retardants on the annual brush fires, to save the locals from their own idiotic carelessness. One thing that just about every Carmichael grew up believing was that you had to accept your responsibilities, no complaining, no questions asked. Even Mike, who was as near to being a rebel as the family had ever produced, understood that.
There would be fires. That was a given. Qualified pilots were needed to go up there and drop retardants on them and put them out. Mike Carmichael was a qualified pilot. He was needed, and he would go. It was as simple as that.
The phone rang seven times at the home number before Carmichael hung up. Cindy had never liked answering machines or call forwarding or screen-mail or anything like that. Things like that were dehumanizing, mechanistic, she said. Which made them practically the last people in the world without such gadgets; but so be it, Carmichael figured. That was the way Cindy wanted it to be.
Next he tried the little studio just off Colfax where she made her jewelry, but she didn’t answer there either. Probably she was on her way to the gallery, which was out in Santa Monica, but she wouldn’t be there yet—the freeways would be worse even than on a normal day, what with all these fires going—and so there was no sense even trying her there.
That bothered him, not being able to say hello to her right away after his six-day absence, and no likely chance for it now for another eight or ten hours. But there was nothing he could do about that.
He took off from Burbank on emergency clearance, firefighting authorization. As soon as he was aloft again he could see the fire not far to the northwest. It was denser now, a greasy black column against the pale sky. And when he stepped from his plane a few minutes later at Van Nuys Airport he felt an immediate blast of sudden unthinkable heat. The temperature had been in the low eighties at Burbank, damned well hot enough for nine in the morning, but here it was over a hundred. The air itself was sweating. He could see the congealed heat, like droplets of fat. It seemed to him that he heard the distant roar of flames, the popping and crackling of burning underbrush, the troublesome whistling sound of dry grass catching fire. It was just as though the fire was two miles away. Maybe it was, he thought.
The airport looked like a combat center. Planes were coming and going with lunatic frenzy, and they were lunatic planes, too. The fire was so serious, apparently, that the regular fleet of conventional airborne tankers had been supplemented with antiques of every sort, planes forty and fifty years old and even older, converted B-iy Flying Fortresses and DC-3S and a Douglas Invader and, to Carmichael’s astonishment, a Ford Trimotor from the 19305 that had been hauled, maybe, out of some movie studio’s collection. Some were equipped with tanks that held fire- retardant chemicals, some were water-pumpers, some were mappers with infrared and electronic scanning equipment glistening on their snouts. Harried-looking men and women were in frantic motion everywhere, making wild gestures to each other across great distances or shouting into CB handsets as they tried to keep the loading process orderly. It didn’t seem very orderly.
Carmichael found his way to Operations HQ, which was full of haggard people peering into computer screens. He knew most of them from other fire seasons. They knew him.
He waited for a break in the frenzy and tapped one of the dispatchers on the shoulder. She looked up, nodded in a goggly-eyed way, then grinned in recognition and said, “Mike. Good. We’ve got a DC-3 waiting for you.” She traced a line with her finger across the screen in front of her. “You’ll dump retardants along this arc, from Ybarra Canyon eastward to Horse Flats. The fire’s in the Santa Susana foothills and so far the wind is from the east, but if it shifts to northerly it’s going to take out everything from Chatsworth to Granada Hills, right on down to Ventura Boulevard. And that’s only this fire.”
“Holy shit! How many are there?”
The dispatcher gave her mouse a couple of clicks. The map of the San Fernando Valley that had been showing on the screen went swirling into oblivion and was replaced by one of the entire Los Angeles basin. Carmichael stared, aghast. Three great scarlet streaks indicated fire zones: this one out at the western end of things along the Santa Susanas, another nearly as big way off to the east in the grasslands north of the 210 Freeway around Glendora or San Dimas, and a third down in eastern Orange County, back of Anaheim Hills. “Ours is the big one so far,” the dispatcher said. “But these other two are only about forty miles apart, and if they should join up somehow—”
“Yeah,” Carmichael said. A single wall of fire running along the whole eastern rim of the basin, maybe—with ferocious Santa Ana winds blowing, carrying airborne rivers of sparks westward across Pasadena, across downtown L.A., across Hollywood, across Beverly Hills, all the way to the coast, to Venice, Santa Monica, Malibu. He shivered. Laurel Canyon would go. The house, the studio. Hell, everything would go. Worse than Sodom and Gomorrah, worse than the fall of Nineveh. Nothing but ashes for hundreds of miles. “Jesus,” he said. “Everybody scared silly of terrorist nukes, and three carloads of dumb kids tossing cigarettes can do the job just as easily.”
“But this time it wasn’t cigarettes, Mike,” the dispatcher said.
“No? What then, arson?”
Again that strange stare and blink, much like the one the field mechanic had given him. “You serious? You haven’t heard?”
“I’ve been in New Mexico the last six days. Way off in the outback.”
“You’re the only one in the world who hasn’t heard, then. Hey, don’t you ever tune in the radio news when you drive?”
“I flew there and back. The Cessna. Listening to the radio is one of the things that I go to New Mexico to get away from having to do.—For Christ’s sake, heard what’?”
“About the E-Ts,” said the dispatcher wearily. “They started the fires. Three spaceships landing at five this morning in three different corners of the L.A. basin. The heat of their engines ignited the dry grass.”
Carmichael did not smile. “E-Ts, yeah. You’ve got one weird sense of humor, kiddo.”
The dispatcher said, “You think it’s a joke?”
“Spaceships? From another world?”
“With critters fifteen feet high on board,” the dispatcher at the next computer said. “Linda’s not kidding. They’re out walking around on the freeways right this minute. Big purple squids fifteen feet high, Mike.”
“Men from Mars?”
“Nobody knows where the hell they’re from.”
“Jesus,” Carmichael said. “Jesus Christ God.”
Half past nine in the morning, and Mike Carmichael’s older brother, Colonel Anson Carmichael III, whom everyone usually spoke of simply as “the Colonel,” was standing in front of his television set, gaping in disbelief. His daughter Rosalie had phoned fifteen minutes before from Newport Beach to tell him to turn it on. That would not have occurred to him, otherwise. The television was here for the grandchildren, not for him. But there he was, now, a lean, long-legged, resolutely straight-backed and stiff-necked retired army officer in his early sixties with piercing blue eyes and a full head of white hair, gaping like a kindergarten kid at his television set in the middle of the morning.
On the huge state-of-the-art screen, set flush into the pink ashlar facing of the Colonel’s recreation-room wall, the same two stupefying scenes had been alternating on every channel, over and over and over again, for the entire fifteen minutes that he had been watching.
One was the aerial shot of the big fire on the northwestern flank of the Los Angeles basin: black billowing clouds, vivid red tongues of flame, an occasional glimpse of a house on fire, or a whole row of houses. The other was the grotesque, unbelievable, even absurd sight of half a dozen titanic alien beings moving solemnly around in the half-empty parking lot of a huge shopping mall in a place called Porter Ranch, with the sleek slender shaft of what he supposed was an alien ground vehicle of some sort rearing up like a shining needle behind them out of a tumbled cluster of charred cars, nose tilted upward at a 45-degree angle.
The camera angles varied from time to time, but the scenes were always the same. A shot of the fire, and then cut to the aliens at the shopping mall. The fire again, looking worse than before; and then cut again to the aliens in the mall. Over and over and over.
And, over and over and over, the same string of words kept running through the Colonel’s mind:
This is an invasion. We are at war. This is an invasion. We are at war.
His mind could handle the fire part of it readily enough. He had seen houses burning before. Huge catastrophic fires were an ugly part of California life, but they were inevitable in a place where thirty-odd million
