Those Who Watch

by Robert Silverberg

  “Pardon my inquisitiveness, sir, but how is that Japanese stuff, anyway?”

  “You’ve never had it?”

  “Oh, no, sir.” The bartender looked at Falkner as though the colonel had just suggested some particularly foul form of self-abuse. “Never. I’m just not a drinking man at all. I guess that’s why the computer put me on bar duty here. Heh. Heh.”

  “Heh,” Falkner said sourly. He eyed the Scotch bottle, so-called. “It’ll do, I guess. It’s got spirits in it and it tastes almost like the real thing, only terrible. And until we can do business with Scotland again, I’ll just have to go on drinking it. This damned crazy embargo. The President ought to have his—” Falkner caught himself. The boy grinned shyly. Despite himself, Falkner grinned too, and made his way back to his seat.

  He stared at the glowing screen. That San Diego center, the seven-foot-six fellow, went high to dunk the ball through the net. You just wait, you lousy long-legged goon, Falkner told him silently. Next season there’ll be a couple of eight-footers in the league, I bet. They’ll knock you off your high horse.

  A wisp of talk drifted his way: “If there are aliens from space watching us, how come they haven’t contacted us yet, eh?”

  “Maybe they have.”

  “Sure, and Frederic Storm is the prophet of the century, too. Don’t tell me you belong to a Contact Cult!”

  “I didn’t say…”

  Falkner kept his head rigidly trained toward the television wall. He would not, could not, let himself think about flying saucers during his free time. He hated even the very name of the things. It was all a bad joke, this saucer thing, and the joke was on him.

  He was 43 years old, though he sometimes felt 143. He could remember, vaguely, when flying saucers first had come into the news. That had been in 1947, right after the Second World War. Falkner couldn’t remember the war itself — he had been born in 1939, on the day Poland was invaded, and he’d been in first grade when the war ended — but he did remember the flying saucer thing, because it had scared him. He had read about it in one of the slick magazines, and it had left him chilly with terror to think that a man out in Oregon or wherever was seeing ships from other worlds. Little Tommy Falkner had always been curious about the planets, about space, the original space bug himself at a time when such things were mysteries to the general public, but it had given him a crawly feeling and a week of nightmares to think about those 1947 saucers.

  Saucer stories had come and gone. Crackpots had crept out of the woodwork to talk about their rides in space. Tom Falkner was also after a ride in space, but a real one. By the time he entered the Air Force Academy in 1957 he had forgotten all about the saucer craze, had thrown his science fiction magazines away. He was going to enroll in the American space program, if it ever got started. He was going to be a spaceman.

  Falkner took an angry gulp at his drink.

  A couple of weeks after he became a cadet, the Russians had a sputnik in orbit. Eventually an American space program materialized, lame, overdue, but authentic. Funny how the word spaceman dropped from the vocabulary, once science fiction started to turn real. Astronauts, that’s what they were called. Lieutenant Thomas Falkner enrolled in the astronaut program. He was a lot too young for Project Mercury, he watched in envy as the Gemini astronauts went up and came down; but there was room for him in Project Apollo. He was down on the list for a trip to the Moon in 1973. With luck, he figured, he might even make it to Mars before he turned forty.

  In those years, space was real, space was earnest. He spent his days in flight simulation, his nights wrestling with mathematics. Flying saucers? For lunatics. ‘California stuff’, Falkner called the stories, even when they came from Michigan or South Dakota. In California they’d believe anything, including purple people eaters from the stars. He worked at his trade. His trade was space. Along the way, he got married, and it wasn’t a bad marriage, except there were no children.

  He remembered a night in 1970 when he and a couple of the’ other Apollo boys did too much justice to a fifth of Scotch, the authentic item, twelve-year-old Ambassador. And Ned Reynolds, looped and incautious, turned to him and said, “You aren’t going to get off Earth, Tom. You want to know why? It’s because you don’t have any kids. Bad public relations. The astronaut’s got to have a couple clean-cut kids waiting for him to come home, or it spoils the TV part.”

  Falkner had been amused, in a strained sort of way. It wasn’t the sort of thing a sober man would say to a friend, or the sort of thing a sober man would take from a friend, but he had laughed. “You aren’t going to get off Earth, Tom.” In vino veritas. Six months later, in a routine physical, they had discovered something awry in his inner ear, something out of kilter in the thing that governs the body’s equilibrium, and that was the end of his career with Project Apollo. Serenely they flunked him out, explaining with all regret that they couldn’t put a vertigo-prone man into orbit, even if he had so far displayed no overt tendencies… …

  They found him a job. It was with Project Bluebook, the Air Force’s three-bit program that was set up to reassure the public that the flying saucers didn’t exist after all. That was a decade ago. Project Bluebook had expanded after the manner of any bureaucracy, and now was AOS, the Atmospheric Objects Survey. And poor old Tom Falkner, the flunked astronaut, was the AOS stringer for Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, and Colorado. He was a colonel in the flying saucer brigade. If he gritted his teeth and held on long enough, he’d be the next flying saucer general the Air Force would have.

  He finished the drink he was holding. At the same moment he became aware that the basketball game had been interrupted, half a minute ago, for a local news bulletin. Something about a meteor, a big streak of light… no cause for alarm, absolutely no cause for alarm…

  Falkner tried to focus his mind. Out of its depths an unwelcome thought came swimming upward. Saucer sighting. At last. The blue-faced bastards from Betelgeuse are here. No cause for alarm, but they just ate Washington, DC. Everything’s all right. Only a meteor.

  He heard the telephone’s insistent chiming back of the bar.

  And then the bartender came over and said, “It’s for you, Colonel Falkner. It’s your office calling. Somebody sounds awfully upset, sir!”

  Two

  Aboard the Dirnan craft trouble had started over the Pole. It was a standard watcher ship, of the kind that had been patrolling the Earth for decades now, and the possibility of malfunction was so slight that a sane person did not think of such things. The ships worked well; that was all there was to it. But aboard this one there was a failure.

  The first indication of problems came at ninety thousand feet, when the safety lamp began to glow. At once, warning signals throbbed beneath the flesh of the three members of the ship’s crew. Among the various useful circuits implanted in their bodies was one that let them know instantly if technical difficulties were arising. The essence of the mission called for the watchers to keep aloof from the watched, and the last thing any Dirnan wanted was a crash landing on Earth.

  The crew was busy. It consisted of a standard three-facet sexual group, in this case two males and a female. They had been together for close to a century as Earth calculates time, and for the past ten of those years they had been performing watcher duty above Earth. The female, Glair, presided over the recording equipment that sought out information from the planet below. Mirtin processed and analyzed the information. Vorneen transmitted it to the mother world. In addition, they had various other duties that they shared on an informal basis: ship maintenance, food preparation, contact with other watchers, and such. They were a good team. When the warning signals came, each looked up from his own work instantly, ready to take whatever action was necessary for the safety of the craft.

  Mirtin — the oldest, the calmest, wearing as his chosen disguise the body of a middle-aged Earthman — was the first to reach the analysis board. His fingers moved swiftly. He gathered the data and turned to the others.

&n
bsp; “The plasma pinch is giving out. We’re going to blow within six minutes.”

  “But that’s impossible,” Glair protested. “We—” Vorneen smiled gently. “It’s happening, Glair. It is possible.” He wore a younger man’s body, and he was perhaps too vain about his looks. But, of course, a Dirnan on watcher duty had to adopt the outer form of an Earthman, and it was merely sane to choose the configuration that best expressed the inner being. If Vorneen chose to look slightly too handsome, if Glair had erred in the direction of voluptuousness, if Mirtin wished to be self-effacingly unglamorous, those all were permissible options.

  Glair, recovering from her momentary foolishness, was all business. “If we shunt the current around the opaquer circuit, that might keep the plasma together, right?”

  “Try it,” Vorneen said. But Glair’s hands were already at work.

  Mirtin laughed. “We’re visible now. It gives one a naked feeling, doesn’t it? Like standing in the marketplace at noon, stripped to one’s bones.”

  “We can’t stay visible for long,” said Vorneen. “We’ll be smashing into every detector net the Earthmen have. There’ll be warheads flying.”

  “I doubt it,” said Glair crisply. “They’ve seen our ships before and haven’t attacked them. Give them credit. They know we’re up here. At least, the governments do. Five minutes without our opaquer won’t be that serious.”

  Vorneen knew that she was right. What was important now was to avert the explosion, not to fret about the fact that they had exposed themselves to every kind of Earthly detection system from the neutron screen to naked-eye observation. He pried open the hatch and wriggled into the power department.

  The Dirnan ship was designed for indefinite flight without refueling. Its hull, a flattened sphere, tapered below to a cupola in which a fusion generator was mounted: nothing more nor less than a miniature sun, from which the ship drew all its necessary power. At the core of the system was a plasma — a fiercely hot soup of electrons and stripped atomic nuclei — kept in check by a powerful magnetic field. Nothing solid could contain that plasma without itself becoming part of the plasma, for what was there in the universe that could serve as a bottle for a gas whose heat was measured in the hundreds of millions of degrees? But the magnetic field set up a pinch effect that controlled the plasma, keeping it apart from anything it might devour. So long as the fiery plasma remained in check, the Dirnans could tap power from it forever, or as close to forever as made no difference to living beings. But if the pinch gave way, the three would find themselves living a dozen feet away from a full-fledged sun. Briefly.

  Entering the crawl space, Vorneen approached the power core and saw to his dismay that five of the control rods had fused already, and ominous bluish arcs were flickering back and forth over the housing of the generator. He had no particular fear of dying, and of all ways to die this would surely be the quickest, but the professionalism in his nature drove him to try to reverse the situation if at all possible. About all he could do, he realized, was to try to draw power from elsewhere in the ship and shore up the magnetic pinch, and hope that the system would stabilize itself through the homeostatic controls that supposedly came into automatic play at times like this.

  Already, the opaquer circuit had been killed, rendering the ship visible to Earthman eyes. That was regrettable, but it had happened before, too often for Vorneen to worry about it now. There’d be a new “flying saucer’ story on the video down there tonight, he thought. But if the fusion generator blew up, and happened to take a couple of cities with it, it would be a news story bigger than he cared to create.

  “Cut the transmitter circuits,” he called.

  “They’re cut,” Mirtin answered. “Twenty seconds ago. You didn’t notice?”

  “No effect.”

  “I’ll knock out the lights,” said Glair.

  “Better knock out everything,” Vorneen shouted. “I’m not getting any gain. I’m losing pinch steadily!”

  The ship went dark. The poor Earthmen would be deprived of the flashing red and green lights they loved so dearly; in fact, they’d be unable to see the saucer at all now, except on governmental detection equipment. Sourly Vorneen realized that he was writing a new chapter in the vast archive of secret documentary information on the watcher ships that the governments down there were known to possess. He hated the thought that he had joined the legion of bunglers giving the show away. But it was hardly his fault. What was happening now was purely a statistical phenomenon: given so many watcher ships in orbit above Earth, at least one was bound to malfunction in some spectacular way. And it happened to be theirs.

  By now, of course, a distress signal had gone booming out across the galaxy. The moment a crew cut its transmitter circuits, breaking contact with the mother world, an SOS was automatically registered. Because of the light-year lag between Earth and Dirna, a couple of decades would pass before anyone at home knew that this particular ship was having problems, but the same distress signal was reaching hundreds of other Dirnan craft closer at hand. That was some comfort.

  Vorneen came back into the heart of the ship. “No use,” he said. “She’s going to blow. We’ve got to abandon ship.”

  Glair looked flustered. “But—”

  Mirtin was at the controls. “I’ll take the ship higher. We want to be above the danger range. Thirty miles up, yes?”

  “Higher,” said Vorneen. “As high as you can manage. And keep on course. We ought to be over desert country, anyway.”

  “Can we take anything?” asked Glair.

  “Ourselves,” said Vorneen.

  The ship had been their home for many years. It was painful to leave it now: more painful for her, perhaps, than for us, Vorneen told himself. It was Glair who tended the little garden of Dirnan flowers they kept aboard, Glair who added all the little feminine touches to the harshness of the ship’s decor. Now they must leave garden and ship and all to their fate, and hurl themselves down onto the dark bosom of Earth. It was something every watcher had to live with, this possibility, but it had never seemed quite real to Vorneen, and he knew what an upheaval this must be for Glair. Only Mirtin seemed wholly detached from the calamity.

  They soared high into the night sky.

  Strange rumbling sounds were coming from the power compartment now. Vorneen tried not to think of what might be going on in there, or how close they might be to the actual explosion. Glair was getting into her jump equipment. He seized his. Mirtin, locking the controls in place, started to slip his harness on.

  “We’re going to be scattered,” Vorneen said. “We may land hundreds of miles apart from each other.” He saw Glair’s frightened eyes. Ruthlessly, he went on, “We may be injured in landing, or perhaps even killed. But we’ve got to jump. Somehow we’ll find each other again.” He yanked the ejection lever, and the hatch they had never expected to use yawned wide. The atmosphere rushed from the ship’s cabin;

  but the jump equipment protected them from the airlessness. Hastily they moved toward the hatch.

  “Out,” Vorneen said to Glair.

  She jumped. He watched in cold horror as she spun away from the ship, arcing out into nothingness with such violence that he feared she had lost consciousness. She had not been trained to jump so clumsily. But it was a long time since they had run a jump drill aboard this ship. Sickened, he knew that Glair must have jumped to her death, and at the loss of one of his mates he felt an anguish far more terrible than he had ever known. Abandoning the ship was nothing, really; but losing Glair …

  “Out,” said Mirtin behind him.

  And then Vorneen left the ship. For all his torment, he executed the jump perfectly. This was the moment when nightmares became solid; any watcher dreamed hundreds of times of making the jump, but for most it remained just a dream. Here he was, hurtling downward with thirty miles of void beneath him, and Glair probably dead already, and a planet of hostile strangers waiting for him. Yet with strange calmness he cut in his life-support system an
d felt the sudden impact as his deployment screen steadied his fall. He would live.

  And Mirtin?

  It was difficult to look up. Vorneen tried. But he was thousands of feet below the ship now, and he could see neither the ship itself nor any sign of Mirtin. Had he jumped? Of course he had. Mirtin made a fetish of rationality; no last-minute panic for him, no staying aboard the doomed ship. No doubt Mirtin was smoothly falling Earthward at this moment. Vorneen looked downward once again.

  An instant later the explosion came.

  It was more horrifying than he would ever have dreamed it might be. If it had happened a moment before, while he was stupidly looking up, it would have boiled away his eyes. As it was he shook with awe as the heavens above him glowed with the quick light of a sudden sun. There was no hard radiation in a fusion generator, of course; neither he nor the distant towns below would suffer. Nor did the well-spaced atmospheric molecules up here transmit much sound. He felt heat on his back and shoulders, but after all, this had been only a tiny sun, strong enough to power one small spacecraft, and he was not charred, nor would anyone below be aware of warmth. What was frightening was the light, that savage glare passing above him and streaking through the sky. It was as though the universe had cracked open up there, allowing the primal light of first creation to shine through. Closing his eyes scarcely helped. What would it look like, down on Earth, he wondered? Would they experience terror and awe? Or would it seem like no more than a robust meteor trail?

  There it went, following the trajectory of what had been the ship. At least there would be no fragments of the craft to arouse mystery on Earth: a small blessing. But that light! That monstrous light!

  Vorneen lost consciousness.