The Alien Years (36 page)

Time for Jill to find someone, yes. Ted Quarles had been asking about her just the other day, at the last meeting of the Resistance committee. Of course that was a little odd, Ted being at least twenty years her senior, maybe more. And Jill had never given him so much as a glance. But these were odd times.

The first person Ron encountered within the house was his older daughter, Leslyn. “Do you know where Grandpa is?” he asked her. “He’s not on the porch.”

“Mommy’s with him. In his room.”

“Is something wrong?”

But the little girl had already gone skipping away. Ron wasted no time calling her back. Hurrying through the maze of slate-floored corridors, he made his way to his father’s bedroom, at the back of the house with a grand view of the mountain wall above the ranch, and found him sitting up in bed, wearing his pajamas and bathrobe and a red muffler about his throat. He seemed pallid and weary and very old. Peggy was with him.

“What’s going on?” he asked her.

“He was feeling chilly, that’s all. I brought him inside.”

“Chilly? It’s a bright sunny morning out there! Practically like summer.”

“Not for me,” the Colonel said, smiling faintly. “For me it’s starting to be very, very late in autumn, Ronnie, going on winter very fast. But your lovely lady is taking good care of me. Giving me my medicine, and all.” He patted Peggy affectionately on the back of one hand. “I don’t know what I’d do without her. What I would have done without her, these many years.”

“Mike and Charlie have been all the way up to Monterey and back,” Peggy said, looking up from the bedside at Ron. “They found a whole new supply of the Colonel’s pills in a store up there. They brought a girl back with them, too, a very nice one. Eloise, her name is. You’ll be impressed.”

Ron blinked a couple of times. “A girl? What are they going to do, share her? Even if they
are
twins, I don’t see how they can seriously propose—”

Laughing, the Colonel said, “You’ve become stuffier than Anse, do you know that, Ronnie?
‘
I don’t see how they can seriously propose—
’ My God, boy, they aren’t
marrying
her! She’s just a houseguest! You sound like you’re fifty years old.”

“I
am
fifty,” Ron said. “Will be in another couple of months, anyway.” He paced restively around the room, clutching the Net message from London, wondering if he ought to bother his obviously ailing father with this startling news now. He decided after a moment that he should; that the Colonel would not have had it any other way.

And in any case the Colonel had already guessed.

“Is there news?” he asked, with a glance at the crumpled grayish sheet in Ron’s hand.

“Yes. Pretty amazing stuff, as a matter of fact. An Entity has been assassinated in the English town of Salisbury. Paul just picked up the story on a Net link.”

The Colonel, nestling back against his mound of pillows and giving Ron a slow, steady, unflustered look, said quietly, as though Ron had announced that word had just arrived via the Net of the second coming of Christ, “Just how reliable is this report, boy?”

“Very. Paid says, unimpeachable authority, London Resistance network, Martin Bardett himself.”

“An Entity. Killed.” The Colonel considered that. “How?”

“A single shot on a lonely road, late at night. Hidden sniper, using some sort of homemade grenade-firing rifle.”

“The very plan that Faulkenburg and Cantelli and some of the others were so hot to put into being two or three years ago, and which we ultimately voted down because it was impossible to kill Entities that way anyhow, because of the telepathic screening field. Now someone has gone and done it, you tell me? How? How? We all agreed it couldn’t be done.”

“Well,” Ron said, “somebody found a way, somehow.”

The Colonel considered that for a time, too. He sat back, there among his framed diplomas and military memorabilia and innumerable photographs of his dead wife and his dead brothers and his sons and daughters and growing tribe of grandchildren, and he seemed to vanish into the labyrinth of his own thoughts and lose his way in there.

Then he said, “There’s really only one way that would work, isn’t there? Getting around the telepathy, I mean. The assassin would have to be like some sort of machine, practically—somebody with no more emotion and feeling than an android. Someone completely stolid and unexcitable. Someone who could wait there by the roadside holding that rifle and never for a moment let his mind dwell on the notion that he was going to strike a great blow for the liberation of mankind, or for that matter that he was about to murder an intelligent creature. Or any other sort of thought that might possibly attract the attention of the Entity who was going to be his victim.”

“A total moron,” Ronnie suggested. “Or an utter sociopath.”

“Well, yes. That might work, if you could teach a moron to use a rifle, or if you found a sociopath who didn’t get some kind of sick kick out of the anticipation of firing that shot. But there are other possibilities, you know.”

“Such as?”

“In Vietnam,” said the Colonel, “we ran across them all the time: absolutely impassive people who did the god- damnedest bloody things without batting an eye. An old woman who looked like your grandmother’s grandmother who would come up to you and placidly toss a bomb in your car. Or a sweet little six-year-old boy putting a knife into you in the marketplace. People who would kill or maim or mutilate you without pausing to think about what they were about to do and without feeling a gnat’s worth of animosity for you as they did it. Or remorse afterward. Half the time they blew themselves up right along with you, and the likelihood that that was going to happen didn’t faze them either. Perhaps it never even entered their minds. They just went ahead and did what they’d been told to do. An Entity mind- field might not be any defense against somebody like that.”

“It’s hard for me to imagine a mentality like that.”

“Not for me,” the Colonel said. “I saw just that kind of mentality in action at very close range indeed. Then I spent much of my academic career studying it. I even taught about it, remember? Way back in the Pleistocene? Professor of non-western psychology.”

He shook his head. “So they’ve actually killed one. Well, well, well. —What about reprisals, now?”

“They’ve cleaned out half a dozen towns in the vicinity, London says.”

“Cleaned them out? What does that mean?”

“Rounded up every person. Taken them away somewhere.”

“And killed them?”

“Not clear,” Ronnie said. “I doubt that anything nice is going to happen to them, though.”

The Colonel nodded. “That’s it, then? Purely local reprisal? No worldwide plagues, no major power shutoffs?”

“So far, no.”

“So far,” said the Colonel. “We can only pray.”

Ronnie approached his father’s bedside. “Well, at any rate, that’s the news. I thought you’d like to know, and now you do. Now you tell me: how are you feeling?”

“Old. Tired.”

“That’s all? Nothing in particular hurting you?”

“Old and tired, that’s all. So far. Of course, the Entities haven’t let any plagues loose yet, either, so far.”

He and Peggy went into the hallway. “Do you think he’s dying?” he asked her.

“He’s been dying for a long time, very very slowly. But I think he’s still got some distance to go. He’s tougher than you think he is, Ron.”

“Maybe so. But I hate to watch him crumbling like this. You have no idea what he was like when we were young, Peg. The way he stood, the way he walked, the way he held himself. Such an amazing man, absolutely fearless, absolutely honorable, always strong when you needed him to be strong. And always
right.
That was the astounding thing. I’d argue with him about something I had done, you know, trying to justify myself and feeling that I had made out a good case for myself, and he’d say three or four quiet words and I’d know that I had no case at all. Not that I would admit it, not then. —Christ, I’ll hate to lose him, Peggy!”

“He’s not going to die yet, Ron. I know that.”

“Who
isn’t going to die?” said Anse, lumbering up out of one of the side corridors. He came to a halt alongside them, breathing hard, leaning on his cane. There was the faint sweet odor of whiskey about him, even now, well before noon. His bad leg had grown much more troublesome lately. “Him, you mean?” Anse asked, nodding toward the closed door of the Colonel’s bedroom.

“Who else?”

“He’ll live to be a hundred,” Anse said. “I’ll go before he does. Honestly, Ron.”

He probably would, Ron thought. Anse was fifty-six and appeared to be at least ten years older. His face was gray and bloated, his no longer intense eyes were lost in deep shadows, his shoulders now were rounded and slumped. All that was new. He didn’t seem as tall as he once had been. And he had lost some weight. Anse had always been a fine, sturdy man, not at all beefy—Ron was the beefy brother—but with plenty of muscle and flesh on him. Now he was visibly shrinking, sagging, diminishing. Some of it was the booze, Ron knew. Some of it was simply age. And some of it was, no doubt, that mysterious dark cloud of disappointment and discontent that had surrounded Anse for so long. The big brother who somehow had not gone on to become head of the family.

“Come off it, Anse,” Ron said, with as much sincerity as he could muster. “There’s nothing wrong with you that a new left leg wouldn’t fix.”

“Which I could probably have gotten,” Anse said, “but for the fucking Entities. —Hey, Paid says a story’s come in that they’ve actually succeeded in killing one, over in England. What are the chances that it’s true?”

“No reason to think it isn’t.”

“Is this the beginning, then? The counterattack?”

“I doubt that very much,” said Ron. “We don’t have a lot of details about how they managed it. But Dad’s got a theory that it would take a very special kind of assassin to bring it off—somebody with essentially no emotions at all, somebody who’s practically an android. It would be hard to put together a whole army of people like that.”

“We could train them.”

“We could, yes,” Ron said. “It would take quite a bit of time. Let me give it some thought, okay?”

“Was he happy about the killing?”

“He wondered about the reprisals, mostly. But yes, yes, he was happy about it. I suppose. He didn’t come right out and say that he was.”

“He wants them eradicated from the Earth once we’re properly ready to do the job,” said Anse. “That’s always been his goal underneath it all, even when they were saying that he had turned pacifist, even when they were hinting he had gone soft in the head. You know that. And now it’s the one thing keeping him alive—the hope that he’ll stick around long enough to see them completely wiped out.”

“Well, he isn’t going to. Nor you, nor me. But we can always hope. And you know, bro, he’s never been anything
but
a pacifist. He hates war. Always has. And his idea of preventing war is to constantly be prepared to fight one. —Ah, he’s some guy, isn’t he? They broke the mold when they made him, let me tell you. I hate to see him fading away like this. I hate it more than I can say.”

It was an oddly valedictory conversation, Ron thought. They were telling each other things, now, that both of them had known since they were children. But it was as though they needed to get these things said one more time before it was too late to say them at all.

Ron suspected he knew what was going to be said next—he could already see the moist gleam of emotion coming into Anse’s eyes, could already hear the heavy throbbing chords of the symphonic accompaniment—and, sure enough, out the words came, a moment later:

“What really gets to me is when you talk about how much you care for him, bro. You know, there were all those years when you and he weren’t speaking to each other, and I thought you really despised him. But I was wrong about that, wasn’t I?”
Now Anse will take my hand fervently between both of his. Yes, like that.
“One more thing, bro. I want to tell you, if I haven’t already done so, how glad I am that in the course of time you did shape up the way that you have, how proud I am that you could be capable of changing so much, to make your peace with our dad and come here and be so much of a comfort to him. You worked out all right, in the long run. I confess I was surprised.”

“Thank you, I guess.”

“Especially when I—didn’t—work out so well.”

“That was a surprise too,” Ron said, having quickly decided that there was no point in offering any contradiction.

“Well, it shouldn’t have been,” said Anse, in a tone that was almost without expression. “It just wasn’t in me to do any better. It really wasn’t. No matter what he expected of me. I tried, but—well, you know how it’s been with me, bro—”

“Of course I know,” said Ron vaguely, and returned the squeeze; and Anse gave him a blurrily affectionate look and went limping
off
toward the front of the house.

“That was very touching,” Peggy said. “He loves you very much.”

“I suppose he does. He’s drunk, Peg.”

“Even so. He meant what he said.”

Ron glowered at her. “Yes. Yes. But I loathe it when people tell me how much I’ve changed, how glad they are that I’m not the mean selfish son of a bitch I used to be. I loathe it. I
haven’t
changed. You know what I mean? I’m simply doing things in this region of my life that I hadn’t felt like making time for before. Like moving to the ranch. Like marrying a woman like you, like settling down and raising a family. Like agreeing with my father instead of automatically opposing him all the time. Like assuming certain responsibilities that extend beyond my own skin. But I’m still living within that skin, Peg. My behavior may have changed, but I haven’t. I’ve always made the sort of choices that make sense to me—they’re just different sorts of choices now, that’s all. And it makes me mad as hell when people, especially my own brother, patronize me by telling me that it’s wonderful that I’m not as shitty as I once was. Do you follow what I’m saying?”