Those Who Watch

One

The explosion was painfully bright against the dark backdrop of the moonless New Mexico sky. To those who looked up at that precise moment — and there were many who happened to look up — it was as though a new star had momentarily blossomed in blue-white incandescence.

The brightness moved in a track from northeast to southwest. It came sputteringly alive in the sacred mountains east of Taos, and grew more fierce as it carved a track roughly over the valley of the Rio Grande, passing above the dusty little pueblos and the bustling city of Santa Fe. Just south of Santa Fe the brightness became unbearable, and eyes were averted as the sudden radiation stabbed at retinas. But now the actinic peak was past. Was the savage flare burning itself out, or was the blaze simply damped by the city lights of sprawling Albuquerque? No matter. The arc of light speared past Isleta Pueblo and was lost somewhere over the Mesa del Oro.

Darkness returned, rolling back over the New Mexico sky like the returning tide.

In the broad plaza of San Miguel Pueblo, forty miles south of Santa Fe, Charley Estancia put his knuckles to his eyes a moment, crushed away the pain, and grinned up at the inverted black bowl of night.

“Shooting star!” he whispered sharply. “Shooting star! Beauty! Beauty!” He laughed. He was eleven years old, skinny and smudge-faced, and he had often seen the ragged tails of the meteors as they sped across the sky. He knew what they were, even if no one else in the pueblo did. But Charley had never seen one like that before. He could still feel the track of it sizzling in his skull. When he blinked, the line of whiteness remained.

Others in the village had seen it too. The plaza was a crowded, busy place tonight, for in another week came the Fire Society dance, and many white folk would travel out from the cities to watch and take pictures and, perhaps, spend money. Charley Estancia heard the gasps, saw the pointing arms of his uncles and cousins and sisters.

“Maiyanyi!” someone muttered. “Spirits!”

Talk of demons, whispers of bad magic, anguished exclamations of doubt and fear crisscrossed the plaza. Charley saw two of his maternal uncles rush toward the tall round windowless kiva, the ceremonial house, and clamber quickly down the ladder to take refuge within. He saw his sister Rosita pull forth the crucifix that hung between her breasts and clasp it against her cheek like some sort of amulet. He saw his father’s brother Juan make the sign of the cross, and three more men rush into the kiva. They were all talking of evil spirits, now. The pueblo bristled with television aerials, and shiny automobiles stood outside the adobe houses, but it took nothing more than a shooting star to send everybody wild with superstitious awe. Charley kicked at the dusty ground. His sister Lupe flashed past him, looking terrified. He reached out and caught her thin wrist.

“Where are you going?”

“Into the house. Devils are in the sky!”

“Sure. The kachinas are coming. They’re going to do the Fire Society dance because we don’t do it right anymore,” Charley said. He laughed.

Lupe was in no mood for Charley’s brand of sarcasm. She twisted at his grip. “Let go! Let go! She was twelve, and only a girl, but she was much stronger than he was. She planted her hand in the middle of his shallow chest and pushed hard, yanking her arm from his grasp at the same time. Charley went over on his back and lay in the dust, looking up at a sky that now had returned to normal. Lupe fled, sobbing. Charley shook his head. Crazy, all of them. Crazy with fear, crazy with religion. Why couldn’t they think? Why did they have to be Indians all the time? Look at them, running around madly, scattering cornmeal, blurting out prayers whose words were only empty sound to them, diving into the kiva, sprinting toward the church!

“Shooting star!” Charley shouted. “Nothing to be afraid of! Just a big shooting star!”

As usual, no one paid attention to him. He was thought to be a little crazy in the head, a skinny boy full of dreams and white man’s ideas. His voice was lost in the night wind. He picked himself up, shivering, and brushed the plaza’s dust from his jeans. It would be funny, this superstitious panic, if it were not so sad.

Ah! There was the padre now! Charley grinned.

The priest came out of the whitewashed little church and held up both arms in what Charley supposed was intended to be a comforting gesture. He called out in Spanish: “Don’t be afraid! It’s all right! Into the church, everyone, and stay calm!”

Some of the women moved toward the church. Most of the men were in the kiva, now — and, of course, women were forbidden there. Charley watched the priest. Padre Herrera was a small, bald-headed man who had come up from El Paso a few years ago, after the old priest had died. He had a hard time here. Everybody in San Miguel was a Roman Catholic, but everybody also believed in the old pueblo religion, and in a way nobody believed much in any religion.

So at a time of stress like this, people ran in all directions, very few of them into Padre Herrera’s church, and the padre did not look pleased.

Charley went up to the priest. “What was it, Padre? A shooting star, is all?”

The priest glowered. “Perhaps a sign of Heaven, Charley.”

“I saw it with these eyes! A shooting star!”

Padre Herrera flashed a quick, hollow smile and turned away, going about the business of shepherding his worried flock into the house of God. Charley realized he had been dismissed. The priest had once told Rosita Estancia that her younger brother Charley was a damned soul, and Charley had found out about it. In a way, he was rather flattered.

Hopefully, Charley looked to the sky. But there were no more shooting stars. Now the plaza was empty; the dozens of Indians who had been in it a few minutes ago had taken refuge. Charley looked across the way, toward the gift shop. The door opened and Marty Moquino came out. He was holding a little spray can of liquor, and a cigarette drooped from the corner of his mouth.

“Where’d everybody go?” Marty Moquino asked.

“They ran away. Scared.” Charley forced a chuckle. “You should’ve seen them go!”

He was a little afraid of Marty Moquino, and despised him a good deal; yet at the same time Charley looked up to him as a man who had done things and gone places. Marty was nineteen years old. Two years ago he had left the pueblo and gone to live in Albuquerque, and he was supposed to have been all the way out to Los Angeles, too. He was a mocker, a troublemaker, but more than anyone else around here he had lived in the white man’s world. Now Marty was back because he had lost his job. People whispered that he made love to Rosita Estancia these days. Charley hated him for that; Still, he felt that he had much to learn from Marty Moquino. Charley hoped to escape from San Miguel himself, one day.

They stood together in the middle of the empty plaza,” Charley short and thin, Marty tall and thin. Marty offered him a cigarette. Charley took it and expertly flipped its ignition cap. They grinned at each other like brothers.

“Did you see it?” Charley asked. “The shooting star?”

Marty nodded. He gave the spray can of whiskey a squirt into his mouth. “I was out back,” he said after a moment. “I saw it. But it wasn’t any shooting star.”

“It was the kachinas coming to visit, huh?”

Laughing, Marty said, “Kid, don’t you know what that thing was? You never saw a shooting star like that. That was a flying saucer blowing up over Taos!”

Kathryn Mason saw the light in the sky only by accident. Ordinarily on these dark winter nights she stayed indoors after nightfall. The house was warm and bright, purring with its array of electrical appliances, and she felt comfortable indoors. Anything might lurk outside. Anything. But her daughter’s kitten had been missing for three days now, which was the biggest crisis in the Mason family for a. long time. It seemed to Kathryn that she heard faint meows outside. Finding the kitten was more important to her than remaining locked indoors in this cozy shelter of an automatic house.

She rushed outside, hoping against hope to see the fluffy black-and-white thing scratching against the doormat. But there was no kitten there; and, abruptly, a streak of light lanced through the sky.

She had no way of knowing that it had already begun to lose intensity. It was the brightest thing she had ever seen in the sky, so bright that instinctively she clapped her hands to her eyes. An instant later, though, she pulled her hands away and forced herself to watch as it completed its fiery trajectory.

What could it be?

Kathryn’s mind supplied an immediate answer: it was the trail of an exploding Air Force jet, one of the boys out of the Kirtland base at Albuquerque going to his death on a training flight. Of course. Of course. And tonight there would be a new widow somewhere, a new set of mourners. Kathryn shivered. To her surprise, tears did not come this time.

She followed the path of light. She watched it curve away toward the south, toward down Albuquerque, and then it disappeared, lost in the haze of brightness that rose from the city. Instantly Kathryn manufactured a new catastrophe, for in her private world catastrophe was always readily at hand. She saw the flaming jet crashing at Mach Three into Central Avenue, plowing up a dozen streets, taking a thousand lives, sending gas mains erupting with volcanic fury. Sirens wailing, women screaming, ambulances, hearses. . . .

Fighting back the hysteria she knew to be foolish, she tried more calmly to assess what she had just seen. The light was gone now, and the world was back to usual again, as usual as it could ever get in these days of her sudden, snowy widowhood. It seemed to her that she heard a muffled boom far in the distance, as of a crash. But all of her experience around Air Force environments told her that that giant streak of light in the sky could not have been an exploding jet, unless there were experimental models with yet-unannounced characteristics. She had seen jets blow up a couple of times, and they made a gaudy burst of light, but nothing like that.

What then? An intercontinental rocket, maybe, carrying five hundred passengers to a fiery doom?

She could hear her husband’s voice saying. Think it through, Kate. Think it through.” He had said that a great deal, before he was killed. Kathryn tried to think it through. The brightness had come from the north, from Santa Fe or Taos, heading south. The intercontinental rockets traveled on east-west courses. Unless one of them was badly off course, her theory was faulty. And the rockets weren’t supposed to go off course. The guidance systems were infallible. Think, Kate, think it through. A Chinese missile, maybe? The war beginning at last? But she’d have seen the night turn into day, then. She’d have felt the terrible explosion as the fusion bomb ripped New Mexico apart. Think. . . . Some kind of meteor, maybe? How about a flying saucer, coming in for a landing at Kirtland? People talked so much about the saucers these days. Creatures from space, so they said, watching us, snooping around. Green men with ropy tentacles and bulging eyes? Kathryn shook her head. There might be something about it on video, she thought.

The sky seemed peaceful now, as though nothing at all had happened.

She drew her wrap closer around her. At night, here at the edge of the desert, the wind ripped in as if it came straight from the Pole. Kathryn lived at the northernmost house of her subdivision; she could look out and see only the dry wasteland of sagebrush and sand ahead of her. When she and Ted had bought the house, two years ago, the agent had solemnly told her that new houses soon would be built to the north of theirs. It hadn’t happened. Financial problems, shortage of money, something like that, and Kathryn still lived on the boundary between somewhere and nowhere. South of her lay the town of Bernalillo, a suburb of Albuquerque, and civilization was spreading in an ever-widening strip along Highway 25 up from Albuquerque to here. But out to the north was nothing, open country full of coyotes and God knows what else. The coyotes had probably devoured her daughter’s kitten. Remembering the kitten, Kathryn clenched her fists and listened once more for the feeble sounds that had brought her outside in the first place.

Nothing. She heard only the whistling of the wind, or perhaps the mocking song of the coyotes. She looked warily at the sky; then, quickly, she turned and went indoors, closing the door, sealing it, putting her thumb to the alarm switch and waiting until the central office gave her the signal. It was good to be inside, in this well-lit, cozy house. She had loved it here at first, while Ted was alive. Now, the best she could do was hang on, and bar the doors to death, and wait for the numbness of widowhood to leave her. She was only thirty. Too young to remain numb forever.

A sleepy voice. “Mommy, where are you?”

“Here, Jilly. Here.”

“Did you find Kitten-cat?”

“No, sweet.”

“Why’d you go outside?”

“Just to look.”

“Did Kitten-cat go to look for Daddy, Mommy?”

The words stabbed her. Kathryn went into her daughter’s bedroom. The little girl lay snug and well covered in her bed, with the golden eye of the monitor peering solemnly down at her. At not quite three, Jill was old enough to climb out of the bed, not old enough to make a safe landing by herself, and so Kathryn still left the baby-monitor on, the watchful electronic guardian. You were supposed to stop using the monitor once a child was past its second birthday, but Kath-tryn could not bring herself to give up the added security.

Kathryn switched on the night lamp. Jill blinked. She had her father’s dark hair, her father’s delicate features. Some day she’d be beautiful, not a plain jane like her mother at all, for which Kathryn was grateful. But what good was it all, if Ted hadn’t lived to see it? Lost in action over Syria during the Peace Offensive of 1981. What had Syria ment to him? Why had a foreign land taken from her the only thing that mattered?

Correction: almost the only thing.

“Will Kitten-cat find Daddy and bring him back?” Jill asked.

“I hope so, love. Go to sleep and dream about Kitten-cat. And Daddy.”

Kathryn adjusted the monitor’s control console, setting up a gentle vibration in the girl’s mattress. Jill smiled. Her eyes closed. Kathryn nudged the light lower, and then off. As she stepped back into the living room, she decided to see if there was something on the eight o’clock news about that thing in the sky. “Flying saucers have landed—” something like that. She cupped her hand over the wall stud, and the video screen bloomed into vibrant life. She was just in time.

“—reports from Taos as far south as Albuquerque. Also observed at Los Alamos, Grants, and Jemez Pueblo. The meteor was one of the brightest ever seen, according to Dr J. F. Kelly, of the Los Alamos technical staff. A scientific team will begin searching for the remnants of the big fireball tomorrow. For those who missed it, we’ve got a tape replay coming up in just ninety seconds. And we repeat, there’s no cause for alarm, absolutely no cause for alarm over this unusual meteor.”

Thank God, Kathryn thought. A meteor. A shooting star. Not an exploding jet, not a crashing rocket. No new widows tonight. She did not want anyone else to suffer as she had had to suffer.

If only the kitten would return now. She could not hope that Ted would walk through the door, but the kitten might still be alive, perhaps safe somewhere, living in a garage down the block. Kathryn switched off the video. She listened for meows. Everything was silent out there.

Colonel Tom Falkner did not see the fireball. While it streaked across the sky he was in the officers’ lounge at the Air Force base, drinking too much cheap Japanese Scotch and watching without interest a televised basketball game between New York and San Diego. He heard, above the buzz of the announcer’s voice, two lieutenants talking in low tones about saucers. One man was pretty passionately convinced that they were the real thing, ships from space. The other man took an orthodox skeptic’s tack: show me a man from another world, show me a piece of a saucer’s landing gear, show me anything I can touch, and I’ll believe it. Not until then. They were both a little liquored up, Falkner knew, or they wouldn’t be talking about saucers at all. Not with him in the room. As it was, they thought they were keeping their conversation to themselves, sparing Colonel Falkner the embarrassment of having to hear the silly words “flying saucer’ once again. Everyone was very tactful to poor Colonel Falkner around the base. Everyone knew that he had been handed a slicing by fate, and they tried to make things as easy as possible for him.

He elbowed out of his vibrator chair and walked stiffly over to the bar. The obliging young noncom on bar duty gave him a bright smile.

“Sir?”

“Another Scotch. Make it a double.”

Was that a hint of reproach in the bartender’s eyes? A flicker of contempt for the boozy colonel? Barkeeps weren’t supposed to be patronizing toward their customers, even if the barkeep happened to be a clean-cut Oklahoma kid who wouldn’t touch the stuff except on a direct order from an officer. Falkner scowled. He told himself that he was too sensitive, that he was reading much too much into everybody’s expressions and words and even their silences these days. He was just a bundle of raw nerve endings, that was the trouble. And he drank this stinking ersatz-san pseudo-Glenlivet to ease his tensions, only it just left him with a new load of guilt and misery.

The boy pushed a glass toward him. Spray cans weren’t fashionable here in the officers’ lounge. So long as there was personnel around to pour, officers who were gentlemen liked to have their alcoholic beverages poured decently into glasses, not squirted like medicine in the approved 1982 manner. Falkner grunted in acknowledgment and slid a hairy-knuckled hand around the glass. Down the hatch. Foosh. He winced.

“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!”