From the wraparound porch of the main house Colonel Carmichael had unimpeded views for vast distances. The front aspect allowed him to look straight out over the series of hills that descended toward the south, down to the red-tile roofs of the city of Santa Barbara and the dark ocean beyond, and on a clear day like this he could see all the way to the Channel Islands. From the side patio he had a tremendous angle eastward over the irregular summits of the low mountains of the coastal range at least to Ventura and Oxnard, and sometimes he even caught a hint of the grayish-white edge of the smog wall that came boiling up into the sky out of Los Angeles itself, ninety miles away.
The air off in that direction wasn’t grayish-white today. A great brownish-black column was climbing toward the stratosphere out of the fire zone—rising from Moorpark, he guessed, or Simi Valley or Calabasas, one of those mushrooming suburban towns strung out along Highway 101 on the way into Los Angeles. As it hit some obstruction of the upper air it turned blunt and spread laterally, forming a dismal horizontal dirty smear across the middle of the sky.
At this distance the Colonel was unable to see the fire itself, not even with the field glasses. He imagined that he could—persuaded himself that he could make out six or eight vermilion spires of flame ascending vertically in the center of that awful filthy pall—but he knew it was only a trick of his mind, that there was no way he could see a blaze that was more than sixty miles down the coast. The smoke, yes. Not the fire.
But the smoke was enough to get his pulse racing. A plume that big—whole towns must be going up in flames! He wondered about his brother Mike, living right there in the middle of the city: whether he was okay, whether the fire was threatening his neighborhood at all. The Colonel reached tentatively for the phone at his hip. But Mike had gone to New Mexico last week, hadn’t he? Hiking around by himself in some desolate back corner of the Navajo reservation, getting his head clear, as he seemed to need to do two or three times a year. And in any case Mike usually was part of the volunteer airborne firefighting crew that went up to dump chemicals on fires like this. If he was back from New Mexico, he was in all likelihood up there right now fluttering around in some rickety little plane.
I really should call him anyway, the Colonel thought. But I’d probably just get Cindy on the phone.
The Colonel didn’t enjoy talking to his brother Mike’s wife Cindy. She was too aggressively perky, too emotional, too goddamned strange. She spoke and acted and dressed and thought like some hippie living thirty years out of her proper era. The Colonel didn’t like the whole idea of having someone like Cindy being part of the family, and he had never concealed his dislike of her from Mike. It was a problem between them.
In all probability Cindy wouldn’t be there either, he decided. No doubt a panicky evacuation was in progress, hundreds of thousands of people heading for the freeways, racing off in all directions. A lot of them would come this way, the Colonel supposed, up the Pacific Coast Highway or the Ventura Freeway. Unless they were cut off from Santa Barbara County by a stray arm of the fire and were forced to go the other way, into the chaotic maelstrom of Los Angeles proper. God pity them if that was so. He could imagine what it must be like in the central city now, what with so much craziness going on at the edges of the basin.
He found himself tapping the keys for Mike’s number, all the same. He simply had to call, whether or not anybody was home. Or even if it was Cindy who answered. He had to.
Where the neat rows and circles of suburban streets ended there was a great open stretch of grassy land, parched by the long dry summer to the color of a lion’s hide, and beyond that were the mountains, and between the grassland and the mountains lay the fire, an enormous lateral red crest topped by a plume of foul black smoke. It seemed already to cover hundreds of acres, maybe thousands. A hundred acres of burning brush, Carmichael had heard once, creates as much heat energy as the original atomic bomb that they had dropped on Hiroshima.
Through the crackle of radio static came the voice of the line boss, directing operations from a bubble-domed helicopter hovering at about four o’clock:
“DC-3, who are you?”
“Carmichael.”
“We’re trying to contain it on three sides, Carmichael. You work on the east, Limekiln Canyon, down the flank of Porter Ranch Park. Got it?”
“Got it,” Carmichael said.
He flew low, less than a thousand feet. That gave him a good view of all the action: sawyers in hard hats and orange shirts cutting burning trees to make them fall toward the fire, bulldozer crews clearing brush ahead of the blaze, shovelers carving firebreaks, helicopters pumping water into isolated outbursts of flame.
He climbed five hundred feet to avoid a single-engine observer plane, then went up five hundred more to avoid the smoke and air turbulence of the fire itself. From that altitude he had a clear picture of it, running like a bloody gash from west to east, wider at its western end.
Just east of the fire’s far tip he saw a circular zone of grassland perhaps a hundred acres in diameter that had already burned out, and precisely at the center of that zone stood a massive gray something that looked vaguely like an aluminum silo, the size of a ten-story building, surrounded at a considerable distance by a cordon of military vehicles.
Carmichael felt a wave of dizziness go rocking through his mind.
That thing, he realized, had to be the E-T spaceship.
It had come out of the west in the night, they said, floating over the ocean like a tremendous meteor over Oxnard and Camarillo, sliding toward the western end of the San Fernando Valley, kissing the grass with its searing exhaust and leaving a trail of flame behind it. And then it had gently set itself down over there and extinguished its own brush fire in a neat little circle about itself, not caring at all about the blaze it had kindled farther back, and God knows what kind of creatures had come forth from it to inspect Los Angeles.
It figured, didn’t it, that when the UFOs finally did make a landing out in the open, it would be in L.A.? Probably they had chosen to land there because they had seen the place so often on television—didn’t all the stories say that UFO people always monitored our TV transmissions? So they saw L.A. on every other show and they probably figured it was the capital of the world, the perfect place for the first landing. But why, Carmichael wondered, had the bastards needed to pick the height of the fire season to put their ships down here?
He thought of Cindy again, how fascinated she was by all this UFO and E-T stuff, those books she read, the ideas she had, the way she had looked toward the stars one night when they were camping in the high country of Kings Canyon and talked of the beings that must live up there. “I’d love to see them,” she said. “I’d love to get to know them and find out what their heads are like.”
She believed in them, all right.
She knew, knew, that they would be coming one day.
They would come, not from Mars—any kid could tell you that, there were no living beings on Mars—but from a planet called HESTEGHON. That was how she always wrote it, in capital letters, in the little poetic fragments he sometimes found around the house. Even when she spoke the name aloud that was how it seemed to come out, with extra-special emphasis. HESTEGHON was on a different vibratory plane from Earth, and the people of HESTEGHON were intellectually and morally superior beings, and one day they would materialize right out of the blue in our midst to set everything to rights on our poor sorry world.
Carmichael had never asked her whether HESTEGHON was her own invention, or something that she had heard about from a West Hollywood guru or read about in one of the cheaply printed books of spiritual teachings that she liked to buy. He preferred not to get into any kind of discussion with her about it.
And yet he had never thought she was insane. Los Angeles was full of nutcases who wanted to ride in flying saucers, or claimed they already had, but it didn’t sound nutty to Carmichael when Cindy talked that way. She had the innate Angeleno love of the exotic and the biza
rre, yes, but he felt certain that her soul had never been touched by the crazy corruption here, that she was untainted by the prevailing craving for the weird and irrational that made him loathe the place so much. If she turned her imagination toward the stars, it was out of wonder, not out of madness: it was simply part of her nature, that curiosity, that hunger for what lay outside her experience, to embrace the unknowable.
Carmichael had had no more belief in E-Ts than he did in the tooth fairy, but for her sake he had told her that he hoped she’d get her wish. And now the UFO people were really here. He could imagine her, eyes shining, standing at the edge of that cordon staring lovingly at the spaceship.
He almost hoped she was. It was a pity he couldn’t be with her now, feeling all that excitement surging through her, the joy, the wonder, the magic.
But he had work to do. Swinging the DC-3 back around toward the west, he swooped down as close as he dared to the edge of the fire and hit the release button on his dump lines. Behind him, a great crimson cloud spread out: a slurry of ammonium sulfate and water, thick as paint, with a red dye mixed into it so they could tell which areas had been sprayed. The retardant clung in globs to anything, and would keep it damp for hours.
Emptying his four 500-gallon tanks quickly, he headed back to Van Nuys to reload. His eyes were throbbing with fatigue and the bitter stink of the wet charred earth below was filtering through every plate of the old plane. It was not quite noon. He had been up all night.
The Colonel stood holding the phone while it rang and rang and rang, but there was no answer at his brother’s house, and no way to leave a message, either. A backup number came up on the phone’s little screen: Cindy’s jewelry studio. What the hell, the Colonel thought. He was committed to this thing now; he would keep on going. He hit the key for the studio. But no one answered there either.
A second backup number appeared. This one was the gallery in Santa Monica where she had her retail shop. Unhesitatingly, now, the Colonel hit that one. A clerk answered, a boy who by the sound of his high scratchy voice was probably about sixteen, and the Colonel asked for Mrs. Carmichael. Hasn’t been in yet today, the clerk said. Should have been in by now, but somehow she wasn’t. The lad didn’t sound very concerned. He made it seem as if he was doing the Colonel a favor by answering the telephone at all. Nobody under twenty-five had any respect for telephones. They were all getting biochips implanted, the Colonel had heard. That was the hottest thing now, passing data around with your forearm pressed against an X-plate. Or so his nephew Paul had said. Paul was twenty-seven, or so: young enough to know about these things. Telephones, Paul had said, were for dinosaurs.
“I’m Mrs. Carmichael’s brother-in-law,” the Colonel said. It was a phrase he could not remember having used before. “Ask her to call me when she comes in, will you, please?” he told the boy, and hung up.
Then he realized that a more detailed message might have been useful. He hit the redial key and when the boy came back on the line he said, “It’s Colonel Carmichael again, Mrs. Carmichael’s brother-in-law. I should have told you that I’m actually trying to find my brother, who’s been out of town all week. I thought perhaps Mrs. Carmichael might know when he’s due back.”
“She said last night that he was supposed to be coming back today,” the boy said. “But like I told you, I haven’t spoken to her yet today. Is there some problem?”
“I don’t know if there is or not. I’m up in Santa Barbara, and I was wondering whether—the fire, you know—their house—”
“Oh. Right. The fire. It’s, like, out by Simi Valley somewhere, right?” The kid spoke as though that were in some other country. “The Carmichaels live, like, in L.A., you know, the hills just above Sunset. I wouldn’t worry about them if I were you. But I’ll have her phone you if she checks in with me. Does she have your implant access code?”
“I just use the regular data web.” I’m a dinosaur, the Colonel thought. I come from a long line of them. “She knows the number. Tell her to call right away. Please.”
As soon as he clipped the cell phone back in his waistband it made the little bleeping sound of an incoming call. He yanked it out again and flipped it open.
“Yes?” he said, a little too eagerly.
“It’s Anse, Dad.” His older son’s deep baritone. The Colonel had three children, Rosalie and the two boys. Anse—Anson Carmichael IV—was the good son, decent family man, sober, steady, predictable. The other one, Ronald, hadn’t worked out quite as expected. “Have you heard what’s going on?” Anse asked.
“The fire? The critters from Mars? Yes. Rosalie called me about it about half an hour ago. I’ve been watching the teevee. I can see the smoke from out here on the porch.”
“Dad, are you going to be all right?” There was an unmistakable undertone of tension in Anse’s voice. “The wind’s blowing east to west, straight toward you. They say the Santa Susana fire’s moving into Ventura County already.”
“That’s a whole county away from me,” the Colonel said. “It would have to get to Camarillo and Ventura and a lot of other places first. Somehow I don’t think that’s going to happen.—How are things down your way, Anse?”
“Here? We’re getting Santa Anas, sure, but the nearest fire’s up back of Anaheim. Not a chance it’ll move down toward us. Ronnie and Paul and Helena are okay too.” Mike Carmichael had never gone in for parenthood at all, but the Colonel’s baby brother Lee had managed to sire two kids in his short life. All of the Colonel’s immediate kin—his two sons and his daughter, and his niece and nephew Paul and Helena, who were in their late twenties now and married—lived in nice respectable suburban places along the lower coast, places like Costa Mesa and Huntington Beach and Newport Beach and La Jolla. Even Anse’s brother Ronald, who was not so nice and not so respectable, was down there. “It’s you I’m worried about, Dad.”
“Don’t. Fire comes anywhere within thirty miles of here, I’ll get in the car and drive up to Monterey, San Francisco, Oregon, someplace like that. But it won’t happen. We know how to cope with fires in this state. I’m more interested in these E-Ts. What the devil do you suppose they are? This isn’t all just some kind of movie stunt, is it?”
“I don’t think so, Dad.”
“No. Neither do I, really. Nobody’s that dumb, to set half of L.A. on fire for a publicity event. I hear that they’re in New York and London and a lot of other places too.”
“Washington?” Anse asked.
“Haven’t heard anything about Washington,” said the Colonel. “Haven’t heard anything from Washington, either. Odd that the President hasn’t been on the air yet.”
“You don’t think they’ve captured him, do you, Dad?”
He didn’t sound serious. The Colonel laughed. “This is all so crazy, isn’t it? Men from Mars marching through our cities.—No, I don’t suppose they’ve captured him. I figure he must be stashed away somewhere very deep, having an extremely lively meeting with the National Security Council. Wouldn’t you say so?”
“We don’t have any kind of contingency plans for alien invasions, so far as I know,” Anse said. “But I’m not up on that sort of stuff these days.” Anse had been an officer in the Army’s materiel-procurement arm, but he had left the Service about two years back, tempted away by a goodly aerospace-industry paycheck. The Colonel hadn’t been too pleased about that. After a moment Anse said, sounding a little uncomfortable, as he always did when he said something he didn’t really believe for no other reason than that he suspected the Colonel wanted to hear it, “Well, if it’s war with Mars, or wherever it is they come from, so be it. I’m ready to go back in, if I’m needed.”
“So am I. I’m not too old. If I spoke Martian, I’d volunteer my services as an interpreter. But I don’t, and nobody’s been calling me for my advice so far, either.”
“They should,” Anse said.
“Yes,” the Colonel said, perhaps a little too vehemently. “They really should.”
There was
silence at the other end for a moment. They were treading on dangerous territory. The Colonel had been reluctant to leave the Service, even after putting in his thirty years, and had never ceased regretting his retirement; Anse had scarcely hesitated, the moment he was eligible to claim his own.
Anse said, finally, “You want to hear one more crazy thing, Dad? I think I caught a glimpse of Cindy on the news this morning, in the crowd at the Porter Ranch mall.”
“Cindy?”
“Or her twin sister, if she has one. Looked just like her, that was for sure. There were five, six hundred people standing outside the entrance of the Wal-Mart watching the E-Ts go walking by, and for a second the camera zoomed down and I was sure I saw Cindy right in the front row. With her eyes as bright as a kid’s on Christmas morning. I was certain it was her.”
“Porter Ranch, that’s up beyond Northridge, isn’t it? What would she have been doing out there early in the morning when she lives way to hell and gone east of there and south, the other side of Mulholland?”
“The hair was just like hers, dark, cut in bangs. And big earrings, the hoops she always wears.—Well, maybe not. But I wouldn’t put it past her, going up to that mall to look at the E-Ts.”
“It would have been cordoned off right away, the moment the critters arrived,” the Colonel said, while the thought went through his mind that she should have been at her gallery in Santa Monica by this time of morning, and hadn’t been there. “Not likely that the police would have been letting rubberneckers in. You must have been mistaken. Someone else, similar appearance.”
“Maybe so.—Mike’s out of town, right? The back end of New Mexico, again?”
“Yes,” said the Colonel. “Supposed to be getting back today. I called his house but I got no answer. If he’s back already, I suspect he’s gone out on volunteer fire duty the way he does every year. Right in the thick of things, I imagine.”