When his plane was ready he took it up and laid down a new line of retardant, flying just above the trees, practically in the faces of the firefighters working on the outskirts of Chatsworth. This time they were too busy to wave. In order to get back to the airport he had to make a big loop behind the fire, over the Santa Susanas and down the flank of the Golden State Freeway, and for the first time he saw the fires burning to the east, two huge conflagrations marking the places where the exhaust streams of the other two spaceships had grazed the dry grassland a bunch of smaller blazes strung out on a south-veering line that ran from Burbank or Glendale deep into Orange County.
His hands were shaking as he touched down at Van Nuys. He had gone without rest now for something like thirty-two hours, and he could feel himself beginning to pass into that blank white exhaustion that lies somewhere beyond ordinary fatigue.
The head dispatcher was waiting for him again as he left his plane. This time there was an odd sappy smile on his implausibly handsome face, and Carmichael thought he understood what it meant. “All right, Hal,” he said at once. “I give in. I’ll knock off for five or six hours and grab some shut-eye, and then you can call me back to—”
“No. That isn’t it.”
“That isn’t what?”
“What I came out here to tell you, Mike. They’ve released some of the hostages.”
“Cindy?”
“I think so. There’s an Air Force car here to take you to Sylmar. That’s where they’ve got the command center set up. They said to find you as soon as you came off your last dump mission and send you over there so you can talk with your wife.”
“So she’s free,” Carmichael cried. “Oh, Jesus, she’s free!”
“You go on along, Mike. We can work on the fire without you for a while, if that’s okay with you.”
The Air Force car looked like a general’s limousine, long and low and sleek, with a square-jawed driver in front and a couple of very tough-looking young officers to sit with him in back. They said hardly anything, and they looked as weary as Carmichael felt. “How’s my wife?” he asked, as the car pulled away, and one of them said, “We understand that she hasn’t been harmed.” The way he said it, deep and somber, was stiff and strange and melodramatic. Carmichael shrugged. Another one who thinks he’s an actor, he told himself. This one’s seen too many old Air Force movies.
The whole city seemed to be on fire now. Within the air-conditioned limo there was only the faintest whiff of smoke, but the sky to the east was terrifying, with apocalyptic streaks of red shooting up like meteors traveling in reverse through the blackness. Carmichael asked the Air Force men about that, but all he got was a clipped, “It looks pretty bad, we understand.”
Somewhere along the San Diego Freeway between Mission Hills and Sylmar Carmichael fell asleep, and the next thing he knew they were waking him gently and leading him into a vast bleak hangar-like building near the reservoir.
The place was a maze of cables and screens, with military personnel operating assorted mysterious biochip gizmos and what looked like a thousand conventional computers and ten thousand telephones. He let himself be shuffled along, moving mechanically and barely able to focus his eyes, to an inner office where a lieutenant colonel with blond hair perhaps just beginning to shade into gray greeted him in his best this-is-the-tense-part-of-the-movie style and said, “This may be the most difficult job you’ve ever had to handle, Mr. Carmichael.”
Carmichael scowled. Everybody was Hollywood to the core in this damned city, he thought. And even the colonels were too young nowadays.
“They told me that the hostages were being freed,” he said. “Where’s my wife?”
The lieutenant colonel pointed to a television screen. “We’re going to let you talk to her right now.”
“Are you saying I don’t get to see her?”
“Not immediately.”
“Why not? Is she all right?”
“As far as we know, yes.”
“You mean she hasn’t been released? They told me the hostages were being freed.”
“All but three have been let go,” said the lieutenant colonel. “Two people, according to the aliens, were slightly injured as they were captured, and are undergoing medical treatment aboard the ship. They’ll be released shortly. The third is your wife, Mr. Carmichael.” Just the merest bit of a pause, now, for that terrific dramatic effect that seemed to be so important to these people. “She is unwilling to leave the ship.”
The effect was dramatic, all right. For Carmichael it was like hitting an air pocket.
“Unwilling—?”
“She claims to have volunteered to make the journey to the home world of the aliens. She says she’s going to serve as our ambassador, our special emissary.—Mr. Carmichael, does your wife have any history of mental imbalance?”
Glaring, Carmichael said, “Cindy is very sane. Believe me.”
“You are aware that she showed no display of fear when the aliens seized her in the shopping-center incident this morning?”
“I know that, yes. That doesn’t mean she’s crazy. She’s unusual. She has unusual ideas. But she’s not crazy. Neither am I, incidentally.” He put his hands to his face for a moment and pressed his fingertips lightly against his eyes. “All right,” he said. “Let me talk to her.”
“Do you think you can persuade her to leave that ship?”
“I’m sure as hell going to try.”
“You are not yourself sympathetic to what she’s doing, are you?” the blond-haired lieutenant colonel asked.
Carmichael looked up. “Yes, I am sympathetic. She’s an intelligent woman doing something that she thinks is important, and doing it of her own free will. Why the hell shouldn’t I be sympathetic? But I’m going to try to talk her out of it, you bet. I love her. I want her back. Somebody else can be the goddamned ambassador to Betelgeuse. Let me talk to her, will you?”
The lieutenant colonel gestured with a little wand the size of a pencil, and the big television screen came to life. For a moment mysterious colored patterns flashed across it in a disturbing random way; then Carmichael caught glimpses of shadowy catwalks, intricate gleaming metal strutworks crossing and recrossing at peculiar angles; and then for an instant one of the aliens appeared on the screen. Yellow saucer-sized eyes of gigantic size looked complacently back at him. Carmichael felt altogether wide-awake now.
The alien’s face vanished and Cindy came into view.
The moment he saw her, Carmichael knew that he had lost her.
Her face was glowing. There was a calm joy in her eyes verging on ecstasy. He had seen her look something like that on many occasions, but this was different: this was beyond anything she had attained before. It was nirvana. She had seen the beatific vision, this time.
“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 g
rieves 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 first hand!”
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 resp
ected 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.