The Alien Years by Robert Silverberg Read Free Book Online Page B

fleshy petals, drifted nearer to her. There was a crevice at its center that looked remarkably like a vagina. From that long dark slit emerged a little tendril that quivered once and gave off a little low-pitched blurt of sound, and abruptly Cindy found herself unable to speak. She had lost the power of shaping words entirely. But there was nothing upsetting about that; she understood without any doubt that the alien simply did not want her to speak just now, and when it was ready to restore her ability to speak it would certainly do so.
    A second quick sound came from the slit at the heart of the black flower, a higher-pitched one than before. And Cindy felt the alien entering her mind.
    It was almost a sexual thing. It went inside her smoothly and easily and completely, and it filled her just as thoroughly as a hand fills a glove. She was still there inside herself, but there was something else in there too, something immense and omnipotent, causing her no injury, displacing nothing, but making itself at home in her as though there had always been a space within her large enough for the mind of a gigantic alien being to occupy.
    She felt it massaging her brain.
    That was the only word for it: massaging. A gentle soothing kneading sensation, as of fingertips lovingly caressing the folds and convolutions of her brain. What the alien was doing, she realized, was methodically going through her entire accumulation of knowledge and memory, examining every single experience of her life from the moment of birth until this second, absorbing it all. In the course of—what? Two seconds?—it was done with the job, and now, she knew, it would be able to write her complete biography, if it wanted to. It knew whatever she knew, the street she had lived on when she was a little girl and the name of her first lover and the exact design of the star sapphire ring she had finished making last Tuesday. And it also had learned from her the multiplication table and how to say “Where is the bathroom, please?” in Spanish and the way to get from the westbound Ventura Freeway to the southbound San Diego Freeway, and all the rest of the things in her mind, including a good many things, very probably, that she had long ago forgotten herself.
    Then it withdrew from her and she could speak again and she said as soon as she could, “You know now, don’t you, that I’m not frightened of you. That I love you and want to do everything I can to help you fulfill your mission.”
    And, since she suspected it preferred to communicate telepathically instead of by voice, she said to it also, silently, with all the mental force that she could muster:
    Tell me everything about Hesteghon.
    But the alien did not seem to be ready to tell her anything. For a moment it contemplated her gravely and, Cindy thought, tenderly, but she felt no sense of contact with its mind. And then it went away.
     
    When Carmichael was aloft again he noticed at once that the fire was spreading. The wind was even rougher and wilder than before, and now it was blowing hard from the northwest, pushing the flames down toward the edge of Chatsworth. Already some glowing cinders had blown across the city limits and Carmichael saw houses afire to his left, maybe half a dozen of them.
    There would be more houses going up, he knew, many more, strings of them exploding into flame one after another as the heat coming from next door became irresistible. He had no doubt of it. In firefighting you come to develop an odd sixth sense of the way the struggle is going, whether you’re gaining on the blaze or the blaze is gaining on you. And that sixth sense told him now that the vast effort that was under way was failing, that the fire was still on the upcurve, that whole neighborhoods were going to be ashes by nightfall.
    He held on tight as the DC-3 entered the fire zone. The fire was sucking air like crazy, now, and the turbulence was astounding: it felt as if a giant’s hand had grabbed the