Robert Silverberg - The Alien Years

“He died battling a fire that the Entities happened to start, by accident, the day they first landed,” the Colonel said. “That’s not quite the same thing.” But he knew it was hopeless. The legends were already beginning to entrench themselves; in twenty or thirty years no one would know fact from fantasy. Well, in twenty years he wouldn’t give a damn.

“Come on,” Anse said, offering the Colonel a hand. “Let’s go inside, Dad.”

Rising from his chair with all the swiftness he could summon, the Colonel shook the hand away. “I can manage,” he said testily, knowing exactly how testy he sounded, knowing too that he sounded that way too much of the time now. It wasn’t anything that he could help. He was seventy-four, and usually felt considerably older than that these days. He hadn’t expected that. He had always felt younger than his years. But there were no medicines any more that could turn back the clock for you when you began to get old, as there had been fifteen or twenty years ago, and doctoring was practiced now, mostly, by people without training who looked things up in whatever medical books they might have on hand and hoped for the best.

So seventy-four was once again a ripe old age, beginning to approach the limit.

They walked slowly into the house, the stiff-jointed old man and the limping younger one. A cloudy aura of alcohol fumes surrounded Anse like a helmet.

“Leg bothering you a lot?” the Colonel asked.

“Comes and goes. Some days worse than others. This is one of the bad ones.”

“And a little booze helps, does it? But there isn’t much of the old stock left, I’d imagine.”

“Enough for a few more years,” Anse said. He and Ronnie had, the Colonel knew, descended into deserted Santa Barbara one morning after the Great Plague had at last abated—a ghost town, was Santa Barbara now, inhabited only by a few spectral squatters—and had cleaned out most of the contents of an abandoned liquor warehouse they had found there. “After that, if I live that long, I’ll rig up a still, I guess. That’s not a lost art yet.”

“You know, I wish you’d take it easier on the drinking, Son.”

Anse hesitated for just a beat before replying, and the Colonel knew that he was fighting off anger. Anger rose all too quickly in Anse these days, but he seemed better at controlling it than he once had been.

“I wish a lot of things were different from what they are, but they aren’t going to be,” Anse said tightly. “We do what we can to get through the day.—Mind the door, Dad. Here you go. Here.”

The members of the Resistance Committee—they had changed the name of it a few years back; Army of Liberation had begun to seem much too grandiose—had gathered in the dining room. They stood at once as the Colonel entered. A tribute to the valiant old chairman, yes. However pathetic the valiant old chairman had become, however superannuated. Anse did most of the work these days, Anse and Ronnie. But Anson Senior, the Colonel, was still chairman, at least in name. He chose to accept the accolade at face value, acknowledging it with a cool smile, stiff little nods to each of them. “Gentlemen,” he said. “Please—sit, if you will—” He stood. He could still do that much. Square-shouldered, straight-backed as ever. Standing here before them, he felt much less the sleepy oldster nodding off on the porch, much more the keen-minded military strategist of decades past, the vigorous and incisive planner, the shrewd leader of men, the enemy of self-deception and failure of inner discipline and all the other kinds of insidious moral sloppiness.

Looking toward Anse, the Colonel said, “Is everybody here?”

“All but Jackman, who sends word that he couldn’t swing an exit permit from L.A. because of a sudden labor-requisition reassignment, and Quarles, whose sister seems to have started keeping company with a quisling and who therefore doesn’t think it’s a smart idea for him to come up here for the meeting today.”

“Is the sister aware of Quarles’s Resistance activities?”

“Not clear,” Anse said. “Maybe he needs to check that out before he feels it’s safe to begin attending again.”

“At any rate, we have a quorum,” the Colonel said, taking the vacant seat beside Anse.

There were ten other committee members present, all of them men. Two were his sons Anse and Ronnie, one his son-in-law Doug Gannett, one his nephew Paul: with the Carmichael ranch standing high and safe above everything, all alone on its mountainside, untouched by the horrors of the plague year and largely unaffected by the transformations that had overtaken the world’s shrunken population in the decade since, the local Resistance Committee had become virtually a Carmichael family enterprise.

Of course there were other Resistance Committees elsewhere, in California and beyond it, and Liberation Armies, and Undergrounds, and other such things. But with communications even within what once had been the United States so chaotic and unpredictable, it was hard to keep in touch with these small, elusive groups in any consistent way, and easy to develop the illusion that you and these few men that were here with you were just about the only people on Earth who still maintained the fiction that the Entities would someday be driven from the world.

The meeting now began. Meetings of this group followed a rigid format, as much of a ritual as a solemn high mass.

An invocation of the Deity, first. Somehow that had crept into the order of events three or four years back, and no one seemed willing to question its presence. Jack Hastings was always the man who intoned the prayer: a former business associate of Ronnie’s from San Diego, who had had some kind of religious conversion not long after the Conquest, and was, so it certainly seemed, passionately sincere about his beliefs.

Hastings rose now. Touched his fingertips together, solemnly inclined his head.

“Our Father, who looketh down from heaven upon our unhappy world, we beseech You to lend Your might to our cause, and to help us sweep from this Your world the creatures who have dispossessed us of it.”

The words were always the same, blandly acceptable to all, no particular sectarian tinge, though Ronnie had privately given the Colonel to understand that Hastings’s own religion was some kind of very strange neo-apocalyptic Christian sect, speaking in tongues, handling of serpents, things like that.

“Amen,” said Ronnie loudly, and Sam Bacon half a second later, and then all the others, the Colonel included. The Colonel had never been much for any sort of organized religious activity, not even in Vietnam where the body-bags were brought in daily; but he was no atheist, either, far from it, and aside from all that he understood the value of formal observance in maintaining the structures of life in a time of stress.

After the prayer came the Progress Report, usually given by Dan Cantelli or Andy Jackman, and more appropriately termed the No Progress Report. This was an account of such success, or lack of it, that had been attained since the last meeting, especially in the way of penetrating Entity security codes and developing information that might be of value in some eventual attempt at launching an attack against the conquerors.

In Jackman’s absence, Cantelli delivered the Progress Report today. He was a short, round, indestructible-looking man of about fifty, who had been an olive grower at the upper end of the Santa Ynez Valley before the Conquest, and still was. His entire family, parents and wife and five or six children, had perished in the Great Plague; but he had married again, a Mexican girl from Lompoc, and had four more children now.

This month’s Progress was, as usual, mainly No Progress. “There was, as you know, a project under way in Seattle last month aimed at finding some means of accessing high-security internal Entity messages and diverting them to Resistance computer centers. I’m sorry to say that that project has ended in complete failure, thanks to the activities of a couple of treacherous borgmanns who wrote counterintrusion software for the Entities. I understand that the Seattle hackers were detected and, I’m afraid, eradicated.”