The Alien Years Page 15

  There were gasps of shock. There were cries of incredulity.

  “Do you have any information that this is about to take place, Dad?” Ronnie asked.

  “As a matter of fact, no. Or I would have brought the whole thing up a long time ago. But there’s no reason why it can’t happen—next month, next week, tomorrow. They’ve already made a start on it, you know. I doubt that I need to remind you that Highway 101’s been shut down near Thousand Oaks for the past six months, north and south, concrete walls right across it both ways. Suppose they decided to do that everywhere else. Just consider what it would be like: a tremendous chaotic migration of refugees, everybody looking out for himself and to hell with the consequences. A million people go west to Malibu and Topanga, and a million more cross into Van Nuys and Sherman Oaks, and all the rest of them head for Orange County. Into Costa Mesa, Anse and Carole. Into Newport Beach, Rosalie, Doug. Huntington Beach. Even all the way down to La Jolla, Ronnie. What will it be like? You haven’t forgotten the Troubles, have you? This will be ten times worse.”

  Anse said, “What are you trying to tell us, Dad?”

  “That I see a New York-style catastrophe shaping up for Los Angeles, and I want all of you to move up here to the ranch before it happens.”

  Anse had never before seen them all look so nonplussed. There were slack jaws all over the room, wide eyes, bewildered faces, astonished murmurs.

  The Colonel overrode it all. His voice was as firm and strong as Anse had ever heard it.

  “Listen to me. We have plenty of space here, and there are outbuildings that can easily be converted to additional residential units. We have our own well. With a little sweat we can make ourselves self-sufficient so far as food goes: we can grow any crop except the really tropical ones, and there’s no reason why all this good land has to be given over to almonds and walnuts. Also our position up here on the side of the mountain is a good strategic one, easily fortified and defended. We—”

  “Hold it, Dad. Please.”

  “Just a minute, Anse. I’m not done.”

  “Please. Let me say something, first.” Anse didn’t wait for permission. “Are you seriously asking us to abandon our houses, our jobs, our lives—”

  “What jobs? What lives?” There was a sudden whip-crack tone in the Colonel’s voice. “Since the Troubles you’ve all been improvising, every bit of the time. There isn’t one of you, is there, who’s still got the same job they had the day before the Entities came. Or goes about any other part of their daily life in remotely the same way. So it isn’t as if you’re clinging to well-loved established routines. And what about your houses? Those nice pretty suburban houses of yours, Anse, Rosalie, Paul, Helena? With the whole population of central Los Angeles flooding down your way to look for a place to sleep, and everybody angry because their neighborhood got sealed off and yours didn’t, what’s going to become of your cute little towns? No. No. What’s just ahead for us is going to be infinitely worse than anything that occurred during the Troubles. It’s going to be like a Richter Nine earthquake, I warn you. I want you here, where you’ll be safe, when that happens.”

  Helena, who had been widowed at twenty-two in the fury of the Troubles, and who had not even begun in the intervening two years to come to terms with her loss, now started to sob. Rosalie and Doug were staring at each other in consternation. Their pudgy son Steve seemed stunned; he looked as though he wanted to crawl under the table. The only ones in the room who appeared completely calm were Peggy Gabrielson, who surely had known in advance that this was what the Colonel had in mind, and Ronnie, whose face was a bland, noncommittal poker-player’s mask.

  Anse looked toward his wife. Panic was visible in her eyes. Leaning across to him, Carole whispered, “He’s gone completely around the bend, hasn’t he? You’ve got to do something, Anse. Get him to calm down.”

  “I’m afraid he is calm,” Anse said. “That’s the problem.”

  Paul Carmichael, with one comforting arm across his sister’s shoulders, said, levelheaded as always, “I don’t have any doubt, Uncle Anson, that we’ll be better off up here if the same thing takes place in Los Angeles that you say was done in New York. But just how likely a possibility is that? The Entities could shut down New York just by cutting half a dozen transportation arteries. Closing off Los Angeles would be a lot more complicated.”

  The Colonel nodded. He moistened his lips thoughtfully.

  “It would be, yes. But they could do it if they wanted to. I don’t know whether they do: nobody does. Let me tell you, though, one further thing that may affect your decision. Or at least I’ll partly tell you.”

  That was too cryptic. There were frowns all over the room.

  The Colonel said, “As I told you, I’ve been more active in the Resistance than I’ve let you know, and thus I happen to be privy to a great deal of information that circulates in Resistance circles. I don’t intend to share any classified details with you, obviously. But what I can tell you is that certain factions within the Resistance are considering making a very serious attempt at a military strike against an Entity compound right after the new year. It’s a rash and stupid and very dangerous idea and I hope to God that it never comes to pass. But if it does, it will certainly fail, and then the Entities will beyond any doubt retaliate severely, and may the Lord help us all, then. Chaos beyond belief will be the result and you, wherever you may be at the time, will wish that you had taken me up on my offer to move up here. That’s all I’m going to say. The rest is up to you.”

  He looked around the room, steely-eyed, fierce, almost defiant, every inch the commanding officer.

  “Well?”

  The Colonel was looking straight at Anse. The oldest, the favorite. But Anse did not know what to say. Were things really going to be as apocalyptic as this? He respected the old man’s concern for them. But even now, after all that had taken place, he could not bring himself to believe that the roof was going to fall in on Los Angeles like that. And he felt a powerful inner opposition to the idea of giving up whatever was left of the life he had made for himself down there in Orange County, uprooting the whole family on the Colonel’s mere say-so and holing up like hermits on this mountainside. Settling in here with his father and his slippery rascal of a brother and all the rest of them. Fort Carmichael, they could call it.

  He sat silent, stymied, stuck.

  Then came a cheerful voice from the corner:

  “I’m with you, Dad. This is the only place to be. I’ll go home right after Christmas and pack up my stuff and get myself back here before the first of the year.”

  Ronnie.

  Uttering words that fell on the astounded Anse like thunderbolts. This is the only place to be.

  Even the Colonel seemed momentarily dumbfounded to realize that Ronnie, of all people, had been the first one to agree. He, of all people, scurrying back ahead of the others to the parental nest. But he made a quick recovery.

  “Good. Good. That’s wonderful, Ronnie. What about the rest of you, now? Doug, Paul, you guys are both computer experts. I don’t know beans about computers, and I need to. We get a little on-line communication with other places here, but it isn’t nearly enough. If you were living here, you could click right into the Resistance net and do some very necessary programming for us. Rosalie, you’re with a money broker of some sort now, is that right? In the next stage of the breakdown of society you could probably help us figure out how to cope with the changes that will be coming. And you, Anse—”

  Anse’s head was swimming. He still could not bring himself to accede. Across the way from him, Carole, reading his mind without the slightest difficulty, was saying silently, lips exaggeratedly pursed, No. No. No. No.

  “Anse?” the Colonel said again.

  “I think I could use a little fresh air,” Anse said.

  He went outside before his father had any chance to respond to that.

  It was cooler tonight than last night, but still on the mild side. There was rain
coming soon: he could feel it. Anse stood looking down at little Santa Barbara and imagined that it was the gigantic city of Los Angeles, and imagined that city in flames, its freeways impenetrably blocked, vast armies of refugees on the march, heading toward his very street. Swarms of gleeful Entities floating along behind them, herding them along.

  He wondered also what was behind Ronnie’s quick acquiescence. Buttering the old man up, gliding cunningly toward the foremost place in his heart after the long estrangement? Why? What for?

  Maybe Peggy Gabrielson had had something to do with it. Anse was pretty sure that Ronnie and Peggy had spent last night together. Did the Colonel know that? The body language was obvious enough. Except, perhaps, to the Colonel. The Colonel would not have been pleased. The Colonel took a very Victorian view of such goings-on. And he was so protective of Peggy. He would surely intervene.

  Well, Colonel or no, Ronnie almost certainly was up to something with Peggy, and was even willing to move to the ranch to keep it going. For one wild moment Anse found himself arguing that he would have to move here too, to protect his father against Ronnie’s schemes, whatever they might be. Because Ronnie was totally amoral. Ronnie was capable of anything.

  Anse had been troubled by his younger brother’s amorality since he was old enough to understand Ronnie’s nature. That was what he was, Anse thought—not immoral, as the Colonel took him to be, but amoral. Someone who does as he pleases without ever pausing a millisecond to consider issues of right and wrong, of guilt or shame. You had to be very cautious when you were dealing with somebody like that.

  But also Anse was, and always had been, intimidated by Ronnie’s volatile intelligence. Ronnie’s mind moved faster and took him into stranger places than Anse could ever enter.

  Anse knew that he himself was a fundamentally ordinary, decent man, flawed, weaker than he would like to be, occasionally guilty of acts of which he disapproved. Ronnie never disapproved of anything having to do with Ronnie. That was frightening. He was demonic; diabolical, even. Capable of almost anything. To prosaic diligent imperfect Anse, who loved his wife and yet was often unfaithful to her, who obeyed his iron-souled father in all things and yet had not troubled himself to have the expected distinguished military career, Ronnie—who had not bothered with any sort of military career, nor offered the slightest explanation for bypassing one—was terrifying to Anse, a superior being, forever outflanking him with maneuvers he could not comprehend.

  Ronnie was always a step ahead, acting out of motives that Anse could not fathom. His two quick marriages and lightning-fast divorces, no visible reasons for either. His equally swift and puzzling shifts from one sort of lucrative borderline-legal business operation to another. Or, for that matter, the time once when they were both still little boys and Ronnie had justified some terrible act of hostile mischief by explaining that it made him angry that Anse, and not he, had been given the sacred privilege of carrying the family name, Anson Carmichael IV, and that he, Ronald Jeffrey Carmichael, was going to get even with Anse for that a million times over during all the days of their lives.

  And now here was Ronnie improbably jumping at the Colonel’s unexpected offer, instantly agreeing to move up here and dwell forever after at the right hand of their father while the rest of Southern California went to hell around them. What did Ronnie know? What did he see in the days ahead that was invisible to Anse?

  Anse thought of his children in the midst of civil strife. A replay of the Troubles, only really bad this time. Gunfire in the street, fires raging on the northern horizon, black smoke filling the sky, maddened hordes of people converging on Costa Mesa, his very district: hundreds of thousands of people from Torrance and Carson and Long Beach and Gardena and Inglewood and Culver City and Redondo Beach and all those million other little places that made up the giant amoebic thing that was Los Angeles, people who had been driven from their own homes by Entity edict and now proposed to take shelter in his. And there were Jill and Mike and Charlie peeking hesitantly out from behind him on the porch, mystified, frightened, their faces gone completely bloodless, asking plaintively, “Daddy, Daddy, why are there so many people on our street, what do they want, why do they look so unhappy?” While Carole, from within the house, called to him again and again, a strangled terrified moan, “Anse—Anse—Anse—Anse—”

  It would never happen. Never. Never never never. It was just the old man’s wild apocalyptic fantasy. Probably he was having Vietnam flashbacks again.

  Even so, Anse was surprised to find that he had somehow decided to move to the ranch after all, in the time it took him to walk back from the edge of the patio to the door of the house. And he discovered, too, once he was inside, that all the others had come to the same decision also.

  Christmas morning, very early. The Colonel lay dreaming. More often than not, what he dreamed of was that happy time right after the war, reunited with his family at last, his children around him and his wife in his bed every night in that pretty little rented house in that cheery Maryland suburb. He was dreaming of that time now. Halcyon days, at least when seen in the warm pink glow of a dream. The Johns Hopkins days, getting his doctorate, working toward it in the library all day, then coming home to robust little Anse, who was always ten or eleven in the dreams, and Rosalie, a pretty little girl in smudged jeans, and Ron, no more than two and already with that rapscallion gleam in his eye. And best of all Irene, still healthy, young, just turned thirty and delicious to look at, strong sturdy thighs, high taut breasts, long dazzling spill of golden hair. She was coming toward him now, smiling, radiant, wearing nothing but a filmy little amethyst-colored negligee—

  But, as ever, he remained on the edge of wakefulness even while asleep, the ancient inescapable discipline of his profession. The soft bleebling of the telephone by the bedside sounded, the private line, and by the second ring Irene and her negligee were gone and the phone was in his hand.

  “Carmichael.”

  “General Carmichael, it’s Sam Bacon.” The former Senate Majority Leader, with the fine tennis-player legs. Now one of the ranking civilian officials of the California Army of Liberation. “I’m sorry to be awakening you so early on Christmas day, but—”

  “There’s probably a good reason, Senator.”

  “I’m afraid there is. Word has just come through from Denver. They’re going to do the laser thing after all.”

  “The stupid fucking sons of bitches,” said the Colonel.

  “Ah—yes. Yes, definitely,” said Bacon. He seemed a little taken aback at the sound of such colorful language, coming from the Colonel. That was not the Colonel’s custom. “They’ve seen Joshua Leonards’s report, and Peter’s comments too, and the response is that they’re going to go ahead with it anyway. They’ve got an anthropologist of their own—no, a sociologist—who says that if only for symbolic reasons we need to begin some sort of counter-offensive against the Entities, in fact it’s long overdue, and now that we have the actual capacity to do so—”

  “Symbolic lunacy,” the Colonel said.

  “We all second that, sir.”

  “When will it happen?”

  “They’re being very cagey. But we’ve also intercepted and decoded a Net message from the Colorado center to their adjuncts in Montana that seems pretty clearly to indicate that the strike will occur on January 1 or 2. That is, approximately seven days from now.”

  “Shit. Shit. Shit.”

  “We’ve already notified the President, and he’s sending a countermanding order through to Denver.”

  “The President,” said the Colonel, making that sound like an obscenity also. “Why don’t they notify God, too? And the Pope. And Professor Einstein. Denver isn’t going to pay any attention to countermanding orders that come out of Washington. Washington’s ancient history. It shouldn’t be necessary for me to say that to you, Senator. What we need to do is get somebody into Denver ourselves and disable that damned laser trigger ourselves before they can use it.”

  �
�I concur. And so do Joshua and Peter. But we have some serious opposition right within our own group.”

  “On the grounds that an act of sabotage aimed against our beloved liberation-front comrades in Denver is treason against humanity in general, is that it?”

  “Not exactly, General Carmichael. The opposition comes on straight military grounds, I’m afraid. General Brackenridge. General Comstock. They believe that the Denver laser strike is a good and proper thing to attempt at this present time.”

  “Jesus Christ Almighty,” the Colonel said. “So I’m outvoted, Sam?”

  “I’m sorry to say that you are, sir.”

  The Colonel’s heart sank. He had been afraid of this.

  Brackenridge had been something fairly high up in the Marines before the Conquest. Comstock was a Navy man. Even a Navy man could be a general in the California Army of Liberation. They were both much younger than the Colonel; they had never had any combat experience whatsoever, not even a minor police action in some third-world boondock. Desk men, both of them. But they had two votes to his one in the military arm of the executive committee.

  The Colonel had suspected they would take the position that they now had taken. And had fought with them about it.

  Let me remind you, he had said, of a remarkably ugly bit of military history. The Second World War, Czechoslovakia: the Czech underground managed to murder the local Nazi commander, a particularly monstrous character named Reinhard Heydrich. Whereupon the Nazis rounded up every single inhabitant of the village where it had happened, a place called Lidice, executed all the men, sent the women and children to concentration camps, where they died too. Don’t you think the same thing is likely to happen, only at least twenty thousand times worse, if we lay a finger on one of these precious E-Ts?

  They had heard him out; he had given it whatever eloquence he could muster; it had not mattered.