“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 respected 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
