But these were of a different sort: monsters, behemoths. They looked like double-humped medium-sized bluish-gray mountains with legs. Their prodigious bodies were rounded, with a sort of valley a couple of feet deep running crosswise along their backs, and they were covered all over with a dense stiff growth midway in texture between fur and feathers. There were three yellow eyes the size of platters at one end and three rigid purple rod-like projections that stuck out seven or eight feet at the other.
The legs were their most elephantine feature—thick and rough-skinned, like tree trunks—and worked on some sort of telescoping principle, capable of being collapsed swiftly back up into the bodies of their owners. Eight was the normal number of legs, but as they moved about they always kept at least one pair withdrawn. From time to time they would let that pair descend and pull up another one, in what seemed to be a completely random way. Now and then they might withdraw two pairs at once, which would cause them to sink down to ground level at one end like a camel kneeling. The purpose of that, it seemed, was to feed. Their mouths were in their bellies; when they wanted to eat something, they simply collapsed all eight of their legs at the same time and sat down on it. It was a mouth big enough to swallow a very large animal at a single gulp—an animal as big as a bison, say. A little later on, when the smaller aliens had opened the cages in the park zoo, the big ones did just that.
Then, well along into the night, a third kind of alien made its appearance. These were wholly different from the other two: towering, tubular, purplish squid-like things that had rows of gleaming orange spots running up and down their sides. There were not many of this sort, and they seemed distinctly to be in charge: the two other kinds, at any rate, appeared to be taking orders from them. By now news was coming in about the alien landing that had occurred a little earlier that same day just west of Los Angeles. Only the squid type had been observed out there.
There had been landings in other places, too. Plenty of them, mostly major cities, though not exclusively. One ship came down in Serengeti National Park in Tanzania, on a broad grassy plain occupied only by a huge herd of wildebeests and a few hundred zebras, who paid little attention. One landing occurred in the midst of a raging sandstorm that was taking place in the Taklimakan Desert of central Asia, and the storm abruptly ceased, according to the mystified but essentially grateful drivers of a convoy of Chinese trucks who were the sole wayfarers in the vicinity at the time. A landing in Sicily, among the dry forlorn hills west of Catania, aroused interest only among some donkeys and sheep and the eighty-year-old owner of a scraggly grove of olive trees, who fell on his knees and crossed himself again and again and again, keeping his eyes shut all the while.
But the main action was in cities. Rio de Janeiro. Johannesburg. Moscow. Istanbul. Frankfurt. London. Oslo. Bombay. Melbourne. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. There were aliens all over the place, in fact, except for a few strikingly obvious places where they had somehow not bothered to land, like Washington, D.C., and Tokyo, and Beijing.
The ships they arrived in were of various kinds, driven by varying means of propulsion that ranged from noisy thrust-driven chemical rockets, as in Los Angeles, up to the mysterious and unfathomably silent. Some of the alien vessels came in on mighty trails of fire, like the big one that had landed near Los Angeles. Some just popped into view out of nowhere, as the one in New York City had done. Some landed right in the middle of big cities, like the one in Istanbul that set itself down on the grand plaza between Haghia Sophia and the Blue Mosque and the one in Rome that parked itself in front of St. Peter’s, but others chose suburban landing sites. In Johannesburg it was only the glistening spooky aliens that emerged, in Frankfurt only the behemoths, in Rio just the squids; elsewhere there were mixtures of the three kinds.
They made no announcements. They made no demands. They decreed no decrees. They offered no explanations. They didn’t say a thing.
They were simply here.
The meeting, the Colonel discovered, was taking place at the Pentagon, not at the White House. That seemed unusual. But why should anything be usual today, with hordes of alien beings wandering the face of the Earth?
It was quite all right with the Colonel to be plodding around in the vast but familiar corridors of the Pentagon once again. He had no illusions about the activities that had gone on in this place over the years or some of the people who had taken part in them, but he was no more inclined to take umbrage at the building simply because stupid or even evil decisions had been made within it than a bishop recalled to Rome would take umbrage at the Vatican because some of its occupants over the centuries had been other than saintly. The Pentagon was just a building, after all. And it had been the center of his professional life for three decades.
Very little had changed in the twelve or thirteen years since he had last set foot within it. The air in the long corridors had the same stale synthetic smell, the lighting fixtures were no more beautiful than they had been and still cast that sickly light, the walls were as drab as ever. One difference he noticed was that the guards at the various checkpoints were much younger—he would easily have believed that they were high-school boys and girls, though he suspected they actually were a little older than that—and some of the security procedures were different, now, too.
These days they screened people to see whether they had biochip implants in their arms, for example. “Sorry,” the Colonel said, grinning. “I’m not that modern.” But they screened him for implants anyway, and very thoroughly. And moved him on through pretty quickly after that, though the other three who had flown with him from California, the ruddy-bearded UCLA professor and the CalTech astronomer with the British accent and that lovely but somewhat dazed young dark-haired woman who had actually been held for a short time as a hostage aboard the alien spaceship, were kept back for more elaborate interrogation, as civilians usually were.
As he approached the meeting room itself, the Colonel began to ratchet himself up a couple of gears, getting himself up to speed for whatever lay ahead.
Once upon a time, some thirty years ago, he had been part of the strategic planning team in Saigon, helping to run a war that could not possibly have been won, coping on a day-by-day basis with the task of tracking down the worms that kept wriggling up through the quicksand and trying to put them in their proper cans, while simultaneously searching for the light at the end of the tunnel. He had distinguished himself pretty considerably in that capacity, which was why he had started his Vietnam tour as a second lieutenant and finished it as a major, with further promotions ahead.
But he had given all that high-powered stuff up, long ago, first for a post-Vietnam doctorate in Asian studies and a teaching appointment at the Academy, and then, after his wife’s death, for the quiet life of a fuddy-duddy walnut farmer in the hills above Santa Barbara. He was, here and now in the charming first decade of the charming twenty-first century, too far out of things to know or care much about the contemporary world, having participated neither in the glorious Net that everybody was plugged into, nor the even newer and glitzier world of biochip implants, nor, in fact, anything else of importance that had happened since about 1995.
Today, though, he needed to reactivate his thinking cap and call upon the smarts that had been at his command in the good old days of the epic battle for the hearts and minds of those pleasant but complicated people out there in the rice paddies of the Mekong Delta.