The Alien Years Read Online Free Page B

either, he decided. No doubt a panicky evacuation was in progress, hundreds of thousands of people heading for the freeways, racing off in all directions. A lot of them would come this way, the Colonel supposed, up the Pacific Coast Highway or the Ventura Freeway. Unless they were cut off from Santa Barbara County by a stray arm of the fire and were forced to go the other way, into the chaotic maelstrom of Los Angeles proper. God pity them if that was so. He could imagine what it must be like in the central city now, what with so much craziness going on at the edges of the basin.
    He found himself tapping the keys for Mike’s number, all the same. He simply had to call, whether or not anybody was home. Or even if it was Cindy who answered. He had to.
     
    Where the neat rows and circles of suburban streets ended there was a great open stretch of grassy land, parched by the long dry summer to the color of a lion’s hide, and beyond that were the mountains, and between the grassland and the mountains lay the fire, an enormous lateral red crest topped by a plume of foul black smoke. It seemed already to cover hundreds of acres, maybe thousands. A hundred acres of burning brush, Carmichael had heard once, creates as much heat energy as the original atomic bomb that they had dropped on Hiroshima.
    Through the crackle of radio static came the voice of the line boss, directing operations from a bubble-domed helicopter hovering at about four o’clock:
    “DC-3, who are you?”
    “Carmichael.”
    “We’re trying to contain it on three sides, Carmichael. You work on the east, Limekiln Canyon, down the flank of Porter Ranch Park. Got it?”
    “Got it,” Carmichael said.
    He flew low, less than a thousand feet. That gave him a good view of all the action: sawyers in hard hats and orange shirts cutting burning trees to make them fall toward the fire, bulldozer crews clearing brush ahead of the blaze, shovelers carving firebreaks, helicopters pumping water into isolated outbursts of flame.
    He climbed five hundred feet to avoid a single-engine observer plane, then went up five hundred more to avoid the smoke and air turbulence of the fire itself. From that altitude he had a clear picture of it, running like a bloody gash from west to east, wider at its western end.
    Just east of the fire’s far tip he saw a circular zone of grassland perhaps a hundred acres in diameter that had already burned out, and precisely at the center of that zone stood a massive gray something that looked vaguely like an aluminum silo, the size of a ten-story building, surrounded at a considerable distance by a cordon of military vehicles.
    Carmichael felt a wave of dizziness go rocking through his mind.
    That thing, he realized, had to be the E-T spaceship.
    It had come out of the west in the night, they said, floating over the ocean like a tremendous meteor over Oxnard and Camarillo, sliding toward the western end of the San Fernando Valley, kissing the grass with its searing exhaust and leaving a trail of flame behind it. And then it had gently set itself down over there and extinguished its own brush fire in a neat little circle about itself, not caring at all about the blaze it had kindled farther back, and God knows what kind of creatures had come forth from it to inspect Los Angeles.
    It figured, didn’t it, that when the UFOs finally did make a landing out in the open, it would be in L.A.? Probably they had chosen to land there because they had seen the place so often on television—didn’t all the stories say that UFO people always monitored our TV transmissions? So they saw L.A. on every other show and they probably figured it was the capital of the world, the perfect place for the first landing. But why, Carmichael wondered, had the bastards needed to pick the height of the fire season to put their ships down here?
    He thought of Cindy again, how fascinated she was by all this UFO and E-T stuff, those books she read, the ideas she had, the way