Those Who Watch

by Robert Silverberg

  Others who learned of the fate of the Mirtin-Vorneen’ Glair ship were certain representatives of the opposing race, the Kranazoi, who were able covertly to tune in on the wavelength of a Dirnan distress signal. But in this instance the Kranazoi headquarters had no need to pick up the signal, since they were receiving a full report on the explosion from one of their ships that had happened to be in the vicinity.

  Then, too, the distress signal activated the receptors at the Dirnan headquarters on Earth.

  There wasn’t supposed to be any Dirnan headquarters on Earth. Dirha and Kranaz had signed covenants governing the permissible contacts between the two galactic races and the people of Earth, and one of the things that was forbidden was any sort of physical landing on the planet by Dirnan or Kranazoi personnel — let alone a permanent presence down there. But covenants sometimes prove to work against global security; and the Dirnans had found it necessary, for their own protection, to station a pocket of agents on the surface of Earth. The station was well hidden, more to keep it from the attention of the Kranazoi than to keep it from the attention of the Earthmen. Earthmen would merely be skeptical if they found out that aliens were living among them; the Kranazoi, though, would be furious, perhaps to the point of war.

  At the hidden Dirnan station, an infinity of messages came flooding in, moments after the distress signal had been received. Every ship in the system was on the air at once, commenting, asking, informing. For several minutes the entire communication link was crippled by a general tie-up of all wavelengths. Then the command station on Earth managed to cut in, silencing the hubbub and letting everybody know it was aware of the situation and meant to do something about it. The ships in their orbits continued to discuss the crash, but they ceased to bother the base on Earth about it.

  In the command station, master computers were plotting possible landing vectors for the crew.

  “There were survivors,” one agent reported. “We’ve picked up tracks of the bailout.”

  “Did all three get away?”

  “Yes. At least, they left the ship.”

  “I knew Glair at Ganymede. She’s a remarkable girl.”

  “All three of them are remarkable. Or were.”

  They’re alive. We’ll find them.”

  “Any news from the trackers yet?”

  “The three of them came down in New Mexico. But they’ve damaged their communicators.”

  “How could that have happened?”

  They dropped from an unusually high altitude to avoid trouble when the generator blew. They must have hit hard. We’re getting fuzzy signals from one of them, but we can’t plot a fix at all. The other two aren’t even coming in.”

  They’re dead.”

  “Don’t be so sure. Injured maybe. But not dead. These bodies of ours are pretty sturdy.”

  “Sturdy enough to survive a crash that can break a communicator?”

  “Communicators don’t have much give. Flesh and bone do. I say they’re alive.”

  “Well, alive or dead, we’ve got to locate them.”

  “Right. If one of them gets autopsied-”

  “You arrogant dogmatic bastard, they aren’t dead! Will you get off that notion?”

  “All right, injured then. If it makes you feel any better. Injured and taken to a hospital and ex-rayed. That’ll cause as much trouble as if they’re autopsied. What’s the matter? You in love with Glair? Why can’t you accept the fact that they may have been killed?”

  “As a matter of fact he’s hung up on Vorneen.”

  “Well, who isn’t? Look, how many agents can we move into New Mexico this week?”

  “A dozen if we have to.”

  “Get them moving, then. The cover story is that they’re investigating the so-called giant meteor. Some of them can be scientists who claim to be hunting the debris. And reporters who interview people who saw the fireball. Cover the state. We’ll continue to prod the computer here, refining the landing vectors as we get a clearer notion of the actual trajectory of the ship before it exploded.”

  “You know where we can get the best trajectory figures?”

  “Where?”

  “U.S. Air Force. I bet AOS taped everything.”

  “Good thought. Call our man in AOS right away and have him checking the data banks.”

  “AOS is probably looking for the ship’s wreckage now too.”

  “But they don’t know about the crew. We’ll find them first.”

  “It’s going to be tough. What’s that Earthman proverb? Needle in a smokestack?”

  “Haystack.”

  “Yeah. Haystack. Where are the new vectors? Get that man moving!”

  “You’re sure they’re alive?”

  “I know they are.”

  Ten

  Vorneen seemed to be sleeping now, Kathryn thought. She couldn’t be sure of it, though. In the four days she had sheltered him in her house, the one certain thing she had learned about him was that she couldn’t be sure of anything about him.

  She stood beside the bed, watching him. Eyes closed. No motion of the eyeballs beneath the lids. Slow, deep, regular breathing. All the symptoms of sleep. But sometimes it seemed that he only pretended to sleep, because she expected it of him. At other times he went to sleep in a fantastic way, evidently turning himself off as though he were a machine, click! Either way, the effect was far from human.

  Kathryn was convinced now that she was playing hostess to a being from another world.

  It was such a bizarre concept that it was taking a long time to sink in. She had played with the thought from the first night, when it had occurred to her that the meteor had been a flying saucer and that this man might have dropped from it. The evidence had been overwhelming, right from the start. And it had grown, day by day, as she watched him closely.

  The orange tinge to his blood. The strange suit in her closet. The strange tools that had fallen from it, like the little flashlight-thing that was a disintegrator ray. The smoothness and coolness of his skin. The nonsense words he spoke while he was delirious. Delirium without fever. The peculiar fractures of his leg that had been so easy to set. The curious lightness of his body, which weighed forty or fifty pounds less than a man of his size ought to weigh.

  How could she pretend that all these things were mere oddities?

  In four days, he had not used the bedpan at all. He had quietly put it under the bed, empty, and it was still there. She checked it from time to time while he seemed to be asleep. How could a man go four days without moving his bowels or passing urine? He was eating regularly, he was drinking plenty of water, yet he neither excreted nor perspired. Kathryn could overlook a lot of odd things about Vorneen, but not that. Where did the waste products go? What kind of metabolism did he have? She was not by nature a woman who had speculated much about other worlds, other forms of life; such notions had simply never been part of her intellectual furniture. But it was hard to avoid the conclusion now that Vorneen came from far away.

  Even the name — Vorneen. What kind of name was that? He had volunteered it, half shyly, on the second day, and she had frowned and made him spell it, and he had stumbled a little over the spelling as if he wasn’t accustomed to thinking of it in terms of an alphabet, but only in terms of sound. Vorneen. Was that his first name, or his last name, or his only name? She did not know. She was afraid to ask too many questions. He would tell her what he chose to tell her, all in his own good time, and she would have to be grateful for that. She studied him as he slept.

  He seemed so peaceful. He had not left the bed since she had lowered him into it, the first night. Kathryn slept on the sofa, poorly, although Vorneen had suggested rather bluntly that she share the bed with him. “It’s big enough for two, isn’t it?” he asked. Yes, it was. She wondered whether he was being deliberately innocent about the significance of a man and a woman sharing the same bed, or whether, because he was not a man, it had never occurred to him that there might be any significance to it at all. Possi
bly he did not think in terms of sex.

  She had turned away, reddening like a silly virgin, when he had suggested she share the bed with him. Her own reaction puzzled her. She had been widowed for a year, now, and she owed nothing to Ted’s memory. She could sleep wherever she chose, exactly as she had done when she was nineteen and single. Yet she was mysteriously prudish, suddenly. During her months of mourning it had been unthinkable to get involved with a man; she had withdrawn from the world almost completely, making a little warm nest here for herself and Jill in this house, and rarely going beyond the local shopping center, but she had been telling herself since the summer that it was time to begin emerging from that and finding a new father for Jill. Well, this man who had dropped from the skies was hardly a candidate for that responsibility, but even so there was no reason why she couldn’t allow herself to get close to him, even to make love with him if his inclinations inclined that way and his broken leg permitted any such strenuous activities. The leg seemed to be healing with fantastic swiftness, anyway; she had it taped, and the swelling had gone down, and he no longer indicated feeling any pain in it.

  Why, then, did she shy back from the bed with such maidenly reserve?

  Kathryn thought she understood. It was not because she was afraid of sleeping with Vorneen. It was because she was afraid of the intensity of her own desires. Something about this slim, pale, improbably handsome man called out physically to her. It had been that way from the first moment Kathryn did not believe in love at first sight, but desire at first sight was a different story, and she was in the grip of it. She drew back, terrified by the intensity of what she felt for Vorneen. If she allowed the barrier between herself and him to slip, even a little, anything might happen.

  Anything.

  She had to know more about him first.

  She adjusted his coverlet and picked up the notepad that lay on the night table. I’ll be back in a couple of hours, she wrote. Going into Albuquerque to shop. Don’t fret. K. Pinning the note to the unused pillow beside him on the double bed, she tiptoed from the room and went into her daughter’s playroom. The little girl was making something sinister and ropy out of the flexiputty Kathryn had bought her, and the thing was writhing like an octopus. Or like a Martian, if there were any Martians. Kathryn was seeing unearthly beings all over the place.

  “Look, Mommy, it’s a snake!” Jill cried.

  “Snakes don’t have legs, honey,” Kathryn said. “But it’s beautiful, anyway. Here, let me put your coat on.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “I’ve got to drive into town. You’ll go over to play at Mrs Webster’s for a little while, all right?”

  Uncomplainingly, Jill let Kathryn pull her coat on. She had a three-year-old’s easy adaptability to changes in surroundings and circumstances. She still remembered her dead father, but only vaguely, remembering more the fact that she had had someone called “Daddy’ than anything specific about him; if Ted were to walk through the door now, Jill probably would not recognize him. The strayed kitten was fading into memory the same way, in a far shorter time. As for the abrupt and inexplicable arrival of Vorneen in the household, Jill did not seem to worry about it at all. She had accepted it as a phenomenon of the universe, like the setting of the sun or the coming of the postman. Shrewdly Kathryn had not warned Jill about mentioning Vorneen to other people, for then the girl surely would. To Jill, Vorneen was a visitor, someone staying with the family, and after the second day she lost all apparent interest in the man in the bed.

  Kathryn scooped Jill up and took her across the street to a neighbor with whom she maintained a vague, distant friendship. The neighbor had four children under ten, and an extra one never seemed to matter to her. “Can you watch Jill until about five?” Kathryn asked. “I’ve got to go to town.” It was as simple as that. Jill waved a solemn goodbye to her.

  Five minutes later, Kathryn was on the highway, buzzing toward Albuquerque at eighty miles an hour. The smooth, silent battery-powered engine of her car throbbed with power. She shot past Bernalillo on the freeway and glided into suburban Albuquerque. At this hour, the traffic was light. The winter sky was speckled with gray clouds, and the lofty skyline ahead of her seemed blurred. It might snow today, perhaps. But there were people in town who could tell her about flying saucers, and this was a good day for talking to them.

  When she’d parked the car in the big city lot underneath Rio Grande Boulevard, Kathryn walked eastward toward the Old Town. The telephone book gave the Contact Cult office an address on Romero Street. Of course, it didn’t call itself a Contact Cult; that was the newspaper name, and Kathryn understood that the cultists resented being thought of as cultists. The official name of the group was the Society for the Brotherhood of Worlds. Kathryn had found it listed in the telephone book under “Religious Organizations’.

  A burnished bronze plaque mounted on the front of a ramshackle old building identified the local office — church of the Society for the Brotherhood of Worlds. Kathryn held back at the entrance. Her cheeks suddenly flamed as she recalled how acidly Ted had spoken of this organization, with its trappings of mystic pomp, its seances at Stonehenge and Mesa Verde, its pious mingling of ancient ritual and modern scientific gadgetry. Ted had said something to the effect that half the members of the. Contact Cult were con men and the other half were willing marks, and that Frederic Storm, the leader, was the biggest con man of all. Kathryn shook off her hesitation. Ted’s opinions didn’t matter now. She hadn’t come here to join the cult, merely to try to find information.

  She went in.

  The lavishly appointed interior belied the building’s shabby facade. Kathryn found herself in a small, high-vaulted anteroom that was empty save for a couple of elegant chairs and a gleaming bronze replica of the statue that was the Contact Cult’s trademark, a naked woman, her eyes closed, her arms outstretched, reaching in welcome toward the stars. Kathryn had always thought that that emblem was marvelously silly, but now, to her discomfort, she was not so sure. On three sides of the room sumptuous mahogany doors led to inner offices.

  She was being scanned, she knew. A moment passed, and one of the doors opened. A woman of about forty came out, flashing a quick professional smile. Her hair was pulled severely back from her forehead; her clothing was fashionably austere; pinned to her collar she wore the little stylized emblem of a flying saucer that served as the Contact Cult’s identifying badge.

  “Good afternoon. Can I can help you?”

  “Ah — yes,” Kathryn said uncertainly. “I’d like — some information—”

  “Would you come this way?”

  She found herself being brusquely conveyed into an office that would have delighted a bank president. The severe, no-nonsense woman seated herself behind an angular desk. Kathryn saw the brooding, consciously mystic features of Frederic Storm staring down from the wall in a tridim photo at least six feet high. Der Fuhrer, she thought, He’d!

  “You’re a little early for our evening service of blessing and universal unity,” the woman said. “We’ll be having Frederic Storm on the screen at eight tonight, and it should be an inspiring event. But in the meantime we can go through the preliminary orientation. Have you belonged to any chapter of the Society prior to this?”

  “No,’Kathryn said.’I-”

  “There’s just this simple routine, then.” The woman pushed a recording cube toward her. “If you’ll answer a few questions for us, we can register you right away, and begin to draw you into the harmony of our group. I take it you’re aware of our general purposes and beliefs?” The woman nodded meaningfully toward the glowering image of Frederic Storm on the wall. “Perhaps you’ve read several of Frederic Storm’s books about his contacts with our brothers from space? He’s a miraculous writer, wouldn’t you say? I don’t understand how any rational person can read his books and fail to see that—”

  Desperately, Kathryn cut in. “I’m sorry, I haven’t read any of his books. I didn’t come here for the serv
ice, either. Or to join, really. I just wanted some information.”

  The look of professional warmth vanished. “Are you from the media?” the woman asked crossly.

  “You mean a reporter? Oh, no. I’m just a—” Kathryn paused and realized the right approach to take. “Just an ordinary housewife. I’m troubled about this space thing, the saucers and all, and I don’t really know where to begin asking questions, except that I want to know more about it, whether there are beings out in space, you know, and what they want with us, and everything. I’ve been meaning to stop by for a long time. And when I saw the fireball a few nights ago, well, that clinched it. 1 came here first chance I got. But I’m really ignorant. You’ll have to start from the beginning with me.”

  The Contact Cult woman relaxed, no longer on guard against a poking newshound. She said, “Perhaps you should start with our literature. This is the introductory kit.” She took a thick manila envelope from her desk and slid it toward Kathryn. “You’ll find all the basic brochures in there. Then—” she added a stout paperback book to the pile “—this is the most recent edition of Frederic Storm’s Our Friends, the Galaxy. It’s quite inspiring.”

  “I’ll look everything over.”