Those Who Watch

Seventeen

“Two alien races watching us,” Tom Falkner said. “Well, I suppose that’s logical enough.”

“And watching each other, too,” said Glair. She stood by the opaqued window of Falkner’s bedroom, shamelessly nude, balancing herself on two canes. She took an experimental step, and another, and another. Her legs felt stronger each time she moved. She was cautiously optimistic. “How am I doing?” she asked.

“Marvelous. You’re in fine shape.”

“I wasn’t asking about my shape. I’m asking about the way I walk.”

“That’s fine too,” Falkner said. He laughed and came over to her and ran his hands quickly, possessively, over the firm contours of her body. His fingertips dug into the yielding bounciness of her breasts. He murmured, “I could almost start to believe that this stuff is real!”

“Don’t lose your perspective, now,”

“I love you, Glair,”

“I’m a creepy-looking thing from another planet, and I rode here in a flying saucer.”

“I love you anyway.”

“You’re a madman.”

“Very likely,” said Falkner complacently. “But don’t let that worry you. Do you love me, Glair?”

“Yes,” she whispered.

The strange thing was that she knew she meant it. She had begun this relationship by feeling sorry for Falkner — the poor Earthman had tied himself into so many psychological knots — and, because he had taken her in and nursed her back to health, she felt grateful to him and wanted to do something for him. He seemed so lonely, so troubled, so confused. A little warmth and reassurance was what he appeared to need, and those commodities were Glair’s specialties. Pity and gratitude are never very solid foundations for real love, Glair knew, even when the people involved belong to the same species. She did not expect anything binding to develop out of them here. Yet as he extended his sick leave to be with her day after day, she found herself sliding imperceptibly into a feeling of real affection for Falkner.

He had strength, underneath all the bitterness. His life had taken a bad turn when he had failed as an astronaut, and nothing had ever been right for him since then, but he was not fundamentally the weakling he seemed to be. The drinking, the outrageous self-pity, the deliberate creation of obstacles for himself — these were effects, not causes. They could be reversed, and once they were, the result would be a reasonably happy, healthy, sound human being. Once Glair saw that, she stopped looking upon him as a broken thing that needed to be fixed, and began seeing him in a more immediately equal relationship.

Of course, there could never be anything permanent. She had been a hundred Earth years old when he was born; she would live for hundreds of years after he died. She had experienced vastly more than he could imagine. Even an Earthman of middle years was really a blank-souled child beside the most innocent of Dirnans, and Glair was far from innocent.

Then, too, the physical union was unreal. Glair felt pleasure in his embrace, yes, but mainly it was the pleasure of giving pleasure, coupled with a faint, insignificant throb-: bing of her outer nervous system. What she and Falkner did in bed together was amusing to her, but it was not sex in any form that was meaningful to her as a Dirnan. Naturally Glair had not let him know this, though probably he suspected it. She had known women who toyed with pets in this fashion.

Yet Falkner was more than a pet to her. Despite her edge in years and maturity, despite the alienness of their natures, despite everything, she felt warm, real affection for him. That surprised her, and pleased her, and — because she must leave him eventually — it troubled her.

“Walk across the room once more and sit down,” he said to her. “Don’t strain yourself too much at the beginning.”

Glair nodded and gripped her canes and started out across the bedroom. A spasm of weakness came over her midway, but she waited for it to pass and continued successfully toward the bed. Sinking down on it, she let the canes fall to the floor.

“How do the legs feel now?”

“Better and better.”

He massaged her calves and the backs of her knees. She lay back, relaxing. The bruises and bumps that had dis-figured her face for the first few days were all gone now. She was radiantly beautiful again, and she liked that idea. Falkner stroked her in an oddly chaste way, not at all as though this were the prelude to making love. He said, “Two races of watchers? Tell me more,”

“I’ve already told you too much.”

“The Dirnans and the Kranazoi. Which of you got to us first, anyway?”

“No one knows,” Glair said. “Each side claims that its scouts were the first to spot Earth. It was all so many thousands of years ago that we can’t honestly say. I like to think that we were the first, that the Kranazoi are just interlopers. But perhaps I’m just starting to believe our own propaganda.”

“So the flying saucers have been looking at us since Cro-Magnon man,” Falkner muttered. “That explains the wheel Ezekiel saw, I guess, and a lot of other things. But why has it been only in the last thirty or forty years that we’ve noticed the watchers regularly?”

“Because there are so many more of us now. Until your nineteenth century, one Dirnan ship and one Kranazoi ship watched Earth, and that was all. As your technology developed, we’ve had to increase the number of watchers. By 1900 we had five ships apiece in your skies. After you got wireless transmission, we added a few more ships to monitor your broadcasts. Then came atomic energy, and we knew we had something special on our hands. I think we had about sixty watchers on duty here in 1947.”

“And the Kranazoi?”

“Oh, they always keep pace with us, and we with them. Neither side lets the other get ahead even an inch.”

“Mutual escalation of watchers, eh?”

Glair grinned. “Exactly. We add one, they add one. A few more each year, until by now we have—”

She stopped.

“You can tell me,” he said. “You’ve already told me so much.”

“Hundreds of ships apiece,” she replied. “I don’t know the exact figure, honestly, but it’s probably a thousand of ours and a thousand of theirs, spread out all over the system. We have to. You people have moved so fast. And so it’s no surprise that you keep getting reports of Atmospheric Objects. We’re pretty thick in your skies, and you’ve got sophisticated sensing devices. You have access to the files of AOS, Tom. Did you honestly believe the watchers were hallucinations, knowing what your own Government has observed?”

“I tried to wish it all away. I didn’t want to believe. But now, I’ve got no choice, do I?”

Laughing, she said, “No. You don’t”

“But how long are you and the Kranazoi going to keep on watching us?”

“We don’t know, Tom. Frankly, we don’t know how to handle you at all. Your race is unique in galactic history: the first people who learned how to get out into space before they learned how to control their own belligerence. We’ve never had an immature race before that could build space vehicles and fusion weapons. Usually the ethical maturity comes a couple of thousand years before the technological maturity. But not here.”

“To you, we’re a bunch of dangerous children, is that it?” Falkner asked, reddening.

Glair tried to sound playful as she said, “I’m afraid that’s it. Lovable children, though. Some of you.”

He ignored her tender caress. “You keep watching us, then. Each of you has your own galactic sphere of influence, and each of you would love to draw us into the right sphere, but you don’t dare. And each side is afraid that the other side will somehow come to terms with us. So you aren’t really watching us at all. You’re watching each other.”

“Both. We have an agreement concerning Earth, though. A covenant. Neither Dirnans nor Kranazoi are allowed to land on Earth at all, or to make contact with Earthmen from space. It’s strictly hands off, while we wait for Earth to attain the degree of maturity we think is minimal for entry into interstellar civilization. Once you reach that stage, the ambassadors will start landing. They’ll unroll their mats and begin talking business. Until then, the covenants restrict us from approaching you.”

“What if we never reach the right degree of maturity?” Falkner asked.

“We go on waiting.”

“And if we blow ourselves up first?”

“It solves a sticky problem for us, Tom. Will I shock you if I say that we’d probably be happiest if you blew yourselves up? You’re all too powerful already. Once you get out into the galaxy, you’re likely to tip over the Dirna-Kranaz

balance that’s existed for thousands of years. We’re afraid of you. That’s why we’d like to tie you up with treaties, but for us the safest thing would be to have you disappear in a puff of smoke.”

“If that’s the way you feel about us, why don’t you land a couple of dozen meddlers and try to start a nuclear war here?”

Glair said, “Because we’re civilized, Tom.” He was silent for a moment over that. Then he said, “Didn’t you break the covenants by landing on Earth, Glair?”

“I crash-landed, remember? I assure you, it wasn’t my idea.”

“And then, letting me discover what you really were?”

“Necessary to my survival. And in terms of the covenants, it’s far better for me to be hidden away here with you than being examined in some government hospital. The game would really be up, then.”

“But you’ve told the whole story to me, everything about the galactic cold war, the Kranazoi and the rest. What’s to stop me from filing a full report with AOS?”

Her eyes sparkled. “What good would it do you? You know all about the contact reports and how they’re regarded officially. No day goes by without somebody showing up to say he’s had a ride in a flying saucer. The report goes to AOS, AOS checks it out, and the results are inconclusive. There’s no hard data, except for the tracking reports that say something’s up there.”

“But if this report came from an AOS officer—”

“Think, Tom! Haven’t there been reports from all sorts of reputable people? Without hard data—”

“All right, then. I could turn you in along with my report. Here’s a Dirnan, I could say. Ask her about the watchers. Ask her about the Kranazoi. Open her up and see what she’s got under her skin.”

“Yes, you could do that,” Glair conceded. “Except that you wouldn’t do it. In fact, you couldn’t do it.”

“No,” he said quietly. “I couldn’t. If I could, I would have done it at the beginning, instead of bringing you home.”

“Which is why I trusted you. Which is why I still trust you. Which is why I’ve told you all kinds of secret things, in violation of covenant. It’s because I know that you won’t betray me while I’m with you. And after I’ve gone, it won’t matter, since no one would believe you.” She took his hands and put them over her breasts. “Am I right?”

“You’re right, Glair. Only — when are you going to leave me?”

“My legs have nearly healed.”

“Where would you go?”

“There must be rescuers looking for me. I’ll try to get in touch with them. Or to find the other members of my—” she faltered’ — my sexual group.”

“You don’t want to stay, do you?”

“Permanently?”

“Yes. Stay here and live with me?”

She shook her head gently. “I’d love to, Tom. But it would never work. I don’t belong here, and the differences between us would kill everything.”

“I need you, Glair. I want you. I love you.”

“I know, Tom. But be realistic. How will you feel when you grow old and I don’t?”

“You won’t?”

“Fifty years from now I’ll look the way I do today.”

“Fifty years from now I’ll be dead,” he whispered.

“You see? And I have my own people. My — friends.”

“Your mates. Yes. You’re right. Glair. Ships that pass in the night, that’s what we are. I mustn’t fool myself into thinking this can last. I ought to end my sick leave and go back to AOS. And I ought to start saying goodbye to you.” His hands gripped her body convulsively. “Glair!”

She held him.

“I don’t want to say goodbye. I don’t want to give you back to the stars,” he said. He pulled her close to him. She felt the tremor of despair go through him, and she opened herself to him and eased that despair in the only way she could.

And while that was happening, she thought of Vorneen and Mirtin, and whether they were alive. She thought of leaving this house and searching for them. She thought of Dirna. She thought of the ship that had been destroyed, with its little garden and its small gallery of Dirnan works of art.

Then she clasped her arms around Tom Falkner’s broad back and tried to push all such thoughts from her mind. For the moment, at least, she succeeded. For the moment.