beheld this morning between nine and ten o’clock.”
The tiny screen showed two upright tubular figures that looked like big squids walking on the tips of the tentacles that sprouted in clusters at their lower ends. Their skins were purplish and leathery-looking, with rows of luminescent orange spots glowing along the sides. They were moving cautiously through the parking lot of a shopping center, peering this way and that out of round yellow eyes as big as saucers. There was something almost dainty about their movements, but Carmichael saw that the aliens were taller than the lampposts—which would make them at least twelve feet high, maybe fifteen. At least a thousand onlookers were watching them at a wary distance, appearing both repelled and at the same time irresistibly drawn.
Now and then the creatures paused to touch their foreheads together in some sort of communion. The camera zoomed in for a close-up, then jiggled and swerved wildly just as an enormously long elastic tongue sprang from the chest of one of the alien beings and whipped out into the crowd.
For an instant the only thing visible on the screen was a view of the sky; then Carmichael saw a shot of a stunned-looking girl of about fourteen who had been caught around the waist by that long tongue, and was being hoisted into the air and popped like a collected specimen into a narrow green sack.
“Teams of the giant creatures roamed the mall for nearly an hour,” the announcer intoned. “It has definitely been confirmed that between twenty and thirty human hostages were captured before they returned to their vehicle, which now has taken off and gone back to the mother ship eleven miles to the west. Meanwhile, firefighting activities desperately continue under Santa Ana conditions in the vicinity of all three landing sites, and—”
Carmichael shook his head.
Los Angeles, he thought, disgusted. Jesus! The kind of people that live here, they just walk right up and let the E-Ts gobble them like flies. Maybe they think it’s just a movie, and everything will be okay by the last reel.
And then he remembered that Cindy was the kind of people who would walk right up to one of these E-Ts. Cindy was the kind of people who lived in Los Angeles, he told himself, except that Cindy was different. Somehow.
There was still a long line in front of every telephone booth. People were angrily banging the useless receivers against the walls. So there was no point even thinking about attempting to call Anson now. Carmichael went back outside. The DC-3 was loaded and ready.
In the forty-five minutes since he had left the fire line, the blaze seemed to have spread noticeably toward the south. This time the line boss had him lay down the retardant from the De Soto Avenue freeway interchange to the northeast corner of Porter Ranch. He emptied his tanks quickly and went back once more to the airport. Maybe they would have a working phone in Operations HQ that they would let him use to try to get quick calls through to his wife and his brother.
But as he was crossing the field a man in military uniform came out of the HQ building and beckoned to him. Carmichael walked over, frowning.
The man said, “You Mike Carmichael? Live in Laurel Canyon?”
“That’s right.”
“I’ve got a little troublesome news for you. Let’s go inside.”
Carmichael was too tired even to feel alarm. “Suppose you tell me here, okay?”
The officer moistened his lips. He looked very uneasy. He had one of those blank featureless baby-faces, nothing interesting about it at all except the incongruously big eyebrows that crawled across his forehead like shaggy caterpillars. He was very young, a lot younger than Carmichael expected officers of his rank to be, and obviously he wasn’t good at this stuff, whatever kind of stuff it was.
“It’s about your wife,” he said. “Cynthia Carmichael? That’s your wife’s name?”
“Come on,” Carmichael said. “God damn it, get to the point!”
“She’s one of the hostages, Mr. Carmichael.”
“Hostages?”
“The space hostages. Haven’t you heard? The people who were captured by the aliens?”
Carmichael shut his eyes for a moment. His breath went from him as though he had been kicked.
“Where did it happen?” he demanded. “How did they get her?”
The young officer gave him a strange strained smile. “It was the shopping-center lot, Porter Ranch. Maybe you saw some of it on the TV.”
Carmichael nodded, feeling more numb by the moment. That girl jerked off her feet by that immense elastic tongue, swept through the air, popped into that green pouch.
And Cindy—Cindy—?
“You saw the part where the creatures were moving around? And then suddenly they were grabbing people, and everyone was running from them?”
“No. I must have missed that part.”
“That was when they got her. She was right up front when they began grabbing, and maybe she would have had a chance to get away, but she waited just a little bit too long. She started to run, I understand, but then she stopped—she looked back at them—she may have called something out to them—and then—well, and then—”
“Then they scooped her up?”
“I have to tell you, sir, that they did.” The baby-face worked hard at looking tragic. “I’m terribly sorry, Mr. Carmichael.”
“I’m sure you are,” Carmichael said stonily. An abyss had begun to open within him. “So am I.”
“One thing all the witnesses agreed, she didn’t panic, she didn’t scream. We can show it to you on tape inside. She was very brave when those monsters grabbed her. How in God’s name you can be brave when something that size is holding you in mid-air is something I don’t understand, but I have to assure you, sir, that those who saw it—”
“It makes sense to me,” Carmichael said.
He turned away. He shut his eyes again, for a moment, and took deep, heavy pulls of the hot smoky air.
It figures, he thought. It makes complete sense.
Of course she had gone right out to the landing site, as soon as the news of their arrival began to get around. Of course. If there was anyone in Los Angeles who would have wanted to get to those creatures and see them with her own eyes and perhaps try to talk to them and establish some sort of rapport with them, it was Cindy. She wouldn’t have been afraid of them. She had never seemed to be afraid of anything. And these were the wise superior beings from HESTEGHON, anyway, weren’t they? It wasn’t hard for Carmichael to imagine her in that panicky mob in the parking lot, cool and radiant, staring at the giant aliens, smiling at them even in the moment when they seized her.
In a way Carmichael felt very proud of her. But it terrified him to think that she was in their grasp.
“She’s on the ship?” he asked. “The one that I saw sitting in that field just beyond the fire zone?”
“Yes.”
“Have there been any messages from the hostages yet? Or from the aliens, for that matter?”
“I’m sorry. I’m not in a position to divulge that information.”
“I’ve been risking my ass all afternoon trying to put that fire out and my wife is a prisoner on the spaceship and you’re not in a position to divulge any information?”
The officer gave him a dead-fish sort of smile. Carmichael tried to tell himself that he was just a kid, the way the cops and the high-school teachers and the mayors and governors and everybody else mysteriously seemed to be just kids these days. A kid with a nasty job to do.
“I was instructed to tell you the news about your wife,” the kid said, after a moment. “I’m not allowed to say anything about any other aspect of this event to anyone, not to anyone at all. Military security.”
“Yes,” Carmichael said, and for an instant he was back in the war again, trying to find out something, anything, about Cong movements in the area he was supposed to be patrolling the next day, and running into that same dead-fish smile, that same solemn meaningless invocation of military security. His head swam and names that he hadn’t thought of in decades ran through his brain, Phu Loi, Binh Thuy, Tuy Hoa, Song Bo. Cam Ranh Bay. The U Minh Forest. Images from the past, swimming around. The greasy sidewalks of Tu Do Street in Saigon, skinny whores grinning out of every bar, ARVNs in red berets all over the place. White sand beaches lined with coconut palms, pretty as a picture; native kids with one leg each, hobbling on improvised crutches; Delta hooches going up in flames. And the briefing officers lying to you, lying, lying, always lying. His buried past, evoked by a single sickly smile.
