The Star-Spangled Future Page 12

  Then something bright flashed across the southern horizon from west to east, like a slow-motion shooting star or a speeded-up satellite. The crowd oohed and then sent up an unsettling subterranean growl of fear.

  Bill looked around nervously. “If we’re going to be invaded, perhaps it would be wise to take to the hills,” he said. “Far from our fellow man and juicy targets.”

  “Jesus, Bill, do you really think this is real?”

  Something flared brightly, north above Harlem.

  As soon as the alarm woke him up, Freddie Dystrum crawled out of bed, staggered into the kitchen, and tried to find some news on the radio. There was nothing but music on all the AM and FM stations, punctuated by the usual commercials and introductions, but not a word of anything else. There were no news shows, no talk shows, and all the all-news stations were off the air.

  Mildred was already in the kitchen making breakfast as if it were just another Tuesday. “What are you doing? What’s happening?” Freddie rumbled as he gave up on the radio.

  “Your breakfast is just about ready, Timmy is in the bathroom, and Kim is finally getting out of bed,” Mildred said, turning over a pancake.

  “Jeez, Mildred, what about last night? What about the radio?”

  “What’s wrong with the radio?” Mildred asked mildly.

  “There’s no news on it. All the news stations are off the air.”

  “You mean that flying saucer thing on Harry Reasoner last night?” Mildred said, finally looking up at him. “It wasn’t a joke?”

  “It doesn’t seem to be,” Freddie said. “There’s no news on the radio, just like Harry Reasoner said.”

  Mildred now began to look worried. “Maybe you should call Charlie, doesn’t he get the Times in the morning?”

  “Yeah, he does,” Freddie said, and he went into the den to call Charlie. Charlie hadn’t gotten his morning paper. Charlie hadn’t gotten to sleep till after 2:00 after hearing the announcement about flying saucers on Walter Cronkite, and about 1:30, he had seen repeated bright flashes of light zip across the horizon far away to the north. Charlie was scared.

  Freddie told him it could have been missiles from Vandenburg, but he had to admit that that might not exactly be a soothing explanation.

  Back in the kitchen, Timmy and Kim had heard about the blackout via the mysterious ectoplasmic kiddie grapevine, and had decided it was a good excuse not to go to school.

  “You’re not going to send us out there with flying saucers landing and Martian monsters running around, are you Dad?” Timmy said slyly. “With tentacles and big teeth and ray guns?”

  Freddie wasn’t having any of that. “Nobody said anything about Martians landing in flying saucers, Timmy,” he said. “They said no news until they get to the bottom of the flying saucer thing, not that we were being invaded.”

  “Why would they do that if nothing’s happening, Daddy?” Kim asked.

  “I don’t know,” Freddie snapped. He eyed the kids significantly. “Maybe your double-dome teachers will have it figured out when you get to school, and then you can tell me. That’s what we pay our property tax for.”

  That ended that, and Freddie dropped the kids off at school on his way to the plant as usual. But after he dropped them off and drove back down the Santa Ana Freeway, he had second thoughts as he watched a long convoy of army vehicles monopolizing the high-speed northbound lane, grim, brown, and sinister-looking as they highballed towards Los Angeles.

  “I tell you I don’t like it, I don’t like it at all,” Karl Bendtsen said, staring glumly across his southern cornfield at the heavy midmorning traffic on the Interstate. “All those cars coming out of Omaha. Damn fools are likely to panic and swarm all over everything like locusts. Wish I had put barbed wire on the fences.”

  “Lot of good that’d do if we’re being invaded by space people,” Ben the foreman said, spitting a stream of tobacco juice in the general direction of Washington.

  Karl snorted. “They got you believing that nonsense too?” he said. “Flying saucers! It’ll turn out to be just the eastern press liberals trying to stir up some trouble. I read only last week in TV Guide that they’re out to embarrass the government and they don’t much care how.”

  “Was the government that made the announcement, Mr. Bendtsen.”

  “Arrr!” Karl threw up his hands. “Maybe they had some crazy flying saucer scare they were going to broadcast and for once someone in Washington had sense enough to shut them up before they stirred up a hornets’ nest.”

  Ben nodded towards the highway. “Don’t seem to have worked too well, do it?” he said.

  A loud sustained roar caused both men to whirl and look to the west. A squadron of B-52s, maybe a dozen of the things, was lumbering ominously high across the sky like vultures, headed north towards the Arctic Circle.

  “Maybe it’s the Russians,” Karl decided. “For sure, they’re up to no good.”

  Willis Cohen’s big editorial lunch with Harrison Gaur had turned into a disaster. Why did his big chance to pitch some article ideas to the editor of the best-paying magazine in New York have to coincide with… with whatever this damned thing was? Gaur could think of nothing else, and people kept coming up to their table to swap paranoias.

  “It can’t be anything as simple as an invasion from outer space,” Gaur was assuring a tweedy longhair. “It smacks of the CIA. It’s got to be a cover for something.”

  “Must be heavy, if this is the cover-up, man!”

  “Maybe it’s a coup,” Cohen said, trying for the tenth time to reassert his presence. This time, he finally succeeded.

  “A coup?” Gaur said, fixing his full attention on Cohen. “You think there’s a coup going on right now?”

  I’ve got his attention, Cohen thought, grasping for conspiracy theories. If I lay it on thick, maybe he’ll buy an article on it. “What if there really are spaceships visiting Earth and the government knows about it?” he said off the top of his head. “What if there are rival factions within the Administration? The hawks want to keep the whole thing secret until they can develop a weapon to knock down the saucers and then use it to drive a big increase in the Pentagon budget through Congress. The moderates want to inform the world and try to negotiate with the saucer people and thus strengthen detente. One side started to make its move and the other side is moving against them.”

  “The CIA versus the State Department—”

  “Maybe the CIA versus the White House, even—”

  “With the Army using the power struggle as an excuse to seize control—”

  “Not necessarily—”

  Suddenly there was a loud surge of voices at the bar around a man who had just sat down.

  “—passing under the Verrazano Bridge—”

  “—my wife called me at the office—”

  Gaur turned and shouted at a silver-bearded man at the bar. “Ken? What’s going on?”

  “There’s an aircraft carrier moving up the Hudson River!” the bearded man shouted, creating instant bedlam in the restaurant. Everyone was talking loudly at once and a dozen people abruptly got up to leave.

  Including Harrison Gaur. “That does it!” he said, pushing his chair away from the table. “Sorry about this, Will, but I’ve got to get going.”

  “Get going where?” Cohen said despairingly.

  Gaur paused, looked at him, started to sit down again. “I don’t really know where,” he said in surprise. Then he was off again. “But I can’t just sit here,” he said. And Cohen, left out in the cold again, began to wonder if the whole thing weren’t a plot against him. Peculiar that it all should have been timed to his meeting with Harrison Gaur.

  Bill had insisted that they put as much distance as possible between themselves and nightfall in New York, so he and Archie drove northwest all day through lush upstate farmland and rolling wooded hills in the general direction of Montreal, staying off the main roads, which Archie figured would be jammed and dangerous if getting the jump o
n a general exodus turned out to have been a good idea.

  As 6:30 approached 7:00, however, it seemed necessary to get a motel fast, so as to be in front of a television set when the network news did or didn’t come on. They stopped at a cluster of wooden cabins in the ass-end of nowhere, where the owner charged them $35 for a grim cubicle with a black and white set, take it or leave it, the next motel is twenty miles away, and I reckon I’m going to have all the business I can handle later on tonight.

  They got the set on just at the station break, and they sat on the edge of the bed while commercials for dog food, deodorant, and huggable toilet paper reeled on in insane normalcy. “I’ll bet we drove all the way up here and spent $35 for nothing,” Archie said. “Now good old Walter Cronkite will come on and tell us it’s all some outre joke.”

  But good old Walter did not come on at all. Instead, there was an idiotic old pilot for a show that had never gotten on the air, about a loveable family of misunderstood Transylvanian peasants living in John Wayne’s Texas.

  “At least they could have run an old Twilight Zone,” Bill said wanly.

  “Or Gore Vidal getting it on with William Buckley,” Archie said, turning off the tube. They sat there for a few minutes silently trying to absorb the reality of what was going on and failing to connect. Then, without saying anything to each other, they went outside into the empty parking lot.

  Night had come on, and here in the country, the sky was an immensity of stars glowing over the black outlines of the hills. Occasionally, a lone car moved down the road, ghostly bright and loud in the dark silence.

  There was traffic up there among the stars. They could see it. A blinking red light moving across the western horizon. A star that moved in a deliberate parabolic curve across the top of the heavens. Things flying in formation far to the east.

  “You know Archie, out here you can believe it, ” Bill said. “You can just about believe it.”

  “But what would they want with us? Our cities are fetid sties, millions of us are starving, we’re ungrateful, vicious creatures, and welfare is bankrupting us. Wouldn’t any self-respecting space monster look for a tonier neighborhood to move into?”

  “Maybe we’re a rare French delicacy to them,” Bill suggested. “Like a good moldy Roquefort. Haven’t you ever been cruised by a fart-sniffer?”

  Archie giggled nervously, but his flesh crawled.

  Something loud was moving across the sky unseen, far away. Dogs began to howl. A helicopter buzzed across the sky, lit by its own strobe. Uneasiness seemed to creep across the heavens like roaches in a dark apartment.

  Bill shuddered and nodded suggestively towards their cabin. “Maybe there’s a Bette Davis movie on inside?” he suggested.

  Freddie Dystrum awoke to glare and blare and a steering-wheel rim in the gut, A bunch of people had gotten together at Frank’s house after a second evening without the news, and when everyone said they were going to keep their kids out of school and go to the mountains or Big Sur or Mexico if it wasn’t over by morning, Freddie figured he’d be smart and beat the morning crush. All night they had driven northeast towards the Sierras in thick moving traffic, not because they wanted to, but because it was already impossible to find an empty motel room. When they finally gave up about 1:00 am and tried to sleep four in the car, with the kids giggling over endless Martian jokes and Mildred jumping at every strange noise, Freddie decided he hadn’t been so smart after all.

  But now, waking up in the middle of a Hollywood Freeway traffic jam way up here in the wilderness, Freddie felt smart again.

  For as far as the eye could see—and in this long straight valley that was saying something—the northbound lanes of the highway were crammed with barely moving cars. Horns shouted, radiators steamed, engines snarled and coughed and died, and a long plume of smog hung over the highway, baking in the heat. The shoulders of the road were full of parked cars—overheated, flat-tired, or full of people sleeping by the road like his own family. Helicopters buzzed around the mess like flies over horseshit. It looked as if it went all the way south to Los Angeles and all the way north to Nome.

  “Good Lord,” Mildred grunted, sliding up the back of the seat beside him, “It’s like the Fourth of July at Disneyland!”

  “Can we get breakfast now, Daddy?” Kim piped up from the back seat. “I’m hungry.”

  “I gotta go to the bathroom,” Timmy whined. “Real bad.”

  Freddie looked north up the road. He needed a john too. Not a motel, gas station, or Pancake House in sight, and it could take all day to go twenty miles in that screaming, coughing, crawling jungle of chrome, gas, and rubber. Looking south, he saw nothing either, but the southbound lanes were clear and empty and would probably be that way all the way back to Torrence.

  “ARROARR!!” Freddie jumped out of his seat as a squadron of Phantom jets swooped low over the highway and roared northeast at treetop level.

  “That does it!” Freddie snapped. “If it’s the end of the world, it’s the end of the world, and at least we can spend it near a toilet. We’re going home.”

  “But Daddy—”

  “No buts!” Freddie snarled, starting the engine. He made a ninety degree turn, stuck the front of the car into the first available hole in the crawling traffic, wedged bis way past shaking fists across the northbound lanes, made a U onto the sweet clear southbound highway, and floored it.

  Highballing south along the empty roadway, Freddie shouted at the idiots in the northbound traffic jam. “Lemmings, is what you are! Buncha goddamn lemmings!”

  “What’s a lemming, Daddy?”

  It was a clear day in San Francisco, and from Coit Tower, Ted and Veronica could see the packed traffic on the Golden Gate, loops of empty freeway snaking along the hills and valleys of San Francisco, the deserted Bay Bridge, and the ominous concentration of warships at the Oakland Navy Yard.

  Ted had wanted to hitchhike up the coast towards redwood country until the coup was over, and then either go home to Berkeley or head for the Canadian border, depending on the gravity of what came down. But Veronica had pointed out that hitchhiking on the road would be the worst place to be when the long night of repression began. Hitchhikers would be the first people they’d scoop up into concentration camps. So they decided they might as well await the inevitable hidden in the belly of the beast. They were on too many Berkeley pig lists not to feel totally paranoid there.

  “In a way, maybe this is a positive thing,” Veronica said. “The beast finally shows its true colors. Maybe people will wake up when they see tanks in the street.”

  Ted grunted dubiously. He hadn’t seen any tanks—though there seemed to be a lot of helicopter activity and comings and goings at the Navy Yard—and the People had either taken to the hills running from Martians or stood around sullenly in confused, isolated little groups. The city had a dazed and empty look, as if an enormity had already occurred.

  “You know,” he said, “I think whoever planned it this way was a genius. The cities are emptied out, troops can maneuver at will and secure all the strong points, and when people finally drag themselves home, sweaty and beat, it’s already all over and there’s no energy to resist.”

  “Unless… unless…” Veronica looked north across the Bay where something strange shimmered like a mirage, bright and formless. “Unless it’s for real.”

  Archie and Bill took a long walk in the woods in the morning after a slow breakfast, had greasy hamburgers for lunch, watched “Godzilla” on TV, looked at the jam of cars on the road, then had an early supper, killing agonizingly slow time waiting for the hour of the seven o’clock news. Stupefying bucolic boredom had made them decide that they would head homo unless… unless there was an announcement that the Army really was battling invaders from outer space in the streets of New York. The coitus interruptus was just too enervating.

  At 6:50, they went inside and turned on the tube, watched the last ten minutes of a Star Trek, in which Captain Kirk had been forced to chan
ge bodies with a woman, then turned to Channel 4, hoping for the soothing moderation of positive old John Chancellor.

  Commercials for beer, pantyhose, vaginal spray, and chicken chow mein, and then the NBC logo, and the familiar announcer’s voice: “The NBC Nightly News, with John Chancellor!”

  And there was John Chancellor, crisp, unruffled, and utterly normal, going into his rundown of the major news stories. An imminent coup was feared in Lebanon. The cost of living was up half a percent. A jet had crashed en route from New York to Shannon. The Secretary of State was flying to Rio. The Israelis had killed three Palestinian terrorists.

  On and on and on. Someone had hit five home runs in a doubleheader. Drought threatened the mid western corn crop. NASA had launched a weather satellite. Workers were striking in Cleveland.

  Bill and Archie watched the nightly pablum unreel in numb amazement, speaking only during the commercials, their nerves rubbed raw by the screaming ordinariness.

  “What’s happening? What’s happening?”

  “Looks like nothing’s happening. Looks like the last two days didn’t happen after all.”

  The last commercial ended, and John Chancellor looked earnestly and forthrightly straight at them, as was his wrap-up habit.

  “Finally tonight,” he said breezily, “the Defense Department’s thorough investigation of the flying saucer phenomenon. After thorough satellite reconnaissance, a complete review of all available evidence, and exhaustive analysis, the Pentagon has announced that there are no such things as flying saucers. Absolutely and definitively. Good night for NBC News. ”

  Freddie Dystrum sat woodenly in front of his television set, feeling the cool wetness of the beer can in his hand, picturing the people dragging their silly asses back to the city, and wondering what the boys would have to say to each other at work tomorrow.

  Beside him, Mildred sat shaking her head as she munched on a cold chicken leg. “What happened to the Martians?” Kim piped up.