“You said,” Buckley reminded her, “that one woman in your group experienced some sort of communication with them?”
“Yes. Yes. There was this woman, who was, like, a little strange, I have to say—she was from Los Angeles, I guess about forty years old, with shiny black hair, and she had a lot of fantastic jewelry on, earrings like big hoops and three or four strings of beads and, like, a whole bunch of rings, and she was wearing this big wide bright-colored skirt like my grandmother used to wear in the Sixties, and sandals, and stuff. Cindy, her name was.”
The Colonel gasped.
The hair was just like hers, Anse had told him, dark, cut in bangs. And big earrings, the hoops she always wears. The Colonel hadn’t believed it. The police would have had the site cordoned off, he had said. Not likely that they’d be letting rubberneckers near the alien ship, he had said. But no: Anse had been right. It was indeed Cindy that Anse had seen on the television news early yesterday morning in the crowd at that shopping mall; and later the aliens had grabbed her, and she had been taken aboard that ship. Did Mike know? Where was Mike, anyway?
Margaret Gabrielson was speaking again.
This woman Cindy, she said, was the only one in the group who had no fear of the aliens. When one of the aliens came into the chamber, she walked right up to it and greeted it like it was an old friend, and told it that it and all its people were welcome on Earth, that she was glad that they were here.
“And did the aliens reply to her in any way?” Buckley asked.
Not that Margaret Gabrielson had been able to notice. While Cindy was saying things to the alien it would just stand there looming high above her, looking down at her the way you might look at a dog or a cat, without showing any kind of reaction or understanding. But after the alien left the room, Cindy told everyone that the alien had spoken to her, like in a mental way, telepathy.
“And said what to her?” asked Buckley.
Silence. Hesitation.
“Like pulling teeth,” said Carlyle-Macavoy, through his own clenched ones.
But then it came out, all in a rush:
“—That the aliens wanted us to know that they weren’t going to harm the world in any way, that they were, like, here on a diplomatic mission, that they were part of some huge United Nations of planets and they had come to invite us to join. And that they were just going to stay for a few weeks and then most of them were going back to their own world, although some of them were going to stay here as ambassadors, you know, to teach us a new and better way of life.”
“Uh-oh,” Joshua Leonards muttered. “Scary stuff. The missionaries always have some new and better way of life that they want to teach. And you know what happens next.”
“They also said,” Margaret Gabrielson continued, “that they were going to take a few Earth people back to their own world to show them what sort of place it was. Volunteers, only. And, like, this woman Cindy had volunteered. When they took us off the ship a few hours later, she was the only one who stayed behind.”
“And she seemed happy about that?” Buckley asked.
“She was, like, ecstatic.”
The Colonel winced. That sounded like Cindy, all right. Oh, Mike! How he loved her, Mike did. But in the twinkling of an eye she had abandoned him for monsters from some far star. Poor Mike. Poor, poor Mike.
Buckley said, “You heard all of this, you say, only from this woman Cindy? None of the others of you had any kind of, ah, mental contact with the aliens?”
“None. It was only Cindy who had it, or said she did. All that stuff about ambassadors, coming in peace, that was all hers. But it couldn’t have been true. She was really crazy, that woman. She was like, ‘The coming of the aliens was prophesied in this book that I read years and years ago, and everything is following the prophecy exactly.’ That’s what she said, and you knew it was impossible. So the whole thing was just in her head. She was crazy, that woman. Crazy.”
Yes, the Colonel thought. Crazy. And Margaret Gabrielson, at that moment reaching her snapping point at last, burst into hysterical tears and began to collapse into herself and sink toward the floor. The Colonel rose in one smooth motion and caught her deftly as she fell, and steadied her and held her against his chest, murmuring soothing things to her while she wept. He felt very paternal. It reminded him of nothing so much as the time, some seven or eight years back, when Irene’s diagnosis had come through and he had had to tell Rosalie that her mother had inoperable cancer, and then had had to hold her for what seemed like hours until she had cried it all out.
“It was awful, awful, awful,” Margaret Gabrielson was saying, voice muffled, head still pressed against the Colonel’s ribs. “Those hideous E-T monsters wandering around—and us not knowing what they were going to do to us—that crazy woman and all her loony-tunes nonsense—crazy, she was, crazy—”
“Well,” Lloyd Buckley said. “So much for the first report of communications with the aliens, I guess.” He looked bemused, perhaps a little irritated by the messiness and uselessness of Margaret Gabrielson’s account. No doubt he had been expecting something more. The Colonel, on the other hand, felt that he had had more than he wanted.
But there was still more to come.
A chime of some sort went off, just then. An aide jumped up, pressed his wrist-implant to a data node in the wall, gave a one-syllable command. Something lit up on a wall-mounted ribbon screen next to the node and a yellow printout came gliding from a slot below it. The aide brought it to Buckley, who glanced at it and coughed and tugged at his lower lip and made a sour face. And eventually said, “Colonel Carmichael—Anson—do you happen to have a brother named Myron?”
“Everyone calls him Mike,” the Colonel said. “But yes, yes, he’s my younger brother.”
“Message just in from California about him that I’m supposed to pass along to you. It’s bad news, I’m afraid, Anson.”
All things considered, it hadn’t been much of a meeting, the Colonel thought, lost in gloom, leaden-hearted over his brother’s heroic but shocking and altogether unacceptable death, as he headed for home sixteen hours later aboard the same plush Air Force VIP jet that had carried him to Washington the day before. He could not bear to think about Alike in his last moments in some rickety little plane, struggling frenetically and ultimately unsuccessfully against the violent air currents above the roiling horror of the Ventura County fire. But when he shifted his attention back to the Entities crisis and the meeting that had been called to discuss it, he felt even worse.
An embarrassment, that meeting. A ghastly waste of time. And a stunning revelation of the hollowness and futility of humanity’s self-aggrandizing pretensions.
Buckley had offered to let him go back to his hotel after the news about Mike had come in: but no, no, what good would that have done? He was needed. He stayed. And sat there in mounting despair during all the dreary pointless remainder of it. All those important Cabinet officers and lavishly decorated generals and admirals and the rest of them too, the whole grand crowd of lofty honchos arrayed in solemn conclave, interminably masticating the situation, and to what end? Ultimately the meeting had broken up without any significant information having been brought forth beyond the mere fact of the landings, no conclusions reached, no policy decisions taken. Aside from Wait and See, that is.
Wait, yes. And See.
The secure blue wall of the sky had been breached without warning; mysterious alien Entities had landed simultaneously all over Earth; yea, out of nowhere bizarre visitors had come, and they had seen, and after two and a half days they were already acting as though they had conquered. And in the face of all that, none of our best and brightest seemed to have the slightest idea of how we should respond.
Not that the Colonel himself had been of much help. That was perhaps the worst part of it: that he was as befuddled as the rest of them, that he had had nothing useful of his own to offer.
What was there to say, though?
We must fight and fight and f
ight until the last of these vile enemy invaders is eradicated from the sacred soil of Earth.
Yes. Yes. Of course. Went without saying. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, et cetera, et cetera. No flagging, no Jailing: fight with growing confidence, go on to the end. We shall never surrender.
But was this actually an invasion?
And if indeed it was, how did we go about fighting back, and what would happen to us if we tried?
Three seats ahead of him, Leonards and Carlyle-Macavoy were having the same discussion with each other that the Colonel was having with himself. And, so it appeared, coming to the same melancholy conclusions.
“Oh, Colonel, I feel so sad for you,” Margaret Gabrielson said, materializing like a wraith in front of him in the aisle. They were all flying back to California together, the valued special consultants, he and she and squat grubby Leonards and the long-legged Brit. “Do you mind if I sit here next to you?”
With a vague indifferent gesture he beckoned her to the vacant seat.
She settled in beside him, pivoting around to give him a warm, earnest, compassionate smile. “You and your brother were very close, weren’t you, Colonel?” she said, pulling him abruptly back from one slough of despond to the other. “I know how terribly upset you must be. The pain is written all over your face.”
He had comforted her at the meeting in Washington, and now she meant to comfort him. She means well, he thought. Be nice.
He said, “I was the oldest of three boys. Now I’m the only one left. I think that’s the biggest shock, that I’m still here and they’re both gone.”
“How awful that must be, to outlive your younger brothers. Were they in the Army too?”
“The youngest one was Air Force. A test pilot, he was. Flew one experimental plane too many, about ten years ago. And the other one, Mike, the one that just—died, he decided to go in for the Navy, because no one in our family had ever been Navy, and Mike always had to do what nobody else in the family would even dream of doing. Like heading out for weeks at a time on camping trips all alone. Like buying his own little plane and flying it around the country by himself, not actually going anywhere, just enjoying being up in the air with nobody else around him. And like marrying that weird woman Cindy and moving to Los Angeles with her.”
“Cindy?”
“The one who was a hostage while you were, the one who volunteered to stay with the aliens. That was Mike’s wife. My sister-in-law?”
Margaret put her hand over her mouth. “Oh, and I said such horrible things about her! I’m sorry! I’m so sorry!”
The Colonel smiled. She seemed to have shed, he noticed, all of those annoying little childish verbal tics, the “likes” and “you knows” with which she had spattered every sentence while she was speaking at the meeting. As though perhaps in her trembling nervousness in front of all those formidable high officials she had reverted to blathery little-girl locutions, but now, in one-to-one human communication, she was once again capable of speaking adult English. She was, the Colonel realized, probably not as stupid as she had sounded earlier.
“I never could stand her, myself,” he said. “Simply not my kind of person. Too—bohemian for me, do you know what I mean? Too wild. I’m your standard-model straight-arrow guy, conservative, old-fashioned, boring.” Which was not entirely true, he hoped, but true enough. “They train us to be that way in the Service. And it’s a good bet that I was born that way, besides.”
“But Mike wasn’t?”
“He was a little bit of a mutant, I suppose. We were a military family, and I guess we were raised to be military types, whatever that means. But Mike had a touch of something else in him, and we always knew it.” He closed his eyes a moment, letting his memories of Mike’s strangeness flood upward in him—Mike’s monumental untidiness, his sudden rages, his arbitrary dogmatic opinions, his willingness to let his life be dictated by the most bizarre whims. His mysterious feelings of inner emptiness and frosty dissatisfaction. And, especially, his fiery obsessive love for Cindy of the beads and sandals. “He was nothing at all like either of us. I was my father’s son all the way, the little soldier boy who was going to grow up to be a real one. And Lee—he was the baby—he was a good obedient kid like me, did what he was told, never wanted to know why. But Mike—Mike—”
“Went his own way, did he?”
“Always. I never understood him, not for a moment,” the Colonel said. “Loved him, of course. But never understood him.—Let me tell you a story. We were six years apart in age, which is like a whole generation when you’re kids. And one time when I was twelve and Mike was six I made some unkind comment about the sloppiness of his side of the room that we shared, and he decided then and there that he had to kill me.”
“Kill you?”
“With his fists. We had a horrendous fight. I was twice his age and twice as tall as he was, but he was always a chunky muscular kid, very strong, and I was always slender, and he came at me like a cannonball without the slightest warning and threw me down and sat on my chest and punched me black and blue before I knew what was happening. Hurt me plenty, too, the little lunatic. After about a minute I pushed him off me, and knocked him down and hurt him—that was how angry I was—but he got up still swinging, and kicking and biting and what-all else, and I held him at arm’s length and told him that if he didn’t calm down I was going to toss him in the pig-pond. We had a pig-pond then, where we lived out back of Bakersfield, and he didn’t calm down, and I tossed him in. Then I went back to the house, and after a while so did he. I had a black eye and a split lip, and he was covered with muck and slop all over, and our mother never asked a single question.”
“And your father?”
“Wasn’t around. This was 1955, a very scary time in the world, and the Army had just transferred him to what was called West Germany, then. We had military bases there. A few months later my mother and my brother Mike and I—Lee hadn’t been born yet—went over there ourselves to be with him. We spent a couple of years there.” The Colonel chuckled. “Mike was the only one of us ever learned much German. All the dirty words first, naturally. People used to gape at him in the street when he cut loose. Oh, a wild one, he was. But not, I think, all that different from the rest of us deep down underneath. When it was Vietnam time and the kids were growing their hair long and smoking dope and wearing funny-colored clothing, you’d have thought Mike would have been a hippie out there with them, but instead of that he became a Navy pilot and saw plenty of action. Hated the war, but did his duty as a man and a soldier and a Carmichael.”
“Were you in that war too?” Margaret asked.
“Yes. I sure was. And came to hate it too, for that matter. But I was there.”
She looked at him wide-eyed, as if he had admitted being at Gettysburg.
“Actually killed people? Got shot at?”
He smiled and shook his head. “I was part of a strategic planning group, behind the lines. But not so far back that I didn’t get to be familiar with the sound of machine-gun fire.” The Colonel let his eyes droop shut once again for a moment or two. “Damn, that was an ugly war! There aren’t any pretty ones, but that one was ugly. Still, you do whatever they ask you to do, and you don’t complain and you don’t ask any questions, because that’s what’s needed if there’s going to be civilized life—somebody to do the uncivilized things, which nevertheless are necessary to be done. Usually, anyway.”
He was silent for a time.
Then he said, “I got my fill of doing uncivilized things in Vietnam, I guess. A few years after the war I took a leave of absence and went back east, got me a degree in Asian studies at Johns Hopkins, eventually wound up as a professor at West Point. In the course of ten years I saw Mike maybe three times at most. He didn’t say much any of those times. I could tell that something was missing from his life—like a life. Then when my wife got sick I came back to California, Santa Barbara—family land, her family—and there
was Mike, living in L.A., of all places, and married to this peculiar modern-day hippie woman Cindy. He wanted me to like her, I tried, Margaret, I tried! I swear that I did. But we were people from two different worlds. The one single thing we had in common was that we both loved Mike Carmichael.”
“Peggy,” she said.
“What?”
“My name. Peggy. Nobody really calls me Margaret.”
“Ah-hah. I see. Right. Peggy.”
“Did she like you?”
“Cindy? I have no idea. She was polite enough to me. Her husband’s old stuffed shirt of a brother. No doubt thought I was as much of a Martian as she seemed to me. We didn’t see a whole lot of each other. Better that way, I figure. Basically we each pretended the other one didn’t exist.”
“And yet yesterday at the meeting, right at the end, you asked that general if there was some way she could be rescued from the E-T spaceship.”
The Colonel felt his cheeks growing hot. He wished she hadn’t brought up that silly little moment. “That was dumb of me, wasn’t it? But somehow I felt I owed it to her, to try to get her off of it. A member of my family, after all. In need of rescue. So I will ask. The proper thing to do, is it not?”
“But she volunteered to stay,” Peggy pointed out.
“Yes. Indeed she did. Besides which, Mike is dead and she’s got nothing to come back to, anyway. And furthermore there’s no way in hell that we could have removed her from that ship even if she was asking us to, which she wasn’t. But you see the tradition-bound mind at work, do you, Peggy? The knee-jerk reflex of the virtuous man? My sister-in-law is in jeopardy, or so it seems to me, and therefore I turn to the powers that be and say, ‘Do you think there might be some way by which—”’
He stopped speaking abruptly. The lights had gone out aboard the plane.
Not just the overhead lights, but the little reading lights, and the auxiliary lights at floor level in the aisle, and everything else, so far as the Colonel could tell, that depended in any way on the movement of electromagnetic waves in the visible part of the spectrum. They were sitting in absolute black darkness within a sealed metal tube that was traveling at hundreds of miles an hour, 35,000 feet above the surface of the Earth.