The Alien Years Read online

  “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.

  2

  NINE YEARS FROM NOW

  It was the greatest catastrophe in human history, beyond any question, because in one moment the world’s entire technological capability had been pushed back three and a half centuries. Somehow the Entities had flipped a gigantic switch and turned everything off, everything, at some fundamental level.

  In 1845 that would have been a serious matter but not, perhaps, catastrophic, and it would have been even less of a problem in 1635 or 1425, and it certainly wouldn’t have mattered much in 1215. But in the first decade of the twenty-first century it was a stupendous calamity. When the electricity stopped, all of modern civilization stopped, and there were no backup systems—candles and windmills, could they really be considered backup systems?—to get things going again. This was more than a mere power failure; it was an immense paradigm shift. It wasn’t just the huge generating stations that had failed; nothing at all electrical would work, right down to battery-operated flashlights. Nobody had ever drawn up a plan for what to do if electricity went away on a worldwide and apparently permanent basis.

  No one could begin to figure out how the Entities had done it, and that was almost as frightening as the thing itself. Had they changed the behavior of electrons? Had they altered the lattice structure of terrestrial matter so that conductivity was no longer a reality? Or, perhaps, achieved some modification of the dielectric constant itself?

  However they had managed it, it had happened. Electromagnetic waves no longer traveled anywhere controllable or useful, and electricity as a going concept was apparently extinct all over Earth. Zap, zap, zap! and the whole electrical revolution, incomprehensibly, was undone in a flash, the entire immense technological pyramid that had been built atop the little friction generator that old Otto von Guericke of Magdeburg had constructed in 1650 and the Leyden jar that Pieter van Musschenbroek concocted to store the energy the Guericke friction machine created, and Alessandro Volta’s silver-and-zinc batteries, and Humphry Davy’s arc lights and Michael Faraday’s dynamos and the life’s work of Thomas Alva Edison and all the rest.

  Goodbye, then—for how long, nobody knew—to telephones and computers and radio and television, to alarm clocks and burglar alarms, to doorbells, garage-door openers, and radar, to oscilloscopes and electron microscopes, to cardiac pacemakers, to electric toothbrushes, to amplifiers of any and every sort, to vacuum tubes and microprocessors. Bicycles were still all right, and rowboats, and graphite pencils. So were handguns and rifles. But anything that required electrical energy in order to function was now inoperative. What became known as the Great Silence had fallen.

  The electrons simply would not flow, that was the problem. The electrical functions of biological organisms were unaffected, but everything else was kaput.

  Any sort of circuitry through which a voltage might pass now had become as non-conductive as mud. Voltages themselves, wattages, amperages, sine waves, bands and band-widths, signal-to-noise ratios, and, for that matter, both signals and noise, et cetera ad infinitum, became non-concepts.

  Drawbridges and canal locks remained frozen in whatever position they might have been in at the time when the current stopped. Planes unlucky enough to be aloft then, suddenly bereft of all navigational aid and the functioning of their most trivial internal mechanisms, crashed. So did some millions of automobiles that were in transit when the roads went dark, the traffic-control computers went dead, and their own internal guidance systems failed. Cars not in transit at the moment of the death of electricity now were incapable of being started, except for the ancient crank-starting models, and there weren’t very many of those still operating. The various computer nets were snuffed in an instant, of course. All commercial records that had not already been printed out became inaccessible. As did the world’s currency reserves, safely sealed behind electronic security gates that now became very secure indeed. But currency reserves, those represented by such inert things as bars of gold as well as those represented by such lively though abstract things as digital entries coursing from mainframe to mainframe among the world’s central banks, were pretty meaningless all of a sudden.

  Most things were. The world as we had known it had ended.

  The apparent precipitating factor of the blackout was that someone, somewhere, had in a moment of foolish exasperation lobbed a couple of bombs at one of the alien ships. No one knew who had done it—the French, the Iraqis, the Russians?—and nobody was claiming responsibility; and in the confusions of the moment there was no reliable way of finding out, though there were plenty of rumors, of course. Perhaps they had been nuclear bombs; perhaps they were only archaic firecrackers. There was no way for anyone to know that, either, because very shortly after the attack all the military detection systems that would have been capable of picking up a sudden release of radiation became just as non-functional as all the rest of the world’s dismantled technology.

  Whatever kind of attack had been made on the Entities, it was an altogether futile one. It did no damage, naturally. The Entity spaceships were, as everyone would swiftly discover, surrounded by force-fields that made it impossible for anyone to approach them without permission or to damage them in attacks from a distance.

  What the attack did succeed in doing was to annoy the Entities. It was annoying in the way that a mosquito’s humming can be annoying, and so they retaliated with what could have been the alien equivalent of a slap that one might aim at the mosquito’s general vicinity on one’s arm. Or, as the anthropologist Joshua Leonards had put it at the Pentagon, the attempted destruction of an Entity vessel had been the openin
g statement in a kind of conversation, to which the Entities had replied in a very much louder voice.

  The first power shutdown, the two-minute one, may simply have represented a tune-up of the equipment. The second one that followed a few hours later was the real thing. The Great Silence. The end of the world that had been, and the beginning of a nightmare time of murderous anarchy and terror and utter despair.

  After a couple of hellish weeks in the cold and the dark, the power began returning. Sporadically. Selectively. Bewilderingly. Some things like automotive engines and deep-freeze units and water-purification plants began to work again; other things like television sets and tape recorders and radar screens didn’t, though electric lights and gas-station pumps did.

  The general effect was to bring mankind back from a medieval level of existence to something like that of about 1937, but with strange and seemingly random exceptions. Who could explain it? There was no rhyme, no reason. Why telephones, but not modems? Why compact-disc players, but not pocket calculators? And when modems eventually did come back, they didn’t always work quite the way they had worked before.

  But by then explanations didn’t really matter. The basic point had been made, anyway: the world had been conquered, good and proper, just like that, by an unknown enemy for unknown reasons, no explanations given: not a word, in fact, said at all. The invaders had not bothered with a declaration of war, nor had any battles been fought, and there had been no peace negotiations, and no articles of surrender had been signed; but nevertheless the thing had been accomplished, in a single night, quite definitively accomplished. Resistance would be punished; and serious resistance would be punished seriously.

  Who, in any case, was going to resist? The government? The armed forces? How? With what? Overnight, all governments and armed forces had been rendered obsolescent, if not downright obsolete. Attempts to hold things together, to proceed with existing forms and procedures, were swept away in whirlwinds of chaos. Governmental structures began to corrode and sag like buildings that had gone without maintenance for centuries; but this was a corrosion that happened within days. Whole governmental sectors simply vanished. Others maintained a ghostly presence and pretended they still were functioning, but no one paid very much attention to them. The social contract that had sustained them had been repealed.

  Many people simply accepted what had happened to the world, and tried to understand it as well as they could, which was not very well, and went about their business as well as they could, which also was not very well. Others—a great many—simply went berserk.

  The police and the courts could not cope with the new anarchy; indeed, the whole law-enforcement structure fairly swiftly dissolved as though it had been dipped in acid, and vanished. Only by common consent, one could see now, had any of it been sustained in the first place. The mandate of the law had been withdrawn. Authority itself had been decapitated in a single stroke. Armies and police forces began to melt away. No formal orders for disbanding were given—quite the contrary—but, as their members went on unofficial leave by ones and twos and threes like water molecules boiling off, preferring to protect themselves and their own families rather than to serve the general good, such organizations simply ceased to exist.

  And so the law was dead. Personal conscience was the only governor left. What had been neighborhoods turned into independent kingdoms, their borders guarded by quick-on-the-trigger vigilantes. Theft, looting, robbery, violent crime of all sorts: these things, never far below the surface in the turn-of-the-century world, now became epidemic.

  In the first three weeks after the invasion—the Conquest—hundreds of thousands of people died by the hands of their fellow citizens in the United States alone. It was the war of everyone against everyone, days of frenzy and blood. In Western Europe, matters were not quite as bad; in Russia and many third world countries, worse.

  This was the time that became known as the Troubles. After the first few wild weeks, things became a little more calm, once electricity began to return, and then calmer still. But they never went back to the pre-Conquest norm.

  And from time to time over the months that followed the Entities would turn the power off again, all over the world, sometimes for a couple of hours, sometimes for three or four days at a stretch. Just to remind people that they could do it. Just to warn them not to get too cozy, because another dose of chaos could hit at any time. Just to let them know who was boss here now, forever and a day, world without end.

  People attempted to re-create some semblance of their former lives, nevertheless. But the old structures, having fallen apart so completely at the first shove, were maddeningly difficult to rebuild.

  The global banking system had been shattered by the death of the computers. The stock exchanges, which had closed “temporarily” at the time of the alien landing, did not reopen, and all the abstract store of wealth that was represented by ownership of shares and funds vanished into some incomprehensible limbo. That was devastating. Everybody became a pauper overnight, and only the shrewdest and toughest and meanest knew what to do about it. National currencies ceased to find acceptance, and were largely replaced by improvised regional ones, or corporate scrip, or units of precious metals, or barter. The whole economy, such as it now was, was built on improvisations of that sort. Credit-card use was unthinkable now. Personal checks were no more acceptable than they had been in the Neolithic.

  A surprising number of businesses remained going concerns, but their modes of doing business had to be radically reinvented. Computer communication resumed, but it, too, was a pallid and eerily transmogrified version of its former self, full of gaps and unpredictabilities. A sort of postal service continued, but only a sort. Private security forces emerged to fill the void left by the evaporation of the public ones.

  Some unofficial underground resistance movements sprang up, too, almost immediately, but they wisely stayed very far underground, and in the first two years did no actual resisting. There were other groups that simply wanted to talk with the Entities, but the Entities did not appear to be interested in talking, though they did, as it soon turned out, have ways of communicating in their own fashion with those with whom they chose to communicate.

  A dreamlike new reality had settled upon the world. The texture of life now, for nearly everyone, was like the way life is the morning after some great local catastrophe, an earthquake, a flood, a huge fire, a hurricane. Everything has changed in a flash. You look around for familiar landmarks—a bridge, a row of buildings, the front porch of your house—to see if they’re still there. And usually they are; but some degree of solidity seems to have been subtracted from them in the night. Everything is now conditional. Everything is now impermanent. That was the way it was now, all over the world.

  After a time, people began to shuffle through their newly dysfunctional lives as though things had always been this way, though they knew in their hearts that that was not so. The only really functional entities in the world now were the Entities. Civilization, as the term had been understood in the early twenty-first century, had just about fallen apart. Some new form would surely evolve, sooner or later. But when? And what?

  Anse was the first of the Carmichael tribe to arrive at the Colonel’s ranch for the Christmas-week family gathering, the third such gathering of the clan since the Conquest.

  That was a pretty time of year, California Christmas. The hills all up and down the coast were green from recent rains. The air was soft and sweet, that lovely Southern California December warmth pervading everything, even though there was the usual incongruous fringe of snow right at the highest crest of the mountains back of town. The birds were caroling away, here in the late afternoon as Anse approached his father’s place. There was bright festive bloom in every garden, masses of purple or red bougainvillea, the red flower-spikes of aloes, the joyous scarlet splash of woody-branched poinsettias taller than a tall man. A steady flow of traffic could be seen heading up from the beach as Anse swung inland
off the main highway and went looking for the road that led upward toward the ranch. It must have been a good day for some merry pre-Christmas surfing.

  Merry Christmas, yes, merry, merry, merry, merry! God bless us every one!

  The cooler air of higher altitude came through the open car window as Anse made his way along the narrow mountain road, which took vehicles up and behind the ranch a little way before curving down again and delivering them to the entrance. He honked three times as he started down the final approach. Peggy, the woman who served as his father’s secretary these days, came out to open the ranch gate for him.

  She gave him a grin and a cheery hello. She was always cheery, Peggy was. Small fine-boned brunette, quite ornamental. The wild thought came to Anse that the old man must be sleeping with her. Anything could be true, here in these grim latter days. “Oh, the Colonel will be so happy to see you!” she cried, peering in, flashing her ever-ready smile at Anse’s wife Carole and at the three weary kids in the back of the car. “He’s been pacing around on the porch all day, restless as a cat, waiting for someone to show up.”

  “My sister Rosalie’s not here yet, then? What about my cousins?”

  “None of them, not yet. Not your brother, either.—Your brother will be coming, won’t he?”

  “He said he would, yes,” Anse replied, no vast amount of conviction in his tone.

  “Oh, terrific! Terrific! The Colonel’s so eager to see him after all this time.—How was your drive?”

  “Wonderful,” Anse said, a little more sourly than was really proper. But Peggy didn’t seem to notice his tone.

  Getting here was a grueling all-day business for him now. He had had to set out before sunrise from his home in Costa Mesa, well down the coast in Orange County, if he wanted to get to Santa Barbara before the early dark of this midwinter day. Once upon a time he had needed no more than about three hours, door to door. But the roads weren’t what they had been back then. Very little was.