang again, opened it almost immediately, thinking, Let it be Mike, let it be Mike.

But no, it was Paul calling—his nephew, Lee’s boy, the one who taught computer sciences at the Oceanside branch of the University. Worried about the old man and checking in with him, Paul was. The basic California catastrophe procedure, same drill good for earthquakes, fires, race riots, floods, and mudslides: call all your kin-folks within a hundred fifty miles of the event, call all your friends, too, make sure everybody’s all right, tie up the phone lines good and proper, overload the entire Net with needless well-meant communication. He would have expected Paul, at least, to have known better. But of course the Colonel had done the same thing himself only about ten minutes ago, calling all around town trying to track down his brother’s wife.

“Hell, I’m fine,” the Colonel said. “Air’s getting a little smoky from what’s going on down there, that’s all. I’ve got four Martians sitting in the living room with me right now and I’m teaching them how to play bridge.”

At the airport they had coffee ready, sandwiches, tacos, burritos. While Carmichael was waiting for the ground crew to fill his tanks he went inside to call Cindy again, and again there was no answer at home, none at the studio. He phoned the gallery, which was open by this time, and the shiftless kid who worked there said lazily that she hadn’t been in touch all morning.

“If you happen to hear from her,” Carmichael said, “tell her I’m flying fire control out of Van Nuys Airport, working the Chatsworth fire, and I’ll be home as soon as things calm down a little. Tell her I miss her, too. And tell her that if I run into an E-T I’ll give it a big hug for her. You got that? Tell her just that.”

“Will do. Oh, by the way, Mr. Carmichael—”

“Yes?”

“Your brother called, twice. Colonel Carmichael, that is. He said he thought you were, like, still in New Mexico and he was trying to find Mrs. Carmichael. I told him you were supposed to be coming back today, and that I didn’t know where she was, but that the fire was, like, nowhere near your house.”

“Good. If he calls again, let him know what I’m doing.” That was odd, Carmichael thought, Anson trying to phone Cindy. The Colonel had done a pretty good job over the past five or six years of pretending that Cindy didn’t exist. Carmichael hadn’t even known that his brother had the gallery number, nor could he understand why he would want to call there. Unless the Colonel was worried about him for some reason, so worried that he didn’t mind having to put up with talking with Cindy.

Probably I should phone him right now, Carmichael thought, before I go back upstairs.

But there was no dial tone now. System overload, most likely. Everybody was calling everybody all around the area. It was a miracle that he’d been able to do as well as he had with the phone just now. He hung up, tried again, still got nothing. And there were other people lined up waiting for the phone.

“Go ahead,” he said to the first man in line, stepping back from the booth. “You try. The line’s dead.”

He went looking for a different phone. Across the way in the main hall he saw a crowd gathered around someone carrying a portable television set, one of those jobs with a postcard-sized screen. Carmichael shouldered his way in just as the announcer was saying, “There has been no sign yet of the occupants of the San Gabriel or Orange County spaceships. But this was the horrifying sight that astounded residents of the Porter Ranch area beheld this morning between nine and ten o’clock.”

The tiny screen showed two upright tubular figures that looked like big squids walking on the tips of the tentacles that sprouted in clusters at their lower ends. Their skins were purplish and leathery-looking, with rows of luminescent orange spots glowing along the sides. They were moving cautiously through the parking lot of a shopping center, peering this way and that out of round yellow eyes as big as saucers. There was something almost dainty about their movements, but Carmichael saw that the aliens were taller than the lampposts—which would make them at least twelve feet high, maybe fifteen. At least a thousand onlookers were watching them at a wary distance, appearing both repelled and at the same time irresistibly drawn.

Now and then the creatures paused to touch their foreheads together in some sort of communion. The camera zoomed in for a close-up, then jiggled and swerved wildly just as an enormously long elastic tongue sprang from the chest of one of the alien beings and whipped out into the crowd.

For an instant the only thing visible on the screen was a view of the sky; then Carmichael saw a shot of a stunned-looking girl of about fourteen who had been caught around the waist by that long tongue, and was being hoisted into the air and popped like a collected specimen into a narrow green sack.

“Teams of the giant creatures roamed the mall for nearly an hour,” the announcer intoned. “It has definitely been confirmed that between twenty and thirty human hostages were captured before they returned to their vehicle, which now has taken off and gone back to the mother ship eleven miles to the west. Meanwhile, firefighting activities desperately continue under Santa Ana conditions in the vicinity of all three landing sites, and—”

Carmichael shook his head.

Los Angeles, he thought, disgusted. Jesus! The kind of people that live here, they just walk right up and let the E-Ts gobble them like flies. Maybe they think it’s just a movie, and everything will be okay by the last reel.

And then he remembered that Cindy was the kind of people who would walk right up to one of these E-Ts. Cindy was the kind of people who lived in Los Angeles, he told himself, except that Cindy was different. Somehow.

There was still a long line in front of every telephone booth. People were angrily banging the useless receivers against the walls. So there was no point even thinking about attempting to call Anson now. Carmichael went back outside. The DC-3 was loaded and ready.

In the forty-five minutes since he had left the fire line, the blaze seemed to have spread noticeably toward the south. This time the line boss had him lay down the retardant from the De Soto Avenue freeway interchange to the northeast corner of Porter Ranch. He emptied his tanks quickly and went back once more to the airport. Maybe they would have a working phone in Operations HQ that they would let him use to try to get quick calls through to his wife and his brother.

But as he was crossing the field a man in military uniform came out of the HQ building and beckoned to him. Carmichael walked over, frowning.

The man said, “You Mike Carmichael? Live in Laurel Canyon?”

“That’s right.”

“I’ve got a little troublesome news for you. Let’s go inside.”

Carmichael was too tired even to feel alarm. “Suppose you tell me here, okay?”

The officer moistened his lips. He looked very uneasy. He had one of those blank featureless baby-faces, nothing interesting about it at all except the incongruously big eyebrows that crawled across his forehead like shaggy caterpillars. He was very young, a lot younger than Carmichael expected officers of his rank to be, and obviously he wasn’t good at this stuff, whatever kind of stuff it was.

“It’s about your wife,” he said. “Cynthia Carmichael? That’s your wife’s name?”

“Come on,” Carmichael said. “God damn it, get to the point!”

“She’s one of the hostages, Mr. Carmichael.”

“Hostages?”

“The space hostages. Haven’t you heard? The people who were captured by the aliens?”

Carmichael shut his eyes for a moment. His breath went from him as though he had been kicked.

“Where did it happen?” he demanded. “How did they get her?”

The young officer gave him a strange strained smile. “It was the shopping-center lot, Porter Ranch. Maybe you saw some of it on the TV.”

Carmichael nodded, feeling more numb by the moment. That girl jerked off her feet by that immense elastic tongue, swept through the air, popped into that green pouch.

And Cindy—Cindy—?

“You saw the part where the creatures were moving around? And then suddenly they were grabbing people, and everyone was running from them?”

“No. I must have missed that part.”

“That was when they got her. She was right up front when they began grabbing, and maybe she would have had a chance to get away, but she waited just a little bit too long. She started to run, I understand, but then she stopped—she looked back at them—she may have called something out to them—and then—well, and then—”

“Then they scooped her up?”

“I have to tell you, sir, that they did.” The baby-face worked hard at looking tragic. “I’m terribly sorry, Mr. Carmichael.”

“I’m sure you are,” Carmichael said stonily. An abyss had begun to open within him. “So am I.”

“One thing all the witnesses agreed, she didn’t panic, she didn’t scream. We can show it to you on tape inside. She was very brave when those monsters grabbed her. How in God’s name you can be brave when something that size is holding you in mid-air is something I don’t understand, but I have to assure you, sir, that those who saw it—”

“It makes sense to me,” Carmichael said.

He turned away. He shut his eyes again, for a moment, and took deep, heavy pulls of the hot smoky air.

It figures, he thought. It makes complete sense.

Of course she had gone right out to the landing site, as soon as the news of their arrival began to get around. Of course. If there was anyone in Los Angeles who would have wanted to get to those creatures and see them with her own eyes and perhaps try to talk to them and establish some sort of rapport with them, it was Cindy. She wouldn’t have been afraid of them. She had never seemed to be afraid of anything. And these were the wise superior beings from HESTEGHON, anyway, weren’t they? It wasn’t hard for Carmichael to imagine her in that panicky mob in the parking lot, cool and radiant, staring at the giant aliens, smiling at them even in the moment when they seized her.

In a way Carmichael felt very proud of her. But it terrified him to think that she was in their grasp.

“She’s on the ship?” he asked. “The one that I saw sitting in that field just beyond the fire zone?”

“Yes.”

“Have there been any messages from the hostages yet? Or from the aliens, for that matter?”

“I’m sorry. I’m not in a position to divulge that information.”

“I’ve been risking my ass all afternoon trying to put that fire out and my wife is a prisoner on the spaceship and you’re not in a position to divulge any information?”

The officer gave him a dead-fish sort of smile. Carmichael tried to tell himself that he was just a kid, the way the cops and the high-school teachers and the mayors and governors and everybody else mysteriously seemed to be just kids these days. A kid with a nasty job to do.

“I was instructed to tell you the news about your wife,” the kid said, after a moment. “I’m not allowed to say anything about any other aspect of this event to anyone, not to anyone at all. Military security.”

“Yes,” Carmichael said, and for an instant he was back in the war again, trying to find out something, anything, about Cong movements in the area he was supposed to be patrolling the next day, and running into that same dead-fish smile, that same solemn meaningless invocation of military security. His head swam and names that he hadn’t thought of in decades ran through his brain, Phu Loi, Binh Thuy, Tuy Hoa, Song Bo. Cam Ranh Bay. The U Minh Forest. Images from the past, swimming around. The greasy sidewalks of Tu Do Street in Saigon, skinny whores grinning out of every bar, ARVNs in red berets all over the place. White sand beaches lined with coconut palms, pretty as a picture; native kids with one leg each, hobbling on improvised crutches; Delta hooches going up in flames. And the briefing officers lying to you, lying, lying, always lying. His buried past, evoked by a single sickly smile.

“Can you at least tell me whether there is any information?”

“I’m sorry, sir, I’m not at liberty to—”

“I refuse to believe,” Carmichael said, “that that ship is just sitting there, that nothing at all is being done to make contact with—”

“A command center has been established, Mr. Carmichael, and certain efforts are under way. That much I can tell you. I can tell you that Washington is involved. But beyond that, at the present point in time—”

Another kid, a pink-faced one who looked like an Eagle Scout, came running up. “Your plane’s all loaded and ready to go, Mike!”

“Yeah,” Carmichael said. The fire, the fucking fire! He had almost managed to forget about it. Almost.

He hesitated a moment, torn between conflicting responsibilities. Then he said to the officer, “Look, I’ve got to get back out on the fire line. I want to look at that tape of Cindy getting captured, but I can’t do it now. Can you stay here a little while?”

“Well—”

“Maybe half an hour. I have to do a retardant dump. Then I want you to show me the tape. And then to take me over to that spaceship and get me through the cordon, so I can talk to those critters myself. If my wife’s on that ship, I mean to get her off it.”

“I don’t see how it would be possible for—”

“Well, try to see,” Carmichael said. “I’ll meet you right here in half an hour, okay?”

She had never seen anything so beautiful. She had never even imagined that such beauty could exist. If this was how their spaceship looked, Cindy thought, what could their home world possibly be like?

The place was palatial. The aliens had taken them up and up on a kind of escalator, rising through a seemingly endless series of spiral chambers. Every chamber was at least twenty feet high, as was to be expected, considering how big the aliens themselves were. The shining walls tapered upward in eerie zigzag angles, meeting far overhead in a kind of Gothic vault, but not rigid-looking the way Gothic was. Instead there was a sudden twist and leap up there, a quick baffling shift of direction, as though the ceilings were partly in one dimension and partly in another.

And the ship was one huge hall of mirrors. Every surface, every single one, had a reflective metallic sheen. Wherever your eye came to rest you saw a million ricocheting shimmering images, receding dizzyingly to infinity. There didn’t seem to be any actual sources of illumination in here, just a luminous glow that came out of nowhere, as though being generated by the back-and-forth interaction of all those mirror-bright metal surfaces.

And the plants—the flowers—

Cindy loved plants, the stranger the better. The garden of their little Laurel Canyon house was dense with them, ferns and orchids and cacti and bromeliads and aloes and philodendrons and miniature palms and all manner of other things from the abundantly stocked nurseries of Los Angeles. Something was in bloom every day of the year. “My science-fiction garden,” she called it. She had picked things for their tropical strangeness, their corkscrew stems and spiky leaves and unusual variegations. Every imaginable shape and texture and color was represented there.

But her garden looked like a dull prosaic bunch of petunias and marigolds compared with the fantasyland plants that grew everywhere about the ship, drifting freely in mid-air, seemingly having no need of soil or water.

There were forking things with immense, fleshy turquoise leaves, big enough to serve as mattresses for elephants; there were plants that looked like clusters of spears, there was one that had a lightning-bolt shape, there were some that grew upside down, standing on fanned-out sprays of delicate purple foliage. And the flowers! Green blossoms with bright inquisitive magenta eyes at their centers; furry black flowers, tipped with splashes of gold, that throbbed like moth-wings; flowers that seemed to be made out of silver wire; flowers that looked like tufts of flame; flowers that emitted low musical tones.

She loved them all. She yearned to know their names. Her mind went soaring into ecstasy at the thought of what a botanical garden on Planet Hesteghon must look like.

There were eight hostages in this chamber with her, three male, five female. The youngest was a girl of about eleven; the oldest, a man who looked to be in his eighties. They all seemed terrified. They were sitting together in a sorry little heap, sobbing, shivering, praying, muttering. Only Cindy was up and around, wandering through the immense room like Alice let loose in Wonderland, gazing delightedly at the marvelous flowers, looking in wonder at the miraculous cascades of interlacing mirror images.

It weirded her out to see how miserable the others all were in the presence of such fantastic beauty.

“No,” Cindy told them, coming over and standing in front of them. “Stop crying! This is going to be the most wonderful moment of your lives. They don’t intend to harm us.”

A couple of them glared at her. The ones who were sobbing sobbed harder.

“I mean it,” she said. “I know. These people are from the planet Hesteghon, which you could have read about in the Testimony of Hermes. That’s a book that was published about six years ago, translated from the ancient Greek. The Hesteghon people come to Earth every five thousand years. They were the original Sumerian gods, you know. Taught the Sumerians how to write on clay tablets. On an earlier visit they taught the Cro-Magnons to paint on cave walls.”

“She’s a lunatic,” one of the women said. “Will somebody please shut her up?”

“Hear me out,” Cindy said. “I promise you, we’re absolutely safe in their hands. On this visit their job is to teach us at long last how to live in peace, forever and ever. We’ll be their communicants. They’ll speak through us, and we’ll carry their message to all the world.” She smiled. “You think I’m a nutcase, I know, but I’m actually the sanest one here. And I tell you—”

Someone screamed. Someone pointed, stabbing her finger wildly into the air. They all began to cower and cringe.

Cindy felt a glow of sudden warmth behind her, and looked about.

One of the aliens had entered the huge room. It stood about ten yards to her rear, swaying gently on the little tips of its walking-tentacles. There was an aura of great tranquillity about it. Cindy felt a wonderful stream of love and peace emanating from it. Its two enormous golden eyes were benign wells of serene radiance.

They are like gods, she thought. Gods.

“My name is Cindy Carmichael,” she told the alien straightaway. “I want to welcome you to Earth. I want you to know how glad I am that you’ve come to fulfill your ancient promise.”

The giant creature continued to rock pleasantly back and forth. It did not appear to notice that she had spoken.

“Talk to me with your mind,” Cindy said to it. “I’m not afraid of you. They are, but I’m not. Tell me about Hesteghon. I want to know everything there is to know about it.”

One of the airborne flowers, a velvety black one with pale green spots on its two fleshy petals, drifted nearer to her. There was a crevice at its center that looked remarkably like a vagina. From that long dark slit emerged a little tendril that quivered once and gave off a little low-pitched blurt of sound, and abruptly Cindy found herself unable to speak. She had lost the power of shaping words entirely. But there was nothing upsetting about that; she understood without any doubt that the alien simply did not want her to speak just now, and when it was ready to restore her ability to speak it would certainly do so.

A second quick sound came from the slit at the heart of the black flower, a higher-pitched one than before. And Cindy felt the alien entering her mind.

It was almost a sexual thing. It went inside her smoothly and easily and completely, and it filled her just as thoroughly as a hand fills a glove. She was still there inside herself, but there was something else in there too, something immense and omnipotent, causing her no injury, displacing nothing, but making itself at home in her as though there had always been a space within her large enough for the mind of a gigantic alien being to occupy.

She felt it massaging her brain.

That was the only word for it: massaging. A gentle soothing kneading sensation, as of fingertips lovingly caressing the folds and convolutions of her brain. What the alien was doing, she realized, was methodically going through her entire accumulation of knowledge and memory, examining every single experience of her life from the moment of birth until this second, absorbing it all. In the course of—what? Two seconds?—it was done with the job, and now, she knew, it would be able to write her complete biography, if it wanted to. It knew whatever she knew, the street she had lived on when she was a little girl and the name of her first lover and the exact design of the star sapphire ring she had finished making last Tuesday. And it also had learned from her the multiplication table and how to say “Where is the bathroom, please?” in Spanish and the way to get from the westbound Ventura Freeway to the southbound San Diego Freeway, and all the rest of the things in her mind, including a good many things, very probably, that she had long ago forgotten herself.

Then it withdrew from her and she could speak again and she said as soon as she could, “You know now, don’t you, that I’m not frightened of you. That I love you and want to do everything I can to help you fulfill your mission.”

And, since she suspected it preferred to communicate telepathically instead of by voice, she said to it also, silently, with all the mental force that she could muster:

Tell me everything about Hesteghon.

But the alien did not seem to be ready to tell her anything. For a moment it contemplated her gravely and, Cindy thought, tenderly, but she felt no sense of contact with its mind. And then it went away.

When Carmichael was aloft again he noticed at once that the fire was spreading. The wind was even rougher and wilder than before, and now it was blowing hard from the northwest, pushing the flames down toward the edge of Chatsworth. Already some glowing cinders had blown across the city limits and Carmichael saw houses afire to his left, maybe half a dozen of them.

There would be more houses going up, he knew, many more, strings of them exploding into flame one after another as the heat coming from next door became irresistible. He had no doubt of it. In firefighting you come to develop an odd sixth sense of the way the struggle is going, whether you’re gaining on the blaze or the blaze is gaining on you. And that sixth sense told him now that the vast effort that was under way was failing, that the fire was still on the upcurve, that whole neighborhoods were going to be ashes by nightfall.

He held on tight as the DC-3 entered the fire zone. The fire was sucking air like crazy, now, and the turbulence was astounding: it felt as if a giant’s hand had grabbed the ship by the nose. The line boss’s helicopter was tossing around like a balloon on a string.

Carmichael called in for orders and was sent over to the southwest side of the zone, close by the outermost street of houses. Firefighters with shovels were beating on wisps of flame rising out of people’s gardens down there. The heavy skirts of dry dead leaves that dangled down the trunks of a row of towering palm trees running along the edge of the curb for the entire length of the block were starting to blaze into flame, going up in a neat consecutive sequence, pop pop pop pop. The neighborhood dogs had formed a crazed pack, running bewilderedly back and forth. Dogs were weirdly loyal during fires: they stuck around. The neighborhood cats, he figured, were halfway to San Francisco by now.

Swooping down to treetop height, Carmichael let go with a red gush of chemicals, swathing everything that looked combustible with the stuff. The shovelers looked up and waved at him and grinned, and he dipped his wings to them and headed off to the north, around the western edge of the blaze—it was edging farther to the west too, he saw, leaping up into the high canyons out by the Ventura County line—and then he flew eastward along the Santa Susana foothills until he spotted the alien spaceship once more, standing isolated in its circle of blackened earth like a high-rise building of strange futuristic design that some real-estate developer had absentmindedly built out here in the middle of nowhere. The cordon of military vehicles seemed now to be even larger, what looked like a whole armored division deployed in concentric rings beginning half a mile or so from the ship.

Carmichael stared intently at the alien vessel as though he might be able to see right through its shining walls to Cindy within.

He imagined her sitting at a table, or whatever the aliens might use instead of tables—sitting at a table with seven or eight of the huge beings, calmly explaining Earth to them and then asking them to explain their world to her.

He was altogether certain that she was safe, that no harm would come to her, that they were not torturing her or dissecting her or sending electric currents through her just for the sake of seeing how she reacted. Things like that would never happen to Cindy, he knew. The only thing he feared was that they would depart for their home star without releasing her. That notion was truly frightening. The terror that that thought generated in him was as powerful as any kind of fear he had ever felt, rising up through his chest like a lump of molten lead, spreading out to fill his throat and send red shafts of pain into his skull.

As Carmichael continued to approach the aliens’ landing site he saw the guns of some of the tanks below swiveling around to point at him, and he picked up a radio voice telling him brusquely, “You’re off limits, DC-3. Get back to the fire zone. This is prohibited airspace.”

“Sorry,” Carmichael replied. “My mistake. No entry intended.”

But as he began to make his turn he dropped down even lower, so that he could have one last good look at the huge spaceship. If it had portholes, and Cindy was looking out one of those portholes, he wanted her to know that he was nearby. That he was watching, that he was waiting for her to come back. But the ship’s vast hull was blind-faced, entirely blank.

—Cindy? Cindy?

It was like something happening in a dream, that she should be inside that spaceship. And yet it was so very much like her that she should have made it happen.

She was always questing after the strange, the mysterious, the unfamiliar. The people she brought to the house: a Navajo once, a bewildered Turkish tourist, a kid from New York. The music she played, the way she chanted along with it. The incense, the lights, the meditation. “I’m searching,” she liked to say. Trying always to find a route that would take her into something that was wholly outside herself. Trying to become something more than she was. That was how they had fallen in love in the first place, an unlikely couple, she with her beads and sandals, he with his steady no-nonsense view of the world: she had come up to him that day long ago when he was in the record shop in Studio City, and God only knew what he was doing in that part of the world in the first place, and she had asked him something and they had started to talk, and they had talked and talked, talked all night, she wanting to know everything there was to know about him, and when dawn came up they were still together and they had rarely been parted since. He never had really been able to understand what it was that she had wanted him for—the Central Valley redneck, the aging flyboy—although he felt certain that she wanted him for something real, that he filled some need for her, as she did for him, which could for lack of a more specific term be called love. She had always been searching for that, too. Who wasn’t? And he knew that she loved him truly and well, though he couldn’t quite see why. “Love is understanding,” she liked to say. “Understanding is loving.” Was she trying to tell the spaceship people about love right this minute? Cindy, Cindy, Cindy—

The Colonel’s phone bleeped again. He grabbed for it, eager and ready for his brother’s voice.

Wrong again. Not Mike. This was a hearty booming unfamiliar voice, one that said, “Anson? Anson Carmichael? Lloyd Buckley here!”

“I’m sorry,” the Colonel said, a little too quickly. “I’m afraid I don’t know—”

Then he placed the name, and his heart began to pound, and a prickle of excitement began running up and down his back.

“Calling from Washington.”

I’ll be damned, the Colonel thought. So they haven’t forgotten about me after all!

“Lloyd, how the hell are you? You know, I was just sitting here fifteen minutes ago hoping you’d call! Expecting you to call.”

It was only partly a lie. Certainly he had hoped Washington would call, though he hadn’t actually expected anything. And the name of Lloyd Buckley hadn’t been one of those that had gone through his mind, although the Colonel realized now that it really should have been.

Buckley, yes. Big meaty red-faced man, loud, cheery, smart, though perhaps not altogether as smart as he thought himself to be. Career State Department man; during the latter years of the Clinton administration an assistant secretary of state for third-world cultural liaison who had done diplomatic shuttle service in Somalia, Bosnia, Afghanistan, Turkey, the Seychelles, and other post-Cold War hot spots, working closely with the military side of things. Probably still working in that line these days. A student of military history, he liked to call himself, brandishing the names of Clausewitz, Churchill, Fuller, Creasy. Fancied himself something of an anthropologist, too. Had audited one semester of the course that the Colonel had taught at the Academy, the one in the psychology of non-western cultures. Had had lunch with him a few times, too, seven or eight years back.

“You’ve been keeping up with the situation, naturally,” Buckley said. “Pretty sensational, isn’t it? You’re not having any problem with those fires, are you?”

“Not here. They’re a couple of counties away. Some smoke riding on the wind, but I think we’ll be okay around here.”

“Good. Good. Splendid.—Seen the Entities on the tube yet? The shopping-mall thing, and all?”

“Of course. The Entities, is that what we’re calling them, then?”

“The Entities, yes. The aliens. The extraterrestrials. The space invaders. ‘Entities’ seems like the best handle, at least for now. It’s a nice neutral term. ‘E-T’ sounds too Hollywood and ‘Aliens’ makes it sound too much like a problem for the Immigration and Naturalization Service.”

“And we don’t know that they’re invaders yet, do we?” the Colonel said. “Do we? Lloyd, will you tell me what the hell this is all about?”

Buckley chuckled. “As a matter of fact, Anson, we were hoping you might be able to tell us. I know that you’re theoretically retired, but do you think you could get your aging bones off to Washington first thing tomorrow? The White House has called a meeting of high honchos and overlords to discuss our likely response to the—ah—event, and we’re bringing in a little cadre of special consultants who might just be of some help.”

“That’s pretty short notice,” the Colonel heard himself saying, to his own horror. The last thing he wanted was to sound reluctant. Quickly he said: “But yes, yes, absolutely yes. I’d be delighted.”

“The whole thing came on pretty short notice for all of us, my friend. If we have an Air Force helicopter on your front lawn at half past five tomorrow morning to pick you up, do you think you could manage to clamber aboard?”

“You know I could, Lloyd.”

“Good. I was sure you’d come through. Be outside and waiting for us, yes?”

“Right. Absolutely.”

“Hasta la manana,” Buckley said, and he was gone.

The Colonel stared in wonder at the phone in his hand. Then he slowly folded it up and put it away.

Washington? Him? Tomorrow?

A great goulash of emotions surged through him as the realization that they had actually called him sank in: relief, satisfaction, surprise, pride, vindication, curiosity, and five or six other things, including a certain sneaky and unsettling measure of apprehensive-ness about whether he was really up to the job. Fundamentally, he was thrilled. On the simplest human level it was good, at his age, just to be wanted, considering how unimportant he had felt when he had finally packed in his career and headed for the ranch. On the loftier level of Carmichael tradition, it was fine to have a chance to serve his country once more, to be able to make oneself useful again in a time of crisis.

All of that felt very, very good.

Provided that he could be of some use, of course, in the current—ah—event.

Provided.

The only way that Mike Carmichael could keep himself from keeling over from fatigue, as he guided his DC-3 back to Van Nuys to load up for his next flight over the fire zone, was to imagine himself back in New Mexico where he had been only twenty-four hours before, alone out there under a bare hard sky flecked by occasional purple clouds. Dark sandstone monoliths all around him, mesas stippled with sparse clumps of sage and mesquite, and, straight ahead, the jagged brown upthrusting pinnacle that was holy Ship Rock—Tse Bit’a’i, the Navajo called it, the Rock with Wings—that spear of congealed magma standing high above the flat arid silver-gray flatness of the desert floor like a mountain that had wandered down from the moon.

He loved that place. He had been entirely at peace there.

And to have come back from there smack into this—frantic hordes jamming every freeway in panicky escape from they knew not what, columns of filthy smoke staining the sky, houses erupting into flame, nightmare creatures parading around in a shopping-mall parking lot, Cindy a captive aboard a spaceship from another star, a spaceship from another star, a spaceship from another star—

No. No. No. No.

Think of New Mexico. Think of the emptiness, the solitude, the quiet. The mountains, the mesas, the perfection of the unblemished sky. Clear your mind of everything else.

Everything.

Everything.

He landed the plane at Van Nuys a few minutes later like a man who was flying in his sleep, and went on into Operations HQ.

Everybody there seemed to know by this time that his wife was one of the hostages. The officer that Carmichael had asked to wait for him was gone. He wasn’t very surprised by that. He thought for a moment of trying to go over to the ship by himself, to get through the cordon and do something about getting Cindy free, but he realized that that was a dumb idea: the military was in charge and they wouldn’t let him or anybody else get within a mile of that ship, and he’d only get snarled up in stuff with the television interviewers looking for poignant crap about the families of those who had been captured.

Then the head dispatcher came over to him, a tanned smooth-featured man named Hal Andersen who had the look of a movie star going to seed. Andersen seemed almost about ready to burst with compassion, and in throbbing funereal tones told Carmichael that it would be all right with him if he called it quits for the day and went home to await whatever might happen. But Carmichael shook him off. “Listen, Hal, I won’t get her back by sitting in the living room. And this fire isn’t going to go out by itself, either. I’ll do one more go-round up there.”

It took twenty minutes for the ground crew to pump the retardant slurry into the DC-3’s tanks. Carmichael stood to one side, drinking Cokes and watching the planes come and go. People stared at him, and those who knew him waved from a distance, and three or four pilots came over and silently squeezed his arm or rested a hand consolingly on his shoulder. It was all very touching and dramatic. Everybody saw himself as starring in a movie, in this town. Well, this one was a horror movie. The northern sky was black with soot, shading to gray to the east and west. The air was sauna-hot and frighteningly dry: you could set fire to it, Carmichael thought, with a snap of your fingers.

Somebody running by said that a new fire had broken out in Pasadena, near the Jet Propulsion Lab, and there was another in Griffith Park. The wind was starting to carry firebrands westward toward the center of Los Angeles from the two inland fires, then. Dodger Stadium was burning, someone said. So is Santa Anita Racetrack, said someone else. The whole damned place is going to go, Carmichael thought. And meanwhile my wife is sitting inside a spaceship from another planet having tea with the boys from HESTEGHON.

When his plane was ready he took it up and laid down a new line of retardant, flying just above the trees, practically in the faces of the firefighters working on the outskirts of Chatsworth. This time they were too busy to wave. In order to get back to the airport he had to make a big loop behind the fire, over the Santa Susanas and down the flank of the Golden State Freeway, and for the first time he saw the fires burning to the east, two huge conflagrations marking the places where the exhaust streams of the other two spaceships had grazed the dry grass, and a bunch of smaller blazes strung out on a south-veering line that ran from Burbank or Glendale deep into Orange County.

His hands were shaking as he touched down at Van Nuys. He had gone without rest now for something like thirty-two hours, and he could feel himself beginning to pass into that blank white exhaustion that lies somewhere beyond ordinary fatigue.

The head dispatcher was waiting for him again as he left his plane. This time there was an odd sappy smile on his implausibly handsome face, and Carmichael thought he understood what it meant. “All right, Hal,” he said at once. “I give in. I’ll knock off for five or six hours and grab some shut-eye, and then you can call me back to—”

“No. That isn’t it.”

“That isn’t what?”

“What I came out here to tell you, Mike. They’ve released some of the hostages.”

“Cindy?”

“I think so. There’s an Air Force car here to take you to Sylmar. That’s where they’ve got the command center set up. They said to find you as soon as you came off your last dump mission and send you over there so you can talk with your wife.”

“So she’s free,” Carmichael cried. “Oh, Jesus, she’s free!”

“You go on along, Mike. We can work on the fire without you for a while, if that’s okay with you.”

The Air Force car looked like a general’s limousine, long and low and sleek, with a square-jawed driver in front and a couple of very tough-looking young officers to sit with him in back. They said hardly anything, and they looked as weary as Carmichael felt. “How’s my wife?” he asked, as the car pulled away, and one of them said, “We understand that she hasn’t been harmed.” The way he said it, deep and somber, was stiff and strange and melodramatic. Carmichael shrugged. Another one who thinks he’s an actor, he told himself. This one’s seen too many old Air Force movies.

The whole city seemed to be on fire now. Within the air-conditioned limo there was only the faintest whiff of smoke, but the sky to the east was terrifying, with apocalyptic streaks of red shooting up like meteors traveling in reverse through the blackness. Carmichael asked the Air Force men about that, but all he got was a clipped, “It looks pretty bad, we understand.”

Somewhere along the San Diego Freeway between Mission Hills and Sylmar Carmichael fell asleep, and the next thing he knew they were waking him gently and leading him into a vast bleak hangar-like building near the reservoir.

The place was a maze of cables and screens, with military personnel operating assorted mysterious biochip gizmos and what looked like a thousand conventional computers and ten thousand telephones. He let himself be shuffled along, moving mechanically and barely able to focus his eyes, to an inner office where a lieutenant colonel with blond hair perhaps just beginning to shade into gray greeted him in his best this-is-the-tense-part-of-the-movie style and said, “This may be the most difficult job you’ve ever had to handle, Mr. Carmichael.”

Carmichael scowled. Everybody was Hollywood to the core in this damned city, he thought. And even the colonels were too young nowadays.

“They told me that the hostages were being freed,” he said. “Where’s my wife?”

The lieutenant colonel pointed to a television screen. “We’re going to let you talk to her right now.”

“Are you saying I don’t get to see her?”

“Not immediately.”

“Why not? Is she all right?”

“As far as we know, yes.”

“You mean she hasn’t been released? They told me the hostages were being freed.”

“All but three have been let go,” said the lieutenant colonel. “Two people, according to the aliens, were slightly injured as they were captured, and are undergoing medical treatment aboard the ship. They’ll be released shortly. The third is your wife, Mr. Carmichael.” Just the merest bit of a pause, now, for that terrific dramatic effect that seemed to be so important to these people. “She is unwilling to leave the ship.”

The effect was dramatic, all right. For Carmichael it was like hitting an air pocket.

“Unwilling?”

“She claims to have volunteered to make the journey to the home world of the aliens. She says she’s going to serve as our ambassador, our special emissary.—Mr. Carmichael, does your wife have any history of mental imbalance?”

Glaring, Carmichael said, “Cindy is very sane. Believe me.”

“You are aware that she showed no display of fear when the aliens seized her in the shopping-center incident this morning?”

“I know that, yes. That doesn’t mean she’s crazy. She’s unusual. She has unusual ideas. But she’s not crazy. Neither am I, incidentally.” He put his hands to his face for a moment and pressed his fingertips lightly against his eyes. “All right,” he said. “Let me talk to her.”

“Do you think you can persuade her to leave that ship?”

“I’m sure as hell going to try.”

“You are not yourself sympathetic to what she’s doing, are you?” the blond-haired lieutenant colonel asked.

Carmichael looked up. “Yes, I am sympathetic. She’s an intelligent woman doing something that she thinks is important, and doing it of her own free will. Why the hell shouldn’t I be sympathetic? But I’m going to try to talk her out of it, you bet. I love her. I want her back. Somebody else can be the goddamned ambassador to Betelgeuse. Let me talk to her, will you?”

The lieutenant colonel gestured with a little wand the size of a pencil, and the big television screen came to life. For a moment mysterious colored patterns flashed across it in a disturbing random way; then Carmichael caught glimpses of shadowy catwalks, intricate gleaming metal strutworks crossing and recrossing at peculiar angles; and then for an instant one of the aliens appeared on the screen. Yellow saucer-sized eyes of gigantic size looked complacently back at him. Carmichael felt altogether wide-awake now.

The alien’s face vanished and Cindy came into view.

The moment he saw her, Carmichael knew that he had lost her.

Her face was glowing. There was a calm joy in her eyes verging on ecstasy. He had seen her look something like that on many occasions, but this was different: this was beyond anything she had attained before. It was nirvana. She had seen the beatific vision, this time.

“Cindy?”

“Hello, Mike.”

“Can you tell me what’s been happening in there, Cindy?”

“It’s incredible. The contact, the communication.”

Sure, he thought. If anyone could make contact with the space people from dear old HESTEGHON, land of enchantment, it would be Cindy. She had a certain kind of magic about her: the gift of being able to open any door.

She said, “They speak mind to mind, you know, no barriers at all. No words. You just know what they mean. They’ve come in peace, to get to know us, to join in harmony with us, to welcome us into the confederation of worlds.”

He moistened his lips. “What have they done to you, Cindy? Have they brainwashed you or something?”

“No, Mike, no! It isn’t anything like that! They haven’t done a thing to me, I swear. We’ve just talked.”

“Talked!”

“They’ve showed me how to touch my mind to theirs. That isn’t brainwashing. I’m still me. I, me, Cindy. I’m okay. Do I look as though I’m being harmed? They aren’t dangerous. Believe me.”

“They’ve set fire to half the city with their exhaust trails, do you know that?”

“That grieves them terribly. It was an accident. They didn’t understand how dry the hills were. If they had some way of extinguishing the flames, they would, but the fires are too big even for them. They ask us to forgive them. They want everyone to know how sorry they are.” She paused a moment. Then she said, very gently, “Mike, will you come on board? I want you to experience them as I’m experiencing them.”

“I can’t do that, Cindy.”

“Of course you can! Anyone can! You just open your mind, and they touch you, and—”

“I know. I don’t want to. Come out of there and come home, Cindy. Please. Please. It’s been six days—seven, now. It feels like a month. I want to hug you, I want to hold you—”

“You can hold me as tight as you like. They’ll let you on board. We can go to their world together. You know that I’m going to go with them to their world, don’t you?”

“You aren’t. Not really.”

She nodded gravely. She seemed to be terribly serious about it.

“They’ll be leaving in a few weeks, as soon as they’ve had a chance to exchange gifts with Earth. This was intended just as a quick diplomatic visit. I’ve seen images of their planet—like movies, only they do it with their minds—Mike, you can’t imagine how beautiful everything is, the buildings, the lakes and hills, the plants! And they want so much to have me come, to have me experience it firsthand!”

Sweat rolled out of his hair into his eyes, making him blink, but he did not dare wipe it away, for fear she would think he was crying.

“I don’t want to go to their planet, Cindy. And I don’t want you to go either.”

She was silent for a time.

Then she smiled delicately and said, “I know you don’t, Mike.”

He clenched his fists and let go and clenched them again. “I can’t go there.”

“No. You can’t. I understand that. Los Angeles is alien enough for you, I think. You need to be in your own places, in your own real world, not running off to some far star. I won’t try to coax you.”

“But you’re going to go anyway?” he asked, and it was not really a question.

“You already know what I’m going to do.”

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry. But not really.”

“Do you love me?” Carmichael said, and regretted saying it the moment it had passed his lips.

She smiled sadly. “You know I do. And you know I don’t want to leave you. But once they touched my mind with theirs, once I saw what kind of beings they are—do you understand what I’m saying? I don’t have to explain, do I? You always know what I’m saying.”

“Cindy—”

“Oh, Mike, I do love you so much.”

“And I love you, babe. And I wish you’d come down out of that goddamned ship.”

Her gaze was unwavering. “You won’t ask that. Because you love me, right? Just as I won’t ask you again to come on board with me, because I really love you. Do you understand what I’m saying, Mike?”

He wanted to reach into the screen and grab her.

“I understand, yes,” he made himself say.

“I love you, Mike.”

“I love you, Cindy.”

“They tell me the trip takes forty-eight of our years, even by hyperspace, but it will only seem like a few weeks to me. Oh, Mike! Goodbye, Mike! God bless, Mike!” She blew kisses to him. He could see her favorite rings on her fingers, the three little strange star sapphire ones that she had made when she first began to design jewelry. They were his favorite rings too. She loved star sapphires, and so did he, because she did.

Carmichael searched his mind for some new way to reason with her, some line of argument that would work. But he couldn’t find any. He felt that vast emptiness beginning to expand within him again, that abyss, as though he were being made hollow by some whirling blade.

Her face was shining. She seemed like a complete stranger to him, all of a sudden.

She seemed now entirely like a Los Angeles person, one of those, lost in kooky fantasies and dreams, and it was as though he had never known her, or as though he had pretended she was something other than she was. No. No, that isn’t right, he told himself. She’s not one of those, she’s Cindy. Following her own star, as always.

Suddenly he was unable to look at the screen any longer, and he turned away, biting his lip, making a shoving gesture with his left hand. The Air Force men in the room wore the awkward expressions of people who had inadvertently eavesdropped on someone’s most intimate moments and were trying to pretend that they hadn’t heard a thing.

“She isn’t crazy, Colonel,” Carmichael said vehemently. “I don’t want anyone believing she’s some kind of nut.”

“Of course not, Mr. Carmichael.”

“But she isn’t going to leave that spaceship. You heard her. She’s staying aboard, going back with them to wherever the hell they came from. I can’t do anything about that. You see that, don’t you? Nothing I could do, short of going aboard that ship and dragging her off physically, would get her out of there. And I wouldn’t ever do that.”

“Naturally not. In any case, you understand that it would be impossible for us to permit you to go on board, even for the sake of attempting to remove her?”

“That’s all right,” Carmichael said. “I wouldn’t dream of it. To remove her or even just to join her for the trip. I don’t have the right to force her to leave and I certainly don’t want to go to that place myself. Let her go: that’s what she was meant to do in this world. Not me. Not me, Colonel. That’s simply not my thing.” He took a deep breath. He thought he might be trembling. He was starting to feel sick. “Colonel, would you mind very much if I got the hell out of here? Maybe I would feel better if I went back out there and dumped some more gunk on that fire. I think that might help. That’s what I think, Colonel. All right? Would you send me back to Van Nuys, Colonel?”

So he went up one last time in the DC-3. He had lost track of the number of missions he had flown that day. They wanted him to dump the retardants along the western face of the fire, but instead he went to the east, where the spaceship was, and flew in a wide circle around it. A radio voice warned him to move out of the area, and he said that he would.

As he circled, a hatch opened in the spaceship’s side and one of the aliens appeared, looking colossal even from Carmichael’s altitude. The huge purplish thing stepped from the ship, extended its tentacles, seemed to be sniffing the smoky air. It appeared very calm, standing there like that.

Carmichael thought vaguely of flying down low and dropping his whole load of retardants on the creature, drowning it in gunk, getting even with the aliens for having taken Cindy from him. He shook his head. That’s crazy, he told himself. Cindy would be appalled if she knew he had ever considered any such thing.

But that’s what I’m like, he thought. Just an ordinary ugly vengeful Earthman. And that’s why I’m not going to go to that other planet, and that’s why she is.

He swung around past the spaceship and headed straight across Granada Hills and Northridge into Van Nuys Airport. When he was on the ground he sat at the controls of his plane a long while, not moving at all. Finally one of the dispatchers came out and called up to him, “Mike, are you okay?”

“Yeah. I’m fine.”

“How come you came back without dropping your load?”

Carmichael peered at his gauges. “Did I do that? I guess I did do that, didn’t I?” “You’re not okay, are you?”

“I forgot to dump, I guess. No, I didn’t forget. I just didn’t bother. I didn’t feel like doing it.”

“Mike, come on out of that plane. You’ve flown enough for one day.”

“I didn’t feel like dumping,” Carmichael said again. “Why the hell bother? This crazy city—there’s nothing left in it that I would want to save, anyway.” His control deserted him at last, and rage swept through him like fire racing up the slopes of a dry canyon. He understood what Cindy was doing, and he respected it, but he didn’t have to like it. He didn’t like it at all. He had lost his one and only wife, and he felt somehow that he had lost his war with Los Angeles as well. “Fuck it,” he said. “Let it burn. This crazy city. I always hated it. It deserves what it gets. The only reason I stayed here was for her. She was all that mattered. But she’s going away, now. Let the fucking place burn.”

The dispatcher gaped at him in amazement. “Hey, Mike—”

Carmichael moved his head slowly from side to side as though trying to shake off an intolerable headache. Then he frowned. “No, that’s wrong,” he said, and all the anger was gone from his voice. “You’ve got to do the job anyway, right? No matter how you feel. You have to put the fires out. You have to save what you can. Listen, Tim, I’m going to fly one last load today, you hear? And then I’ll go home and get some sleep. Okay? Okay?”

He had the plane in motion as he spoke, going down the short runway. Dimly he realized that he had not requested clearance. The tinny squawks of somebody in the control tower came over his phones, but he ignored them. A little Cessna spotter plane moved hastily out of his way, and then he was aloft.

The sky was black and red. The fire was completely uncontained now, and maybe uncontainable. But you had to keep trying, he thought. You had to save what you could. He gunned and went forward, flying calmly into the inferno in the foothills, dumping his chemicals as he went. He felt the plane fighting him as wild thermals caught his wings from below, and, glassy-eyed, more than half asleep, he fought back, doing whatever he could to regain control, but it was no use, no use at all, and after a little while he stopped fighting it and sat back, at peace at last, as the air currents lifted him and tossed him like a toy skimming over the top, and sent him hurtling toward the waiting hills to the north.

The invasion happened differently, less apocalyptically, in New York City. Great devastating grass fires, with accompanying panicky evacuations, had never been a feature of life in New York. New York’s specialty, then as always, was inconvenience rather than apocalypse, and that was how the invasion began, as simply one more goddamned New York inconvenience.

It was one of those glorious gold-and-blue dance-and-sing days that New York City provides in October, right after the season of hot-and-sticky has taken itself offstage and the season of cold-and-nasty is not quite ready to come on.

There were seventeen witnesses to the onset of the invasion. The point of initial disembarkation was the meadow near the southern end of Central Park. There were many more than seventeen people on the meadow when the aliens arrived, of course, but most of them didn’t seem to have been paying attention.

It had begun, so said the seventeen, with a strange pale blue shimmering about thirty feet off the ground. The shimmering rapidly became a churning, like water going down a drain. Then a light breeze started to blow and very quickly turned into a brisk gale. It lifted people’s hats and whirled them in a startling corkscrew spiral around the churning shimmering blue place. At the same time you had a sense of rising tension, a something’s-got-to-give feeling. All this lasted perhaps forty-five seconds.

Then came a pop and a whoosh and a ping and a thunk—everybody agreed on the sequence of the sound effects—and the instantly famous not-quite-egg-shaped spaceship of the invaders was there, hovering about in mid-air twenty yards above the surface of the grass, and gliding gently toward the ground. An absolutely unforgettable sight: the gleaming silvery skin of it, the disturbing angle of the slope from its wide top to its narrow bottom, the odd hieroglyphics on its flanks that tended to slide out of your field of vision if you stared at them for more than a moment.

A hatch opened and a dozen of the invaders stepped out. Or floated out, rather.

They looked strange. They looked exceedingly strange. Where humans have feet they had a single oval pedestal, maybe five inches thick and a yard in diameter. From this fleshy base their wraith-like bodies sprouted like tethered balloons. They had no arms, no legs, not even discernible heads: just a broad dome-shaped summit, dwindling away to a rope-like termination that was attached to the pedestal. Their lavender skins were glossy, with a metallic sheen. Dark eye-like spots sometimes formed on them but didn’t last long. There was no sign of mouths. As they moved about they seemed to exercise great care never to touch one another.

The first thing they did was to seize half a dozen squirrels, three stray dogs, a softball, and a baby carriage, unoccupied. No one will never know what the second thing was that they did, because no one stayed around to watch. The park emptied with impressive rapidity.

All of this created, naturally, no small degree of excitement in midtown Manhattan. Police sirens began to sound. Car horns were honking, too: not the ordinary routine everyday exasperated when-do-things-start-to-move random honkings that many cities experience, but the special rhythmic New York City oh-for-Christ’s-sake-what-now kind of honk that arouses terror in the hearts of visitors to the city. People with berserk expressions ran fleeing from the vicinity of the park as though King Kong had just emerged from the monkey house at the Central Park Zoo and was personally coming after them, and other people were running just as hard in the opposite direction, toward the park, as though they absolutely had to see what was happening. New Yorkers were like that.

But the police moved swiftly in to seal off the park, and for the next three hours the aliens had the meadow to themselves. Later in the day the video networks sent up spy-eyes that recorded the scene for the evening news. The aliens tolerated them for perhaps an hour, and then shot them down, casually, as if they were swatting flies, with spurts of pink light that emerged from the tip of their vehicle.

Until then it was possible for the viewers to see ghostly gleaming aliens wandering around within a radius of perhaps five hundred yards of their ship, collecting newspapers, soft-drink dispensers, discarded items of clothing, and something that was generally agreed to be a set of dentures. Whatever they picked up they wrapped in a sort of pillow made of a glowing fabric with the same shining texture as their own bodies, which immediately began floating off with its contents toward the hatch of the ship.

After the spy-eyes were shot down, New Yorkers were forced to rely for their information on government spy satellites monitoring the Earth from space, and on whatever observers equipped with binoculars could glimpse from the taller apartment houses and hotels bordering the park. Neither of these arrangements was entirely satisfactory. But it soon became apparent that a second spaceship had arrived just as the first one had, pop whoosh ping thunk, out of some pocket of hyperspace. More aliens emerged from this one.

But these were of a different sort: monsters, behemoths. They looked like double-humped medium-sized bluish-gray mountains with legs. Their prodigious bodies were rounded, with a sort of valley a couple of feet deep running crosswise along their backs, and they were covered all over with a dense stiff growth midway in texture between fur and feathers. There were three yellow eyes the size of platters at one end and three rigid purple rod-like projections that stuck out seven or eight feet at the other.

The legs were their most elephantine feature—thick and rough-skinned, like tree trunks—and worked on some sort of telescoping principle, capable of being collapsed swiftly back up into the bodies of their owners. Eight was the normal number of legs, but as they moved about they always kept at least one pair withdrawn. From time to time they would let that pair descend and pull up another one, in what seemed to be a completely random way. Now and then they might withdraw two pairs at once, which would cause them to sink down to ground level at one end like a camel kneeling. The purpose of that, it seemed, was to feed. Their mouths were in their bellies; when they wanted to eat something, they simply collapsed all eight of their legs at the same time and sat down on it. It was a mouth big enough to swallow a very large animal at a single gulp—an animal as big as a bison, say. A little later on, when the smaller aliens had opened the cages in the park zoo, the big ones did just that.

Then, well along into the night, a third kind of alien made its appearance. These were wholly different from the other two: towering, tubular, purplish squid-like things that had rows of gleaming orange spots running up and down their sides. There were not many of this sort, and they seemed distinctly to be in charge: the two other kinds, at any rate, appeared to be taking orders from them. By now news was coming in about the alien landing that had occurred a little earlier that same day just west of Los Angeles. Only the squid type had been observed out there.

There had been landings in other places, too. Plenty of them, mostly major cities, though not exclusively. One ship came down in Serengeti National Park in Tanzania, on a broad grassy plain occupied only by a huge herd of wildebeests and a few hundred zebras, who paid little attention. One landing occurred in the midst of a raging sandstorm that was taking place in the Taklimakan Desert of central Asia, and the storm abruptly ceased, according to the mystified but essentially grateful drivers of a convoy of Chinese trucks who were the sole wayfarers in the vicinity at the time. A landing in Sicily, among the dry forlorn hills west of Catania, aroused interest only among some donkeys and sheep and the eighty-year-old owner of a scraggly grove of olive trees, who fell on his knees and crossed himself again and again and again, keeping his eyes shut all the while.

But the main action was in cities. Rio de Janeiro. Johannesburg. Moscow. Istanbul. Frankfurt. London. Oslo. Bombay. Melbourne. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. There were aliens all over the place, in fact, except for a few strikingly obvious places where they had somehow not bothered to land, like Washington, D.C., and Tokyo, and Beijing.

The ships they arrived in were of various kinds, driven by varying means of propulsion that ranged from noisy thrust-driven chemical rockets, as in Los Angeles, up to the mysterious and unfathomably silent. Some of the alien vessels came in on mighty trails of fire, like the big one that had landed near Los Angeles. Some just popped into view out of nowhere, as the one in New York City had done. Some landed right in the middle of big cities, like the one in Istanbul that set itself down on the grand plaza between Haghia Sophia and the Blue Mosque and the one in Rome that parked itself in front of St. Peter’s, but others chose suburban landing sites. In Johannesburg it was only the glistening spooky aliens that emerged, in Frankfurt only the behemoths, in Rio just the squids; elsewhere there were mixtures of the three kinds.

They made no announcements. They made no demands. They decreed no decrees. They offered no explanations. They didn’t say a thing.

They were simply here.

The meeting, the Colonel discovered, was taking place at the Pentagon, not at the White House. That seemed unusual. But why should anything be usual today, with hordes of alien beings wandering the face of the Earth?

It was quite all right with the Colonel to be plodding around in the vast but familiar corridors of the Pentagon once again. He had no illusions about the activities that had gone on in this place over the years or some of the people who had taken part in them, but he was no more inclined to take umbrage at the building simply because stupid or even evil decisions had been made within it than a bishop recalled to Rome would take umbrage at the Vatican because some of its occupants over the centuries had been other than saintly. The Pentagon was just a building, after all. And it had been the center of his professional life for three decades.

Very little had changed in the twelve or thirteen years since he had last set foot within it. The air in the long corridors had the same stale synthetic smell, the lighting fixtures were no more beautiful than they had been and still cast that sickly light, the walls were as drab as ever. One difference he noticed was that the guards at the various checkpoints were much younger—he would easily have believed that they were high-school boys and girls, though he suspected they actually were a little older than that—and some of the security procedures were different, now, too.

These days they screened people to see whether they had biochip implants in their arms, for example. “Sorry,” the Colonel said, grinning. “I’m not that modern.” But they screened him for implants anyway, and very thoroughly. And moved him on through pretty quickly after that, though the other three who had flown with him from California, the ruddy-bearded UCLA professor and the CalTech astronomer with the British accent and that lovely but somewhat dazed young dark-haired woman who had actually been held for a short time as a hostage aboard the alien spaceship, were kept back for more elaborate interrogation, as civilians usually were.

As he approached the meeting room itself, the Colonel began to ratchet himself up a couple of gears, getting himself up to speed for whatever lay ahead.

Once upon a time, some thirty years ago, he had been part of the strategic planning team in Saigon, helping to run a war that could not possibly have been won, coping on a day-by-day basis with the task of tracking down the worms that kept wriggling up through the quicksand and trying to put them in their proper cans, while simultaneously searching for the light at the end of the tunnel. He had distinguished himself pretty considerably in that capacity, which was why he had started his Vietnam tour as a second lieutenant and finished it as a major, with further promotions ahead.

But he had given all that high-powered stuff up, long ago, first for a post-Vietnam doctorate in Asian studies and a teaching appointment at the Academy, and then, after his wife’s death, for the quiet life of a fuddy-duddy walnut farmer in the hills above Santa Barbara. He was, here and now in the charming first decade of the charming twenty-first century, too far out of things to know or care much about the contemporary world, having participated neither in the glorious Net that everybody was plugged into, nor the even newer and glitzier world of biochip implants, nor, in fact, anything else of importance that had happened since about 1995.

Today, though, he needed to reactivate his thinking cap and call upon the smarts that had been at his command in the good old days of the epic battle for the hearts and minds of those pleasant but complicated people out there in the rice paddies of the Mekong Delta.

Even if he had been, after all, part of the losing team, that other time.

But through no fault of his own, that time.

The meeting, which was being held in a big, bleak, surprisingly unpretentious conference room on the third floor, had been going on for some hours by the time the Colonel was ushered into it, which was about two in the afternoon eastern time on the day after the arrival of the Entities. Neckties had been loosened all over the room, coats had come off, the male faces were beginning to look stubbly, pyramids and ziggurats of empty white plastic coffee containers were stacked up everywhere. Lloyd Buckley, who came rumbling forward to seize the Colonel’s hand the moment the Colonel entered, had the eroded look of a man who had gone without sleep the night before. Probably that was true of most of them. The Colonel hadn’t had very much himself.

“Anson Carmichael!” Buckley bellowed. “God damn, it’s good to see you again after all this time! Man, you haven’t aged half a minute!”

Buckley had. The Colonel remembered a lot of rumpled brown hair; it was mostly gray now, and there was much less of it. The State Department man had added fifty pounds or so, which surely had brought him up into the 270-280 range; his heavy features had thickened and coarsened, his shrewd gray-green eyes seemed lost now beneath heavy lids circled by puffy rings of fat.

To the room in general Buckley cried, “Gentlemen, ladies, may I introduce Colonel Anson Carmichael III, U.S. Army, Retired—former professor of non-western psychology and Asian linguistics at West Point, and a distinguished military career before that, including, I suppose I should say, a creditable tour of duty during that unfortunate circus we staged long ago in southeast Asia. A brilliant man and a devoted public servant, whose special insights, I know, are going to be invaluable to us today.”

The Colonel wondered what position Buckley held these days that entitled him to make a windy speech like that to people such as these.

Turning back to the Colonel now, Buckley said, “I assume you recognize most if not all of these folks, Anson. But just to avoid any confusions, let me rattle off the cast of characters.”

The Colonel recognized the Vice President, naturally, and the Speaker of the House. The President did not seem to be in the room, nor the Secretary of State. There was an assortment of Navy people and Air Force people and Army people and Marines people, plenty of braid. The Colonel knew most of the Army men at least by sight, and a couple of the Air Force ones. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Joseph F. Steele, gave the Colonel a warm smile. They had served together in Saigon in ’67 under General Matheson, when the Colonel of future times had been a brand-new second lieutenant assigned to the Field Advisory Unit of the U.S. Military Assistance Command, dear old gummed-up MAC-V, as an interpreter, and Joe Steele, four years younger and a green kid just out of West Point, had started out with some exceedingly humble flunky position for MAC-V’s intelligence guys, though he had risen very quickly. And had kept on rising ever since.

Buckley went around the room, making introductions. “The Secretary of Defense, Mr. Gallagher—” A slight, almost inconsequential-looking man, lantern jaw, close-cropped gray hair forming a kind of skullcap on his narrow head, formidable glint of Jesuitical intelligence and dedication in his chilly dark-brown eyes. “The Secretary of Communications, Ms. Crawford—” Elegant woman, coppery glints in her dark hair, a Native American sharpness to her cheekbones and lips. “The Senate Majority Leader, Mr. Bacon of your very own state—” Rangy, athletic-looking fellow, probably a terrific tennis player. “Dr. Kaufman of Harvard’s physics department—” Plump, sleepy-looking, badly dressed. “The Presidential Science Advisor, Dr. Elias—” Impressive woman, stocky, self-contained, a mighty fortress unto herself. The heads of the House Armed Services Committee and the Senate Armed Services Committee. The Chief of Naval Operations. The Marine Commandant. The top brass of the Army and Air Force as well. The Secretaries of the Army and Navy. And so on and so on, a goodly number in all, the high and the mighty of the land. The Colonel noticed that Buckley had left two men in civilian clothes completely unintroduced, and assumed he had some good reason for that. CIA, he supposed, something like that.

“And your own title these days, Lloyd?” the Colonel asked quietly, when Buckley seemed to have finished.

Buckley seemed nonplussed at that. It was the Vice President who said, while Buckley merely gaped, “Mr. Buckley is the National Security Advisor, Colonel Carmichael.”

Ah, so. A long way up from being an assistant secretary of state for cultural affairs. But of course Buckley had surely been angling for something like this all the time, turning his expertise in anthropology and history and the psychology of nationalistic fervor into credentials for a quasi-military post of Cabinet status in this era of resurgent cultural rivalries with roots going back beyond medieval times. The Colonel murmured something in an apologetic tone about not keeping up with the news as assiduously as he once did, now that he was retired to his hillside walnut groves and his almond trees.

There was action at the conference-room door, now. A flurry among the guards; new people arriving. The rest of the passengers from the Colonel’s cross-country flight filed in at last: Joshua Leonards, the rotund UCLA anthropologist, who with his untrimmed red beard and ratty argyle sweater looked like some nineteenth-century Russian anarchist, and Peter Carlyle-Macavoy, the British astronomer from the CalTech extraterrestrial-intelligence search program, extremely elongated of body and fiercely bright of eye, and the shopping-mall abductee, Margaret Something-or-Other, a petite, rather attractive woman of thirty or so who was either still in shock from her experiences or else was under sedation, because she had said essentially nothing during the entire journey from California.

“Good,” Buckley said. “We’re all here, now. This would be a good moment to bring our newcomers up to date on the situation as it now stands.” He clapped a data wand to his wrist—that was interesting, the Colonel thought, a man of Buckley’s age has had a biochip implant—and uttered a quick command into it, and a screen blossomed into vivid colors on the wall behind him.

“These,” said Buckley, “are the sites of known Entity landings. As you see, their ships have touched down on every continent except Antarctica and in most of the capital cities of the world, not including this city and three or four other places where they would have been expected to land. As of the noon recap, we believe that at least thirty-four large-scale ships, containing hundreds or even thousands of aliens, have arrived. Landings are apparently continuing; and aliens of various kinds are coming forth from the big ships in smaller vehicles, also of various kinds. So far we have identified five different types of Entity vehicles and three distinct species of alien life, as so—

He touched the wand to the implanted biochip node in his forearm and said the magic word, and pictures of strange life-forms appeared on the screen. The Colonel recognized the upright squid-like things that he had seen on television, stalking around that shopping mall in Porter Ranch, and Margaret Something-or-Other recognized them too, uttering a little gasp of shock or distaste. But then the squids went away and some creatures that looked like faceless, limbless ghosts appeared, and, after those, some truly monstrous things as big as houses that were galumphing around in a park on clusters of immense legs, knocking over tall trees as they went.

“Up till now,” Buckley went on, “the Entities have made no attempt at communicating with us, insofar as we are aware. We have sent messages to them by every means we could think of, in a variety of languages and artificial information-organizing systems, but we have no way of telling whether they’ve received them, or, if they have, whether they’re capable of understanding them. At the present time—”

“What means have you actually used for sending these messages?” asked Carlyle-Macavoy, the CalTech man, crisply.

“Radio, of course. Short wave, AM, FM, right on up the communications spectrum. Plus semaphore signals of various kinds, laser flashes and such, Morse code: you name it. Just about everything but smoke signals, as a matter of fact, and we hope Secretary of Communications Crawford will have someone working on that route pretty soon.”

Thin laughter went through the room. Secretary of Communications Crawford was not among those who seemed amused.

Carlyle-Macavoy said, “How about coded emissions at 1420 megahertz? The universal hydrogen emission frequency, I mean.”

“First thing they tried,” said Kaufman of Harvard. “Nada. Zilch.”

“So,” Buckley said, “the aliens are here, we somehow didn’t see them coming in any way, and they’re prowling around unhindered in thirty or forty cities. We don’t know what they want, we don’t know what they plan to do. Of course, if they have any kind of hostile intent, we intend to be on guard against it. I should tell you, though, that we have discussed already today, and already ruled out, the thought of an immediate pre-emptive attack against them.”

The Colonel raised an eyebrow at that. But Joshua Leonards, the burly, shaggy UCLA anthropology professor, went ballistic. “You mean,” he said, “that at one point you were seriously considering tossing a few nuclear bombs at them as they sat there in midtown Manhattan and the middle of London and a shopping mall in the San Fernando Valley?”

Buckley’s florid cheeks turned very red. “We’ve explored all sorts of options today, Dr. Leonards. Including some that obviously needed to be rejected instantly.”

“A nuclear attack was never for a moment under consideration,” said General Steele of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in the tone of voice he might have used to a bright but obstreperous eleven-year-old boy. “Never. But going nuclear isn’t our only offensive choice. We have plenty of ways of making war by means of conventional methods. For the time being, though, we have decided that any sort of offensive move would be—”

“The time being’?” Leonards cried. He waved his arms around wildly and flung his head back, unkempt russet beard jabbing upward, which made him look more than ever like some primordial Marxist getting ready to toss a grenade at the Czar. “Mr. Buckley, is it too soon after my arrival at this meeting for me to be butting in? Because I think I need to do some butting in right away.”

“Go ahead, Dr. Leonards.”

“I know you say you’ve already ruled out a pre-emptive strike. Which I assume that you mean that we, the United States of America, aren’t planning any such thing. And I assume that there’s nobody on Earth crazy enough to be in favor of nuking ships that happen to be occupying sites right in the middle of big cities. But, as you say, that doesn’t rule out other kinds of military action. I don’t see anyone in this room representing Russia or England or France, to name just three of the countries where spaceships have landed that can be considered major military powers. Are we making any attempt to coordinate our response with such countries as those?”

Buckley looked toward the Vice President.

She said, “We are, Dr. Leonards, and we will be continuing to do so on a round-the-clock basis. Let me assure you of that.”

“Good. Because Mr. Buckley has said that every imaginable means has been used in trying to communicate with the aliens, but he also said that we had been at least considering making them targets for our weaponry. May I point out that suddenly firing a cannon at somebody is a form of communication too? Which I think would indeed result in the opening of a dialog with the aliens, but it probably wouldn’t be a conversation we’d enjoy having. And the Russians and the French and everybody else ought to be told that, if they haven’t figured it out already themselves.”

“You’re suggesting that if we attacked, we’d be met with unanswerable force?” asked Secretary of Defense Gallagher, sounding displeased by the thought. “You’re saying that we’re fundamentally helpless before them?”

Leonards said, “We don’t know that. Very possibly we are. But it’s not a hypothesis that we really need to test right this minute by doing something stupid.”

At least seven people spoke at once. But Peter Carlyle-Macavoy said, in the kind of quiet, chipped-around-the-edges voice that cuts through any sort of hubbub, “I think we can safely assume that we’d be completely out of our depth in any kind of military encounter with them. Attacking those ships would be the most suicidal thing we could possibly do.”

The Colonel, a silent witness to all this, nodded.

But the Joint Chiefs and more than a few others in the room began once again to stir and thrash about in their seats and show other signs of agitation before the astronomer was halfway through his statement.

The Secretary of the Army was the first to voice his objections. “You’re taking the same pessimistic position as Dr. Leonards, aren’t you?” he demanded. “You’re essentially telling us that we’re beaten already, without our firing a shot, right?” He was quickly followed by half a dozen others saying approximately the same thing.

“Essentially, yes, that’s the situation,” replied Carlyle-Macavoy. “If we try to fight, I have no doubt we’ll be met with a display of insuperable power.” Which set off a second and louder uproar that was interrupted only by the impressive clapping of Buckley’s hands.

“Please, gentlemen. Please!”

The room actually grew quiet.

Buckley said, “Colonel Carmichael, I saw you nodding a moment ago. As our expert on interactions with alien cultures, what do you think of the situation?”

“That we are absolutely in the dark at the present moment and we had damned well not do anything until we know what’s what. We don’t even know whether we’ve been invaded. This may simply be a friendly visit. It may be a bunch of harmless tourists making a summer cruise of the galaxy. On the other hand, if it is an invasion, it’s being undertaken by a vastly superior civilization and there’s every chance that we are just as helpless before it as Dr. Carlyle-Macavoy says we are.”

Defense, Navy, Army, and three or four others were standing by that time, waving their arms for attention. The Colonel wasn’t through speaking, though.

“We know nothing about these beings,” he said, with great firmness. “Nothing. We don’t even know how to go about learning anything about them. Do they understand any of our languages? Who knows? We sure don’t understand any of theirs. Among the many things we don’t know about this collection of Entities,” he went on, “is, for example, which of them is the dominant species. We suspect that the big squid-like ones are, but how can we be sure? For all we know, the various kinds we’ve seen up till now are just drones, and the real masters are still up in space aboard a mother ship that they’ve made invisible and indetectable to us, waiting for the lesser breeds to get done with the initial phases of the conquest.”

That was quite a wild idea to have come from the lips of an elderly, retired, walnut-farming colonel. Lloyd Buckley looked startled. So did the scientists, Carlyle-Macavoy and Kaufman and Elias. The Colonel was pretty startled by it himself.

“I have another thought,” the Colonel went on, “about their failure so far to attempt any kind of communication with us, and how it reflects on their sense of their relative superiority to us. Speaking now in my academic capacity as a professor of non-western psychology, rather than as a former military man, I want to put forth the point that their refusal to speak with us might not be a function of their ignorance so much as it is a way of making that overwhelming superiority obvious. I mean, how could they not have learned our languages, if they had wanted to? Considering all the other capabilities they obviously have. Races that can travel between the stars shouldn’t have any difficulty decoding simple stuff like Indo-European-based languages. But if they’re looking for a way to show us that we are altogether insignificant to them, well, not bothering to say hello to us in our own language is a pretty good way of doing it. I could cite plenty of precedent for that kind of attitude right out of Japanese or Chinese history.”

Buckley said to Carlyle-Macavoy, “Can we have some of your thoughts about all this, if you will?”

“What the Colonel has proposed is an interesting notion, though of course I have no way of telling whether there’s any substance to it. But let me point out this: these aliens appeared in our skies without having given us a whisper of radio noise and not a smidgeon of visual evidence that they were approaching us. Let’s not even mention the various Starguard groups that keep watch for unexpected incoming asteroids. Let’s just consider the radio evidence. Do you know about the SETI project that’s been going on under that and several other names for the last forty or fifty years? Scanning the heavens for radio signals from intelligent beings elsewhere in the galaxy? I happen to be affiliated with one branch of that project. Don’t you think we had instruments looking all up and down the electromagnetic spectrum for signs of alien life at the very moment the aliens arrived? And we didn’t detect a thing until they began showing up on airport radar screens.”

“So you think there can be a hidden mother ship sitting out there in orbit,” Steele said.

“It’s perfectly possible that there is. But the main point, as I know Colonel Carmichael will agree, is that the only thing we can say about these aliens for certain at this moment is that they’re representatives of a race vastly more advanced than ourselves, and we had bloody well be cautious about how we react to their arrival here.”

“You keep telling us that,” the Army Secretary grumbled, “but you don’t support it with any—”

“Look,” said Peter Carlyle-Macavoy, “either they materialized right bang out of hyperspace somewhere inside the orbit of the moon, a concept which I think will make Dr. Kaufman and some of the rest of you extremely uncomfortable on the level of theoretical physics, or else they used some method of shielding themselves from all of our detecting devices as they came sneaking up on us. But however they managed to conceal themselves from us as they made their final approach to Earth, it shows that we are dealing with beings who possess an exceedingly superior technology. It’s reasonable to believe that they would easily be able to cope with any sort of firepower we might throw at them. Our most frightful nuclear weapons would be so much bows-and-arrows stuff to them. And they might, if sufficiently annoyed, retaliate to even a non-nuclear attack in a way intended to teach us to be less bothersome.”

“Agreed,” said Joshua Leonards. “Completely.”

“They may be superior,” said a voice from the back, “but we’ve got the superiority of numbers on our side. We’re a whole planet full of human beings on our home turf and they’re just forty shiploads of—”

“Perhaps we outnumber them, yes,” Colonel Carmichael said, “but may I remind you that the Aztecs considerably outnumbered the Spaniards and were also on their home turf, and people speak Spanish in Mexico today?”

“So is it an invasion, do you think, Colonel?” General Steele asked.

“I told you: I can’t say. Certainly it has the look of one. But the only real fact we have about these—ah—Entities—is that they’re here. We can’t make any assumptions at all about their behavior. If we learned anything at all out of our unhappy entanglement in Vietnam, it’s that there are plenty of peoples on this planet whose minds don’t necessarily operate the way ours do, who work off an entirely different set of basic assumptions from ours; and even so those are all human beings with the same inner mental wiring that we have. The Entities aren’t even remotely human, and their way of thinking is entirely beyond my expertise right now. Until we know how to communicate with them—or, to put it another way, until they have deigned to communicate with us—we need to simply sit tight and—”

“Maybe they have communicated with us, if what I was told aboard the ship was true,” said the woman who had been taken hostage at the shopping mall, suddenly, in a tiny and dreamy but perfectly audible voice. “With one of us, at least. And they told her lots of things about themselves. So it’s already happened. If you can believe what she said, that is.”

More hubbub. Sounds of surprise, even shock, and a few low exasperated expostulations. Some of these high masters and overlords plainly were not enjoying the experience of finding themselves transformed into characters in a science-fiction movie.

Lloyd Buckley asked the dark-haired woman to stand and introduce herself. The Colonel yielded the floor to her with a little formal bow. She got a bit unsteadily to her feet and said, not looking at anyone in particular and speaking in a breathy monotone, “My name is Margaret Gabrielson and I live on Wilbur Avenue in Northridge, California, and yesterday morning I was on my way to visit my sister who lives in Thousand Oaks when I stopped for gas at a Chevron station in a mall in Porter Ranch. And I was captured by an alien and taken aboard their spaceship, which is the truth and nothing but truth, so help me God.”

“This isn’t a courtroom, Ms. Gabrielson,” said Buckley gently. “You aren’t testifying now. Just tell us what happened to you when you were on board the alien ship.”

“Yes,” she said. “What happened to me when I was on board the alien ship.”

And then she was silent for about ten thousand years.

Was she abashed at finding herself inside the actual and literal Pentagon, standing in front of a largely though not entirely male group of highly important governmental personages and asked to describe the wholly improbable, even absurd, events that had befallen her? Was she still befuddled and bewildered by her strange experiences among the Entities, or by the sedatives that had been given to her afterward? Or was she simply your basic inarticulate early-twenty-first century American, who had not in any way been equipped during the thirty years of her life with the technical skill required in order to express herself in public in linear and connected sentences?

Some of each, no doubt, the Colonel thought.

Everyone was very patient with her. What choice was there?

And after that interminable-seeming silence she said, “It was like, mirrors, everywhere. The ship. All metal and everything shining and it was gigantic inside, like some sort of stadium with walls around it.”

It was a start. The Colonel, sitting just beside her, gave her a warm encouraging smile. Lloyd Buckley beamed encouragement at her too. So did Ms. Crawford, the Cherokee-faced Secretary of Communications. Carlyle-Macavoy, though, who obviously didn’t suffer fools gladly, glared at her with barely veiled contempt.

“There were, you know, around twenty of us, maybe twenty-five,” she continued, after another immense terrified pause. “They put us, like, in two groups in different rooms. Mine was a little girl and an old man and a bunch of women around my age and then three men. One of the men had been hurt when they caught him, like, I think, a broken leg, and the other two men were trying to make him, you know, comfortable. It was this giant-sized room, like maybe as big as a movie theater, with weird enormous flowers floating through the air everywhere, and we were all in one corner of it. And very scared, most of us. We figured they were, like, going to cut us up, you know, to see what was inside of us. Like, you know, what they do to laboratory animals. Somebody said that and after that we couldn’t stop thinking about it.”

She dabbed away tears.

There was another interminable silence.

“The aliens,” Buckley prompted softly. “Tell us about them.”

They were big, the woman said. Huge. Terrifying. But they came by only occasionally, perhaps every hour or two, never more than one at a time, just checking up, gazing at them for a little while and then going away again. It was, she said, like seeing your worst nightmares come to life, whenever one of those monsters entered the chamber where they were being kept. She had felt sick to her stomach every time she looked at one of them. She had wanted to curl up and cry. She looked as though she wanted to curl up and cry right this minute, here and now, in front of the Vice President and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and all these Cabinet members.

“You said,” Buckley reminded her, “that one woman in your group experienced some sort of communication with them?”

“Yes. Yes. There was this woman, who was, like, a little strange, I have to say—she was from Los Angeles, I guess about forty years old, with shiny black hair, and she had a lot of fantastic jewelry on, earrings like big hoops and three or four strings of beads and, like, a whole bunch of rings, and she was wearing this big wide bright-colored skirt like my grandmother used to wear in the Sixties, and sandals, and stuff. Cindy, her name was.”

The Colonel gasped.

The hair was just like hers, Anse had told him, dark, cut in bangs. And big earrings, the hoops she always wears. The Colonel hadn’t believed it. The police would have had the site cordoned off, he had said. Not likely that they’d be letting rubberneckers near the alien ship, he had said. But no: Anse had been right. It was indeed Cindy that Anse had seen on the television news early yesterday morning in the crowd at that shopping mall; and later the aliens had grabbed her, and she had been taken aboard that ship. Did Mike know? Where was Mike, anyway?

Margaret Gabrielson was speaking again.

This woman Cindy, she said, was the only one in the group who had no fear of the aliens. When one of the aliens came into the chamber, she walked right up to it and greeted it like it was an old friend, and told it that it and all its people were welcome on Earth, that she was glad that they were here.

“And did the aliens reply to her in any way?” Buckley asked.

Not that Margaret Gabrielson had been able to notice. While Cindy was saying things to the alien it would just stand there looming high above her, looking down at her the way you might look at a dog or a cat, without showing any kind of reaction or understanding. But after the alien left the room, Cindy told everyone that the alien had spoken to her, like in a mental way, telepathy.

“And said what to her?” asked Buckley.

Silence. Hesitation.

“Like pulling teeth,” said Carlyle-Macavoy, through his own clenched ones.

But then it came out, all in a rush:

“—That the aliens wanted us to know that they weren’t going to harm the world in any way, that they were, like, here on a diplomatic mission, that they were part of some huge United Nations of planets and they had come to invite us to join. And that they were just going to stay for a few weeks and then most of them were going back to their own world, although some of them were going to stay here as ambassadors, you know, to teach us a new and better way of life.”

“Uh-oh,” Joshua Leonards muttered. “Scary stuff. The missionaries always have some new and better way of life that they want to teach. And you know what happens next.”

“They also said,” Margaret Gabrielson continued, “that they were going to take a few Earth people back to their own world to show them what sort of place it was. Volunteers, only. And, like, this woman Cindy had volunteered. When they took us off the ship a few hours later, she was the only one who stayed behind.”

“And she seemed happy about that?” Buckley asked.

“She was, like, ecstatic.”

The Colonel winced. That sounded like Cindy, all right. Oh, Mike! How he loved her, Mike did. But in the twinkling of an eye she had abandoned him for monsters from some far star. Poor Mike. Poor, poor Mike.

Buckley said, “You heard all of this, you say, only from this woman Cindy? None of the others of you had any kind of, ah, mental contact with the aliens?”

“None. It was only Cindy who had it, or said she did. All that stuff about ambassadors, coming in peace, that was all hers. But it couldn’t have been true. She was really crazy, that woman. She was like, ‘The coming of the aliens was prophesied in this book that I read years and years ago, and everything is following the prophecy exactly.’ That’s what she said, and you knew it was impossible. So the whole thing was just in her head. She was crazy, that woman. Crazy.” Yes, the Colonel thought. Crazy. And Margaret Gabrielson, at that moment reaching her snapping point at last, burst into hysterical tears and began to collapse into herself and sink toward the floor. The Colonel rose in one smooth motion and caught her deftly as she fell, and steadied her and held her against his chest, murmuring soothing things to her while she wept. He felt very paternal. It reminded him of nothing so much as the time, some seven or eight years back, when Irene’s diagnosis had come through and he had had to tell Rosalie that her mother had inoperable cancer, and then had had to hold her for what seemed like hours until she had cried it all out.

“It was awful, awful, awful,” Margaret Gabrielson was saying, voice muffled, head still pressed against the Colonel’s ribs. “Those hideous E-T monsters wandering around—and us not knowing what they were going to do to us—that crazy woman and all her loony-tunes nonsense—crazy, she was, crazy—”

“Well,” Lloyd Buckley said. “So much for the first report of communications with the aliens, I guess.” He looked bemused, perhaps a little irritated by the messiness and uselessness of Margaret Gabrielson’s account. No doubt he had been expecting something more. The Colonel, on the other hand, felt that he had had more than he wanted.

But there was still more to come.

A chime of some sort went off, just then. An aide jumped up, pressed his wrist-implant to a data node in the wall, gave a one-syllable command. Something lit up on a wall-mounted ribbon screen next to the node and a yellow printout came gliding from a slot below it. The aide brought it to Buckley, who glanced at it and coughed and tugged at his lower lip and made a sour face. And eventually said, “Colonel Carmichael—Anson—do you happen to have a brother named Myron?”

“Everyone calls him Mike,” the Colonel said. “But yes, yes, he’s my younger brother.”

“Message just in from California about him that I’m supposed to pass along to you. It’s bad news, I’m afraid, Anson.”

All things considered, it hadn’t been much of a meeting, the Colonel thought, lost in gloom, leaden-hearted over his brother’s heroic but shocking and altogether unacceptable death, as he headed for home sixteen hours later aboard the same plush Air Force VIP jet that had carried him to Washington the day before. He could not bear to think about Mike in his last moments in some rickety little plane, struggling frenetically and ultimately unsuccessfully against the violent air currents above the roiling horror of the Ventura County fire. But when he shifted his attention back to the Entities crisis and the meeting that had been called to discuss it, he felt even worse.

An embarrassment, that meeting. A ghastly waste of time. And a stunning revelation of the hollowness and futility of humanity’s self-aggrandizing pretensions.

Buckley had offered to let him go back to his hotel after the news about Mike had come in: but no, no, what good would that have done? He was needed. He stayed. And sat there in mounting despair during all the dreary pointless remainder of it. All those important Cabinet officers and lavishly decorated generals and admirals and the rest of them too, the whole grand crowd of lofty honchos arrayed in solemn conclave, interminably masticating the situation, and to what end? Ultimately the meeting had broken up without any significant information having been brought forth beyond the mere fact of the landings, no conclusions reached, no policy decisions taken. Aside from Wait and See, that is.

Wait, yes. And See.

The secure blue wall of the sky had been breached without warning; mysterious alien Entities had landed simultaneously all over Earth; yea, out of nowhere bizarre visitors had come, and they had seen, and after two and a half days they were already acting as though they had conquered. And in the face of all that, none of our best and brightest seemed to have the slightest idea of how we should respond.

Not that the Colonel himself had been of much help. That was perhaps the worst part of it: that he was as beruddled as the rest of them, that he had had nothing useful of his own to offer.

What was there to say, though?

We must fight and fight and fight until the last of these vile enemy invaders is eradicated from the sacred soil of Earth.

Yes. Yes. Of course. Went without saying. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, et cetera, et cetera. No flagging, no failing: fight with growing confidence, go on to the end. We shall never surrender.

But was this actually an invasion?

And if indeed it was, how did we go about fighting back, and what would happen to us if we tried?

Three seats ahead of him, Leonards and Carlyle-Macavoy were having the same discussion with each other that the Colonel was having with himself. And, so it appeared, coming to the same melancholy conclusions.

“Oh, Colonel, I feel so sad for you,” Margaret Gabrielson said, materializing like a wraith in front of him in the aisle. They were all flying back to California together, the valued special consultants, he and she and squat grubby Leonards and the long-legged Brit. “Do you mind if I sit here next to you?”

With a vague indifferent gesture he beckoned her to the vacant seat.

She settled in beside him, pivoting around to give him a warm, earnest, compassionate smile. “You and your brother were very close, weren’t you, Colonel?” she said, pulling him abruptly back from one slough of despond to the other. “I know how terribly upset you must be. The pain is written all over your face.”

He had comforted her at the meeting in Washington, and now she meant to comfort him. She means well, he thought. Be nice.

He said, “I was the oldest of three boys. Now I’m the only one left. I think that’s the biggest shock, that I’m still here and they’re both gone.”

“How awful that must be, to outlive your younger brothers. Were they in the Army too?”

“The youngest one was Air Force. A test pilot, he was. Flew one experimental plane too many, about ten years ago. And the other one, Mike, the one that just—died, he decided to go in for the Navy, because no one in our family had ever been Navy, and Mike always had to do what nobody else in the family would even dream of doing. Like heading out for weeks at a time on camping trips all alone. Like buying his own little plane and flying it around the country by himself, not actually going anywhere, just enjoying being up in the air with nobody else around him. And like marrying that weird woman Cindy and moving to Los Angeles with her.”

“Cindy?”

“The one who was a hostage while you were, the one who volunteered to stay with the aliens. That was Mike’s wife. My sister-in-law.”

Margaret put her hand over her mouth. “Oh, and I said such horrible things about her! I’m sorry! I’m so sorry!”

The Colonel smiled. She seemed to have shed, he noticed, all of those annoying little childish verbal tics, the “likes” and “you knows” with which she had spattered every sentence while she was speaking at the meeting. As though perhaps in her trembling nervousness in front of all those formidable high officials she had reverted to blathery little-girl locutions, but now, in one-to-one human communication, she was once again capable of speaking adult English. She was, the Colonel realized, probably not as stupid as she had sounded earlier.

“I never could stand her, myself,” he said. “Simply not my kind of person. Too—bohemian for me, do you know what I mean? Too wild. I’m your standard-model straight-arrow guy, conservative, old-fashioned, boring.” Which was not entirely true, he hoped, but true enough. “They train us to be that way in the Service. And it’s a good bet that I was born that way, besides.”

“But Mike wasn’t?”

“He was a little bit of a mutant, I suppose. We were a military family, and I guess we were raised to be military types, whatever that means. But Mike had a touch of something else in him, and we always knew it.” He closed his eyes a moment, letting his memories of Mike’s strangeness flood upward in him—Mike’s monumental untidiness, his sudden rages, his arbitrary dogmatic opinions, his willingness to let his life be dictated by the most bizarre whims. His mysterious feelings of inner emptiness and frosty dissatisfaction. And, especially, his fiery obsessive love for Cindy of the beads and sandals. “He was nothing at all like either of us. I was my father’s son all the way, the little soldier boy who was going to grow up to be a real one. And Lee—he was the baby—he was a good obedient kid like me, did what he was told, never wanted to know why. But Mike—Mike—”

“Went his own way, did he?”

“Always. I never understood him, not for a moment,” the Colonel said. “Loved him, of course. But never understood him.—Let me tell you a story. We were six years apart in age, which is like a whole generation when you’re kids. And one time when I was twelve and Mike was six I made some unkind comment about the sloppiness of his side of the room that we shared, and he decided then and there that he had to kill me.”

“With his fists. We had a horrendous fight. I was twice his age and twice as tall as he was, but he was always a chunky muscular kid, very strong, and I was always slender, and he came at me like a cannonball without the slightest warning and threw me down and sat on my chest and punched me black and blue before I knew what was happening. Hurt me plenty, too, the little lunatic. After about a minute I pushed him off me, and knocked him down and hurt him—that was how angry I was—but he got up still swinging, and kicking and biting and what-all else, and I held him at arm’s length and told him that if he didn’t calm down I was going to toss him in the pig-pond. We had a pig-pond then, where we lived out back of Bakersfield, and he didn’t calm down, and I tossed him in. Then I went back to the house, and after a while so did he. I had a black eye and a split lip, and he was covered with muck and slop all over, and our mother never asked a single question.”

“And your father?”

“Wasn’t around. This was 1955, a very scary time in the world, and the Army had just transferred him to what was called West Germany, then. We had military bases there. A few months later my mother and my brother Mike and I—Lee hadn’t been born yet—went over there ourselves to be with him. We spent a couple of years there.” The Colonel chuckled. “Mike was the only one of us ever learned much German. All the dirty words first, naturally. People used to gape at him in the street when he cut loose. Oh, a wild one, he was. But not, I think, all that different from the rest of us deep down underneath. When it was Vietnam time and the kids were growing their hair long and smoking dope and wearing funny-colored clothing, you’d have thought Mike would have been a hippie out there with them, but instead of that he became a Navy pilot and saw plenty of action. Hated the war, but did his duty as a man and a soldier and a Carmichael.”

“Were you in that war too?” Margaret asked.

“Yes. I sure was. And came to hate it too, for that matter. But I was there.”

She looked at him wide-eyed, as if he had admitted being at Gettysburg.

“Actually killed people? Got shot at?”

He smiled and shook his head. “I was part of a strategic planning group, behind the lines. But not so far back that I didn’t get to be familiar with the sound of machine-gun fire.” The Colonel let his eyes droop shut once again for a moment or two. “Damn, that was an ugly war! There aren’t any pretty ones, but that one was ugly. Still, you do whatever they ask you to do, and you don’t complain and you don’t ask any questions, because that’s what’s needed if there’s going to be civilized life—somebody to do the uncivilized things, which nevertheless are necessary to be done. Usually, anyway.”

He was silent for a time.

Then he said, “I got my fill of doing uncivilized things in Vietnam, I guess. A few years after the war I took a leave of absence and went back east, got me a degree in Asian studies at Johns Hopkins, eventually wound up as a professor at West Point. In the course of ten years I saw Mike maybe three times at most. He didn’t say much any of those times. I could tell that something was missing from his life—like a life. Then when my wife got sick I came back to California, Santa Barbara—family land, her family—and there was Mike, living in L.A., of all places, and married to this peculiar modern-day hippie woman Cindy. He wanted me to like her. I tried, Margaret, I tried! I swear that I did. But we were people from two different worlds. The one single thing we had in common was that we both loved Mike Carmichael.”

“Peggy,” she said.

“What?”

“My name. Peggy. Nobody really calls me Margaret.”

“Ah-hah. I see. Right. Peggy.”

“Did she like you?”

“Cindy? I have no idea. She was polite enough to me. Her husband’s old stuffed shirt of a brother. No doubt thought I was as much of a Martian as she seemed to me. We didn’t see a whole lot of each other. Better that way, I figure. Basically we each pretended the other one didn’t exist.”

“And yet yesterday at die meeting, right at the end, you asked that general if there was some way she could be rescued from die E-T spaceship.”

The Colonel felt his cheeks growing hot. He wished she hadn’t brought up that silly little moment. “That was dumb of me, wasn’t it? But somehow I felt I owed it to her, to try to get her off of it. A member of my family, after all. In need of rescue. So I will ask. The proper thing to do, is it not?”

“But she volunteered to stay,” Peggy pointed out.

“Yes. Indeed she did. Besides which, Mike is dead and she’s got nothing to come back to, anyway. And furthermore there’s no way in hell that we could have removed her from that ship even if she was asking us to, which she wasn’t. But you see the tradition-bound mind at work, do you, Peggy? The knee-jerk reflex of the virtuous man? My sister-in-law is in jeopardy, or so it seems to me, and therefore I turn to the powers that be and say, ‘Do you think there might be some way by which—’ ”

He stopped speaking abruptly. The lights had gone out aboard die plane.

Not just the overhead lights, but the little reading lights, and the auxiliary lights at floor level in the aisle, and everything else, so far as the Colonel could tell, that depended in any way on the movement of electromagnetic waves in the visible part of the spectrum.

They were sitting in absolute black darkness within a sealed metal tube that was traveling at hundreds of miles an hour, 35,000 feet above the surface of the Earth.

“Power failure?” Peggy asked, very quietly.

“An extremely odd one, if it is,” said the Colonel.

A voice out of the blackness said, from the front of the cabin, “Ah, we have a little problem here, folks.”

It was the second officer, and despite the attempted joviality of his words he sounded shaken, and the Colonel began to feel a little shaken too as he listened to the man’s report. Every one of the ship’s electrical systems, he said, had conked out simultaneously. All the instruments had failed, all, including the navigation devices and the ones responsible for feeding fuel to the engines. The big jet was without power of any sort now. It had effectively been transformed in the last couple of moments into a giant glider; it was coasting, right now, traveling on its accumulated momentum and nothing more.

They were somewhere over southern Nevada, the second officer said. There seemed to be some sort of little electrical problem down there, too, because the lights of the city of Las Vegas had been visible off to the left a moment ago and now they were not. The world outside the ship was as dark as the ship’s interior. But there was no way of finding out what was actually going on out there, because the radio had gone dead, of course, as well as all other instrumentation linking them to the ground. Including air traffic control, of course.

And therefore we are dead also, the Colonel thought, a bit surprised at his own calmness; because how much longer could a plane of this size go on coasting without power through the upper reaches of the atmosphere before it went into free fall? And even if the pilot tried to jolly it down for a landing, how was he possibly going to control the plane with every one of its components kaput, no navigational capacity whatever, and where would he land it in the absolute dark that prevailed?

But then the lights came back on, showing the second officer standing just at the cockpit door, pale and trembling and with the glossy lines of tears showing on his cheeks; and the audio voice of the pilot now was heard, a good old solid deep pilot-voice with only the hint of a tremor in it, saying, “Well, people, I don’t have the foggiest idea of what just happened, but I’m going to be making an emergency landing at the Naval Weapons Center before it happens again. Fasten seat-belts, everybody, and hang on tight.”

He had the plane safely on the ground six and a half minutes before the lights went off a second time.

This time, they stayed off.