The Alien Years (11 page)

“Agreed,” said Joshua Leonards. “Completely.”

“They may be superior,” said a voice from the back, “but we’ve got the superiority of numbers on our side. We’re a whole planet full of human beings on our home turf and they’re just forty shiploads of—”

“Perhaps we outnumber them, yes,” Colonel Carmichael said, “but may I remind you that the Aztecs considerably outnumbered the Spaniards and were also on their home turf, and people speak Spanish in Mexico today?”

“So is it an invasion, do you think, Colonel?” General Steele asked.

“I told you: I can’t say. Certainly it has the look of one. But the only real fact we have about these—ah—Entities—is that they’re here. We can’t make any assumptions at all about their behavior. If we learned anything at all out of our unhappy entanglement in Vietnam, it’s that there are plenty of peoples on this planet whose minds don’t necessarily operate the way ours do, who work off an entirely different set of basic assumptions from ours; and even so those are all human beings with the same inner mental wiring that we have. The Entities aren’t even remotely human, and their way of thinking is entirely beyond my expertise right now. Until we know how to communicate with them—or, to put it another way, until they have deigned to communicate with us—we need to simply sit tight and—”

“Maybe they
have
communicated with us, if what I was told aboard the ship was true,” said the woman who had been taken hostage at the shopping mall, suddenly, in a tiny and dreamy but perfectly audible voice. “With one of us, at least. And they told her lots of things about themselves. So it’s already happened. If you can believe what she said, that is.”

More hubbub. Sounds of surprise, even shock, and a few low exasperated expostulations. Some of these high masters and overlords plainly were not enjoying the experience of finding themselves transformed into characters in a science-fiction movie.

Lloyd Buckley asked the dark-haired woman to stand and introduce herself. The Colonel yielded the floor to her with a little formal bow. She got a bit unsteadily to her feet and said, not looking at anyone in particular and speaking in a breathy monotone, “My name is Margaret Gabrielson and I live on Wilbur Avenue in Northridge, California, and yesterday morning I was on my way to visit my sister who lives in Thousand Oaks when I stopped for gas at a Chevron station in a mall in Porter Ranch. And I was captured by an alien and taken aboard their spaceship, which is the truth and nothing but truth, so help me God.”

“This isn’t a courtroom, Ms. Gabrielson,” said Buckley gently. “You aren’t testifying now. Just tell us what happened to you when you were on board the alien ship.”

“Yes,” she said. “What happened to me when I was on board the alien ship.”

And then she was silent for about ten thousand years.

Was she abashed at finding herself inside the actual and literal Pentagon, standing in front of a largely though not entirely male group of highly important governmental personages and asked to describe the wholly improbable, even absurd, events that had befallen her? Was she still befuddled and bewildered by her strange experiences among the Entities, or by the sedatives that had been given to her afterward? Or was she simply your basic inarticulate early-twenty-first century American, who had not in any way been equipped during the thirty years of her life with the technical skill required in order to express herself in public in linear and connected sentences?

Some of each, no doubt, the Colonel thought.

Everyone was very patient with her. What choice was there?

And after that interminable-seeming silence she said, “It was like, mirrors, everywhere. The ship. All metal and everything shining and it was gigantic inside, like some sort of stadium with walls around it.”

It was a start. The Colonel, sitting just beside her, gave her a warm encouraging smile. Lloyd Buckley beamed encouragement at her too. So did Ms. Crawford, the Cherokee-faced Secretary of Communications. Carlyle-Macavoy, though, who obviously didn’t suffer fools gladly, glared at her with barely veiled contempt.

“There were, you know, around twenty of us, maybe twenty-five,” she continued, after another immense terrified pause. “They put us, like, in two groups in different rooms. Mine was a little girl and an old man and a bunch of women around my age and then three men. One of the men had been hurt when they caught him, like, I think, a broken leg, and the other two men were trying to make him, you know, comfortable. It was this giant-sized room, like maybe as big as a movie theater, with weird enormous flowers floating through the air everywhere, and we were all in one corner of it. And very scared, most of us. We figured they were, like, going to cut us up, you know, to see what was inside of us. Like, you know, what they do to laboratory animals. Somebody said that and after that we couldn’t stop thinking about it.”

She dabbed away tears.

There was another interminable silence.

“The aliens,” Buckley prompted softly. “Tell us about them.”

They were big, the woman said. Huge. Terrifying. But they came by only occasionally, perhaps every hour or two, never more than one at a time, just checking up, gazing at them for a little while and then going away again. It was, she said, like seeing your worst nightmares come to life, whenever one of those monsters entered the chamber where they were being kept. She had felt sick to her stomach every time she looked at one of them. She had wanted to curl up and cry. She looked as though she wanted to curl up and cry right this minute, here and now, in front of the Vice President and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and all these Cabinet members.

“You said,” Buckley reminded her, “that one woman in your group experienced some sort of communication with them?”

“Yes. Yes. There was this woman, who was, like, a little strange, I have to say—she was from Los Angeles, I guess about forty years old, with shiny black hair, and she had a lot of fantastic jewelry on, earrings like big hoops and three or four strings of beads and, like, a whole bunch of rings, and she was wearing this big wide bright-colored skirt like my grandmother used to wear in the Sixties, and sandals, and stuff. Cindy, her name was.”

The Colonel gasped.

The hair was just like hers,
Anse had told him,
dark, cut in bangs. And big earrings, the hoops she always wears.
The Colonel hadn’t believed it. The police would have had the site cordoned off, he had said. Not likely that they’d be letting rubberneckers near the alien ship, he had said. But no: Anse had been right. It was indeed Cindy that Anse had seen on the television news early yesterday morning in the crowd at that shopping mall; and later the aliens had grabbed her, and she had been taken aboard that ship. Did Mike know? Where
was
Mike, anyway?

Margaret Gabrielson was speaking again.

This woman Cindy, she said, was the only one in the group who had no fear of the aliens. When one of the aliens came into the chamber, she walked right up to it and greeted it like it was an old friend, and told it that it and all its people were welcome on Earth, that she was glad that they were here.

“And did the aliens reply to her in any way?” Buckley asked.

Not that Margaret Gabrielson had been able to notice. While Cindy was saying things to the alien it would just stand there looming high above her, looking down at her the way you might look at a dog or a cat, without showing any kind of reaction or understanding. But after the alien left the room, Cindy told everyone that the alien had spoken to her, like in a mental way, telepathy.

“And said what to her?” asked Buckley.

Silence. Hesitation.

“Like pulling teeth,” said Carlyle-Macavoy, through his own clenched ones.

But then it came out, all in a rush:

“—That the aliens wanted us to know that they weren’t going to harm the world in any way, that they were, like, here on a diplomatic mission, that they were part of some huge United Nations of planets and they had come to invite us to join. And that they were just going to stay for a few weeks and then most of them were going back to their own world, although some of them were going to stay here as ambassadors, you know, to teach us a new and better way of life.”

“Uh-oh,” Joshua Leonards muttered. “Scary stuff. The missionaries
always
have some new and better way of life that they want to teach. And you know what happens next.”

“They also said,” Margaret Gabrielson continued, “that they were going to take a few Earth people back to their own world to show them what sort of place it was. Volunteers, only. And, like, this woman Cindy had volunteered. When they took us off the ship a few hours later, she was the only one who stayed behind.”

“And she seemed happy about that?” Buckley asked.

“She was, like, ecstatic.”

The Colonel winced. That sounded like Cindy, all right.
Oh, Mike!
How he loved her, Mike did. But in the twinkling of an eye she had abandoned him for monsters from some far star. Poor Mike. Poor, poor Mike.

Buckley said, “You heard all of this, you say, only from this woman Cindy? None of the others of you had any kind of, ah, mental contact with the aliens?”

“None. It was only Cindy who had it, or said she did. All that stuff about ambassadors, coming in peace, that was all hers. But it couldn’t have been true. She was really crazy, that woman. She was like, ‘The coming of the aliens was prophesied in this book that I read years and years ago, and everything is following the prophecy exactly.’ That’s what she said, and you knew it was impossible. So the whole thing was just in her head. She was crazy, that woman.
Crazy.”

Yes, the Colonel thought.
Crazy.
And Margaret Gabrielson, at that moment reaching her snapping point at last, burst into hysterical tears and began to collapse into herself and sink toward the floor. The Colonel rose in one smooth motion and caught her deftly as she fell, and steadied her and held her against his chest, murmuring soothing things to her while she wept. He felt very paternal. It reminded him of nothing so much as the time, some seven or eight years back, when Irene’s diagnosis had come through and he had had to tell Rosalie that her mother had inoperable cancer, and then had had to hold her for what seemed like hours until she had cried it all out.

“It was awful, awful, awful,” Margaret Gabrielson was saying, voice muffled, head still pressed against the Colonel’s ribs. “Those hideous E-T monsters wandering around—and us not knowing what they were going to do to us—that crazy woman and all her loony-tunes nonsense—crazy, she was, crazy—”

“Well,” Lloyd Buckley said. “So much for the first report of communications with the aliens, I guess.” He looked bemused, perhaps a little irritated by the messiness and uselessness of Margaret Gabrielson’s account. No doubt he had been expecting something more. The Colonel, on the other hand, felt that he had had more than he wanted.

But there was still more to come.

A chime of some sort went off, just then. An aide jumped up, pressed his wrist-implant to a data node in the wall, gave a one-syllable command. Something lit up on a wall-mounted ribbon screen next to the node and a yellow printout came gliding from a slot below it. The aide brought it to Buckley, who glanced at it and coughed and tugged at his lower lip and made a sour face. And eventually said, “Colonel Carmichael—Anson—do you happen to have a brother named Myron?”

“Everyone calls him Mike,” the Colonel said. “But yes, yes, he’s my younger brother.”

“Message just in from California about him that I’m supposed to pass along to you. It’s bad news, I’m afraid, Anson.”

All things considered, it hadn’t been much of a meeting, the Colonel thought, lost in gloom, leaden-hearted over his brother’s heroic but shocking and altogether unacceptable death, as he headed for home sixteen hours later aboard the same plush Air Force VIP jet that had carried him to Washington the day before. He could not bear to think about Alike in his last moments in some rickety little plane, struggling frenetically and ultimately unsuccessfully against the violent air currents above the roiling horror of the Ventura County fire. But when he shifted his attention back to the Entities crisis and the meeting that had been called to discuss it, he felt even worse.

An embarrassment, that meeting. A ghastly waste of time. And a stunning revelation of the hollowness and futility of humanity’s self-aggrandizing pretensions.

Buckley had offered to let him go back to his hotel after the news about Mike had come in: but no, no, what good would that have done? He was needed. He stayed. And sat there in mounting despair during all the dreary pointless remainder of it. All those important Cabinet officers and lavishly decorated generals and admirals and the rest of them too, the whole grand crowd of lofty honchos arrayed in solemn conclave, interminably masticating the situation, and to what end? Ultimately the meeting had broken up without any significant information having been brought forth beyond the mere fact of the landings, no conclusions reached, no policy decisions taken. Aside from Wait and See, that is.

Wait, yes. And See.

The secure blue wall of the sky had been breached without warning; mysterious alien Entities had landed simultaneously all over Earth; yea, out of nowhere bizarre visitors had come, and they had seen, and after two and a half days they were already acting as though they had conquered. And in the face of all that, none of our best and brightest seemed to have the slightest idea of how we should respond.