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 grieves 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 firsthand!”
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.
