“We don’t have any kind of contingency plans for alien invasions, so far as I know,” Anse said. “But I’m not up on that sort of stuff these days.” Anse had been an officer in the Army’s materiel-procurement arm, but he had left the Service about two years back, tempted away by a goodly aerospace-industry paycheck. The Colonel hadn’t been too pleased about that. After a moment Anse said, sounding a little uncomfortable, as he always did when he said something he didn’t really believe for no other reason than that he suspected the Colonel wanted to hear it, “Well, if it’s war with Mars, or wherever it is they come from, so be it. I’m ready to go back in, if I’m needed.”
“So am I. I’m not too old. If I spoke Martian, I’d volunteer my services as an interpreter. But I don’t, and nobody’s been calling me for my advice so far, either.”
“They should,” Anse said.
“Yes,” the Colonel said, perhaps a little too vehemently. “They really should.”
There was silence at the other end for a moment. They were treading on dangerous territory. The Colonel had been reluctant to leave the Service, even after putting in his thirty years, and had never ceased regretting his retirement; Anse had scarcely hesitated, the moment he was eligible to claim his own.
Anse said, finally, “You want to hear one more crazy thing, Dad? I think I caught a glimpse of Cindy on the news this morning, in the crowd at the Porter Ranch mall.”
“Cindy?”
“Or her twin sister, if she has one. Looked just like her, that was for sure. There were five, six hundred people standing outside the entrance of the Wal-Mart watching the E-Ts go walking by, and for a second the camera zoomed down and I was sure I saw Cindy right in the front row. With her eyes as bright as a kid’s on Christmas morning. I was certain it was her.”
“Porter Ranch, that’s up beyond Northridge, isn’t it? What would she have been doing out there early in the morning when she lives way to hell and gone east of there and south, the other side of Mulholland?”
“The hair was just like hers, dark, cut in bangs. And big earrings, the hoops she always wears.—Well, maybe not. But I wouldn’t put it past her, going up to that mall to look at the E-Ts.”
“It would have been cordoned off right away, the moment the critters arrived,” the Colonel said, while the thought went through his mind that she should have been at her gallery in Santa Monica by this time of morning, and hadn’t been there. “Not likely that the police would have been letting rubberneckers in. You must have been mistaken. Someone else, similar appearance.”
“Maybe so.—Mike’s out of town, right? The back end of New Mexico, again?”
“Yes,” said the Colonel. “Supposed to be getting back today. I called his house but I got no answer. If he’s back already, I suspect he’s gone out on volunteer fire duty the way he does every year. Right in the thick of things, I imagine.”
“I imagine so. That’s exactly what he would be doing.” Anse laughed. “Old Mike would have a fit if it turned out that that really was Cindy out there at the mall with the E-Ts, wouldn’t he, Dad?”
“I suppose he would. But that wasn’t Cindy out there.—Listen, Anse, I do appreciate your calling, okay? Stay in touch. Give my love to Carole.”
“You know I will, Dad.”
The Colonel clapped the phone shut, and then, as it rang again, opened it almost immediately, thinking, Let it be Mike, let it be Mike.
But no, it was Paul calling—his nephew, Lee’s boy, the one who taught computer sciences at the Oceanside branch of the University. Worried about the old man and checking in with him, Paul was. The basic California catastrophe procedure, same drill good for earthquakes, fires, race riots, floods, and mudslides: call all your kin-folks within a hundred fifty miles of the event, call all your friends, too, make sure everybody’s all right, tie up the phone lines good and proper, overload the entire Net with needless well-meant communication. He would have expected Paul, at least, to have known better. But of course the Colonel had done the same thing himself only about ten minutes ago, calling all around town trying to track down his brother’s wife.
“Hell, I’m fine,” the Colonel said. “Air’s getting a little smoky from what’s going on down there, that’s all. I’ve got four Martians sitting in the living room with me right now and I’m teaching them how to play bridge.”
At the airport they had coffee ready, sandwiches, tacos, burritos. While Carmichael was waiting for the ground crew to fill his tanks he went inside to call Cindy again, and again there was no answer at home, none at the studio. He phoned the gallery, which was open by this time, and the shiftless kid who worked there said lazily that she hadn’t been in touch all morning.
“If you happen to hear from her,” Carmichael said, “tell her I’m flying fire control out of Van Nuys Airport, working the Chatsworth fire, and I’ll be home as soon as things calm down a little. Tell her I miss her, too. And tell her that if I run into an E-T I’ll give it a big hug for her. You got that? Tell her just that.”
“Will do. Oh, by the way, Mr. Carmichael—”
“Yes?”
“Your brother called, twice. Colonel Carmichael, that is. He said he thought you were, like, still in New Mexico and he was trying to find Mrs. Carmichael. I told him you were supposed to be coming back today, and that I didn’t know where she was, but that the fire was, like, nowhere near your house.”
“Good. If he calls again, let him know what I’m doing.” That was odd, Carmichael thought, Anson trying to phone Cindy. The Colonel had done a pretty good job over the past five or six years of pretending that Cindy didn’t exist. Carmichael hadn’t even known that his brother had the gallery number, nor could he understand why he would want to call there. Unless the Colonel was worried about him for some reason, so worried that he didn’t mind having to put up with talking with Cindy.
Probably I should phone him right now, Carmichael thought, before I go back upstairs.
But there was no dial tone now. System overload, most likely. Everybody was calling everybody all around the area. It was a miracle that he’d been able to do as well as he had with the phone just now. He hung up, tried again, still got nothing. And there were other people lined up waiting for the phone.
“Go ahead,” he said to the first man in line, stepping back from the booth. “You try. The line’s dead.”
He went looking for a different phone. Across the way in the main hall he saw a crowd gathered around someone carrying a portable television set, one of those jobs with a postcard-sized screen. 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 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.