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doing the Colonel a favor by answering the telephone at all. Nobody under twenty-five had any respect for telephones. They were all getting biochips implanted, the Colonel had heard. That was the hottest thing now, passing data around with your forearm pressed against an X-plate. Or so his nephew Paul had said. Paul was twenty-seven, or so: young enough to know about these things. Telephones, Paul had said, were for dinosaurs.
    “I’m Mrs. Carmichael’s brother-in-law,” the Colonel said. It was a phrase he could not remember having used before. “Ask her to call me when she comes in, will you, please?” he told the boy, and hung up.
    Then he realized that a more detailed message might have been useful. He hit the redial key and when the boy came back on the line he said, “It’s Colonel Carmichael again, Mrs. Carmichael’s brother-in-law. I should have told you that I’m actually trying to find my brother, who’s been out of town all week. I thought perhaps Mrs. Carmichael might know when he’s due back.”
    “She said last night that he was supposed to be coming back today,” the boy said. “But like I told you, I haven’t spoken to her yet today. Is there some problem?”
    “I don’t know if there is or not. I’m up in Santa Barbara, and I was wondering whether—the fire, you know—their house—”
    “Oh. Right. The fire. It’s, like, out by Simi Valley somewhere, right?” The kid spoke as though that were in some other country. “The Carmichaels live, like, in L.A., you know, the hills just above Sunset. I wouldn’t worry about them if I were you. But I’ll have her phone you if she checks in with me. Does she have your implant access code?”
    “I just use the regular data web.” I’m a dinosaur, the Colonel thought. I come from a long line of them. “She knows the number. Tell her to call right away. Please.”
    As soon as he clipped the cell phone back in his waistband it made the little bleeping sound of an incoming call. He yanked it out again and flipped it open.
    “Yes?” he said, a little too eagerly.
    “It’s Anse, Dad.” His older son’s deep baritone. The Colonel had three children, Rosalie and the two boys. Anse—Anson Carmichael IV—was the good son, decent family man, sober, steady, predictable. The other one, Ronald, hadn’t worked out quite as expected. “Have you heard what’s going on?” Anse asked.
    “The fire? The critters from Mars? Yes. Rosalie called me about it about half an hour ago. I’ve been watching the teevee. I can see the smoke from out here on the porch.”
    “Dad, are you going to be all right?” There was an unmistakable undertone of tension in Anse’s voice. “The wind’s blowing east to west, straight toward you. They say the Santa Susana fire’s moving into Ventura County already.”
    “That’s a whole county away from me,” the Colonel said. “It would have to get to Camarillo and Ventura and a lot of other places first. Somehow I don’t think that’s going to happen. —How are things down your way, Anse?”
    “Here? We’re getting Santa Anas, sure, but the nearest fire’s up back of Anaheim. Not a chance it’ll move down toward us. Ronnie and Paul and Helena are okay too.” Mike Carmichael had never gone in for parenthood at all, but the Colonel’s baby brother Lee had managed to sire two kids in his short life. All of the Colonel’s immediate kin—his two sons and his daughter, and his niece and nephew Paul and Helena, who were in their late twenties now and married— lived in nice respectable suburban places along the lower coast, places like Costa Mesa and Huntington Beach and Newport Beach and La Jolla. Even Anse’s brother Ronald, who was not so nice and not so respectable, was down there. “It’s you I’m worried about, Dad.”
    “Don’t. Fire comes anywhere within thirty miles of here, I’ll get in the car and drive up to Monterey, San Francisco, Oregon, someplace like that. But it won’t happen. We