Those Who Watch
Page 4
His ingrained obstinate skepticism about the Atmospheric Objects was matched only by his ingrained obstinate skepticism about official Government announcements. If the Government was going to all this trouble to keep people calm, then there had to be something big to worry about. That much was axiomatic. On the other hand, trained as he was in interpreting the phoniness of official handouts, Falkner had a deep and abiding need to believe in the futility and emptiness of his own assignment. He could not let himself believe in real saucers. But he did not believe the Government, either. It was well past midnight now. He peered at the thick neck of his driver, sealed off from him in the front compartment, and fought back a yawn. He would ride all night. There was nothing waiting for him back in Albuquerque but an empty bed and a day of crushed cigarette butts. His wife was vacationing in Buenos Aires with her new husband. Falkner had grown accustomed to being alone by now, but he did not like it much. Other men soothed themselves in their work at such times, but Falkner’s work was no work for a grown man, he often said.
At three in the morning he was right up at the edge of the mountains. There was a logging road through the national forest that he could take if he wanted to take it, but he ordered the driver to swing around. He would return to Albuquerque on a big loop, around the Mesa Prieta, skirting Jemez Pueblo, and down the western side of the Rio Grande to home. They were still awake in Topeka, and probably in Washington as well. Good for them, the heroes.
The information flow on the various channels was slowing down. To fill in the time, Falkner ran off the taped playback of the fireball a few times. By this time, he had picked up half a dozen relayed shots of it from several points along its trajectory. He studied them carefully, and had to admit that the sudden glowing streak must have been an impressive sight. Too bad he had been indoors tanking up and had missed it. But it still looked like a meteor track, Falkner told himself stubbornly. A big meteor, but what of that? How about the one that had slashed its way through the Siberian forest in 1908 and cut such a swath? Or the giant meteor crater in Arizona? What were those, if not natural phenomena?
And the ferocity of the actinic radiation?
Simple. He had been arguing about that with Bronstein two hours ago.
“Postulate a lump of contraterrene matter dropping into our atmosphere,” Falkner said. “A couple of tons of anti-iron, say. A great slew of antiprotons and antineutrons meeting and annihilating terrene matter.”
“That’s old hat, Tom.”
“So what? It’s plausible, isn’t it?”
“Not plausible enough. It involves the necessity to postulate a large mass of antimatter somewhere in our part of the universe,” said Bronstein, “and there’s no real evidence that such a mass exists, or even can exist. It’s a far simpler hypothesis to postulate an intelligent extraterrestrial race sending observers here. Just apply Occam’s Razor to your antimatter idea and you’ll see what a lousy theory it is.”
“Apply Occam’s Razor to your throat, Bronstein. And press hard.”
Falkner liked the idea despite Bronstein’s objections. Sure, it violated the law of the least complex hypothesis. But Occam’s Razor was a logical tool, not an inflexible condition of the universe, and it didn’t hold good in all conditions. Falkner blinked hard, and wished he had some Scotch. Pale streaks of dawn were beginning to strain the eastern sky. In the nation’s capital it was morning already, and they were up and forming their traffic jams. Now, if we look at this notion of antimatter in a rigorous fashion, we find—
Something went ping on one of the half-track’s external detector systems.
“Stop the truck!” Falkner yelled to the driver.
The vehicle halted. The pinging didn’t. Very carefully, Colonel Falkner examined his inputs and tried to discover what the hell was going on. He isolated the cause of the disturbance. The detectors were picking up the thermals of a human being with a mass of some eighty to one hundred pounds within a radius of a thousand yards. Sure enough, the metal-detectors were confirming it, coming up with plenty of data. Someone was out there.
The nearest town was twenty miles away. There wasn’t even a road within a dozen miles. This was lonely country, nothing but lots of sagebrush, a few tufts of yucca and bear grass, here and there a misplaced juniper or pinon tree that belonged to the highlands. No streams, no ponds, no houses. Nothing. And nobody belonged out here. This land wasn’t good for anything. Falkner told himself that his detector was picking up an Eagle Scout camping for the night, or something equally innocuous. Nevertheless, he had to check. Leaving the driver in the half-track, Falkner got out.
Which way?
A thousand yards to cover — that was plenty, when you converted radius to circumference and started thinking in terms of area. He switched on the mercury beacon at his hip, but it didn’t do much good; in this gray predawn light, artificial illumination was little help. He decided to look around for fifteen minutes and then call for a copter to bring a search party. The trouble with these fancy detecting systems was that they didn’t function well at really close range.
He chose a direction at random and picked his way over the rough, sandy ground. When he had gone fifty paces, he saw what looked like a bundle of old clothes lying in a clump of sage, and ran toward it, feeling a kind of wild, fearful excitement that he could not understand.
When he reached the bundle of old clothes, he saw that it was a woman, blond, young, a pretty face except for the smears of blood on her lips and chin. She was alive. She didn’t seem to be conscious. She was wearing some sort of spacesuit of a design Falkner had never seen before, with elaborate personnel-transport jets, a sleek faceplate, and fabric of a shimmering, oddly lovely texture. Instantly he suspected that the girl must be a Chinese or Russian observer who had been forced to bail out from some kind of overflight. Racially, of course, she was anything but Chinese, but there was no reason why Peking could not hire a blonde from Brooklyn as a spy, if necessary. If this was what a Chinese spacesuit looked like these days, you had to take your hat off to them.
She had clearly had a bumpy landing, though. He couldn’t see much of her body, but from the way she was hunched up Falkner suspected that she had a couple of broken legs, for openers, and probably internal injuries. Well, there was a power stretcher in the half-track; he’d scoop her up, get her safely back to town, and turn her over to the medics. At least she wasn’t from some other galaxy, unless there was a galaxy out there that produced beautiful blondes.
Her faceplate had been jarred open in the landing. Falkner saw that she was stirring, that she appeared to be murmuring something, and he nudged the clear plate away from his lips, bending close to listen.
She wasn’t talking Russian: the words were too liquid for that. She wasn’t talking Chinese: the inflection was a monotone. She wasn’t talking any language Falkner had ever heard. That made him a little queasy. He refused to let himself believe that she was speaking a language of another world. This was delirium he was hearing. Mere ravings.
Was that something in English, now?
If they will help . … they speak which here? English. Yes …English…”
He looked the spacesuit over again, saw how alien it was, and his flesh began to crawl;
The girl’s eyes opened. Beautiful eyes. Frightened eyes. Pain-misted eyes.
“Help me,” she said.
Four
As he fell toward Earth, Mirtin knew that he was going to be severely injured. He took that calmly, as he took everything else. The matter was out of his hands. What he regretted was the notoriety that this involuntary exploit would win him at home, not the pain his body would suffer in the immediate future. Sooner or later, some watcher ship had been bound by probability to malfunction and force its crew to make an unscheduled landing on Earth, but Mirtin had never thought the malfunctioning ship would be his own.
There were techniques for calming one’s spirit in a time of stress. He used them as he hurtled toward the dark world below.
No, what troubled Mirtin now was the disruption of his sexual group. As the oldest, the steadiest, he felt a responsibility for protecting the other two, and now they were beyond his help.
Glair was probably dead. That was a harsh blow. Mirtin had watched her make her clumsy leap, had seen her go pinwheeling out into emptiness in the worst of all possible dives. Perhaps she had pulled out of it, but what was most likely was that she had fallen, stonelike, to a quick and horrid death. Mirtin had lost group partners before, long ago, and he knew the trauma it brought. And Glair was special, uniquely sensitive to the needs of the group, the perfect female bridge to link the two males. She could not easily be replaced.
Vorneen had made a better jump, and in any case Vorneen could look out for himself. But he would land many miles from Mirtin’s impact point, and they might never find each other. Even if they did, their position would not be an easy one — especially without Glair.
Mirtin calmed himself.
Impact could not be far away, now.
They said that making a jump like this delivered an impact equal to dropping from a height of a hundred feet. Such a fall would not kill a Dirnan, but it would still be a substantial jolt. Since they had left the ship at an altitude far above the recommended one for a jump, it was reasonable to expect severe bodily damage. Mirtin did what he could, coiling his Dirnan interior securely within his fleshy outer shell, his Earthman disguise. That was all he could do. The bones that supported his shell would probably break; the Dirnan gristle and cartilage within was safe. But it would cause him pain and inconvenience to break bones, all the same. This housing he wore was now his body, even though he had not been born in it.
Down.
Consciousness threatened to leave him in the last few moments. Making a strenuous effort, Mirtin maintained his awareness. He saw that he was landing far from any large city. To the east He observed the rectangular mud buildings of an Indian village, one of those living curios of the past that the Earthmen preserved so carefully in this part of their world. To the west, in the distance, was the great cleft of a canyon. In between was his landing area, a furrowed plain marked by deep gorges, eroded terraces, steeply rising mesas. Down here he was subject to atmospheric currents; Mirtin felt them lift him slightly, deflect him toward the Indian village a mile or two. He checked the trend with his stabilizer jets, and cut in the deployment screen to spare himself the worse effects of impact.
At the last moment he blanked out anyway, despite his hard work. It was just as well; for when he regained his consciousness, Mirtin knew that he was badly injured.
The first order of business was to deal with the pain. He went down the rows of ganglia, deliberately switching them off. Some, of course, had to remain active — the ones that operated his autonomous nervous system. He needed the breathing reflex and the cluster of nerves that powered his digestive/respiratory/circulatory nexus. But anything that could be spared was disconnected, for the time being. Without that feverish haze of pain, he could survey his situation more clearly and see what else needed to be done.
More than an hour passed before Mirtin had shut off enough of his nervous system to reduce the pain to a tolerable level. He needed half an hour more to wash the accumulated pain-poisons from his body. Then he took stock.
He was lying on his back, toward the eastern end of a triangular wedge of land slightly elevated above the surrounding terrain. To his left ran the dry gully of what must be a stream in springtime. To his right was a steeply rising cliff, and by the faint light of approaching morning he saw that the stone was soft and sandy, pocked with many small openings. No more than a dozen body-lengths behind him was the dark mouth of a cave. If he could crawl in there somehow, he would have the sanctuary he needed while his body went through the healing process.
But he could not crawl.
He could not move at all.
It was difficult to evaluate the bodily damage with so much of his nervous system disconnected, but Mirtin guessed that he had suffered a perpendicular break across his central inner column. His legs and arms seemed to be all right, but there was no motor response in them, which meant that he must have snapped his spine. He could repair that, given enough time. First the bone would have to knit, and then he would have to regenerate the paths of the nerves. It would take, say, two months of local time. His inner, Dirnan, body was basically whole, so all he had to do was recreate his shell.
Lying out here on his back in the open, though? In winter? Without food?
His body had many special abilities unknown on Earth, but it could not do without food indefinitely. Mirtin estimated that he would starve to death long before he was healed enough to rise and seek food. That was academic, anyway; a week without water would finish him off. He needed shelter and food and water, and in his present state he could get none of those things unaided, which meant that he needed help.
Vorneen? Glair? If they were alive, they had problems of their own. Mirtin was unable to activate his communicator, which was mounted on his side just above his hip, and there was no way of signaling them. His only hope was the arrival of some friendly Earthman. And, in this wasteland, Mirtin did not find that very probable.
He realized that he was going to die.
Not yet, though. He resolved to wait three days, and see what happened. By then, the lack of water would be causing him great distress, and he would have just enough strength left to disconnect the rest of his nervous system and slip into a peaceful death. His corpse would decay swiftly, even in this dry climate, and some day only his empty suit would be discovered. These artificial Earthman bodies were designed to rot in a hurry, bones and all, once the inner spark of Dirnan life was withdrawn; the planners took every precaution to keep the watched from learning of the presence of the watchers. Mirtin waited.
Morning came, a slow increase of brightness rising out of the gully. He lay patiently. Another morning, and then another, and all would be over. He reviewed his life. He thought of Glair and Vorneen, and how deeply he had loved them. He wondered, in a calm way, whether it had been fruitful to give his life for his world like this.
He became aware, eventually, that someone was approaching him.
Mirtin had not expected that. He was already resigned to lying broken-backed in the desert for his arbitrarily chosen three days, letting the clock run out, and extinguishing himself. Yet it seemed he would be discovered after all.
Though he could not lift his head, he could roll his eyes. In the distance he saw an Earthman and a pet animal corning toward him, though not in any purposeful way. They moved circuitously, the animal leaping and frolicking, the Earthman pausing to hurl stones into the gully. Mirtin debated the proper course to take. A quick death, now, before he was discovered? If any risk existed that he would be brought before authorities, he was bound by oath to destroy himself. But the Earthman looked young. A boy, merely. Mirtin forced himself to think in English, to shift his entire frame of reference. What was the animal? He had forgotten most of what he knew about local mammals. Cat, rat, bat? Dog. Dog. The dog was on his scent, now. A small lean brown creature with a long white-tufted tail, a bristly nose, yellow eyes. Heading this way. Sniffing. Mirtin could see the bony ridges along the dog’s back. The boy followed.
The black snout was up against his faceplate now. The boy stood over him, eyes wide, mouth agape. Mirtin summoned his knowledge. The boy was in the prepuberty stage, perhaps ten or eleven years old. Black hair, black-brown eyes, light brown skin. A Negro-group member? No. The hair was straight. The lips were thin. The nose was narrow-bridged. A member of the surviving aborigines of this continent. Does he speak English? Is he malevolent? Th
e mouth no longer gaped. Now it was closed, its corners turning upward. A smile. A sign of friendliness. Mirtin tried to smile too, and was relieved to find that his facial muscles worked.
“Hello,” the boy said. “Are you hurt?”
“I — Yes. I’m hurt very badly.”
The boy knelt beside him. Shining dark eyes peered into his own. The dog, tail wagging, nosed around Mirtin, prodding at him. With a quick slap the boy sent the animal away. Mirtin sensed sympathy from the young Earthman.
“Where’d you come from?” the boy whispered. “You fall out of an airplane?”
Mirtin let the awkward question slide past. I need food… water…”
“Yeah. What should I do, call the chief? They can send a truck out. Take you to the hospital in Albuquerque, maybe.”
Mirtin tensed. Hospital? Internal examination? He couldn’t risk it. Let an Earthman doctor shine one of their radiation machines through his body and see what was coiled within it, and the game was up. He was pledged to die first.
Shaping his words with care, Mirtin said, “Could you bring me food out here? Something to drink? Help me into that cave, maybe? Just until I’m all right.”
There was a long silence.
Then — a lucky stab, an intuitive leap, perhaps? — the boy narrowed his mouth and made a whistling sound and said, “Hey, I know! You fell off the flying saucer!”
It was a direct hit, and Mirtin flinched. He hadn’t been prepared for anything like that. Automatically he said, “Flying saucer? No … No, not a flying saucer. I was riding in a car. There was an accident. 1 was thrown from it.”
“Where’s the car, then?”