The Alien Years (8 page)

“Cindy?” “Hello, Mike.”

“Can you tell me what’s been happening in there, Cindy?”

“It’s incredible. The contact, the communication.”

Sure, he thought. If anyone could make contact with the space people from dear old HESTEGHON, land of enchantment, it would be Cindy. She had a certain kind of magic about her: the gift of being able to open any door.

She said, “They speak mind to mind, you know, no barriers at all. No words. You just
know
what they mean. They’ve come in peace, to get to know us, to join in harmony with us, to welcome us into the confederation of worlds.”

He moistened his lips. “What have they done to you, Cindy? Have they brainwashed you or something?”

“No, Mike, no! It isn’t anything like that! They haven’t done a thing to me, I swear. We’ve just talked.”

“Talked!”

“They’ve showed me how to touch my mind to theirs. That isn’t brainwashing. I’m still me. I, me, Cindy. I’m okay. Do I look as though I’m being harmed? They aren’t dangerous. Believe me.”

“They’ve set fire to half the city with their exhaust trails, do you know that?”

“That grieves them terribly. It was an accident. They didn’t understand how dry the hills were. If they had some way of extinguishing the flames, they would, but the fires are too big even for them. They ask us to forgive them. They want everyone to know how sorry they are.” She paused a moment. Then she said, very gently, “Mike, will you come on board? I want you to experience them as I’m experiencing them.”

“I can’t do that, Cindy.”

“Of course you can! Anyone can! You just open your mind, and they touch you, and—”

“I know. I don’t want to. Come out of there and come home, Cindy. Please. Please. It’s been six days—seven, now. It feels like a month. I want to hug you, I want to hold you—”

“You can hold me as tight as you like. They’ll let you on board. We can go to their world together. You know that I’m going to go with them to their world, don’t you?”

“You aren’t. Not really.”

She nodded gravely. She seemed to be terribly serious about it.

“They’ll be leaving in a few weeks, as soon as they’ve had a chance to exchange gifts with Earth. This was intended just as a quick diplomatic visit. I’ve seen images of their planet—like movies, only they do it with their minds—Mike, you can’t imagine how beautiful everything is, the buildings, the lakes and hills, the plants! And they want so much to have me come, to have me experience it firsthand!”

Sweat rolled out of his hair into his eyes, making him blink, but he did not dare wipe it away, for fear she would think he was crying.

“I don’t want to go to their planet, Cindy. And I don’t want you to go either.”

She was silent for a time.

Then she smiled delicately and said, “I know you don’t, Mike.”

He clenched his fists and let go and clenched them again. “I
can’t
go there.”

“No. You can’t. I understand that. Los Angeles is alien enough for you, I think. You need to be in your own places, in your own real world, not running off to some far star. I won’t try to coax you.”

“But you’re going to go anyway?” he asked, and it was not really a question.

“You already know what I’m going to do.”

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry. But not really.”

“Do you love me?” Carmichael said, and regretted saying it the moment it had passed his lips.

She smiled sadly. “You know I do. And you know I don’t want to leave you. But once they touched my mind with theirs, once I saw what kind of beings they are—do you understand what I’m saying? I don’t have to explain, do I? You always know what I’m saying.”

“Cindy—”

“Oh, Mike, I do love you so much.”

“And I love you, babe. And I wish you’d come down out of that goddamned ship.”

Her gaze was unwavering. “You won’t ask that. Because you love me, right? Just as I won’t ask you again to come on board with me, because I really love you. Do you understand what I’m saying, Mike?”

He wanted to reach into the screen and grab her.

“I understand, yes,” he made himself say.

“I love you, Mike.”

“I love you, Cindy.”

“They tell me the trip takes forty-eight of our years, even by hyperspace, but it will only seem like a few weeks to me. Oh, Mike! Goodbye, Mike! God bless, Mike!” She blew kisses to him. He could see her favorite rings on her fingers, the three little strange star sapphire ones that she had made when she first began to design jewelry. They were his favorite rings too. She loved star sapphires, and so did he, because she did.

Carmichael searched his mind for some new way to reason with her, some line of argument that would work. But he couldn’t find any. He felt that vast emptiness beginning to expand within him again, that abyss, as though he were being made hollow by some whirling blade.

Her face was shining. She seemed like a complete stranger to him, all of a sudden.

She seemed now entirely like a Los Angeles person, one of
those,
lost in kooky fantasies and dreams, and it was as though he had never known her, or as though he had pretended she was something other than she was. No. No, that isn’t right, he told himself. She’s not one of
those,
she’s Cindy. Following her own star, as always.

Suddenly he was unable to look at the screen any longer, and he turned away, biting his lip, making a shoving gesture with his left hand. The Air Force men in the room wore the awkward expressions of people who had inadvertently eavesdropped on someone’s most intimate moments and were trying to pretend that they hadn’t heard a thing.

“She isn’t crazy, Colonel,’’ Carmichael said vehemently. “I don’t want anyone believing she’s some kind of nut.”

“Of course not, Mr. Carmichael.”

“But she isn’t going to leave that spaceship. You heard her. She’s staying aboard, going back with them to wherever the hell they came from. I can’t do anything about that. You see that, don’t you? Nothing I could do, short of going aboard that ship and dragging her off physically, would get her out of there. And I wouldn’t ever do that.”

“Naturally not. In any case, you understand that it would be impossible for us to permit you to go on board, even for the sake of attempting to remove her?”

“That’s all right,” Carmichael said. “I wouldn’t dream of it. To remove her or even just to join her for the trip. I don’t have the right to force her to leave and I certainly don’t want to go to that place myself. Let her go: that’s what she was meant to do in this world. Not me. Not me, Colonel. That’s simply not my thing.” He took a deep breath. He thought he might be trembling. He was starting to feel sick. “Colonel, would you mind very much if I got the hell out of here? Maybe I would feel better if I went back out there and dumped some more gunk on that fire. I think that might help. That’s what I think, Colonel. All right? Would you send me back to Van Nuys, Colonel?”

So he went up one last time in the DC-3. He had lost track of the number of missions he had flown that day. They wanted him to dump the retardants along the western face of the fire, but instead he went to the east, where the spaceship was, and flew in a wide circle around it. A radio voice warned him to move out of the area, and he said that he would.

As he circled, a hatch opened in the spaceship’s side and one of the aliens appeared, looking colossal even from Carmichael’s altitude. The huge purplish thing stepped from the ship, extended its tentacles, seemed to be sniffing the smoky air. It appeared very calm, standing there like that.

Carmichael thought vaguely of flying down low and dropping his whole load of retardants on the creature, drowning it in gunk, getting even with the aliens for having taken Cindy from him. He shook his head. That’s crazy, he told himself. Cindy would be appalled if she knew he had ever considered any such thing.

But that’s what I’m like, he thought. Just an ordinary ugly vengeful Earthman. And that’s why I’m not going to go to that other planet, and that’s why she is.

He swung around past the spaceship and headed straight across Granada Hills and Northridge into Van Nuys Airport. When he was on the ground he sat at the controls of his plane a long while, not moving at all. Finally one of the dispatchers came out and called up to him, “Mike, are you okay?”

“Yeah. I’m fine.”

“How come you came back without dropping your load?”

Carmichael peered at his gauges. “Did I do that? I guess I did do that, didn’t I?”

“You’re
not
okay, are you?”

“I forgot to dump, I guess. No, I didn’t forget. I just didn’t bother. I didn’t feel like doing it.”

“Mike, come on out of that plane. You’ve flown enough for one day.”

“I didn’t feel like dumping,” Carmichael said again. “Why the hell bother? This crazy city—there’s nothing left in it that I would want to save, anyway.” His control deserted him at last, and rage swept through him like fire racing up the slopes of a dry canyon. He understood what Cindy was doing, and he respected it, but he didn’t have to like it. He didn’t like it at all. He had lost his one and only wife, and he felt somehow that he had lost his war with Los Angeles as well. “Fuck it,” he said. “Let it burn. This crazy city. I always hated it. It deserves what it gets. The only reason I stayed here was for her. She was all that mattered. But she’s going away, now. Let the fucking place burn.”

The dispatcher gaped at him in amazement. “Hey, Mike—”

Carmichael moved his head slowly from side to side as though trying to shake off an intolerable headache. Then he frowned. “No, that’s wrong,” he said, and all the anger was gone from his voice. “You’ve got to do the job anyway, right? No matter how you feel. You have to put the fires out. You have to save what you can. Listen, Tim, I’m going to fly one last load today, you hear? And then I’ll go home and get some sleep. Okay? Okay?”

He had the plane in motion as he spoke, going down the short runway. Dimly he realized that he had not requested clearance. The tinny squawks of somebody in the control tower came over his phones, but he ignored them. A little Cessna spotter plane moved hastily out of his way, and then he was aloft.

The sky was black and red. The fire was completely uncontained now, and maybe uncontainable. But you had to keep trying, he thought. You had to save what you could. He gunned and went forward, flying calmly into the inferno in the foothills, dumping his chemicals as he went. He felt the plane fighting him as wild thermals caught his wings from below, and, glassy-eyed, more than half asleep, he fought back, doing whatever he could to regain control, but it was no use, no use at all, and after a little while he stopped fighting it and sat back, at peace at last, as the air currents lifted him and tossed him like a toy skimming over the top, and sent him hurtling toward the waiting hills to the north.

The invasion happened differently, less apocalyptically, in New York City. Great devastating grass fires, with accompanying panicky evacuations, had never been a feature of life in New York. New York’s specialty, then as always, was inconvenience rather than apocalypse, and that was how the invasion began, as simply one more goddamned New York inconvenience.

It was one of those glorious gold-and-blue dance-and-sing days that New York City provides in October, right after the season of hot-and-sticky has taken itself offstage and the season of cold-and-nasty is not quite ready to come on.

There were seventeen witnesses to the onset of the invasion. The point of initial disembarkation was the meadow near the southern end of Central Park. There were many more than seventeen people on the meadow when the aliens arrived, of course, but most of them didn’t seem to have been paying attention.

It had begun, so said the seventeen, with a strange pale blue shimmering about thirty feet off the ground. The shimmering rapidly became a churning, like water going down a drain. Then a light breeze started to blow and very quickly turned into a brisk gale. It lifted people’s hats and whirled them in a startling corkscrew spiral around the churning shimmering blue place. At the same time you had a sense of rising tension, a something’s-got-to-give feeling. All this lasted perhaps forty-five seconds.

Then came a pop and a whoosh and a ping and a thunk—everybody agreed on the sequence of the sound effects—and the instantly famous not-quite-egg-shaped spaceship of the invaders was there, hovering about in midair twenty yards above the surface of the grass, and gliding gently toward the ground. An absolutely unforgettable sight: the gleaming silvery skin of it, the disturbing angle of the slope from its wide top to its narrow bottom, the odd hieroglyphics on its flanks that tended to slide out of your field of vision if you stared at them for more than a moment.

A hatch opened and a dozen of the invaders stepped out. Or
floated
out, rather.

They looked strange. They looked exceedingly strange. Where humans have feet they had a single oval pedestal, maybe five inches thick and a yard in diameter. From this fleshy base their wraith-like bodies sprouted like tethered balloons. They had no arms, no legs, not even discernible heads: just a broad dome-shaped summit, dwindling away to a rope-like termination that was attached to the pedestal. Their lavender skins were glossy, with a metallic sheen. Dark eye-like spots sometimes formed on them but didn’t last long. There was no sign of mouths. As they moved about they seemed to exercise great care never to touch one another.