ship by the nose. The line boss’s helicopter was tossing around like a balloon on a string.
Carmichael called in for orders and was sent over to the southwest side of the zone, close by the outermost street of houses. Firefighters with shovels were beating on wisps of flame rising out of people’s gardens down there. The heavy skirts of dry dead leaves that dangled down the trunks of a row of towering palm trees running along the edge of the curb for the entire length of the block were starting to blaze into flame, going up in a neat consecutive sequence, pop pop pop pop. The neighborhood dogs had formed a crazed pack, running bewilderedly back and forth. Dogs were weirdly loyal during fires: they stuck around. The neighborhood cats, he figured, were halfway to San Francisco by now.
Swooping down to treetop height, Carmichael let go with a red gush of chemicals, swathing everything that looked combustible with the stuff. The shovelers looked up and waved at him and grinned, and he dipped his wings to them and headed off to the north, around the western edge of the blaze—it was edging farther to the west too, he saw, leaping up into the high canyons out by the Ventura County line—and then he flew eastward along the Santa Susana foothills until he spotted the alien spaceship once more, standing isolated in its circle of blackened earth like a high-rise building of strange futuristic design that some real-estate developer had absentmindedly built out here in the middle of nowhere. The cordon of military vehicles seemed now to be even larger, what looked like a whole armored division deployed in concentric rings beginning half a mile or so from the ship.
Carmichael stared intently at the alien vessel as though he might be able to see right through its shining walls to Cindy within.
He imagined her sitting at a table, or whatever the aliens might use instead of tables—sitting at a table with seven or eight of the huge beings, calmly explaining Earth to them and then asking them to explain their world to her.
He was altogether certain that she was safe, that no harm would come to her, that they were not torturing her or dissecting her or sending electric currents through her just for the sake of seeing how she reacted. Things like that would never happen to Cindy, he knew. The only thing he feared was that they would depart for their home star without releasing her. That notion was truly frightening. The terror that that thought generated in him was as powerful as any kind of fear he had ever felt, rising up through his chest like a lump of molten lead, spreading out to fill his throat and send red shafts of pain into his skull.
As Carmichael continued to approach the aliens’ landing site he saw the guns of some of the tanks below swiveling around to point at him, and he picked up a radio voice telling him brusquely, “You’re off limits, DC-3. Get back to the fire zone. This is prohibited airspace.”
“Sorry,” Carmichael replied. “My mistake. No entry intended.”
But as he began to make his turn he dropped down even lower, so that he could have one last good look at the huge spaceship. If it had portholes, and Cindy was looking out one of those portholes, he wanted her to know that he was nearby. That he was watching, that he was waiting for her to come back. But the ship’s vast hull was blind-faced, entirely blank.
— Cindy? Cindy?
It was like something happening in a dream, that she should be inside that spaceship. And yet it was so very much like her that she should have made it happen.
She was always questing after the strange, the mysterious, the unfamiliar. The people she brought to the house: a Navajo once, a bewildered Turkish tourist, a kid from New York. The music she played, the way she chanted along with it. The incense, the lights, the meditation. “I’m searching,” she liked to say. Trying always to find a route that would take her into something that was wholly outside herself.
Carmichael called in for orders and was sent over to the southwest side of the zone, close by the outermost street of houses. Firefighters with shovels were beating on wisps of flame rising out of people’s gardens down there. The heavy skirts of dry dead leaves that dangled down the trunks of a row of towering palm trees running along the edge of the curb for the entire length of the block were starting to blaze into flame, going up in a neat consecutive sequence, pop pop pop pop. The neighborhood dogs had formed a crazed pack, running bewilderedly back and forth. Dogs were weirdly loyal during fires: they stuck around. The neighborhood cats, he figured, were halfway to San Francisco by now.
Swooping down to treetop height, Carmichael let go with a red gush of chemicals, swathing everything that looked combustible with the stuff. The shovelers looked up and waved at him and grinned, and he dipped his wings to them and headed off to the north, around the western edge of the blaze—it was edging farther to the west too, he saw, leaping up into the high canyons out by the Ventura County line—and then he flew eastward along the Santa Susana foothills until he spotted the alien spaceship once more, standing isolated in its circle of blackened earth like a high-rise building of strange futuristic design that some real-estate developer had absentmindedly built out here in the middle of nowhere. The cordon of military vehicles seemed now to be even larger, what looked like a whole armored division deployed in concentric rings beginning half a mile or so from the ship.
Carmichael stared intently at the alien vessel as though he might be able to see right through its shining walls to Cindy within.
He imagined her sitting at a table, or whatever the aliens might use instead of tables—sitting at a table with seven or eight of the huge beings, calmly explaining Earth to them and then asking them to explain their world to her.
He was altogether certain that she was safe, that no harm would come to her, that they were not torturing her or dissecting her or sending electric currents through her just for the sake of seeing how she reacted. Things like that would never happen to Cindy, he knew. The only thing he feared was that they would depart for their home star without releasing her. That notion was truly frightening. The terror that that thought generated in him was as powerful as any kind of fear he had ever felt, rising up through his chest like a lump of molten lead, spreading out to fill his throat and send red shafts of pain into his skull.
As Carmichael continued to approach the aliens’ landing site he saw the guns of some of the tanks below swiveling around to point at him, and he picked up a radio voice telling him brusquely, “You’re off limits, DC-3. Get back to the fire zone. This is prohibited airspace.”
“Sorry,” Carmichael replied. “My mistake. No entry intended.”
But as he began to make his turn he dropped down even lower, so that he could have one last good look at the huge spaceship. If it had portholes, and Cindy was looking out one of those portholes, he wanted her to know that he was nearby. That he was watching, that he was waiting for her to come back. But the ship’s vast hull was blind-faced, entirely blank.
— Cindy? Cindy?
It was like something happening in a dream, that she should be inside that spaceship. And yet it was so very much like her that she should have made it happen.
She was always questing after the strange, the mysterious, the unfamiliar. The people she brought to the house: a Navajo once, a bewildered Turkish tourist, a kid from New York. The music she played, the way she chanted along with it. The incense, the lights, the meditation. “I’m searching,” she liked to say. Trying always to find a route that would take her into something that was wholly outside herself.
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