Robert Silverberg - The Alien Years

“What’s the range of this mind-field?”

“Nobody knows. Wide enough to pick up the mental broadcasts of any sniper who might get within shooting range, evidently.”

“Mental telepathy too,” the Colonel said. He closed his eyes for a moment, shook his head slowly. “They must have animals on their planet that are more evolved than we are. Pets, even.—So Doug dumped all this out into the Committee meeting, and that killed the attrition plan right then and there?”

“It was tabled. Between the mind-field thing and the whole reprisal issue, we decided that there was no sense in attempting anything against them right now. Everybody but Faulkenburg agreed, and sooner or later he came around too. Before we can launch any sort of hostile action, we need to gather more information, a lot more, about how their minds work. At present we know practically nothing. If there was some way we could neutralize that mind-field, for example—”

“Right,” the Colonel said. He chuckled. His own mind was as clear now as it had been in days. “The Santa Claus approach to coping with the problem, eh? Maybe he’ll bring us a mind-field neutral-izer next Christmas. Or maybe he won’t. At any rate, I’m glad the vote went the way it did. I was worried, for a while. Everybody seemed in such a hurry to kill the Entities off, all of a sudden, and not a reason in the world for a rational person to think that it could be done. I thought we were done for. I thought you were all going to shoot us clear over the brink.”

Late that night, as Ronnie was moving through the back wing of the building turning off the lights, he caught sight of Anse sitting by himself in one of the small rooms off the library. There was a bottle in front of him on a little table. There usually was a bottle somewhere close by Anse, these days. A damned shame, Ronnie thought, the way Anse had gone back on the stuff after breaking his leg. Anse had worked so hard for so many years to keep his boozing under control. And now. Look at him, Ronnie thought sadly. Look at him.

“Little nightcap, bro?” Anse called.

“Sure,” Ronnie said. Why the hell not?

“What are we drinking?”

“Grappa.”

“Grappa,” Ronnie repeated, glancing away and wincing. “Well, sure, Anse. Sure.” It was a sort of Italian brandy, very harsh, not much to his taste, really. They had a case of it, one of the stranger things in the weird loot they had brought back from that deserted warehouse downtown. Anse would drink anything, though.

Anse poured. “Say when, bro.”

“When,” said Ronnie, quickly.

Solemnly he clinked glasses with his brother and took a shallow sip. If only to be sociable. He didn’t like to see Anse drinking alone. It was ironic, he thought, how the Colonel had always looked upon Anse as a pillar of stability and dependability and virtue, and on him as some kind of wild, disreputable high-living heathen, when in fact Anse was a deeply closeted drunk who had spent his whole adult life struggling desperately against his craving for the sauce and he, for all his high-life tastes and fast-lane companions, had never had the slightest problem with it.

Anse drained his glass and set it down. He picked up the half-empty bottle and stared at it a long while, as though the deepest secrets of the universe were inscribed on its label. When the silence started to drag a little Ronnie said, “Everything all right, bro?”

“Fine. Fine.”

“But it isn’t, is it?”

“What do you think?”

“I don’t think anything,” Ronnie said. “It’s been a long day. I don’t like to think after ten in the evening. Sometimes I call it quits even earlier than that.—What’s eating you now, Anse? The old man? He’ll be okay. Not what he once was, but which one of us is? We aren’t immortal, you know. But he brightened up plenty when I told him how the vote had turned out today.”

“Have some more?”

“Thanks, no. I’m still working on this.”

“Mind if I?”

Ronnie shrugged. Anse filled his glass practically to the brim.

“This fucking meeting,” Anse said in a low, somber tone, when he had put another goodly slug of the grappa away. “This whole fucking Resistance, Ronnie.”

“What about it?”

“What a sham! What a miserable idiotic sham! We hold these meetings, and all we’re doing is making empty gestures. Spinning our wheels, don’t you see? Appointing committees, making studies, cooking up grand plans, sending e-mail about those grand plans to people just as helpless as we are all around the world. That’s a Resistance? Are the Entities giving ground before our valiant onslaughts? Is the liberation of Earth practically within our grasp, do you think? Are we doing the slightest fucking thing, really, to achieve it?—There isn’t any Resistance, not really. We’re just pretending that there is.”

“As long as we go on pretending,” Ronnie said, “we keep the idea of being free alive. You’ve heard the Colonel say that a million times. Once we give up even the pretense, we’re slaves forever.”

“You really believe that shit, bro?”

Some grappa was needed before replying to that one. Ronnie tried to gulp the stuff without tasting it. “Yes,” he said, fixing his gaze squarely on Anse’s squinting bloodshot eyes. “Yes, bro, I really do. I don’t think it’s shit at all.”

Anse laughed. “You sound so amazingly sincere.”

“I am sincere, Anse.”

“Right. Right. You say that very sincerely, too.—You’re still a con man at heart, aren’t you, bro? Always were, always will be. And very good at it.”

“Watch it, Anse.”

“Am I saying anything other than the truth, bro? You can tell me that you believe the old man’s bullshit, sure, but don’t ask me to start believing yours, not this late in the game.—Here. Here. Have some more grappa. Do you some good. Oil up your sincerity glands a little more for the next sucker, right?”

He extended the bottle toward Ronnie, who peered at it for perhaps ten seconds while trying to gain control over the anger that was surging upward in him, anger at Anse’s drunken mocking accusations and the partial truths that lay not very far beneath their surface, at the Colonel’s deterioration, at his own growing sense of mortality as the years went along, at the continued presence of the Entities in the world. At everything. Then, as Anse pushed the grappa bottle even closer, thrusting it practically into his face, Ronnie slapped at it with a hard backhand blow, knocking it out of Anse’s hand. The bottle struck Anse across the lip and chin and went bouncing to the floor. A stream of grappa came spilling forth. Anse grunted in fury and burst from his chair, clawing at Ronnie with one hand and trying to swing with the other.

Ronnie pressed one hand against the middle of Anse’s chest to hold him at bay and tried to push him back into his chair. Anse, eyes bright now with rage, growled and swung again, with the same futility as before. Ronnie shoved hard. Anse went toppling backward and sat down heavily, just as Peggy came scurrying into the room.

“Hey! Hey, guys! What is this?”

Ronnie looked shamefacedly toward his wife. He could feel his. face growing hot with embarrassment. All his anger was gone, now. “We were discussing today’s meeting, is all.”

“I’ll bet you were.” She scooped the fallen grappa bottle up, sniffed at it disgustedly, tossed it into a wastebasket. She gave him a withering look. “Yes, you ought to blush, Ron. Like little boys, the two of you. Little boys who’ve found their way into their father’s liquor closet.”

“It’s a little more complicated than that, Peg.”

“Sure it is. Sure.” Then she turned away from him, toward Anse, who sat now with his head bowed, hands covering his face. “Hey,” she said. “What’s this, Anse?”