The Alien Years Read online

  “I imagine so. That’s exactly what he would be doing.” Anse laughed. “Old Mike would have a fit if it turned out that that really was Cindy out there at the mall with the E-Ts, wouldn’t he, Dad?”

  “I suppose he would. But that wasn’t Cindy out there.—Listen, Anse, I do appreciate your calling, okay? Stay in touch. Give my love to Carole.”

  “You know I will, Dad.”

  The Colonel clapped the phone shut, and then, as it rang again, opened it almost immediately, thinking, Let it be Mike, let it be Mike.

  But no, it was Paul calling—his nephew, Lee’s boy, the one who taught computer sciences at the Oceanside branch of the University. Worried about the old man and checking in with him, Paul was. The basic California catastrophe procedure, same drill good for earthquakes, fires, race riots, floods, and mudslides: call all your kinfolks within a hundred fifty miles of the event, call all your friends, too, make sure everybody’s all right, tie up the phone lines good and proper, overload the entire Net with needless well-meant communication. He would have expected Paul, at least, to have known better. But of course the Colonel had done the same thing himself only about ten minutes ago, calling all around town trying to track down his brother’s wife.

  “Hell, I’m fine,” the Colonel said. “Air’s getting a little smoky from what’s going on down there, that’s all. I’ve got four Martians sitting in the living room with me right now and I’m teaching them how to play bridge.”

  At the airport they had coffee ready, sandwiches, tacos, burritos. While Carmichael was waiting for the ground crew to fill his tanks he went inside to call Cindy again, and again there was no answer at home, none at the studio. He phoned the gallery, which was open by this time, and the shiftless kid who worked there said lazily that she hadn’t been in touch all morning.

  “If you happen to hear from her,” Carmichael said, “tell her I’m flying fire control out of Van Nuys Airport, working the Chatsworth fire, and I’ll be home as soon as things calm down a little. Tell her I miss her, too. And tell her that if I run into an E-T I’ll give it a big hug for her. You got that? Tell her just that.”

  “Will do. Oh, by the way, Mr. Carmichael—”

  “Yes?”

  “Your brother called, twice. Colonel Carmichael, that is. He said he thought you were, like, still in New Mexico and he was trying to find Mrs. Carmichael. I told him you were supposed to be coming back today, and that I didn’t know where she was, but that the fire was, like, nowhere near your house.”

  “Good. If he calls again, let him know what I’m doing.”

  That was odd, Carmichael thought, Anson trying to phone Cindy. The Colonel had done a pretty good job over the past five or six years of pretending that Cindy didn’t exist. Carmichael hadn’t even known that his brother had the gallery number, nor could he understand why he would want to call there. Unless the Colonel was worried about him for some reason, so worried that he didn’t mind having to put up with talking with Cindy.

  Probably I should phone him right now, Carmichael thought, before I go back upstairs.

  But there was no dial tone now. System overload, most likely. Everybody was calling everybody all around the area. It was a miracle that he’d been able to do as well as he had with the phone just now. He hung up, tried again, still got nothing. And there were other people lined up waiting for the phone.

  “Go ahead,” he said to the first man in line, stepping back from the booth. “You try. The line’s dead.”

  He went looking for a different phone. Across the way in the main hall he saw a crowd gathered around someone carrying a portable television set, one of those jobs with a postcard-sized screen. Carmichael shouldered his way in just as the announcer was saying, “There has been no sign yet of the occupants of the San Gabriel or Orange County spaceships. But this was the horrifying sight that astounded residents of the Porter Ranch area beheld this morning between nine and ten o’clock.”

  The tiny screen showed two upright tubular figures that looked like big squids walking on the tips of the tentacles that sprouted in clusters at their lower ends. Their skins were purplish and leathery-looking, with rows of luminescent orange spots glowing along the sides. They were moving cautiously through the parking lot of a shopping center, peering this way and that out of round yellow eyes as big as saucers. There was something almost dainty about their movements, but Carmichael saw that the aliens were taller than the lampposts—which would make them at least twelve feet high, maybe fifteen. At least a thousand onlookers were watching them at a wary distance, appearing both repelled and at the same time irresistibly drawn.

  Now and then the creatures paused to touch their foreheads together in some sort of communion. The camera zoomed in for a close-up, then jiggled and swerved wildly just as an enormously long elastic tongue sprang from the chest of one of the alien beings and whipped out into the crowd.

  For an instant the only thing visible on the screen was a view of the sky; then Carmichael saw a shot of a stunned-looking girl of about fourteen who had been caught around the waist by that long tongue, and was being hoisted into the air and popped like a collected specimen into a narrow green sack.

  “Teams of the giant creatures roamed the mall for nearly an hour,” the announcer intoned. “It has definitely been confirmed that between twenty and thirty human hostages were captured before they returned to their vehicle, which now has taken off and gone back to the mother ship eleven miles to the west. Meanwhile, firefighting activities desperately continue under Santa Ana conditions in the vicinity of all three landing sites, and—”

  Carmichael shook his head.

  Los Angeles, he thought, disgusted. Jesus! The kind of people that live here, they just walk right up and let the E-Ts gobble them like flies. Maybe they think it’s just a movie, and everything will be okay by the last reel.

  And then he remembered that Cindy was the kind of people who would walk right up to one of these E-Ts. Cindy was the kind of people who lived in Los Angeles, he told himself, except that Cindy was different. Somehow.

  There was still a long line in front of every telephone booth. People were angrily banging the useless receivers against the walls. So there was no point even thinking about attempting to call Anson now. Carmichael went back outside. The DC-3 was loaded and ready.

  In the forty-five minutes since he had left the fire line, the blaze seemed to have spread noticeably toward the south. This time the line boss had him lay down the retardant from the De Soto Avenue freeway interchange to the northeast comer of Porter Ranch. He emptied his tanks quickly and went back once more to the airport. Maybe they would have a working phone in Operations HQ that they would let him use to try to get quick calls through to his wife and his brother.

  But as he was crossing the field a man in military uniform came out of the HQ building and beckoned to him. Carmichael walked over, frowning.

  The man said, “You Mike Carmichael? Live in Laurel Canyon?”

  “That’s right.”

  “I’ve got a little troublesome news for you. Let’s go inside.”

  Carmichael was too tired even to feel alarm. “Suppose you tell me here, okay?”

  The officer moistened his lips. He looked very uneasy. He had one of those blank featureless baby-faces, nothing interesting about it at all except the incongruously big eyebrows that crawled across his forehead like shaggy caterpillars. He was very young, a lot younger than Carmichael expected officers of his rank to be, and obviously he wasn’t good at this stuff, whatever kind of stuff it was.

  “It’s about your wife,” he said. “Cynthia Carmichael? That’s your wife’s name?”

  “Come on,” Carmichael said. “God damn it, get to the point!”

  “She’s one of the hostages, Mr. Carmichael.”

  “Hostages?”

  “The space hostages. Haven’t you heard? The people who were captured by the aliens?”

  Carmichael shut his eyes for a moment. His breath went from him as t
hough he had been kicked.

  “Where did it happen?” he demanded. “How did they get her?”

  The young officer gave him a strange strained smile. “It was the shopping-center lot, Porter Ranch. Maybe you saw some of it on the TV.”

  Carmichael nodded, feeling more numb by the moment. That girl jerked off her feet by that immense elastic tongue, swept through the air, popped into that green pouch.

  And Cindy—Cindy—?

  “You saw the part where the creatures were moving around? And then suddenly they were grabbing people, and everyone was running from them?”

  “No. I must have missed that part.”

  “That was when they got her. She was right up front when they began grabbing, and maybe she would have had a chance to get away, but she waited just a little bit too long. She started to run, I understand, but then she stopped—she looked back at them—she may have called something out to them—and then—well, and then—”

  “Then they scooped her up?”

  “I have to tell you, sir, that they did.” The baby-face worked hard at looking tragic. “I’m terribly sorry, Mr. Carmichael.”

  “I’m sure you are,” Carmichael said stonily. An abyss had begun to open within him. “So am I.”

  “One thing all the witnesses agreed, she didn’t panic, she didn’t scream. We can show it to you on tape inside. She was very brave when those monsters grabbed her. How in God’s name you can be brave when something that size is holding you in mid-air is something I don’t understand, but I have to assure you, sir, that those who saw it—”

  “It makes sense to me,” Carmichael said.

  He turned away. He shut his eyes again, for a moment, and took deep, heavy pulls of the hot smoky air.

  It figures, he thought. It makes complete sense.

  Of course she had gone right out to the landing site, as soon as the news of their arrival began to get around. Of course. If there was anyone in Los Angeles who would have wanted to get to those creatures and see them with her own eyes and perhaps try to talk to them and establish some sort of rapport with them, it was Cindy. She wouldn’t have been afraid of them. She had never seemed to be afraid of anything. And these were the wise superior beings from HESTEGHON, anyway, weren’t they? It wasn’t hard for Carmichael to imagine her in that panicky mob in the parking lot, cool and radiant, staring at the giant aliens, smiling at them even in the moment when they seized her.

  In a way Carmichael felt very proud of her. But it terrified him to think that she was in their grasp.

  “She’s on the ship?” he asked. “The one that I saw sitting in that field just beyond the fire zone?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have there been any messages from the hostages yet? Or from the aliens, for that matter?”

  “I’m sorry. I’m not in a position to divulge that information.”

  “I’ve been risking my ass all afternoon trying to put that fire out and my wife is a prisoner on the spaceship and you’re not in a position to divulge any information?”

  The officer gave him a dead-fish sort of smile. Carmichael tried to tell himself that he was just a kid, the way the cops and the high-school teachers and the mayors and governors and everybody else mysteriously seemed to be just kids these days. A kid with a nasty job to do.

  “I was instructed to tell you the news about your wife,” the kid said, after a moment. “I’m not allowed to say anything about any other aspect of this event to anyone, not to anyone at all. Military security.”

  “Yes,” Carmichael said, and for an instant he was back in the war again, trying to find out something, anything, about Cong movements in the area he was supposed to be patrolling the next day, and running into that same dead-fish smile, that same solemn meaningless invocation of military security. His head swam and names that he hadn’t thought of in decades ran through his brain, Phu Loi, Binh Thuy, Tuy Hoa, Song Bo. Cam Ranh Bay. The U Minh Forest. Images from the past, swimming around. The greasy sidewalks of Tu Do Street in Saigon, skinny whores grinning out of every bar, ARVNs in red berets all over the place. White sand beaches lined with coconut palms, pretty as a picture; native kids with one leg each, hobbling on improvised crutches; Delta hooches going up in flames. And the briefing officers lying to you, lying, lying, always lying. His buried past, evoked by a single sickly smile.

  “Can you at least tell me whether there is any information?”

  “I’m sorry, sir, I’m not at liberty to—”

  “I refuse to believe,” Carmichael said, “that that ship is just sitting there, that nothing at all is being done to make contact with—”

  “A command center has been established, Mr. Carmichael, and certain efforts are under way. That much I can tell you. I can tell you that Washington is involved. But beyond that, at the present point in time—”

  Another kid, a pink-faced one who looked like an Eagle Scout, came running up. “Your plane’s all loaded and ready to go, Mike!”

  “Yeah,” Carmichael said. The fire, the fucking fire! He had almost managed to forget about it. Almost.

  He hesitated a moment, torn between conflicting responsibilities. Then he said to the officer, “Look, I’ve got to get back out on the fire line. I want to look at that tape of Cindy getting captured, but I can’t do it now. Can you stay here a little while?”

  “Well—”

  “Maybe half an hour. I have to do a retardant dump. Then I want you to show me the tape. And then to take me over to that spaceship and get me through the cordon, so I can talk to those critters myself. If my wife’s on that ship, I mean to get her off it.”

  “I don’t see how it would be possible for—”

  “Well, try to see,” Carmichael said. “I’ll meet you right here in half an hour, okay?”

  She had never seen anything so beautiful. She had never even imagined that such beauty could exist. If this was how their spaceship looked, Cindy thought, what could their home world possibly be like?

  The place was palatial. The aliens had taken them up and up on a kind of escalator, rising through a seemingly endless series of spiral chambers. Every chamber was at least twenty feet high, as was to be expected, considering how big the aliens themselves were. The shining walls tapered upward in eerie zigzag angles, meeting far overhead in a kind of Gothic vault, but not rigid-looking the way Gothic was. Instead there was a sudden twist and leap up there, a quick baffling shift of direction, as though the ceilings were partly in one dimension and partly in another.

  And the ship was one huge hall of mirrors. Every surface, every single one, had a reflective metallic sheen. Wherever your eye came to rest you saw a million ricocheting shimmering images, receding dizzyingly to infinity. There didn’t seem to be any actual sources of illumination in here, just a luminous glow that came out of nowhere, as though being generated by the back-and-forth interaction of all those mirror-bright metal surfaces.

  And the plants—the flowers—

  Cindy loved plants, the stranger the better. The garden of their little Laurel Canyon house was dense with them, ferns and orchids and cacti and bromeliads and aloes and philodendrons and miniature palms and all manner of other things from the abundantly stocked nurseries of Los Angeles. Something was in bloom every day of the year. “My science-fiction garden,” she called it. She had picked things for their tropical strangeness, their corkscrew stems and spiky leaves and unusual variegations. Every imaginable shape and texture and color was represented there.

  But her garden looked like a dull prosaic bunch of petunias and marigolds compared with the fantasyland plants that grew everywhere about the ship, drifting freely in mid-air, seemingly having no need of soil or water.

  There were forking things with immense, fleshy turquoise leaves, big enough to serve as mattresses for elephants; there were plants that looked like clusters of spears, there was one that had a lightning-bolt shape, there were some that grew upside down, standing on fanned-out sprays of delicate purple foliage. And the flowers!
Green blossoms with bright inquisitive magenta eyes at their centers; furry black flowers, tipped with splashes of gold, that throbbed like moth-wings; flowers that seemed to be made out of silver wire; flowers that looked like tufts of flame; flowers that emitted low musical tones.

  She loved them all. She yearned to know their names. Her mind went soaring into ecstasy at the thought of what a botanical garden on Planet Hesteghon must look like.

  There were eight hostages in this chamber with her, three male, five female. The youngest was a girl of about eleven; the oldest, a man who looked to be in his eighties. They all seemed terrified. They were sitting together in a sorry little heap, sobbing, shivering, praying, muttering. Only Cindy was up and around, wandering through the immense room like Alice let loose in Wonderland, gazing delightedly at the marvelous flowers, looking in wonder at the miraculous cascades of interlacing mirror images.

  It weirded her out to see how miserable the others all were in the presence of such fantastic beauty.

  “No,” Cindy told them, coming over and standing in front of them. “Stop crying! This is going to be the most wonderful moment of your lives. They don’t intend to harm us.”

  A couple of them glared at her. The ones who were sobbing sobbed harder.

  “I mean it,” she said. “I know. These people are from the planet Hesteghon, which you could have read about in the Testimony of Hermes. That’s a book that was published about six years ago, translated from the ancient Greek. The Hesteghon people come to Earth every five thousand years. They were the original Sumerian gods, you know. Taught the Sumerians how to write on clay tablets. On an earlier visit they taught the Cro-Magnons to paint on cave walls.”

  “She’s a lunatic,” one of the women said. “Will somebody please shut her up?”

  “Hear me out,” Cindy said. “I promise you, we’re absolutely safe in their hands. On this visit their job is to teach us at Jong last how to live in peace, forever and ever. We’ll be their communicants. They’ll speak through us, and we’ll carry their message to all the world.” She smiled. “You think I’m a nutcase, I know, but I’m actually the sanest one here. And I tell you—”