Those Who Watch

Seven

For three days Glair hovered on the threshold of consciousness. Her limbs throbbed with fiery pain; her entire body felt bloated and puffy. She knew she was hideous now, and that appalled her. That was harder to take than the pain itself.

A kind of feedback oscillation kept her moving along the border of awareness. When she was awake, the pain was severe, and she began to use her conscious control to knock out any nerve ganglion that she could dispense with. When she had knocked out enough, she began to relax and slide into the non-pain of unconsciousness. But she did not trust herself to go under with her nervous system shut down, and so when she felt herself sliding she would open the ganglia again, and draw back from the gray haze of nothingness in renewed pain. The pain brought a kind of unconsciousness of its own, when she allowed it to go unchecked. Not only the nerves of her outer housing but the nerves of her Dirnan body within were affected by the impulses, which at times were so strong that the neural channels tended to overload.

Dimly, Glair knew that she had been found in the desert and brought to some Earthman dwelling. Dimly, she realized that her suit and even her waistband had been taken from her. She sensed the succession of night and day. She had the idea that she was being given pain-killing drugs — a useless gesture; she couldn’t respond to them — and that something had been done to set her injured legs, which was more useful. But she did not rise fully to consciousness, and took no surveys of her surroundings. She remained quiet in her bath of pain.

Had Vorneen survived the explosion? Had Mirtin lived?

She had been too busy trying to counteract her own faulty jump to pay any attention to what was happening above her. Glair assumed that her two mates had jumped in time, but she had no way of being certain. Again and again she relived her jump — that stupidly akward stumble, that moment of total paralysis as terror invaded her soul, that horrid unbroken plummeting fall. And then the recovery, after a drop of thousands of feet, and the feeling of relief as the deployment screen took hold and broke her descent. Of course, there was no hope of a smooth landing by then; she had already built up a ferocious velocity, and the screen couldn’t possibly decelerate her in time. The best it could do was keep her from being smashed to jelly. She had landed — though she had choked off consciousness before the moment of impact came. She had been badly hurt. She had been found. Glair was sure of nothing else.

On the fourth day she woke.

She felt a tickling sensation against her arm, first, and though it was something she had felt before in these days of pain, this time it amused her rather than annoyed her. Glair opened her eyes to see what was happening. A muscular Earthman stood above her, pressing a small glossy brown ceramic tube against the fleshy part of her arm. He straightened up instantly when her eyes met his.

“You’re finally awake,” he said. “How do you feel?”

“Ghastly. What were you trying to do to my arm?”

“Give you an intravenous injection. I’m trying to feed you. But I’ve been having trouble finding your veins.”

Glair attempted to laugh. Laughing, she knew, was what the Earthmen did to relieve social stress. But it was a long time since she had gone through her Earthman-customs drill, and her facial muscles did not easily produce the configuration that was laughter. She had to struggle, and the result must have seemed more like a grimace of anguish than like a laugh, for it drew a sympathetic sigh from the Earthman.

He said, “You’re in pain. I have some paindamp here — ”

Glair shook her head. “No. No, I’m going to be all right. Is this a hospital? Are you a doctor?”

“No. And no.”

She was relieved and puzzled. “Where am T, then?”

“At my home. In Albuquerque. I’ve been taking care of you since I found you that night.”

Glair studied him. He was the first Earthman she had ever seen in the flesh — as opposed to the solidograph recordings that every Dirnan watcher dealt with during the training period — and the sight of him fascinated her. How thick his body was! How heavy his shoulders! Her sensitive nostrils picked up the scent of his body, fragrant and exciting, against the sharper scent of Earth’s air. He looked almost as much like a beast as like an intelligent creature, so primor-dially powerful was his frame.

And it seemed to Glair that this man, her rescuer, was in mortal pain. Inexperienced as she was with Earthmen, she could read the signs of distress on their faces. This man held his jaws clamped so tensely that the muscles bunched and rippled in his cheeks. His tongue moved swiftly and ceaselessly over his lips; his nostrils were rigid. His eyes, rimmed with dark lines, bore the red tracks of sleeplessness. There was something terrifying about the sight of such strain on the face of a sentient being. Forgetting her own difficulties for the moment, her injuries, her isolation from her own kind, her fear of discovery, Glair tried to radiate warm sympathy for this man’s problems, whatever they were.

She looked about the room. It was small, austere, with a low ceiling and modest furnishings. Through a translucent part of one wall sunlight flooded in. She was lying on a narrow bed, unclothed, a light blanket drawn up as far as her waist. The firm globes of her breasts were exposed, which was of no concern to her but which seemed to be causing some sexual disturbance to her host, considering the obvious conflicting pull that drew his eyes to her chest and away from it again instantly. The Earthman appeared to be suffering from half a dozen different sorts of tension at once.

She lay still, exhausted from the effort of translating theoretical terms learned long ago into realities. She had been well prepared, like any watcher, for the likelihood that she might have to make a forced landing on Earth. All the same, it required conscious effort to adapt herself to her new environment, to think: This is a bed, these are blankets, that is a wall, the Earthman is wearing a gray shirt and brown trousers. It was not just a matter of finding Earthman equivalents for Dirnan words, but of identifying whole concepts. Dirnans did not use beds, blankets, shirts, or trousers. Or many other things that had abruptly become of vital concern to her.

He said, “Both your legs were broken. I’ve set them. I’ve been able to get some food down your throat. I’ve watched over you for three days and nights. I thought you were going to die, the first day and a half. But you said ‘Help me,’ do you remember that? You were conscious when I found you, and that’s what you said to me. Those were the last words I heard from you until just now. I’ve helped you, I hope.”

“You’ve been very kind. Probably I would have died without your help.”

“But I’m a lunatic. I should never have brought you here. I should have driven you right to town, to the military hospital. Under tight security.” He was quivering as if every muscle in his huge body were at war with every other muscle. “I’m inviting a court-martial doing this. It’s pure madness.”

She did not know what a court-martial was, but the Earthman seemed obviously close to collapse. Soothingly she said, “You need rest. You must not have slept at all, talcing care of me. You look unhappy.”

He knelt beside the bed. He flipped the blanket up, covering her to the chin, as though the sight of her breasts were disturbing or perhaps disgusting to him. His face was close to hers, and Glair saw the torment in his eyes.

In a low, edgy voice he whispered, What are you?”

Her improvised cover story flowed easily to her lips. “I’m a student pilot,” she said. “1 took off with my trainer from the Taos airport right after dinner and we developed engine trouble over Santa Fe — ”

His hands balled into massive fists. “Look, that sounds very slick, but I’m not going to buy it. You’ve been lying here three days naked in my house. I’ve been doctoring you. I’ve had a good chance to look you over. I don’t know what you are, but I know what you aren’t. You aren’t a sweet little girl from Taos who happened to bail out when your jet went haywire. You aren’t human at all. Don’t pretend. For God’s sake, tell me what you are, where you’re from! I’ve been living in hell for the whole time you’ve been here.”

Glair hesitated. She knew what the rules were that governed accidental contact with Earthmen. You were supposed to guard at all costs against being found out for what you were, particularly against discovery by any sort of governmental authority. But the rules were not inflexible. You were entitled to take what steps you could to preserve your own life, and in certain cases a judicious disclosure of your true identity might be deemed permissible. The object was to survive, and get off Earth as fast as you could. But in her injured state she could go nowhere, and this man was her only means of survival. Glair construed the regulations to mean that she could confide in him for the sake of staying alive, under the assumption that once she had made good her escape no one would believe his story, anyway.

“What do you think I am?” she said.

“You landed in the desert after the damnedest fireball anybody’s ever seen in the sky. You didn’t have a parachute, only a kind of rubber suit full of weird tools and equipment. You were muttering to yourself in a language I Had never heard before. All right, I could still believe that you were a spy from some foreign country. But I took you home. I shouldn’t have done it, and I don’t know why I did, but I did it, and I had my half-track driver transferred to Wyoming so he wouldn’t say anything, and I put you in bed and got that suit off you, and your rubber underwear too. All the time I was doing that, I was trying to tell myself that you were a human being.”

He rose and walked to the window and folded one big hand inside the other. Glair heard a popping, crackling sound as he applied pressure to his knuckles.

He went on, “I examined you. Both legs broken. While I was examining one of your legs, just touching it a little to find out how bad the damage was, I felt the bone sliding back into place. What kind of bones do you have, anyway? They must have broken clean across, and they popped right back. You don’t perspire, either. And you don’t excrete. The equipment’s there, but you don’t use it. Your body temperature is eighty-five degrees. I couldn’t figure out your pulse rate at all. When I tried to give you intravenous injections of food, I couldn’t find any of the right veins, so I had to slop the food into your mouth. But I don’t even know if you needed the food.” He walked over to her again and stared levelly into her eyes. “You aren’t a human being. You’re the perfect plastic shell of a beautiful girl, wrapped around God knows what. You’re human from the skin out. So what are you?”

In a quiet voice Glair said, “I’m a watcher. I come from Dirna. That’s a distant planet of another sun. Does it make you happy to know that?”

He reacted as though she had plunged a dagger into his body. He stepped back, hissing briefly, his face becoming harsh with confusion. His hand came up stiffly and clapped against his breast, and he rubbed it as if in pain. His tone was leaden as he asked, “You’re from a flying saucer, is that it?”

“You call our ships that, yes.”

“Say it! You’re from a flying saucer! Say the whole silly sentence!”

“I’m from a flying saucer,” Glair murmured, feeling foolish as she used the foolish phrase.

The Earthman turned away from her again. “I could go downtown and preach to the Contact Cult now,” he said hollowly. “I could tell them all about the beautiful saucer woman I found in the desert, how I took her home and nursed her to health, how she told me stories of her planet far away. The whole lunatic business, just like the others. Except you’re real, aren’t you? I’m not hallucinating any of this! Do you understand what I’m saying?’-

“Most of it.”

“Is all of this really happening?”

“Yes,” Glair said softly. “Come here.”

He went to her. She put her hand against the hard, powerful piston that was his arm. She had never touched the flesh of an Earthman before. Her fingers dug in, and the solid flesh resisted her grasp.

“Touch me,” she said.

She brushed the blanket away from her body and whipped it to the floor. The Earthman blinked his eyes as if blinded by sudden light. Looking down at herself, over the hills and valleys of the body that had become so familiar to her in the past ten years, Glair saw the light brown wrappings that covered her legs from ankles to knees. He had cared for her well, tenderly doing what he could do to heal her broken limbs.

He touched her.

With a timidity that seemed out of place in so mature-looking a man, he rested his hands on her shoulders and ran them along her arms. Lightly and only for a moment he touched the resilient mounds of her breasts. He caressed the sides of her abdomen and the taut columns of her thighs. His breath was coarse, ragged, irregular; his hands trembled, and she sensed the acrid odor of his perspiration cutting across the earlier, more pleasant odor of his flesh. She had mastered the technique of smiling now, and her smile did not waver while his hands searched her flesh. Finally he withdrew from her, picked up the blanket, put it back over her.

“Am I real, or am I a dream?” she asked.

“Real. Your skin’s so smooth … so convincing.”

“Watchers must look like Earthmen. Sometimes it becomes necessary for us to come among you. Not often. When it is, we must seem to be of your kind. But there is always a chance that one of you will come too close and discover what lies beneath the skin. We have no way of changing our inner nature to duplicate yours.”

“So it’s true, then? Beings from space have been watching Earth from — from flying saucers?”

“It has been true for many years. We have watched Earth longer than you have been alive. Longer than I have been alive. The first patrols came here many thousands of years ago. Today we watch more closely than ever.”

The Earthman’s hands swung limply at his sides. His mouth worked, but no words came forth.

Finally he said, “Do you know what the AOS is? The Atmospheric Objects Survey?”

Glair had heard of it. “It is the organization that you American Earthmen have established. To watch the watchers, so to speak.”

“Yes. To watch the watchers. Well, I work for the AOS. It’s my job to track down any reports of what these idiots call flying saucers, and see if there’s substance to them. I draw a paycheck every month to hunt for alien beings. Don’t you see, 1 can’t keep you here! It’s my duty to turn you over to my Government! My duty, dammit!”