The Alien Years (12 page)

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 fight 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—
bobemian
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.

“Power failure?” Peggy asked, very quietly.

“An extremely odd one, if it is,” said the Colonel.

A voice out of the blackness said, from the front of the cabin, “Ah, we have a little problem here, folks.”

It was the second officer, and despite the attempted joviality of his words he sounded shaken, and the Colonel began to feel a little shaken too as he listened to the man’s report. Every one of the ship’s electrical systems, he said, had conked out simultaneously. All the instruments had failed,
all
, including the navigation devices and the ones responsible for feeding fuel to the engines. The big jet was without power of any sort now. It had effectively been transformed in the last couple of moments into a giant glider; it was coasting, right now, traveling on its accumulated momentum and nothing more.

They were somewhere over southern Nevada, the second officer said. There seemed to be some sort of little electrical problem down there, too, because the lights of the city of Las Vegas had been visible off to the left a moment ago and now they were not. The world outside the ship was as dark as the ship’s interior. But there was no way of finding out what was actually going on out there, because the radio had gone dead, of course, as well as all other instrumentation linking them to the ground. Including air traffic control, of course.

And therefore we are dead also, the Colonel thought, a bit surprised at his own calmness; because how much longer could a plane of this size go on coasting without power through the upper reaches of the atmosphere before it went into free fall? And even if the pilot tried to jolly it down for a landing, how was he possibly going to control the plane with every one of its components kaput, no navigational capacity whatever, and where would he land it in the absolute dark that prevailed?

But then the lights came back on, showing the second officer standing just at the cockpit door, pale and trembling and with the glossy lines of tears showing on his cheeks; and the audio voice of the pilot now was heard, a good old solid deep pilot-voice with only the hint of a tremor in it, saying, “Well, people, I don’t have the foggiest idea of what just happened, but I’m going to be making an emergency landing at the Naval Weapons Center before it happens again. Fasten seat-belts, everybody, and hang on tight.”

He had the plane safely on the ground six and a half minutes before the lights went off a second time.

This time, they stayed off.

2

NINE YEARS FROM NOW

It was the greatest catastrophe in human history, beyond any question, because in one moment the world’s entire technological capability had been pushed back three and a half centuries. Somehow the Entities had flipped a gigantic switch and turned everything off, everything, at some fundamental level.