“Cindy—”
“Oh, Mike, I do love you so much.”
“And I love you, babe. And I wish you’d come out of that goddamned ship.”
“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 that, 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 round trip takes forty-eight of our years, but it will only seem like a few weeks to me. Oh, Mike! Goodbye, Mike! God bless, Mike!” She blew kisses to him. He saw his favorite rings on her fingers, the three little strange star sapphire ones that she had made when she first began to design jewelry. He searched his mind for some new way to reason with her, some line of argument that would work, and could find none. He felt a vast emptiness beginning to expand within him, as though he were being made hollow by some whirling blade. Her face was shining. She seemed like a stranger to him suddenly. She seemed like a Los Angeles person, one of those, lost in fantasies and dreams, and it was as though he had never known her, or though he had pretended she was something other than she was. No. No, that isn’t right. 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 they had heard nothing.
“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’s not 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 want to go to that place. 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. “Colonel, do you mind 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?”
He went up one last time in the DC-3. 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 gigantic even from Carmichael’s altitude. The huge purplish thing stepped from the ship, extended its tentacles, seemed to be sniffing the smoky air.
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 feel sick 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 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.”
“I didn’t feel like doing it,” 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 she was doing, and he respected it, but he didn’t have to like it. He didn’t like it at all. He had lost Cindy, 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. “Mike—”
Carmichael moved his head slowly from side to side as though trying to shake a monstrous headache from it. Then he frowned. “No, that’s wrong,” he said. “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, going down the short runway. Dimly he realized that he had not requested clearance. A little Cessna spotter plane moved desperately 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, until the wild thermals caught his wings from below and lifted him and tossed him like a toy skimming over the top, and sent him hurtling toward the waiting hills to the north.
Thus saith the Lord; Behold, I will raise up against Babylon, and against them that dwell in the midst of them that rise up against me, a destroying wind;
And will send unto Babylon fanners, that shall fan her, and shall empty her land: for in the day of trouble they shall be against her round about.