Robert Silverberg - Against Babylon

Carmichael flew in from New Mexico that morning and the first thing they told him when he put his little plane down at Burbank was that fires were burning out of control all around the Los Angeles basin. He was needed bad, they told him. It was late October, the height of the brush-fire season in Southern California, and a hot hard dry wind was blowing out of the desert, and the last time it had rained was the fifth of April. He phoned the district supervisor right away and the district supervisor told him, “Get your ass out here on the line double fast, Mike.”

“Where do you want me?”

“The worst one’s just above Chatsworth. We’ve got planes loaded and ready to go out of Van Nuys Airport.”

“I need time to pee and to phone my wife,” Carmichael said. “I’ll be in Van Nuys in fifteen, okay?”

He was so tired that he could feel it in his teeth. It was nine in the morning and he’d been flying since half past four, and it had been rough all the way, getting pushed around by that same fierce wind out of the heart of the continent that was threatening now to fan the flames in L.A. At this moment all he wanted was home and shower and Cindy and bed. But Carmichael didn’t regard firefighting work as optional. This time of year, the whole crazy city could go in one big firestorm. There were times he almost wished that it would. He hated this smoggy tawdry Babylon of a city, its endless tangle of freeways, the strange-looking houses, the filthy air, the thick choking glossy foliage everywhere, the drugs, the booze, the divorces, the laziness, the sleaziness, the porno shops and the naked encounter parlors and the massage joints, the weird people wearing their weird clothes and driving their weird cars and cutting their hair in weird ways. There was a cheapness, a trashiness, about everything here, he thought. Even the mansions and the fancy restaurants were that way: hollow, like slick movie sets. He sometimes felt that the trashiness bothered him more than the out-and-out evil. If you kept sight of your own values you could do battle with evil, but trashiness slipped up around you and infiltrated your soul without your even knowing it. He hoped that his sojourn in Los Angeles was not doing that to him.

He came from the Valley, and what he meant by the Valley was the great San Joaquin, out behind Bakersfield, and not the little cluttered San Fernando Valley they had here. But L.A. was Cindy’s city and Cindy loved L.A. and he loved Cindy, and for Cindy’s sake he had lived here seven years, up in Laurel Canyon amidst the lush green shrubbery, and for seven Octobers in a row he had gone out to dump chemical retardants on the annual brush-fires, to save the Angelenos from their own idiotic carelessness. You had to accept your responsibilities, Carmichael believed.

The phone rang seven times at the home number before he hung up. Then he tried the little studio where Cindy made her jewelry, but she didn’t answer there either, and it was too early to call her at the gallery. That bothered him, not being able to say hello to her right away after his three-day absence, and no likely chance for it now for another eight or ten hours. But there was nothing he could do about that.

As soon as he was aloft again he could see the fire not far to the northwest, a greasy black column against the pale sky. And when he stepped from his plane a few minutes later at Van Nuys he felt the blast of sudden heat. The temperature had been in the mid-eighties at Burbank, damned well hot enough for nine in the morning, but here it was over a hundred. He heard the distant roar of flames, the popping and crackling of burning underbrush, the peculiar whistling sound of dry grass catching fire.

The airport looked like a combat center. Planes were coming and going with lunatic frenzy, and they were lunatic planes, too, antiques of every sort, forty and fifty years old and even older, converted B-17 Flying Fortresses and DC-3s and a Douglas Invader and, to Carmichael’s astonishment, a Ford Trimotor from the 1930’s that had been hauled, maybe, out of some movie studio’s collection. Some were equipped with tanks that held fire-retardant chemicals, some were water-pumpers, some were mappers with infrared and electronic scanning equipment glistening on their snouts. Harried-looking men and women ran back and forth, shouting into CB handsets, supervising the loading process. Carmichael found his way to Operations HQ, which was full of haggard people staring into computer screens. He knew most of them from other years. They knew him.

One of the dispatchers said, “We’ve got a DC-3 waiting for you. You’ll dump retardants along this arc, from Ybarra Canyon eastward to Horse Flats. The fire’s in the Santa Susana foothills and so far the wind’s from the east, but if it shifts to northerly it’s going to take out everything from Chatsworth to Granada Hills, and right on down to Ventura Boulevard. And that’s only this fire.”

“How many are there?”

The dispatcher tapped his keyboard. The map of the San Fernando Valley that had been showing disappeared and was replaced by one of the entire Los Angeles basin. Carmichael stared. Three great scarlet streaks indicated fire zones: this one along the Santa Susanas, another nearly as big way off to the east in the grasslands north of the 210 Freeway around Glendora or San Dimas, and a third down in eastern Orange County, back of Anaheim Hills. “Ours is the big one so far,” the dispatcher said. “But these other two are only about forty miles apart, and if they should join up somehow—”

“Yeah,” Carmichael said. A single wall of fire running along the whole eastern rim of the basin, maybe—with Santa Ana winds blowing, carrying sparks westward across Pasadena, across downtown L.A., across Hollywood, across Beverly Hills, all the way to the coast, to Venice, Santa Monica, Malibu. He shivered. Laurel Canyon would go. Everything would go. Worse than Sodom and Gomorrah, worse than the fall of Nineveh. Nothing but ashes for hundreds of miles. “Jesus,” he said. “Everybody scared silly of Russian nukes, and three carloads of dumb kids tossing cigarettes can do the job just as easily.”

“But this wasn’t cigarettes, Mike,” the dispatcher said.

“No? What then, arson?”

“You haven’t heard.”

“I’ve been in New Mexico the last three days.”

“You’re the only one in the world who hasn’t heard, then.”

“For Christ’s sake, heard what?”

“About the E-Ts,” said the dispatcher wearily. “They started the fires. Three spaceships landing at six this morning in three different corners of the L.A. basin. The heat of their engines ignited the dry grass.”

Carmichael did not smile. “You’ve got one weird sense of humor, man.”

The dispatcher said, “You think I’m joking?”

“Spaceships? From another world?”

“With critters fifteen feet high on board,” the dispatcher at the next computer said. “Tim’s not kidding. They’re out walking around on the freeways right this minute. Fifteen feet high, Mike.”

“Men from Mars?”

“Nobody knows where the hell they’re from.”

“Jesus,” Carmichael said. “Jesus Christ God.”

Wild updrafts from the blaze buffeted the plane as he took it aloft, and gave him a few bad moments. But he moved easily and automatically to gain control, pulling the moves out of the underground territories of his nervous system. It was essential, he believed, to have the moves in your fingers, your shoulders, your thighs, rather than in the conscious realms of your brain. Consciousness could get you a long way, but ultimately you had to work out of the underground territories or you were dead.

He felt the plane responding and managed a grin. DC-3s were tough old birds. He loved flying them, though the youngest of them had been manufactured before he was born. He loved flying anything. Flying wasn’t what Carmichael did for a living—he didn’t actually do anything for a living, not any more—but flying was what he did. There were months when he spent more time in the air than on the ground, or so it seemed to him, because the hours he spent on the ground often slid by unnoticed, while time in the air was heightened, intensified, magnified.