Robert Silverberg - The Alien Years

He got back only crackling noises. The continued silence was unsettling. The column of smoke behind him was still rising. It looked to be half a mile high. Frank thought he heard the sound of distant explosions, now.

“Andy?”

Another minute or so, still no Andy.

Then: “Sorry. That you, Frank?” At last. “I’ve been busy. Where did you say you are?”

“Heading northward across the Valley along Reseda Boulevard. There’s a tremendous fire happening behind me.”

“I know. There are a lot of fires. The Entities are hitting back, doing reprisals for killing Prime.”

“Reprisals?” The word went ricocheting around in Frank’s head, pummeling his brain.

“Damn right. LACON planes are bombing the shit out of everything all over town.”

“But the mission was successful,” Frank said uncomprehendingly. “Prime is dead.”

“Yes. Apparently he is.”

“And half an hour ago you told me the Entities all over the world were going completely around the bend from the shock of his death. That they were crazed and staggering, berserk with pain, falling down all over the place. They were finished, you said.”

“I did say that, yes.”

“So who ordered the reprisals?” Frank asked, pushing his words out slowly and thickly, as though trying to speak through wads of cotton.

“The Entities did.” Andy sounded tired, terribly tired. “They seem to have picked themselves up somehow and put themselves back together again. And they’ve sent out a whole armada of LACON people and other assorted quislings to make air raids, pretty much at random, from the looks of it, by way of showing how annoyed they are with us.”

Frank leaned forward over the steering wheel, breathing slowly in and out. It was hard, very hard, assimilating all this. “Then it was just a waste of time, everything we just did? Knocking out Prime didn’t really achieve anything?”

“For about ten minutes, it did. But what it looks like is that they have backup Primes. Which is something that Borgmann’s files didn’t tell me.”

“No! Oh, Jesus, Andy! Jesus!”

“Once I got the picture of what was going on in Los Angeles,” Andy said, “I went back in and hunted around and discovered that there’s evidently another Prime in London, and one in Istanbul, and the original one still in Prague. And more, maybe. They’re all interchangeable and linked in series. If one dies, the next one is activated right away.”

“Jesus,” Frank said again. And then, anguishedly: “What about Rasheed? And the others.”

“All okay. Rasheed’s currently riding with Charlie, traveling westward on the Foothill Freeway, somewhere near La Canada. Cheryl’s coming right up behind him. Mark’s on the Golden State Freeway in the vicinity of Mission Hills, heading north.”

“Well, thank God for that much. But I thought we had them beaten,” Frank said.

“Me too, for about five minutes.”

“Finished them all off at once, with one big bang.”

“That would have been nice, wouldn’t it? Well, we gave them a pretty good hit, anyway. But now they’re banging us back. And then, I guess, everything will go on pretty much as before.” The sound that came over the line from Andy was one that Frank interpreted as laughter, more or less. “Makes you feel like shit, doesn’t it, cuz?”

“I thought we had them,” Frank said. “I really did.”

A sensation that was entirely new to him, a feeling of utter and overwhelming hopelessness, swept through him like a cold bitter wind. They had been so completely absorbed in the project for so long, convinced that it would bring them to their goal. They had given it their best shot: all that ingenuity, all that sweat, all that bravery. Rasheed walking right into the lion’s den and sticking the bomb to the wall. And for what? For what? There had been one little fact they didn’t know; and because of it they hadn’t accomplished a damn thing.

It was maddening. Frank wanted to yell and kick and break things. But that wouldn’t make anything any better. He drew a deep breath, another, another. It didn’t help. He might just as well have been breathing ashes.

“Goddamn it, Andy. You worked so hard.”

“We all did. The only trouble was that the theory behind what we were doing didn’t happen to be valid.—Look, kiddo, just get yourself back to the ranch, and we’ll try to figure out something else, okay? I’ve got other calls to make. See you in about an hour, Frank. Over and out.”

Over, yes. Out.

Try not to think about it, Frank told himself. It hurts too much to think. Pretend you’re Rasheed. Empty your mind of everything except the job of getting home.

That worked, for a while. Then it didn’t.

And then, about an hour later, he had something new to think about. He was far up the coast, just past Carpinteria, practically on the outskirts of Santa Barbara, when he saw strange streaks of light in the sky ahead of him, something that might have been a golden comet that exploded into a shower of green and purple sparkles. Fireworks? He heard muffled booming sounds. A moment later the dark slim shapes of three swiftly moving planes passed overhead, high up, heading south, back toward Los Angeles.

A bombing mission? All the way up here?

He told the audio to kick in.

“Andy? Andy?”

The crackle of static. Otherwise, silence.

“Andy?”

He kept trying. No reply from the ranch.

He was past Summerland now, past Montecito, moving on into downtown Santa Barbara. The familiar hills of home rose up back of the city. Another couple of miles up the freeway and he would be able to see the ranch itself, nestling high on its mountain among the folded canyons that sheltered it.

And now Frank saw it. Or the place where he knew it to be. Smoke was rising from it, not a gigantic black pillar like the one he had seen when leaving Los Angeles, but only a small spiraling trail, wisping out at its upper end and losing itself in the darkening late-afternoon sky.

Stunned, he traversed the city and made his way up the mountain road, keeping his eyes on the smoke and trying to make himself believe that it was coming from some other hilltop. The road twisted about so much as it ascended that perspectives were tricky, and for a time Frank actually did believe that the fire was on another hill entirely, but then he was on the final stretch, where the road hooked around and leveled out on the approach to the ranch gate, and there could be no doubt of it. The ranch had been bombed. All these years it had been sacrosanct, as though exempt by some special sanction from the direct touch of the conquerors. But that exemption had ended now.

He gave the signal that would open the gate, and the bars went sliding back.

As he drove in, down the little road, Frank could see that the main house was on fire. Flames were dancing across its rear facade. The whole front of the building looked to be gone, and the tiled roof over the middle section had fallen in. There was a shallow crater behind the house, where the path to the communications center had been. The communications center itself was still standing, but it had taken some damage, and appeared to have been knocked off its foundation. Most of the other structures, the minor outbuildings, looked more or less intact. Little fires were burning here and there in the trees behind them.

Through the haze and smoke Frank saw a small figure wandering about outside, moving as though in a daze. Cindy. Ancient, tottering little Cindy. Her face was smudged and blackened. He got out of the car and ran toward her, and embraced her. It was like clutching a bundle of sticks.

“Frank,” she said. “Oh, look at everything, Frank! Look at it!”

“I saw the planes leaving. Three of them, I saw.”