The Alien Years Read Free Page A

been expecting Wells to supply something more satisfying than having the invincible Martian conquerors succumb to unfamiliar Earthly disease bacteria even as the armies of Earth lay flattened and helpless before their advance. That was ingenious of Wells, but it wasn’t the right kind of ingenuity, because it left no scope for human mental ability or courage; it was simply a case of one external event canceling out another, like a tremendous downpour suddenly showing up to extinguish a raging forest fire while all the firefighters stood around sucking their thumbs.
    Well, here, strange to say, was Wells’s book come to life. The Martians actually had landed, real ones, though surely not from Mars. Descending out of nowhere—what had happened to our orbital early warning systems, he wondered, the space-based telescopes that were supposed to be scanning for incoming asteroids and other little cosmic surprises?—and, if what he was seeing on the teevee was any fair sample, they were already strutting around very much like conquerors. Willy-nilly, the world seemed to be at war, and with creatures of a superior technology, evidently, since they had managed to get here from some other star and that was something we could not have achieved.
    It remained to be seen, of course, what these invaders wanted. Maybe this wasn’t even an invasion, but just an embassy that had arrived in a singularly clumsy way. But if it was war, the Colonel thought, and these creatures had weapons and abilities beyond our fathoming, then we were about to get our chance to deal squarely with the problem that H. G. Wells a hundred years ago had preferred to finesse with an expedient nick-of-time gimmick.
    Already the Colonel’s mind was beginning to tick through a litany of options, wondering about which people he needed to call in Washington, wondering whether any of them would call him. If indeed there was going to be war against these aliens, and he was intuitively certain that there would be, he intended to play a part in it.
    The Colonel had no love for war and very little eagerness to become involved in it, and not just because he had been retired from the armed services for close to a dozen years. He had never glamorized war. War was a nasty, stupid, ugly business, usually signifying nothing more than the failure of rational policy. His father, Anson II, the Old Colonel, had fought—and fought plenty, and had the scars to show for it—in the Second World War, and nevertheless had raised his three sons to be soldiers. The Old Colonel had liked to say, “People like us go into the military in order to see to it that nobody will ever have to fight again.” His eldest son Anson had never ceased to believe that.
    Sometimes, though, you simply had war thrust upon you without any choice, and then it was necessary to fight or be obliterated, and this looked like one of those times. In that case, retired though he was, he might have something to offer. The psychology of alien cultures, after all, had been his big specialty from his Vietnam days onward, although he had never imagined having to deal with a culture as alien as this. But still, there were certain general principles that probably would apply, even in this case—
    Abruptly the idiot repetitiousness of the stuff they were showing on the screen began to irritate and anger him. He went back outside.
     
    Wild updrafts from the blaze buffeted Carmichael’s plane as he took it aloft. That gave him a few bad moments. But he moved easily and automatically to gain control, pulling the moves out of the underground territories of his nervous system. It was essential, he believed, to have the moves in your fingers, your shoulders, your thighs, rather than in the conscious realms of your brain. Consciousness could get you a long way, but ultimately you had to work out of the underground territories or you were dead.
    This was nothing, after all, compared with the stuff he had had to deal with in