Read Online The Alien Years by Robert Silverberg - Free Book Online

the military was in charge and they wouldn’t let him or anybody else get within a mile of that ship, and he’d only get snarled up in stuff with the television interviewers looking for poignant crap about the families of those who had been captured.
    Then the head dispatcher came over to him, a tanned smooth-featured man named Hal Andersen who had the look of a movie star going to seed. Andersen seemed almost about ready to burst with compassion, and in throbbing funereal tones told Carmichael that it would be all right with him if he called it quits for the day and went home to await whatever might happen. But Carmichael shook him off. “Listen, Hal, I won’t get her back by sitting in the living room. And this fire isn’t going to go out by itself, either. I’ll do one more go-round up there.”
    It took twenty minutes for the ground crew to pump the retardant slurry into the DC-3’s tanks. Carmichael stood to one side, drinking Cokes and watching the planes come and go. People stared at him, and those who knew him waved from a distance, and three or four pilots came over and silently squeezed his arm or rested a hand consolingly on his shoulder. It was all very touching and dramatic. Everybody saw himself as starring in a movie, in this town. Well, this one was a horror movie. The northern sky was black with soot, shading to gray to the east and west. The air was sauna-hot and frighteningly dry: you could set fire to it, Carmichael thought, with a snap of your fingers.
    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 grassland 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