The Alien Years Read online

  He found himself wondering if this was some kind of manic overreaction to his father’s death.

  No, Anson decided. No. It was simply that the time had come to make the big move.

  The pounding in his head was starting again. That terrible pressure, the furious knuckles knocking from within. This is the time, it seemed to be saying. This is the time. This is the time.

  If not now, when?

  When?

  Anson waited two weeks after the funeral.

  On a bright, crisp morning he came striding into the chart room. “All right,” he said, looking about the room at Steve and Charlie and Paul and Peggy and Mike. “I think that the right moment to get things started has arrived. I’m sending Tony down to L.A. to take out Prime.”

  Nobody said a word against it. Nobody dared. This was Anson’s party all the way. He had that look in his eye, the look that came over him when something started throbbing inside his head, that unanswerable something that told him to get on with the job of saving the world.

  Down there in Los Angeles, Andy was in business in a big way, or at least semi-big. Mickey Megabyte, ace pardoner. It beat sitting around the ranch listening to the sheep go baa.

  He found a little apartment right in the middle of his district, just south of Wilshire, and for the first two days sat there wondering how people who needed a pardoner’s services were going to know how to find him. But they knew. It wasn’t necessary for him to beat the bushes for jobs. In his first week he did four pardoning deals, splicing himself neatly and expertly into the system to reverse a driver’s-license cancellation for a man who lived on Country Club Drive, to cancel a mystifying denial of a marriage permit for a couple from Koreatown, to arrange a visit to relatives in New Mexico for someone who had arbitrarily been refused exit passage from Los Angeles—the Entities were getting tighter and tighter about letting people move about from place to place, God only knew why, but who ever had any answers to questions about Entity policies?—and to maneuver a promotion and a raise for a LACON highway patrolman who was raising two families at opposite ends of the city.

  That last one was pushing things a little, doing a hack for a LACON man, but the fellow came to Andy with valid documentation from Mary Canary saying it was safe to take on the job, and Andy risked it. It worked out. So did the others. Everybody paid promptly and Andy obediently flipped his commissions over to the guild right away and all was well.

  So: the pardoning career of Mickey Megabyte had begun. Easy money for not very much work. He would begin to yearn for something more challenging after a while, he knew. But Andy didn’t expect to spend his life at this, after all. It was his plan to pile up bank accounts for himself all around the continent and then write himself an exit ticket that would let him get out of L.A. and see a little of the world.

  After the fourth pardon came a surprise, though. Someone from Mary Canary’s staff dropped around and said to him, “You like to do things a little too well, don’t you, kid?”

  “What?”

  “Didn’t anybody tell you? You can’t make every fucking pardon you write a perfect one. You do that all the time, you’re bound to attract the attention of the Entities, and that’s not something you really want to do, is it? Or anything that we would want you to do.”

  Andy didn’t get it. “I’m supposed to write bad pardons some of the time, is that what you’re saying? Pardons that don’t go through?”

  “Right. Some of them, anyway. I know, I know, it’s a professional thing with you. You have a rep to maintain and you want to look good. But don’t look too good, you know what I mean? For your own sake. And also it makes everybody else look bad, because nobody else does perfect work. Once word gets around town about you, customers will start coming in here from other districts, and you can see the problem with that. So flub a few, Mickey. Stiff a client, now and then, okay? For your own sake. Okay? Okay?”

  That was hard, being expected to do less than perfect work. It went against his nature to do an incompetent hack. But he’d have to write a couple of stiffs before long, he supposed, just to keep the guild guys happy.

  At the beginning of the second week a woman came to him who wanted a transfer to San Diego. Nice-looking woman, twenty-eight, maybe thirty years old, job in the LACON judiciary wing, had some reason for wanting to change towns but couldn’t swing the transfer arrangements. Tessa, her name was. Fluffy red hair, full red lips, pleasant smile, good figure. Nice. He had always had a thing for older women.

  Andy was uneasy about having so many LACON people coming to him for pardons. But this one had the right letter of recommendation too.

  He started setting up the hack for her.

  Then he said, thinking about the fluffy red hair, the good figure, the week and a half he had just spent sleeping alone in this strange new town, “You know, Tessa, I’ve got an idea. Suppose I write a transfer for both of us, for Florida, or maybe Mexico, Mexico would be nice, wouldn’t it? Cuernavaca, Acapulco, somewhere down there in the sun.” A sudden wild impulse. But what the hell: nothing ventured, nothing gained. “We could have a nice little holiday together, okay? And when we came back you’d go to San Diego, or wherever you wanted, and—”

  Andy could see her reaction right away, and it wasn’t a good one.

  “Please,” she said, very cool and crisp, no pleasant smile at all, now. Glowering at him, in fact. “They told me you were a professional. Making passes at the customers isn’t very professional.”

  “Sorry,” Andy said. “Maybe I got a little carried away.”

  “San Diego is what I want, yes? And solo, if you don’t mind.”

  “Right, Tessa. Right.”

  She was still giving him that scowling look, as though he had unzipped himself in front of her, or worse. Suddenly he was angry. Perhaps he had let himself get carried away, yes. A little out of line, yes. But she didn’t have to look at him that way, did she? Did she? It was offensive, being scowled at like that, just because he had stepped a little out of line.

  He was supposed to write a few pardons that didn’t work out, Mary Canary’s guy had told him. Screw up his code a little, once in a while, get things just a tiny bit wrong.

  All right, he thought. Let this one be the first. What the hell. What the hell. He wrote her an exit permit for San Diego. And put just the littlest little bug in it, down near the end, that invalidated the whole thing top to bottom. It was a very little bug, not even an entire line of code. It would do the trick, though. Teach her a lesson, too. He didn’t like it when people glowered at him like that.

  Mark, Paul Carmichael’s oldest son, drove Tony down to Los Angeles from the ranch, taking the back road eastward through Fillmore and Castaic to the place where it met the remnants of Interstate 5, and heading south from there. Steve Gannett had determined that the most likely location of Prime’s sanctuary was in the northeastern sector of the city, bounded by the Hollywood Freeway on the north, the Harbor Freeway on the west, the city wall on the east, and Vernon Boulevard on the south.

  Within that zone, Steve said, the highest-probability location for the site itself was right in the heart of the old downtown business district. He had all sorts of figures, based on Entity transit vector observations, that proved to his own satisfaction, at least, that a certain building two blocks south of the old Civic Center was the place. Mark delivered him, therefore, to the East Valley gate of the wall, where Burbank met Glendale, which was as close as he could get to downtown. There Mark would wait, for days, if necessary, while Tony entered the city on foot and made his steady way toward the designated target area.

  “Give me a ping,” Mark said, as Tony got out of the car.

  Tony grinned and held up his arm. “Ping,” he said. “Ping. Ping. Ping. Ping.”

  “There you are,” Mark said. “Right on the screen where you belong.”

  They had put an implant in Tony’s forearm, one that had a directional locator built into it. One of the best implant men in San Francisco had
designed it and come down to the ranch to install it, and Lisa Gannett had programmed it to broadcast its signal right into the city telephone lines. Wherever Tony went, they would be able to follow him. Mark could trace him from the car; Steve or Lisa could track him from the ranch’s communications center.

  “Well, now,” Mark said. “All set to get going, are you, then?”

  “Ping,” said Tony again, and moved off in the direction of the wall.

  Mark watched him go. Tony didn’t look back. He walked quickly and steadily toward the gate. When he reached it, he put his implant over the gatekeeper node and let it read the access code that Lisa had written for him.

  The gate opened. Tony entered Los Angeles. It was a few minutes past midnight. His big moment was unfolding at last.

  He was ready for it. More than ready: Tony was ripe.

  He was carrying, in his backpack, a small explosive device powerful enough to take out half a dozen square blocks of the city. All he had to do now was find the building where Steve thought Prime might be hidden, affix the bomb to its side, walk quickly away, and send the signal to the ranch, the single blurt of apparently meaningless digital information that would tell them they could detonate at will.

  Khalid had spent close to seven years training him for this, emptying out whatever had been inside Tony’s soul before and replacing it with a sense of serene dedication to unthinking action. And, so they all hoped, Tony was completely and properly programmed now. He would go about his tasks in Los Angeles the way a broom goes about sweeping away fallen leaves scattered along a walk, giving no more thought to what he had come here to do, or what the consequences of a successful mission might be, than the broom gives to the leaves or the walk.

  “He’s inside the wall,” Mark said, over the car phone. “On his way.”

  “He’s inside the wall,” Steve said at the ranch, pointing to the yellow dot of light on the screen, and to the red one. “That’s Mark, sitting in the car just outside the wall,” he said. “And that one’s Tony.”

  “And now we wait, I guess,” said Anson. “But is his mind blank enough, I wonder? Can you just trot right in there and stick a bomb on a building without thinking at all about what you’re doing?”

  Steve looked up from the screen. “I know what Khalid would say to that. Everything is in the hands of Allah, Khalid would say.”

  “Everything is,” said Anson.

  In the darkness of the city Tony plodded on, south and south and south, past looming silent freeways, past gigantic empty office buildings, dead and dark, that were left over from an era that now seemed prehistoric. The computer in his forearm made little soft noises. Steve was guiding him from Santa Barbara, following his progress on the screen and moving him from street to street like the machine he was. A sound like this meant to turn left. A sound like that, right. Eventually he might hear a tone that sounded like this this this, and then he was to take the little package from his backpack and stick it to the wall of the building that was just in front of him. After which he was supposed to move swiftly away from the site, going back in the direction from which he had just come.

  The streets were practically deserted, here. Occasionally a car went by; occasionally, one of the floating wagons of the Entities, with a glowing figure or two standing upright in it. Tony glanced at them incuriously. Curiosity was a luxury he had long ago relinquished.

  Turn left at this corner. Yes. Right at the next one. Yes. Straight ahead, now, ten blocks, until the mighty pillars of an elevated freeway blocked his way. Steve, far away, directed him with tiny sounds toward an underpass that went between the freeway’s elephantine legs, taking him beneath the roadbed and across to the far side. Onward. Onward. Onward.

  Mark, in the car outside the wall, followed the pings coming from Tony’s implant as they converted themselves into splashes of light on the screen on his dashboard. Steve, at the ranch, monitored them also. Anson stood beside him, watching the screen.

  “You know,” Anson said hoarsely, breaking a long silence about four in the morning, “this can’t possibly work.”

  “What?” Steve said.

  Startled, he glanced up from his equipment. Sweat was streaming down Anson’s face, giving him a glossy, waxen look His eyes were bulging. Knotted-up muscles were writhing along his jawline. Altogether he looked very strange.

  Anson said, “The problem is that the basic idea is wrong, I see that now. It’s complete madness to imagine that we could decapitate the entire Entity operation just by knocking off the top Entity. Steve, I’ve sent Tony down there to die for nothing.”

  “Maybe you ought to get some rest. It doesn’t take two of us to do this.”

  “Listen to me, Steve. This is all a huge mistake.”

  “For Christ’s sake, Anson! Have you lost your mind? You’ve been behind the project from the start. It’s a hell of a time for you to be saying stuff like this. Anyway, Tony’s going to be all right.”

  “Will he?”

  “Look, here: he’s moving along very smoothly, past the Civic Center already, closing in on the building that I think is Prime’s, nicely going about his job, and there’s no sign of any intercept. If they knew he had a bomb on him this close to Prime, they’d have stopped him by now, wouldn’t they? Five more minutes and it’ll be done. And once we kill Prime, they’ll all go bonkers from the shock. You know that, Anson. Their minds are all hooked together.”

  “Are you sure of that? What do we know, really? We don’t even know that Prime exists in the first place. If Prime isn’t in that building, it might not matter to them that Tony’s armed. And even if Prime does exist and is sitting right there, and even if they are all hooked together telepathically, how can we be sure what’ll happen if we kill him? Other than terrible reprisals, that is? We’re assuming that they’ll just lie down and weep, once Prime’s dead. What if they don’t?”

  Steve ran his hand in anguish through what was left of his hair. The man seemed to be having a breakdown right before his eyes.

  “Cut it out, Anson, will you? It’s very late in the game to be spouting crap like this.”

  “But is it such crap? The way it looks to me, all of a sudden, is that in my godawful impatience to do something big, I’ve done something very, very dumb. Which my father and my grandfather before me had the common sense not to try.—Call him back, Steve.”

  “Huh?”

  “Get him out of there.”

  “Jesus, he’s practically at the site now, Anson. Maybe half a block away, looks like. Maybe less than that.”

  “I don’t care. Turn him around. That’s an order.”

  Steve pointed to the screen. “He has turned around. You see those bleeps of light? He’s signaling that he’s already placed the explosive. Leaving the scene, heading for safe ground. So the thing’s done. In five minutes or so I can detonate. No sense not doing it, now that the bomb’s been planted.”

  Anson was silent. He put his hands to the sides of his head and rubbed them.

  “All right,” he said, though the words came from him with a reluctance that was only too obvious. “Go ahead and detonate, then.”

  Tony heard the sound rising through the air behind him, an odd kind of hissing first, then a thud, then the first part of the boom, then the main part of it, very loud. Painfully loud, even. His ears tingled. A hot breeze went rushing past him. He walked quickly on. Something must have exploded, he thought. Yes. Something must have exploded. There has been an explosion back there. And now he had to return to the wall and go through the gate and find Mark and go home. Yes.

  But there were figures, suddenly, standing in his way. Human figures, three, four, five of them, wearing gray LACON uniforms. They seemed to have sprung right from the pavement before him, as though they had been following him all this time, waiting for the moment for making themselves known.

  “Sir?” one of them said, too politely. “May I see your identification, sir?”

  “He’s off the screen,” Mark s
aid, from the car outside the wall. “I don’t know what happened.”

  “The bomb went off, didn’t it?” said Steve.

  “It went off, all right. I could hear it from here.”

  “He’s off my screen too. Could he have been caught up in the explosion?”

  “Looked to me like he was well clear of the site when it blew,” Mark said.

  “Me too. But where—”

  “Hold it, Steve. Entity wagon going by just now. Three of them in it.”

  “Behaving crazily? Signs of shock?”

  “Absolutely normal,” Mark said. “I’d think I’d better begin getting myself out of here.”

  Steve looked toward Anson. “You hear all that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Entity wagon going by. No sign of unusual behavior. I think the site we blew might not have been the right one.”

  Anson nodded wearily. “And Tony?” he asked.

  “Off the screen. Allah only knows.”

  In the three days after Andy had written the self-canceling pardon for the woman with fluffy red hair, he wrote five legitimate ones for other people who were in various sorts of trouble. He figured that was about the right proportion to keep the guild happy, one stiff per every five or six legits.

  He wondered what had befallen her when she showed up at the wall and presented her dandy little exit permit, the one he had written that granted her the right to change her residence to San Diego. The gatekeeper would disagree. And then? Off to a labor camp for trying to use a phony permit, most likely. What a pity, Tessa. But no pardoner ever offered guarantees. They all made that clear right up front. You hired a pardoner, you had to understand that there were certain risks, both for you and the pardoner. And it wasn’t as if the customers had any recourse, did they? You couldn’t hire somebody to do illegal work for you and then complain about the quality of the job. Pardoners didn’t give refunds to dissatisfied customers.

  Poor Ms. Tessa, he thought. Poor, poor Tessa.

  He put her out of his mind. Her problems were not his problem. She was just a job that hadn’t worked out.