The Alien Years Read Online Free PDF Page A

she had looked toward the stars one night when they were camping in the high country of Kings Canyon and talked of the beings that must live up there. “I’d love to see them,” she said. “I’d love to get to know them and find out what their heads are like.”
    She believed in them, all right.
    She knew, knew, that they would be coming one day.
    They would come, not from Mars—any kid could tell you that, there were no living beings on Mars—but from a planet called HESTEGHON. That was how she always wrote it, in capital letters, in the little poetic fragments he sometimes found around the house. Even when she spoke the name aloud that was how it seemed to come out, with extra-special emphasis. HESTEGHON was on a different vibratory plane from Earth, and the people of HESTEGHON were intellectually and morally superior beings, and one day they would materialize right out of the blue in our midst to set everything to rights on our poor sorry world.
    Carmichael had never asked her whether HESTEGHON was her own invention, or something that she had heard about from a West Hollywood guru or read about in one of the cheaply printed books of spiritual teachings that she liked to buy. He preferred not to get into any kind of discussion with her about it.
    And yet he had never thought she was insane. Los Angeles was full of nutcases who wanted to ride in flying saucers, or claimed they already had, but it didn’t sound nutty to Carmichael when Cindy talked that way. She had the innate Angeleno love of the exotic and the bizarre, yes, but he felt certain that her soul had never been touched by the crazy corruption here, that she was untainted by the prevailing craving for the weird and irrational that made him loathe the place so much. If she turned her imagination toward the stars, it was out of wonder, not out of madness: it was simply part of her nature, that curiosity, that hunger for what lay outside her experience, to embrace the unknowable.
    Carmichael had had no more belief in E-Ts than he did in the tooth fairy, but for her sake he had told her that he hoped she’d get her wish. And now the UFO people were really here. He could imagine her, eyes shining, standing at the edge of that cordon staring lovingly at the spaceship.
    He almost hoped she was. It was a pity he couldn’t be with her now, feeling all that excitement surging through her, the joy, the wonder, the magic.
    But he had work to do. Swinging the DC-3 back around toward the west, he swooped down as close as he dared to the edge of the fire and hit the release button on his dump lines. Behind him, a great crimson cloud spread out: a slurry of ammonium sulphate and water, thick as paint, with a red dye mixed into it so they could tell which areas had been sprayed. The retardant clung in globs to anything, and would keep it damp for hours.
    Emptying his four 5oo-gallon tanks quickly, he headed back to Van Nuys to reload. His eyes were throbbing with fatigue and the bitter stink of the wet charred earth below was filtering through every plate of the old plane. It was not quite noon. He had been up all night.
     
    The Colonel stood holding the phone while it rang and rang and rang, but there was no answer at his brother’s house, and no way to leave a message, either. A backup number came up on the phone’s little screen: Cindy’s jewelry studio. What the hell, the Colonel thought. He was committed to this thing now; he would keep on going. He hit the key for the studio. But no one answered there either.
    A second backup number appeared. This one was the gallery in Santa Monica where she had her retail shop. Unhesitatingly, now, the Colonel hit that one. A clerk answered, a boy who by the sound of his high scratchy voice was probably about sixteen, and the Colonel asked for Mrs. Carmichael. Hasn’t been in yet today, the clerk said. Should have been in by now, but somehow she wasn’t. The lad didn’t sound very concerned. He made it seem as if he was