Those Who Watch

Twelve

— and can I have your central credit number?” the motel clerk asked.

“I don’t have a credit card,” David Bridger said. “I’ll pay cash for the room.” He saw the look of suspicion on the clerk’s face, and turned on his ho-ho-ho Santa Claus persona. He boomed out a huge laugh and said, “I guess I’m the last man in the Western Hemisphere without one, hey? Just don’t believe in the things! Cash was good enough for my daddy, cash is good enough for me! How much?”

The clerk told him. Bridger drew several crumpled bills from the wallet that had been in his emergency kit — every Kranzoi agent carried a wad of Earthman money, just in case he might have to make a forced landing — and spread them out on the counter. The clerk looked more satisfied. A dusty stranger, without baggage, without even a credit card, tramping in here on foot — that was funny business for a motel. But the stranger’s money was green. And who could begrudge a room to Santa Claus three weeks before Christmas?

“It’s Room Two-sixteen,” the clerk told him. “Second tier, to your left.”

The room was a triangular wedge with scarcely any en-tranceway at all, opening out to perhaps thirty degrees of arc along the outer perimeter of the circular building. Bridger squeezed inside, locked and thumb-sealed the door, and sank down heavily on the bed. Walking these few miles had left his Earth-body exhausted. He was out of shape, he thought, even though they carefully maintained full gravity aboard the ship to keep their muscles in tone.

He stripped off his clothing and thrust everything into the coin-operated ultrasonic cleanser against the right wall. Then he stepped under the shower. He knew in theory how a shower worked, but his Kranazoi conditioning made him hold back from activating it. Kranaz was a dry world, where water was life and power, and it appalled him to think that even here in this driest part of North America he need only touch those studs and an unending supply of water would cascade over him. Feeling shameless, he turned the water on. Bridger wished he could strip away his Earthman body of his, pull it off in great sloppy chunks and expose his true skin to this water. He stood under the shower for half an hour, reveling in it.

He dried and dressed and eyed himself in the mirror. He looked fairly presentable. A fat man didn’t have to look really neat. The cosmetics men who had designed his skin had arranged things so that his face always seemed as though it had been shaved three hours ago, and would not need to be shaved again in another half a day. They hadn’t yet solved the technical problem of a continuously growing beard. No matter, Bridger thought. This would do.

Now, about those three Dirnans—

He sidled out of the room and walked down to ground level. The motel had a cocktail lounge just below the street, a fancy one with a waterfall thundering over a glass barrier. Water again! Bridger entered the cocktail lounge. He saw little groups of men, three and four at most, sitting about over drinks. They were formally dressed: businessmen, he realized. He took a seat at the bar. A girl came over to serve him. Her scanty costume left plenty of flesh visible, and Bridger observed with some fascination that her nearly bare breasts had been coated with a kind of fluorescing substance. In the dimness of the lounge, the blue-green glow of her bosom was violently conspicuous. A new style, eh? It was not to his taste; but, then, Kranazoi were not mammals, and he failed to appreciate the erotic significance of breasts at all.

She cocked her luminous mammaries at him and said, “What’ll it be?”

“Sherry on the rocks,” Bridger said.

He got a queer look from her for that. Evidently no real man would drink anything so mild. Bridger merely grinned. Sherry, he knew, was only a fortified wine, less than ten percent alcohol in it. Fine. His metabolism regarded alcohol as a poison, and the less of it he consumed, the healthier he’d be. He needed to drink something, as his entree to the conversations of the cocktail lounge, but the lighter it was, the better.

She gave him his drink. He paid her, and she jiggled off to the next patron. Bridger sipped delicately.

He listened. His auditory system was extremely sensitive.

“—raised the dividend four years in a row, and I’ve got the word they’ll split three to one in April—”

“—so he took her up to the room, you know, but when he got her clothes off her it turned out that—”

“—Braves don’t have a chance if Pasquarelli really plays out the season in Japan—”

“—no matter what they say about that damn fireball, I refuse to believe that it was only a—”

“—they’s got seven lots left in that subdivision, except three of them’s half sold to—”

“—how can you argue with earnings of six bucks a share?—”

“—forty-one home runs with a sprained wrist — ”

“—and then she said, give me fifty bucks or I’ll call a cop, so he—”

“—flying saucer—”

“—putting in the utility lines, that’s an extra cost—”

“—over-the-counter now, but they’re going to be listed in—”

“—sure I believe that stuff! Listen, mac, they’re all over the goddam place!—”

“—they got this Mexican shortstop, no, Cuban—”

“—kicked her good and hard—”

“—after the bank forecloses, we can—”

Bridger took another cautious sip of his drink. Then he pulled himself ponderously out of his seat and crossed the room, working hard to look benevolent and friendly. He stood above the group of four men a moment; they took little notice of him. A waitress with purplish thighs flitted by. The men were young, Bridger guessed, but not very young. When a couple of them looked up, the Kranazoi agent beamed broadly and said as affably as he could, “Excuse me for butting in, fellers, but I couldn’t help hearing you talk about that flying saucer—”