The Alien Years (46 page)

“Minimal, tell him.”

“Minimum?”

“Close.
Minimal
is what I said. It means Very little.’ It means ‘just about goddamn none,’ as a matter of fact. Tell him that I didn’t get anywhere worth speaking of, but I do see one possible new approach to the problem, and I’m going to ask Andy to explore it this morning. Tell him that. And then, Frank, go look for Andy and tell him to get himself over here lickety-split.”

“Lickety-split?”

“‘Extremely quickly’ is what that phrase means.”

Jesus Christ, Steve thought. The language is rotting away before my very eyes.

Anson, looking out the chart room’s open window half an hour later, saw Steve go trudging like a weary bullock across the lawn toward the Gannett family compound, and called out to him: “Hey, cousin! Cousin! Got a minute to spare for me?”

Yawning, Steve said, “Just about that much, I guess.” There was very little enthusiasm in his voice.

He came trudging over and peered in through the window. A light early-season rain had begun to fall, but Steve was standing out there as though unable to perceive that that was happening.

Anson said, “No. Come on inside. This may take a minute and a half, maybe even two, and you’re going to get soaked if you stay out there.”

“I would really like to get some sleep, Anson.”

“Just give me a little of your time first, cousin,” Anson said, a little less affably this time, his tone verging on what his father described as the Colonel-voice. Anson, who had been sixteen when the Colonel died, had only the vaguest of recollections of his grandfather’s special tone of command. But apparently he had inherited it.

“So?” Steve said, when he had arrived in the chart room, letting droplets of water fall to the rug in front of Anson’s leather-topped desk.

“So Frank tells me you say you’ve found some new approach to the Prime problem. Can you tell me what it is?”

“It’s not a new approach, exactly. It’s the approach to a new approach. What it is is, I think I’ve hacked into the entrance to Karl-Heinrich Borgmann’s private archives.”

“The
Borgmann?”

“The very one. Our own special latter-day Judas himself.”

“He’s been dead for ages. You mean his archives still exist?”

“Listen, can we discuss this after I’ve had some sleep, Anson?”

“Just let me have a moment more. We’re approaching a kind of crisis point in the Prime project and I need to keep myself on top of all the data. Tell me about this Borgmann thing insofar as it may impact the hunt for Prime. I assume that that’s the angle, right? Some link to Prime in the Borgmann files?”

Steve nodded. He looked about ready to fall down. Anson wondered charitably whether he might be pushing the man too hard. He expected top-flight performance from everyone, the way his father had, the way the old Colonel had before him. Carmichael-grade performance. But Steve Gannett was only half Carmichael, a bald, soft- bellied, bearish middle-aged man who had been up all night.

There were things Anson needed to know, though. Now.

Steve said, “Borgmann was assassinated twenty-five years back. In Prague, which is a city in the middle of Europe that has been the site of a major Entity headquarters just about from the beginning. We know that he was hooked right into the main Entity computer net for at least ten years prior to his death, doing so with the knowledge and permission of the Entities, but also perhaps in some illicit way too. That would be true to what we know about Borgmann, that he’d have been spying on the very people he was working for. We also know, from what we’ve heard from people who dealt with the actual Borgmann in the period between the Conquest and his murder, that he was the sort of person who never deleted a file, who squirreled every goddamned thing away in the most anal-retentive way you could imagine.”

“Anal-retentive?” Anson said.

“It means retentive, okay? Just a fancy way of saying it.”

Steve seemed to sway, and his eyes began to close for a moment. “Don’t interrupt me, okay? Okay? —What you need to know, Anson, is that we’ve always thought Borgmann’s archives are still there somewhere, maybe buried down deep in the Prague mainframe in a secret cache that he was able to conceal even from the Entities, and it’s widely believed that if they exist, they would be frill of critical information about how the minds of the Entities work. Highly explosive stuff, so it’s thought. Just about every hacker in the world has been looking for Borgmann’s data practically since the day he died. The quest for the Holy Grail, so to speak. And with pretty much the same degree of success.”

Anson started to ask another question, and cut himself off. Steve’s speech frequently was laced with cryptic references out of the world culture that had vanished, that world of books and plays and music, of history and literature, which Steve had been just old enough to experience, to some degree, before it disappeared; but Anson reminded himself that he probably did not need to find out just now what the Holy Grail was.

Steve said, “As you know, I devoted this night past to yet one more goddamn heroic eight-hour attempt to link up all the data we’ve been able to compile about every major nexus of Entity intelligence, create an overlay, get some kind of confirmation of the theory that we’ve been playing with, for God only knows how long, that Prime is situated in downtown Los Angeles. Well, I failed. Again. But in the course of failing I think I stumbled over something peculiar in the data conduit linking Prague, Vienna, and Budapest that might just have Karl-Heinrich Borgmann’s personal paw prints on it.
Might.
It’s a locked door and I don’t know what’s behind it and I don’t know how to pick the lock, either. But it’s the first hopeful thing I’ve come upon in five years.”

“If you can’t pick the lock, who can?”

“Andy can,” Steve said. “He’s very likely the only hacker in the world who could do it. He’s the best there is, even if I say so myself. That’s not paternal pride speaking, Anson. God knows I’m not very proud of Andy. But he can do magic with a data chain. It’s just the truth.”

“Okay. Let’s get him on it, then!”

“Sure,” said Steve. “I sent your boy Frank out just now to find Andy and bring him to me. Frank reports that Andy left the ranch at four in the morning and took off for parts unknown. Frank got this bit of information from Eloise’s girl La-La, who saw him go, and who unbeknownst to the rest of us has apparently been indulging in some kind of romance with Andy for the past six months and who, incidentally, revealed to your son Frank this morning that she’s pregnant, presumably by Andy. She thinks that’s why he took off. She also doesn’t think he plans to come back. He took his two favorite computers with him and apparently spent all of last evening downloading all his files into them.”

“The little son of a bitch,” Anson said. “Begging your pardon, Steve. Well, we’ve just got to find him and haul his sneaky ass back here, then.”

“Find Andy?” Steve guffawed. “Nobody’s going to find Andy unless he feels like being found. It would be easier to find Entity Prime. Now can I go to sleep, Anson?”

We’re approaching a kind of crisis point in the Prime project.

That was what he had told Steve, a little to his own surprise, for he had not quite articulated the situation that way before, even to himself. But yes, yes, indeed, Anson thought. A crisis. A time to make bold decisions and act on them. He realized now that he had been thinking of the situation that way for several weeks. But he was beginning to suspect that the whole dire thing was taking place within the arena of his own mind.

It had been building up in him for years. He knew that, now. That sense of himself as Anson the Entity-Killer, the man who finally would drive the alien bastards from the planet, the shining hero who would give Earth back to itself. He couldn’t remember a time when he hadn’t thought it was his destiny to be the one who brought the task to culmination.

But three times now in these recent weeks something very strange had come over him: a dizzying intensification of that ambition, a frantic passion for it, a wild hunger to get on with the job, strike now, strike hard. A passion that possessed him beyond all reasoning—that became, for the five or ten minutes that it held him in its grip, utterly uncontrollable. At such times he could feel the pressure beating against his skull, hammering against it from within as though there were some creature in there trying to get out.

It was a little scary. Passionate impatience is not the hallmark of a great military commander.

Perhaps, he thought, I should have a little talk with my father.

Ron, who was nearly seventy and not in the best of health, had inherited the Colonel’s old bedroom, as was fitting for the patriarch of the family. Anson found him there now, sitting up in bed amidst a pile of ancient books and magazines, yellowing rarities from the Colonel’s crumbling library of twentieth-century reading matter. He looked poorly, pale and peaked.

Cassandra was with him: the Carmichael community doctor, Cassandra was, self-trained out of the Colonel’s books and such medical texts as Paul or Doug or Steve had been able to extricate from the remnants of the pre- Conquest computer net. She did her best, and sometimes seemed like a miracle-worker; but it always was a sobering thing to find the busy Cassandra in a sick person’s room, because it usually meant that the patient had taken a turn for the worse. That was how it had been six months before, when Anson’s wife Raven, having gone through one pregnancy too many, had died, exhausted, from some very minor infection a few weeks after giving birth to their eighth child. Cassandra had done her best then, too. Had even seemed hopeful, for a time. But Anson had realized from the outset that nothing could save the worn-out Raven. He had pretty much the same feeling here.

“Your father is a man of iron,” she said at once, almost defiantly, before Anson could say anything at all. “He’ll be up and around and chopping down trees with a single blow of the axe by this time tomorrow. I guarantee it.”

“Don’t believe her, boy,” Ron said, winking. “I’m a goner, and that’s the truth. You can tell Khalid to get started carving the stone. And tell him to make it a damned good one, too. ‘Ronald Jeffrey Carmichael,’ and remember that you spell ‘Jeffrey’ with just seven letters, J-E-F-F-R-E- Y, born the twelfth of April, 1971, died the sixteenth of—”

“Today’s the fourteenth already, Dad. You should have given him a little more notice.” Turning to Cassandra, Anson said, “Am I interrupting something important? Or can you excuse us for a little while?”

She smiled pleasantly and went from the room.

“How sick are you, really?” Anson asked bluntly, when Cassandra was gone.

“I feel pretty shitty. But I don’t think I’m actually dying just yet, although I wish Cassie had some clearer idea of what’s really going on in my midsection. —Is there some problem, Anson?”

“I’m itching to make a move on Prime. That’s the problem.”

“You mean you’ve succeeded in discovering Prime’s hiding-place at last? Then why is that a problem? Go in there and get him!”

“We
haven’t
discovered it. We don’t know any more than we did five years ago. The Los Angeles theory is still top of the list, but it’s still only a theory. The problem is that I don’t want to wait any longer. My patience has just about run itself out.”

“And Tony? Is he getting impatient too? All in a sweat to make a strike in the dark, is he? Willing to go in there without knowing exactly where he’s supposed to go?”

“He’ll do whatever I tell him to do. Khalid’s got him all charged up. He’s like a bomb waiting to go off.”

“Like a bomb,” Ron said. “Waiting to go off. Ah.
Ah”
He seemed almost amused. There was a curiously skeptical expression on his face, a smile that was not entirely a smile.

Anson said nothing, simply met Ron’s gaze stare for stare and waited. It was an awkward moment. There was a streak of playfulness, of quicksilver unpredictability, in his father that he had never been able to deal with.

Then Ron said gravely, “Let me get this straight. We’ve been planning this attack for years and years, training our assassin with an eye to sending him in as soon as we’ve pinned down the precise location of Prime, and now we have the assassin ready but we still don’t have the location, and you want to send him in
anyway
? Today? Tomorrow? Isn’t this a little premature, boy? Do we even know for sure that Prime actually exists, let alone where he is?”

Like scalpel thrusts, they were. The hotheaded young leader’s idiocy neatly laid bare, just as Anson had feared and expected and even hoped it would be. He felt his cheeks flaming. It became all that he could manage to keep his eyes on Ron’s. He felt his headache beginning to get going.

Lamely he said, “The pressure’s been rising inside me for weeks, Dad. Longer, maybe. I get the feeling that I’m letting the whole world down by holding Tony back this long. And then my head starts pounding. It’s pounding now.”

“Take an aspirin, then. Take two. We’ve still got plenty on hand.”

Anson recoiled as though he had been struck.

But Ron didn’t seem to notice. He was wearing that strange smile again. “Listen, Anson, the Entities have been here for forty years. We’ve all been holding ourselves back, all this time. Except for the suicidally addlebrained laser strike that brought the Great Plague down on us before you were born, and Khalid’s uniquely successful and perhaps unduplicatable one-man attack, we haven’t lifted a finger against them in all that time. Your grandfather grew old and died, miserable because the world had been enslaved by these aliens but only too well aware that it would be dumb to try any hostile action before we understood what we were doing. Your Uncle Anse sat stewing on this very mountain decade after decade, drinking himself silly for the same reason. I’ve held things together pretty well, I suppose, but I’m not going to last forever either, and don’t you think I’d like to see the Entities on the run before I check out? So we’ve all had our little lesson in patience to learn. You’re what, thirty-five years old?”