The head dispatcher was waiting for him again as he left his plane. “All right,” Carmichael said at once. “I give in. I’ll knock off for five or six hours and grab some sleep, and then you can call me back to—”
“No. That isn’t it.”
“That isn’t what?”
“What I came out here to tell you, Mike. They’ve released some of the hostages.”
“Cindy?”
“I think so. There’s an Air Force car here to take you to Sylmar. That’s where they’ve got the command center set up. They said to find you as soon as you came off your last dump mission and send you over there so you can talk with your wife.”
“So she’s free,” Carmichael said. “Oh, Jesus, she’s free!”
“You go on along, Mike. We’ll look after the fire without you for a while, okay?”
The Air Force car looked like a general’s limo, long and low and sleek, with a square-jawed driver in front and a couple of very tough-looking young officers to sit with him in back. They said hardly anything, and they looked as weary as Carmichael felt. “How’s my wife?” he asked, and one of them said, “We understand that she hasn’t been harmed.” The way he said it was stiff and strange. Carmichael shrugged. The kid has seen too many old movies, he told himself.
The whole city seemed to be on fire now. Within the air-conditioned limo there was only the faintest whiff of smoke, but the sky to the east was terrifying, with streaks of red bursting like meteors through the blackness. Carmichael asked the Air Force men about that, but all he got was a clipped, “It looks pretty bad, we understand.” Somewhere along the San Diego Freeway between Mission Hills and Sylmar, Carmichael fell asleep, and the next thing he knew they were waking him gently and leading him into a vast, bleak, hangarlike building near the reservoir. The place was a maze of cables and screens, with military personnel operating what looked like a thousand computers and ten thousand telephones. He let himself be shuffled along, moving mechanically and barely able to focus his eyes, to an inner office where a gray-haired colonel greeted him in his best this-is-the-tense-part-of-the-movie style and said, “This may be the most difficult job you’ve ever had to handle, Mr. Carmichael.”
Carmichael scowled. Everybody was Hollywood in this damned town, he thought.
“They told me the hostages were being freed,” he said. “Where’s my wife?”
The colonel pointed to a television screen. “We’re going to let you talk to her right now.”
“Are you saying I don’t get to see her?”
“Not immediately.”
“Why not? Is she all right?”
“As far as we know, yes.”
“You mean she hasn’t been released? They told me the hostages were being freed.”
“All but three have been let go,” said the colonel. “Two people, according to the aliens, were injured as they were captured, and are undergoing medical treatment aboard the ship. They’ll be released shortly. The third is your wife, Mr. Carmichael. She is unwilling to leave the ship.”
It was like hitting an air-pocket.
“Unwilling—?”
“She claims to have volunteered to make the journey to the home world of the aliens. She says she’s going to serve as our ambassador, our special emissary. Mr. Carmichael, does your wife has any history of mental imbalance?”
Glaring, Carmichael said, “She’s very sane. Believe me.”
“You are aware that she showed no display of fear when the aliens seized her in the shopping-center incident this morning?”
“I know, yes. That doesn’t mean she’s crazy. She’s unusual. She has unusual ideas. But she’s not crazy. Neither am I, incidentally.” He put his hands to his face for a moment and pressed his fingertips lightly against his eyes.
“All right,” he said. “Let me talk to her.”
“Do you think you can persuade her to leave that ship?”
“I’m sure as hell going to try.”
“You are not yourself sympathetic to what she’s doing, are you?” the colonel asked.
Carmichael looked up. “Yes, I am sympathetic. She’s an intelligent woman doing something that she thinks is important and doing it of her own free will. Why the hell shouldn’t I be sympathetic? But I’m going to try to talk her out of it, you bet. I love her. I want her. Somebody else can be the goddamned ambassador to Betelgeuse. Let me talk to her, will you?”
The colonel gestured, and the big television screen came to life. For a moment mysterious colored patterns flashed across it in a disturbing, random way; then Carmichael caught glimpses of shadowy catwalks, intricate metal strutworks crossing and recrossing at peculiar angles; and then for an instant one of the aliens appeared on the screen. Yellow platter-eyes looked complacently back at him. Carmichael felt altogether wide awake now.
The alien’s face vanished and Cindy came into view. The moment he saw her, Carmichael knew that he had lost her.
Her face was glowing. There was a calm joy in her eyes verging on ecstasy. He had seen her look something like that on many occasions, but this was different: This was beyond anything she had attained before. She had seen the beatific vision, this time.
“Cindy?”
“Hello, Mike.”
“Can you tell me what’s been happening in there, Cindy?”
“It’s incredible. The contact, the communication.”
Sure, he thought. If anyone could make contact with the space people it would be Cindy. She had a certain kind of magic about her: the gift of being able to open any door.
She said, “They speak mind to mind, you know, no barriers at all. They’ve come in peace, to get to know us, to join in harmony with us, to welcome us into the confederation of worlds.”
He moistened his lips. “What have they done to you, Cindy? Have they brainwashed you or something?”
“No! No, nothing like that! They haven’t done a thing to me, Mike! We’ve just talked.”
“Talked!”
“They’ve showed me how to touch my mind to theirs. That isn’t brainwashing. I’m still me. I, me, Cindy. I’m okay. Do I look as though I’m being harmed? They aren’t dangerous. Believe me.”
“They’ve set fire to half the city with their exhaust trails, you know.”
“That grieves them. It was an accident. They didn’t understand how dry the hills were. If they had some way of extinguishing the flames, they would, but the fires are too big even for them. They ask us to forgive them. They want everyone to know how sorry they are.” She paused a moment. Then she said, very gently, “Mike, will you come onboard? I want you to experience them as I’m experiencing them.”
“I can’t do that, Cindy.”
“Of course you can! Anyone can! You just open your mind, they touch you, and—”
“I know. I don’t want to. Come out of there and come home, Cindy. Please. Please. It’s been three days—four, now—I want to hug you, I want to hold you—”
“You can hold me as tight as you like. They’ll let you onboard. We can go to their world together. You know that I’m going to go with them to their world, don’t you?”
“You aren’t. Not really.”
She nodded gravely. She seemed terribly serious. “They’ll be leaving in a few weeks, as soon as they’ve had a chance to exchange gifts with Earth. I’ve seen images of their planet—like movies, only they do it with their minds—Mike, you can’t imagine how beautiful it is! How eager they are to have me come!”
Sweat rolled out of his hair into his eyes, making him blink, but he did not dare wipe it away, for fear she would think he was crying.
“I don’t want to go to their planet, Cindy. And I don’t want you to go either.”
She was silent for a time.
Then she smiled delicately and said, “I know, Mike.”
He clenched his fists and let go and clenched them again. “I can’t go there.”
“No. You can’t. I understand that. Los Angeles is alien enough for you, I think. Y
ou need to be in your Valley, in your own real world, not running off to some far star. I won’t try to coax you.”
“But you’re going to go anyway?” he asked, and it was not really a question.
“You already know what I’m going to do.”
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry. But not really.”
“Do you love me?” he said, and regretted saying it at once.
She smiled sadly. “You know I do. And you know I don’t want to leave you. But once they touched my mind with theirs, once I saw what kind of beings they are—do you know what I mean? I don’t have to explain, do I? You always know what I mean.”
“Cindy—”
“Oh, Mike, I do love you so much.”
“And I love you, babe. And I wish you’d come out of that goddamned ship.”
“You won’t ask that. Because you love me, right? Just as I won’t ask you again to come onboard with me, because I really love you. Do you understand that, Mike?”
He wanted to reach into the screen and grab her.
“I understand, yes,” he made himself say.
“I love you, Mike.”
“I love you, Cindy.”
“They tell me the round-trip takes forty-eight of our years, but it will only seem like a few weeks to me. Oh, Mike! Good-bye, Mike! God bless, Mike!” She blew kisses to him. He saw his favorite rings on her fingers, the three little strange star sapphire ones that she had made when she first began to design jewelry. He searched his mind for some new way to reason with her, some line of argument that would work, and could find none. He felt a vast emptiness beginning to expand within him, as though he were being made hollow by some whirling blade. Her face was shining. She seemed like a stranger to him suddenly. She seemed like a Los Angeles person, one of those, lost in fantasies and dreams, and it was as though he had never known her, or as though he had pretended she was something other than she was. No. No, that isn’t right. She’s not one of those, she’s Cindy. Following her own star, as always. Suddenly he was unable to look at the screen any longer, and he turned away, biting his lip, making a shoving gesture with his left hand. The Air Force men in the room wore the awkward expressions of people who had inadvertently eavesdropped on someone’s most intimate moments and were trying to pretend they had heard nothing.
“She isn’t crazy, Colonel,” Carmichael said vehemently. “I don’t want anyone believing she’s some kind of nut.”
“Of course not, Mr. Carmichael.”
“But she’s not going to leave that spaceship. You heard her. She’s staying aboard, going back with them to wherever the hell they came from. I can’t do anything about that. You see that, don’t you? Nothing I could do, short of going aboard that ship and dragging her off physically, would get her out of there. And I wouldn’t ever do that.”
“Naturally not. In any case, you understand that it would be impossible for us to permit you to go onboard, even for the sake of attempting to remove her.”
“That’s all right,” Carmichael said. “I wouldn’t dream of it. To remove her or even just to join her for the trip. I don’t want to go to that place. Let her go: That’s what she was meant to do in this world. Not me. Not me, Colonel. That’s simply not my thing.” He took a deep breath. He thought he might be trembling. “Colonel, do you mind if I got the hell out of here? Maybe I would feel better if I went back out there and dumped some more gunk on that fire. I think that might help. That’s what I think, Colonel. All right? Would you send me back to Van Nuys, Colonel?”
He went up one last time in the DC-3. They wanted him to dump the retardants along the western face of the fire, but instead he went to the east, where the spaceship was, and flew in a wide circle around it. A radio voice warned him to move out of the area, and he said that he would.
As he circled a hatch opened in the spaceship’s side and one of the aliens appeared, looking gigantic even from Carmichael’s altitude. The huge, purplish thing stepped from the ship, extended its tentacles, seemed to be sniffing the smoky air.
Carmichael thought vaguely of flying down low and dropping his whole load of retardants on the creature, drowning it in gunk, getting even with the aliens for having taken Cindy from him. He shook his head. That’s crazy, he told himself. Cindy would feel sick if she knew he had ever considered any such thing. But that’s what I’m like, he thought. Just an ordinary, ugly, vengeful Earthman. And that’s why I’m not going to go to that other planet, and that’s why she is.
He swung around past the spaceship and headed straight across Granada Hills and Northridge into Van Nuys Airport. When he was on the ground he sat at the controls of his plane a long while, not moving at all. Finally one of the dispatchers came out and called up to him, “Mike, are you okay?”
“Yeah. I’m fine.”
“How come you came back without dropping your load?”
Carmichael peered at his gauges. “Did I do that? I guess I did that, didn’t I?”
“You’re not okay, are you?”
“I forgot to dump, I guess. No, I didn’t forget. I just didn’t feel like doing it.”
“Mike, come on out of that plane.”
“I didn’t feel like doing it,” Carmichael said again. “Why the hell bother? This crazy city—there’s nothing left in it that I would want to save anyway.” His control deserted him at last, and rage swept through him like fire racing up the slopes of a dry canyon. He understood what she was doing, and he respected it, but he didn’t have to like it. He didn’t like it at all. He had lost Cindy, and he felt somehow that he had lost his war with Los Angeles as well. “Fuck it,” he said. “Let it burn. This crazy city. I always hated it. It deserves what it gets. The only reason I stayed here was for her. She was all that mattered. But she’s going away now. Let the fucking place burn.”
The dispatcher gaped at him in amazement. “Mike—”
Carmichael moved his head slowly from side to side as though trying to shake a monstrous headache from it. Then he frowned. “No, that’s wrong,” he said. “You’ve got to do the job anyway, right? No matter how you feel. You have to put the fires out. You have to save what you can. Listen, Tim, I’m going to fly one last load today, you hear? And then I’ll go home and get some sleep. Okay? Okay?” He had the plane in motion, going down the short runway. Dimly he realized that he had not requested clearance. A little Cessna spotter plane moved desperately out of his way, and then he was aloft. The sky was black and red. The fire was completely uncontained now, and maybe uncontainable. But you had to keep trying, he thought. You had to save what you could. He gunned and went forward, flying calmly into the inferno in the foothills, until the wild thermals caught his wings from below and lifted him and tossed him like a toy skimming over the top and sent him hurtling toward the waiting hills to the north.
Thus saith the Lord; Behold, I will raise up against Babylon, and against them that dwell in the midst of them that rise up against me, a destroying wind;
And will send unto Babylon fanners, that shall fan her, and shall empty her land: For in the day of trouble they shall be against her round about.
Jeremiah, 51:1-2
SYMBIONT
Long ago there was a gaudy pulp magazine called Planet Stories, which was devoted to two-fisted, colorful tales of action and adventure on other worlds. Don’t think it was junk, though: Ray Bradbury, Poul Anderson, Theodore Sturgeon, and Leigh Brackett were regular contributors, Isaac Asimov and Jack Vance wrote for it, Philip K. Dick’s first published story appeared in it. Readers loved it and so did the writers, because they could rare back and let their imaginations run wild.
I never had anything published in Planet Stories, because it went out of business in 1955, just as my career was getting started. But I enjoyed doing Planet-type material for such later imitators as Science Fiction Adventures and Venture SF, which flourished toward the end of the fifties, and suddenly, one day in the spring of 1984, it occurred to me to attempt one for Playboy in the old Planet Stories mod
e, appropriately buffed and polished for Playboy’s demanding readership. (I would, after all, be fighting for a place on the contents page with the likes of Nabokov, Updike, and Joyce Carol Oates, all of whom were once Playboy regulars.) And out of the machine came “Symbiont,” the somber tale of jungle adventure and diabolical revenge that you are about to read. Off it went, with some trepidation on my part, to the formidable Alice K. Turner, who had put me so exhaustingly through my paces fifteen months earlier with “Tourist Trade.” And back from Alice a few days later came this letter of acceptance:
“Your check, as we like to say, is in the mail. I was dumbfounded when I read this story (avidly, I should add) and sent it off to Teresa [her assistant editor], whose youth was not misspent, as mine was, in reading stories that featured creatures with tentacles and body-takeovers by alien nasties. I waited, somewhat apprehensively, for her response—and she loved it. That’s good enough for me. If such a noble mind can be here o’erthrown, what the hell. This is one of the ones that will go with not a word unchanged, though not till ’85 some time.” And so it did, in the June 1985 issue.
The initial idea for the story, incidentally, was given to me by a young woman named Karen Haber, whom I had met while on a speaking tour in Texas. It originally involved something that had happened to a friend of hers in Vietnam, but I applied my usual science-fiction metamorphosis techniques to it and “Symbiont” was the result. Ms. Haber was very impressed. I was very impressed with Ms. Haber, too. A couple of years later I married her.
——————
Ten years later, when I was long out of the Service and working the turnaround wheel at Betelgeuse Station, Fazio still haunted me. Not that he was dead. Other people get haunted by dead men; I was haunted by a live one. It would have been a lot better for both of us if he had been dead; but as far as I knew Fazio was still alive.