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.”
“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 die meeting, right at the end, you asked that general if there was some way she could be rescued from die E-T spaceship.”
