Across the way in the main hall he saw a crowd gathered around someone carrying a portable television set. Carmichael shouldered his way in just as the announcer was saying, “There has been no sign yet of the occupants of the San Gabriel or Orange County spaceships. But this was the horrifying sight that astounded residents of the Porter Ranch area beheld this morning between nine and ten o’clock.” The screen showed two upright tubular figures that looked like squids walking on the tips of their tentacles, moving cautiously through the parking lot of a shopping center, peering this way and that out of enormous yellow platter-shaped eyes. 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. They moved very daintily, but Carmichael saw that they were taller than the lampposts—twelve feet high, maybe fifteen. Their skins were purplish and leathery-looking, with rows of luminescent orange spots glowing along the sides. 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 whippped 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, caught around the waist by that long tongue, being hoisted into the air and popped like a collected specimen into a narrow green sack. “Teams of the giant creatures roamed the town 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 spacecraft. 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. The kind of people that live here, they 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.
He went 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. When he returned to the airport, intending to try phoning Cindy once again, a man in military uniform stopped him as he was crossing the field and said, “You Mike Carmichael, Laurel Canyon?”
“That’s right.”
“I’ve got some troublesome news for you. Let’s go inside.”
“Suppose you tell me here, okay?”
The officer looked at him strangely. “It’s about your wife,” he said. “Cynthia Carmichael? That’s your wife’s name?”
“Come on,” Carmichael said.
“She’s one of the hostages, Mr. Carmichael.”
His breath went from him as though he had been kicked.
“Where did it happen?” he demanded. “How did they get her?”
The 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. That girl jerked off her feet by that immense elastic tongue, swept through the air, popped into that green pouch. And Cindy—?
“You saw the part where the creatures were moving around? And then suddenly they were grabbing people, and everyone was running from them? That was when they got her. She was up front when they began grabbing, and maybe she had a chance to get away but she waited just a little 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 that they did.”
“I see,” Carmichael said stonily.
“One thing all the witnesses agreed, she didn’t panic, she didn’t scream. 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 that those who saw it—”
“It makes sense to me,” Carmichael said.
He turned away. He shut his eyes for a moment and took deep, heavy pulls of the hot smoky air.
It figures, he thought. It makes absolute sense.
Of course she had gone right out to the landing site. Of course. If there was anyone in Los Angeles who would have wanted to get to them 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. 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 right up to the moment they seized her.
In a way he 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 we have right up back here?”
“Yes.”
“Have there been any messages from the hostages? Or from the aliens, for that matter?”
“I’m not in a position to divulge that information.”
“Is there any information?”
“I’m sorry, I’m not at liberty to—”
“I refuse to believe,” Carmichael said, “that that ship is just sitting there, that nothing at all is being done to make contact with—”
“A command center has been established, Mr. Carmichael, and certain efforts are under way. That much I can tell you. I can tell you that Washington is involved. But beyond that, at the present point in time—”
A kid who looked like an Eagle Scout came running up. “Your plane’s all loaded and ready to go, Mike!”
“Yeah,” Carmichael said. The fire, the fucking fire! He had almost managed to forget about it. Almost. He hesitated a moment, torn between conflicting responsibities. Then he said to the officer, “Look, I’ve got to get back out on the fire line. Can you stay here a little while?”
“Well—”
“Maybe half an hour. I have to do a retardant dump. Then I want you to take me over to that spaceship and get me through the cordon, so I can talk to those critters myself. If she’s on that ship, I mean to get her off it.”
“I don’t see how it would be possible for—”
“Well, try to see,” Carmichael said. “I’ll meet you right here in half an hour.”
When he was aloft he noticed right away that the fire was spreading. The wind was even rougher and wilder than before, and now it was blowing hard from the northeast, pushing the flames down toward the edge of Chatsworth. Already some glowing cinders had blown across the city limits and Carmichael saw houses afire to his left, maybe half a dozen of them. There would be more, he knew. In firefighting you come to develop an odd sense of which way the struggle is going, whether you’re gaining on the blaze or the blaze is gaining on you, and that sense told him now that the vast effort that was under way was failing, that the fire was still on the upcurve, that whole neighborhoods were going to be ashes by nightfall.
He held on tight as the DC-3 entered the fire zone. The fire was sucking air like crazy, now, and the turbulence was astounding: it felt as if a giant’s hand had grabbed the ship by the nose. The line boss’ helicopter was tossing around like a balloon on a string.