Somebody running by said that a new fire had broken out in Pasadena, near the Jet Propulsion Lab, and there was another in Griffith Park. The wind was starting to carry firebrands westward toward the center of Los Angeles from the two inland fires, then. Dodger Stadium was burning, someone said. So is Santa Anita Racetrack, said someone else. The whole damned place is going to go, Carmichael thought. And meanwhile my wife is sitting inside a spaceship from another planet having tea with the boys from HESTEGHON.
When his plane was ready he took it up and laid down a new line of retardant, flying just above the trees, practically in the faces of the firefighters working on the outskirts of Chatsworth. This time they were too busy to wave. In order to get back to the airport he had to make a big loop behind the fire, over the Santa Susanas and down the flank of the Golden State Freeway, and for the first time he saw the fires burning to the east, two huge conflagrations marking the places where the exhaust streams of the other two spaceships had grazed the dry grass, and a bunch of smaller blazes strung out on a south-veering line that ran from Burbank or Glendale deep into Orange County.
His hands were shaking as he touched down at Van Nuys. He had gone without rest now for something like thirty-two hours, and he could feel himself beginning to pass into that blank white exhaustion that lies somewhere beyond ordinary fatigue.
The head dispatcher was waiting for him again as he left his plane. This time there was an odd sappy smile on his implausibly handsome face, and Carmichael thought he understood what it meant. “All right, Hal,” he said at once. “I give in. I’ll knock off for five or six hours and grab some shut-eye, and then you can call me back to—”
“No. That isn’t it.”
“That isn’t what?”
“What I came out here to tell you, Mike. They’ve released some of the hostages.”
“Cindy?”
“I think so. There’s an Air Force car here to take you to Sylmar. That’s where they’ve got the command center set up. They said to find you as soon as you came off your last dump mission and send you over there so you can talk with your wife.”
“So she’s free,” Carmichael cried. “Oh, Jesus, she’s free!”
“You go on along, Mike. We can work on the fire without you for a while, if that’s okay with you.”
The Air Force car looked like a general’s limousine, long and low and sleek, with a square-jawed driver in front and a couple of very tough-looking young officers to sit with him in back. They said hardly anything, and they looked as weary as Carmichael felt. “How’s my wife?” he asked, as the car pulled away, and one of them said, “We understand that she hasn’t been harmed.” The way he said it, deep and somber, was stiff and strange and melodramatic. Carmichael shrugged. Another one who thinks he’s an actor, he told himself. This one’s seen too many old Air Force movies.
The whole city seemed to be on fire now. Within the air-conditioned limo there was only the faintest whiff of smoke, but the sky to the east was terrifying, with apocalyptic streaks of red shooting up like meteors traveling in reverse through the blackness. Carmichael asked the Air Force men about that, but all he got was a clipped, “It looks pretty bad, we understand.”
Somewhere along the San Diego Freeway between Mission Hills and Sylmar Carmichael fell asleep, and the next thing he knew they were waking him gently and leading him into a vast bleak hangar-like building near the reservoir.
The place was a maze of cables and screens, with military personnel operating assorted mysterious biochip gizmos and what looked like a thousand conventional computers and ten thousand telephones. He let himself be shuffled along, moving mechanically and barely able to focus his eyes, to an inner office where a lieutenant colonel with blond hair perhaps just beginning to shade into gray greeted him in his best this-is-the-tense-part-of-the-movie style and said, “This may be the most difficult job you’ve ever had to handle, Mr. Carmichael.”
Carmichael scowled. Everybody was Hollywood to the core in this damned city, he thought. And even the colonels were too young nowadays.
“They told me that the hostages were being freed,” he said. “Where’s my wife?”
The lieutenant colonel pointed to a television screen. “We’re going to let you talk to her right now.”
“Are you saying I don’t get to see her?”
“Not immediately.”
“Why not? Is she all right?”
“As far as we know, yes.”
“You mean she hasn’t been released? They told me the hostages were being freed.”
“All but three have been let go,” said the lieutenant colonel. “Two people, according to the aliens, were slightly injured as they were captured, and are undergoing medical treatment aboard the ship. They’ll be released shortly. The third is your wife, Mr. Carmichael.” Just the merest bit of a pause, now, for that terrific dramatic effect that seemed to be so important to these people. “She is unwilling to leave the ship.”
The effect was dramatic, all right. For Carmichael it was like hitting an air pocket.
“Unwilling?”
“She claims to have volunteered to make the journey to the home world of the aliens. She says she’s going to serve as our ambassador, our special emissary.—Mr. Carmichael, does your wife have any history of mental imbalance?”
Glaring, Carmichael said, “Cindy is very sane. Believe me.”
“You are aware that she showed no display of fear when the aliens seized her in the shopping-center incident this morning?”
“I know that, yes. That doesn’t mean she’s crazy. She’s unusual. She has unusual ideas. But she’s not crazy. Neither am I, incidentally.” He put his hands to his face for a moment and pressed his fingertips lightly against his eyes. “All right,” he said. “Let me talk to her.”
“Do you think you can persuade her to leave that ship?”
“I’m sure as hell going to try.”
“You are not yourself sympathetic to what she’s doing, are you?” the blond-haired lieutenant colonel asked.
Carmichael looked up. “Yes, I am sympathetic. She’s an intelligent woman doing something that she thinks is important, and doing it of her own free will. Why the hell shouldn’t I be sympathetic? But I’m going to try to talk her out of it, you bet. I love her. I want her back. Somebody else can be the goddamned ambassador to Betelgeuse. Let me talk to her, will you?”
The lieutenant colonel gestured with a little wand the size of a pencil, and the big television screen came to life. For a moment mysterious colored patterns flashed across it in a disturbing random way; then Carmichael caught glimpses of shadowy catwalks, intricate gleaming metal strutworks crossing and recrossing at peculiar angles; and then for an instant one of the aliens appeared on the screen. Yellow saucer-sized eyes of gigantic size looked complacently back at him. Carmichael felt altogether wide-awake now.
The alien’s face vanished and Cindy came into view.
The moment he saw her, Carmichael knew that he had lost her.
Her face was glowing. There was a calm joy in her eyes verging on ecstasy. He had seen her look something like that on many occasions, but this was different: this was beyond anything she had attained before. It was nirvana. She had seen the beatific vision, this time.
“Cindy?”
“Hello, Mike.”
“Can you tell me what’s been happening in there, Cindy?”
“It’s incredible. The contact, the communication.”