The Alien Years Read online

  The meeting was moving right along. The Colonel realized that Ronnie had sat down and Paul was speaking now, some item of new business. The Colonel, much of his mind still somewhere back there in 1971, glanced toward his nephew and frowned. He was noticing, as though for the first time, that Paul no longer looked like a young man. It was as if the Colonel had not seen him in many years, although Paul had lived right here at the ranch for the entire decade past. For a long while Paul had borne an astonishing resemblance to his late father, Lee, but not any more: his heavy thatch of dark hair had gone gray and eroded far back from his forehead, his smooth oval face had grown longer and become creased with deep parallel lines, as Lee’s had never been, and his eyes, once glitteringly bright with the hunger for knowledge, had lost their sheen.

  How old the boy looked, how frayed and worn! The boy! What boy? Paul was at least forty now. Lee had died at thirty-nine, destined to remain forever young in the Colonel’s memory.

  Paul was saying something about the latest all-points Resistance bulletin: a roster, a worldwide census, of Entities, that had been compiled by some colleague of his from his University days, when he had been a brilliant young professor of computer sciences. The colleague, who was part of the San Diego Resistance cell and whose field was statistics—the Colonel had managed to miss his name, but that didn’t matter—had over the course of the past eighteen months collected, sifted, collated, and analyzed a mass of fragmentary espionage reports from the far corners of the world and had come to the conclusion that the total number of Entities currently to be found on Earth was—

  “Excuse me,” the Colonel said, finding himself lost as Paul went rattling onward with a flurry of correlatives and corollaries. “What was that number again, Paul?”

  “Nine hundred, plus or minus some, as stated. You understand I’m speaking just of the big tubular kind, the purplish squid-like ones with the spots, which everyone agrees are the dominant form. We haven’t tried to come up with figures for the other two types, the Spooks and the Behemoths. Those types seem somewhat more numerous, but—”

  “Hold it,” said the Colonel. “This sounds like craziness to me. How can anybody have come up with a reliable count of the Entities, when they hide in their compounds most of the time, and when there doesn’t seem to be any way of telling one from another in the first place?”

  There was some murmuring in the room at that.

  Paul said, his voice oddly gentle, “I’ve just pointed out, Uncle Anson, that the numbers are only approximate, the result mainly of stochastic analysis, but they’re based on very careful observations of the known movements of the dominant Entities, the traffic flow in and around their various compounds. The figure we have isn’t entirely hard and precise—I guess you missed what I was saying when I mentioned that there might well be another fifty or a hundred of them—but we’re confident that it’s close enough. Certainly there can’t be many more than a thousand, all told.”

  “It took just a thousand of them to conquer the entire Earth?”

  “So it would seem. I agree that it seemed like more, when it was happening. But that was evidently an illusion. A deliberately induced exaggeration.”

  “I don’t trust these numbers,” said the Colonel stubbornly. “How could anybody really know? How could they?”

  Sam Bacon said, in a tone just as patient and gentle as Paul’s had been, “The point is, Anson, that even if the numbers are off by a factor of as much as two or three hundred percent, there can only be a few thousand dominant-level Entities on this planet altogether. Which brings up the question of a campaign of attrition aimed against them, a program of steady assassination that will in time eliminate the entire—”

  “Assassination?” the Colonel cried, aghast. He came up out of his chair like a rocket.

  “Guerrilla warfare, yes,” Bacon said. “As I’ve said, a campaign of attrition. Picking them off one by one with sniper attacks, until—”

  “Wait a second,” said the Colonel. “Just wait.” He was trembling, suddenly. Suddenly unsteady on his feet. He started to sway and clamped his fingers down hard into Anse’s shoulder. “I don’t like the direction in which we’re heading, here. Does any of you seriously think we’re anywhere near ready to begin a program of—of—”

  He began to falter. They were all looking at him, and they seemed uneasy. He had the hazy impression that this was not the first time these matters had come up.

  No matter. He had to get it all out. He heard some faint muttering, but he kept on going.

  “Let’s leave out of the discussion for the moment,” the Colonel said, summoning from some half-forgotten reserve the strength to continue, “the fact that nobody, so far as we know for certain, has ever managed to assassinate as many as one Entity, and here we are talking of knocking the whole bunch of them off, bang bang bang. Maybe we should call for opinions from Generals Brackenridge and Comstock before we get any deeper into this.”

  “Brackenridge and Comstock are both dead, Dad,” Anse said in what was becoming the universally kindly, condescending way of addressing him today.

  “Don’t you think I’m aware of that? Died in the Plague, both of them, and the Plague, I remind you, is something that the Entities called down on us in reprisal for that Denver laser attack, which for all we ever knew achieved nothing anyway. Now you want to get some snipers out there who’ll start shooting down the whole population of Entities one at a time in the streets, without stopping to consider what they would do to us if we killed even a single one of them? I fought that notion then, and I’m going to fight it again today. It’s much too soon to try any such thing. If they killed off half the world’s population the last time, what will they do now?”

  “They won’t kill us all off, Anson,” said someone on the far side. Hastings, Hal Faulkenburg, one of those. “The last time, when they sent the Plague, it was as a warning to us not to try any more funny business. And we haven’t. But they won’t kill us off like that again, even if we do take another whack at them. They need us too much. We’re their labor supply. They’ll get nasty, sure. But they won’t get that nasty.”

  “How can you know that?” the Colonel demanded.

  “I don’t. But a second round of the Plague would just about exterminate us all. I don’t think that’s what they want. That’s a calculated risk, I agree. But we can kill all of them. Only nine hundred, Paul says, maybe a thousand? One by one, we’ll get the whole bunch of them, and when they’re gone we’re a free planet again. It’s high time we got under way. If not now, when?”

  “There’s a whole planet of them somewhere,” said the Colonel. “We knock off a few, and they’ll send some more.”

  “From forty light-years away, or wherever their world is? That’ll take time.” This was definitely Faulkenburg speaking now, a rancher from Santa Maria, slab-jawed, cold-eyed, vehement. “Meanwhile we’ll get ourselves ready for their next visit. And when they arrive—”

  “Craziness,” the Colonel said hollowly, and subsided into his seat. “Absolute lunacy. You don’t understand the first thing about our true situation.”

  He was quivering with anger. A pounding pulsation hammered at his left temple. The room had grown very silent, a silence that had a peculiar, almost electric, intensity.

  Then it was broken by a voice from the other side of the room: “I ask you, Anson—” The Colonel looked across. Cantelli, it was. “I ask you, sir: what kind of resistance movement do you think we have here, if we don’t ever dare to resist?”

  “Hear! Hear!” That was Faulkenburg again.

  The Colonel began to reply, but then he realized he was not sure of his answer, though he knew there had to be a good one. He said nothing.

  “He’s always been a pacifist at heart, really,” someone murmured. The voice was distant, indistinct. The Colonel could not tell who it might belong to. “Hates the Entities, but hates fighting even more. And doesn’t even see the contradictions in his own words. What kind of soldier i
s that?”

  No, the Colonel roared, though no sound came from him. Not so. Not so.

  “He had all the right training,” said someone else. “But he was in Vietnam. That changes you, losing a war.”

  “I don’t think it’s that,” came a third voice. “It’s just that he’s so old. All the fight’s gone out of him.”

  Were they, he wondered, actually saying these things, right out loud in his very presence? Or was he simply imagining them?

  “Hey, wait just one goddamned second!” the Colonel cried, trying once more to get to his feet and not quite succeeding. He felt a hand on his wrist. Then another. Anse and Ronnie, flanking him.

  “Dad—” Anse said, that same soft, gentle, infuriatingly condescending tone. “A little fresh air, maybe? That always perks a person up, don’t you think?”

  Outside, again. The warm springtime sun, the lush green hills. A little fresh air, yes. Always a good idea. Perks a person up.

  The Colonel’s head was spinning. He felt very shaky.

  “Just take it easy, Dad. Everything’ll be all right in a minute.”

  That was Ronnie. A fine boy, Ronnie. Just as solid as Anse, nowadays, maybe even more so. Got off to a bad beginning in life, but had come around wonderfully in the last few years. Of course, it was Peggy who had been the making of him. Settled him down, straightened him out.

  “Don’t fret over me. I’ll be okay,” the Colonel said. “You go back inside, Ron. Vote my proxy at the meeting. Keep hammering away at the reprisal issue.”

  “Right. Right. Here—you sit right here, Dad—”

  His mind seemed to be clearing, a little.

  A disheartening business, in there. He recognized the sound of blind determination in the face of all logic when he heard it. The old, old story: they saw the light at the end of the tunnel, or thought they did. And so they would, the Colonel knew, make the Denver mistake a second time, no matter what arguments he raised. And would produce the catastrophic Denver result again, too.

  And yet, and yet, Cantelli had a point: How could they call themselves a Resistance, if they never resisted? Why these endless, useless meetings? What were they waiting for? When were they going to strike? Was it not their goal to rid the world of these mysterious invaders, who, like thieves coming in the night, had stolen all point and purpose from human existence without offering a syllable of explanation?

  Yes. That was the goal. We have to kill them all and reclaim our world.

  And, if so, why let any more time go by before beginning the struggle? Were we getting any stronger as the years went by? Were the Entities growing weaker?

  A hummingbird shot past him, a brilliant flash of green and red, not much bigger than a butterfly. Two hawks were circling far overhead, dark swooping things high up against the blinding brightness of the sky. A couple of small children had emerged from somewhere, a boy and a girl, and stood staring in silence at him. Six or seven years old: the Colonel was confused for a moment about who they were, mistaking them for Paul and Helena, until he reminded himself that Paul and Helena had long since entered into adulthood. This boy here was his youngest grandson, Ronnie’s boy. The latest-model Anson Carmichael: the fifth to bear that name, he was. And the girl? Jill, was she, Anse’s daughter? No. Too young for that. This had to be Paul’s daughter, the Colonel supposed. What was her name? Cassandra? Samantha? Something fancy like that.

  “The thing is,” the Colonel said, as though picking up a conversation they had broken off only a little while before, “that you must never forget that Americans were free people once, and when you grow up and have children of your own you’ll need to teach them that.”

  “Just Americans?” the boy asked, the young Anson.

  “No, others too. Not everyone. Some peoples never knew what freedom was. But we did. Americans are all we can think about now, I guess. The others will have to get free on their own.”

  They were looking at him strangely, big-eyed, bewildered. Didn’t have a clue about the meaning of what he was saying. He wasn’t any too sure himself that it made any sense.

  “I don’t really know how it’s going to come about,” he went on. “But we must never forget that it has to come about, someday, somehow. There has to be a way, but we haven’t discovered it yet. And meanwhile, while we’re biding our time, you mustn’t let the concept of liberty be forgotten, you children. We have to remember who and what we once were. Do you hear me?”

  Blank looks of incomprehension. They did not understand, he was certain of that. Too young, perhaps? No. No. They ought to be old enough to grasp these ideas. He certainly had, when he was their age and his father was explaining to him the reasons why the country had gone to war in Korea. But these two had never known the world to be anything other than this. They had nothing to compare it with, no yardstick by which to measure the notion of “freedom.” And so, as time went along and the ones who remembered the old kind of world gave way to these children, that notion would be lost forever.

  Would it? Would it, really?

  If no one ever lifted a finger against the Entities, then, yes, it would. Something had to be done. Something. Something. But what?

  Right now there was nothing they could do. He had said so many times: The world is the toy of the Entities. They are omnipotent and we are weak. And so the situation was likely to remain, until somehow—he could not say how—we were able to change things. Then, when we had bided our time long enough, when we were ready to strike, we would strike, and we would prevail.

  Wasn’t that so?

  You could still see the ghostly lettering over the front door of the former restaurant, if you knew what to look for, the pale greenish outlines of the words that once had been painted there in bright gold: KHAN’S MOGUL PALACE. The old swinging sign that had dangled above the door was still lying out back, too, in a clutter of cracked basins and discarded stewpots and broken crockery.

  But the restaurant itself was gone, long gone, a victim of the Great Plague, as was poor sad Haleem Khan himself, the ever-weary little brown-skinned man who in ten years had somehow saved five thousand pounds from his salary as a dishwasher at the Lion and Unicorn Hotel and had used that, back when England had a queen and Elizabeth was her name, as the seed money for the unpretentious little restaurant that was going to rescue him and his family from utter hopeless poverty. Four days after the Plague had hit Salisbury, Haleem was dead. But if the Plague hadn’t killed him, the tuberculosis that he was already harboring probably would have done the job soon enough. Or else simply the shock and disgrace and grief of his daughter Yasmeena’s ghastly death in childbirth two weeks earlier, at Christmastime, in an upstairs room of the restaurant, while bringing into the world the bastard child of the long-legged English boy, Richie Burke, the future traitor, the future quisling.

  Haleem’s other daughter, the little girl Leila, had died in the Plague also, three months after her father and two days before what would have been her sixth birthday. As for Yasmeena’s older brother, Khalid, he was already two years gone by then, beaten to death late one Saturday night during the time known as the Troubles by a gang of long-haired yobs who had set forth in fine English wrath, determined to vent their resentment over the conquest of the Earth by doing a lively spot of Paki-bashing in the town streets.

  Which left, of all the family, only Aissha, Haleem’s hardy and tireless second wife. She came down with the Plague, too, but she was one of the lucky ones, one of those who managed to fend the affliction off and survive—for whatever that was worth—into the new and transformed and diminished world. But she could hardly run the restaurant alone, and in any case, with three quarters of the population of Salisbury dead in the Plague, there was no longer much need for a Pakistani restaurant there.

  Aissha found other things to do. She went on living in a couple of rooms of the now gradually decaying building that had housed the restaurant, and supported herself, in this era when national currencies had ceased to mean much and strange new s
orts of money circulated in the land, by a variety of improvised means. She did housecleaning and laundry for those people who still had need of such services. She cooked meals for elderly folks too feeble to cook for themselves. Now and then, when her number came up in the labor lottery, she put in time at a factory that the Entities had established just outside town, weaving little strands of colored wire together to make incomprehensibly complex mechanisms whose nature and purpose were never disclosed to her.

  And when there was no such work of any of those kinds available, Aissha would make herself available to the lorry-drivers who passed through Salisbury, spreading her powerful muscular thighs in return for meal certificates or corporate scrip or barter units or whichever other of the new versions of money they would pay her in. That was not something she would have chosen to do, if she had had her choices. But she would not have chosen to have the invasion of the Entities, for that matter, nor her husband’s early death and Leila’s and Khalid’s, nor Yasmeena’s miserable lonely ordeal in the upstairs room, but she had not been consulted about any of those things, either. Aissha needed to eat in order to survive; and so she sold herself, when she had to, to the lorry-drivers, and that was that.

  As for why survival mattered, why she bothered at all to care about surviving in a world that had lost all meaning and just about all hope, it was in part because survival for the sake of survival was in her genes, and—mostly—because she wasn’t alone in the world. Out of the wreckage of her family she had been left with a child to look after—her grandchild, her dead stepdaughter’s baby, Khalid Haleem Burke, the child of shame. Khalid Haleem Burke had survived the Plague too. It was one of the ugly little ironies of the epidemic that the angered Entities had released upon the world in retribution for the Denver laser attack that children less than six months old generally did not contract it. Which created a huge population of healthy but parentless babes.