The Alien Years Read online

  “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 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 o
r 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 300-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.