Those Who Watch

by Robert Silverberg

  Mirtin’s eyes looked toward the gully. “Down there, I suppose. I don’t know. I was unconscious.”

  “There isn’t any car. You couldn’t drive anything in here. Look, you came off that flying saucer, mister. You aren’t fooling me. What planet you from, huh? How come you look so much like Earthpeople there?”

  Mirtin felt like laughing. There was so much intelligence in the pinched, angular little face, such a keen, skeptical mind behind those shining eyes. He liked the boy tremendously. Just a shabby child, who didn’t even speak English very well, and yet Mirtin could sense a potential within him, a spark of something. He wished he could be honest with the boy and drop this elaborate facade of lies.

  Mirtin said, “Can you bring me food? Something to drink?”

  “You mean, bring it to you out here?”

  “Yes. If I could just stay in that cave — until I’m well again—”

  “But I could get help from the pueblo. We’d take you to a hospital.”

  “I don’t want to go to a hospital. I just want to stay out here… alone.”

  Silence for a moment.

  The boy said, “You don’t look like a jailbird. You aren’t running away. So why don’t you want the hospital? You in this funny suit. And you talk kind of funny, around the edges. Come on, mister. What planet you from? Mars? Saturn? You can trust me. I don’t get along so good with the pueblo, nohow. I help you, you help me. Yeah?”

  Mirtin saw his opportunity. Why not confide in the boy? After all, he wasn’t under any binding oath to keep all Earthmen in ignorance of his extraterrestrial origin. He had to use his judgment about that. He might have more to gain by telling the truth to the smudge-faced boy, and getting help that way, than by maintaining secrecy. Especially if the only alternatives were to die out here or to go to a hospital and have his secret discovered by those most likely to expose it widely.

  “Can I trust you?” Mirtin asked.

  “You help me, I’ll help you. Sure.”

  “All right. I baled out of a watcher ship. A saucer. You saw it explode last night?”

  “You bet I did!”

  “Well, that was me. Us. I landed here. I’m hurt — a broken back. It’ll take me a long time to get well. But if you take care of me, and bring me food and water, and don’t tell anybody I’m out here, I’ll be all right. And then I’ll try to help you, anything you want. But you mustn’t tell anyone about this.”

  “You think anybody would believe me, anyway? A flying saucer man out in the desert? I won’t tell.”

  “Good. What’s your name?”

  “Charley Estancia. San Miguel tribe. I got two sisters Lupe and Rosita, and two brothers. They’re all dopes. What’s your name?”

  “Mirtin.”

  Charley repeated it. “That’s all? Just Mirtin?*

  “That’s all.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “It’s a coded pattern of sound. It includes information on the place of my birth, the names of the members of my parent-group, and my vocational skills. There’s a lot packed into those two syllables.”

  “So how come you look like an Earthman, Mirtin?”

  “It’s a disguise. I’m different inside. That’s why I don’t want to go to a hospital.”

  “They’d X-ray you and find out, huh?”

  “Right.”

  “What are you like inside?”

  “You’d say I was plenty strange. I’ll try to tell you what I’m like. Later.”

  “Will you show me?”

  “I can’t do that,” said Mirtin. “My disguise — doesn’t come off that easily, Charley. It’s part of me. But I’ll tell you what’s underneath it, when we have time. I’ll tell you all about it.”

  “You speak English pretty good.”

  “I’ve had a long time to study it. I’ve been assigned to Earth since—” he paused, calculating “—since 1972. Ten years.”

  “You speak any other languages? Spanish?”

  “Pretty well.”

  “What about Tewa? That’s my pueblo language. You know that?”

  “I’m afraid not,” Mirtin confessed.

  The boy exploded with laughter. “That’s okay! Because we don’t know it so good ourselves. The old people, they think they can say things in Tewa, but they don’t really understand each other anymore. They just think so, but they’re fooling themselves. It’s pretty funny. Hey, you from Saturn? Neptune?”

  “I’m from a different solar system,” Mirtin said. “Far from here. From a planet that goes around another star. You know what a solar system is? And stars and planets? This is a planet right here, this Earth, and there are other—”

  “You think I’m a dumb Indian?” Charley Estancia said hotly. I know stars and planets. And galaxies and nebulas. The whole deal. I’m no dope. I can read. They got a library truck, it comes around even to a pueblo. Where you from? When the stars come out tonight, point to it.”

  “I can’t point to anything, Charley. I can’t lift my arm. Paralyzed.”

  “It’s that bad, huh?”

  “For now. I’ll get better, if you take care of me. But I’ll show you where to look, tonight. You can see the three bright stars, right in a row.”

  “You mean, Orion’s belt?”

  Pausing, Mirtin considered the constellations as seen from Earth. “Yes. That’s the one.”

  “And that’s were you from?”

  “That’s were I’m from. The fifth planet of the star on the eastern end. It’s a long way from here.”

  “And you came all the way from there in a flying saucer?”

  Mirtin smiled. “In a watcher ship, yes. To patrol Earth. And tonight our ship exploded. We got free just in time, and this is where I landed. I don’t know about the other two.”

  The boy was silent, staring at him, the gleaming eyes picking out details of Mirtin’s suit, searching Mirtin’s face perhaps for some hint of alienness. At length Charley said, “I don’t know who crazier. You for telling, me for believing.”

  “Don’t you think it’s the truth?”

  “I don’t know. What should I do? Take a knife and cut you open, see what’s inside?”

  I’d rather you didn’t”

  The boy laughed in his explosive way. “Don’t worry, I won’t. It all sounds so crazy, though. A flying saucer man dropping right here. Look, you got to tell me what it’s like out there, huh? You talk, I listen, then I’ll know if it’s real. I can tell if you fooling me. I’ll get you into that cave, and then you’ll talk to me about the stars. I got to know everything. I never been away from home, and you’re from a planet. You’re going to tell me, okay?”

  “Okay,” Mirtin said.

  “Now we got to get you into that cave, though. Then I’ll get you something to eat, drink. The pueblo isn’t far. Will it hurt if I help you stand up? You could lean on me.”

  “That won’t work. My legs are paralyzed too. You’ll have to pull me along the ground.”

  “Drag you by the arms? With you hurt bad like this? You won’t like that. Hey, I got a better idea, Mirtin. I’ll put you on a stretcher. It’s better that way.”

  Mirtin watched as the boy leaped up, pulling a hunting knife from a sheath at his side, and began to slash at the nearby vegetation. He cut two slim poles from a scrawny tree, pruned away the branches, and started to hack at the stems of scrubby gray-green plants growing low to the ground. His face was set tight in concentration, lips clamped. The boy’s fingers moved rapidly, weaving a network of fibers between the two poles. The sight fascinated Mirtin. It was so primitive, and yet so efficient!

  After a silent hour of energetic work, the stretcher was done.

  “This is gonna hurt,” Charley said. I got to haul you onto that stretcher somehow. Once you’re on it it’ll be okay, but while I’m hauling you—”

  “I can shut off my body,” Mirtin told him. “I won’t feel anything for several minutes. Longer than that and I’ll die.”

  “Just turn it o
ff? Like a switch?”

  “Something like that. When my eyes close, you move fast and get me on the stretcher.”

  For the first time, Mirtin saw something like genuine awe, even terror, come into the boy’s eyes. But only for a moment. It was as though Charley had still half believed it was all a joke, until Mirtin had offered to shut down his central nervous system, and the boy had come to realize that he might actually be in the presence of a genuine extraterrestrial. But the terror passed swiftly. Charley Estancia did not seem to fear him at all. Mirtin knew that he had been amazingly lucky in his discoverer. He and Charley were going to get along fine.

  “Whenever you’re ready,” Charley said.;

  “Now,” said Mirtin.

  He knocked out the remaining ganglia. Briefly, he felt thin, cold hands grasping his wrists, and then he descended into the darkness of a temporary death.

  Five

  About midnight Kathryn thought she heard the whimpering of Jill’s kitten once again. She rolled over, telling herself it was just a dream, but the sound came again, insistently, and this time Kathryn sat up and listened. Yes, there was something out there. She could hear the soft, high-pitched mewling noise. She was certain the kitten was back. Thank God, thank God, thank God! How happy Jill would be!

  She sprang from the bed. Her robe lay somewhere on the floor by the foot of the bed; she snatched it up and wriggled into it, belting it tightly. Unsealing the door, neutralizing the house alarm, she stepped outside. A chilly breeze off the desert struck her broadside, cutting through her thin robe and the flimsy nightgown beneath, and she shivered at the icy hand on her flesh. Where was the kitten, now?

  She did not see it anywhere. But she still heard the soft high-pitched sound.

  And now it seemed to her that what she heard was less of a meow, more of a moan.

  Kathryn fought back her impulse to rush inside the house and seal it again. Someone might be hurt out here. An auto accident, maybe. She hadn’t heard the sound of a crash, but perhaps she had slept through it. Warily she glanced around, looking at the neighboring house to her left, looking at the open desert to her right. She took a few hesitant steps.

  She saw the man, sprawled some twenty feet from her front door on a bare patch of sandy soil.

  He lay on his side, facing her, wearing some kind of high-altitude suit. The faceplate had split, evidently upon impact, and was dangling open. Kathryn saw smears of blood on his lips and cheeks. His eyes were shut. He was moaning steadily, but he was not moving. By his side lay three or four gleaming metal things, tools of some sort, that might have fallen out of pockets in his suit.

  She thought about that fireball she had seen a few hours before. Only a meteor? Or had it really been an exploding ship, and was this one of the survivors of the disaster?

  Kathryn rushed toward him. He stirred as she approached, but his eyes remained closed. She crouched by him, ignoring the roughness of the sand against her knees.

  It was difficult to tell how badly hurt he was. He seemed young — thirtyish — and in pain. And very handsome, Kathryn was surprised and shaken by the intensity of her response to the injured man’s good looks. She felt herself in the grip of an instant sexual pull, and that astonished her. In annoyance she clamped her thighs tight together and bent forward to peer at him more closely.

  Gingerly she nudged the faceplate out of the way. His face was flecked with blood, but she had expected to find him perspiration-soaked as well, and he was not. The bloodstains seemed odd too, Kathryn thought. By the dim starlight it appeared to her that there was a distinct orange tinge to the blood. Imagination? Perhaps. She had seen blood before, in her nursing days, and she had never seen blood like this.

  I ought to call the police, she told herself. Or get an ambulance, or something.

  Yet she held back. She did not want to involve the outside authorities in this, just now, and she did not know why. Carefully she slipped her hand into the open helmet and touched the injured man’s cheek. Feverish. But no perspiration? Why was that? She turned one of his eyelids up, and a cool gray eye stared briefly at her. The eye closed when she removed her finger, and the man quivered and grunted. His moans were congealing into words now. Kathryn could not make sense of them. Was he speaking some foreign language, or was this just the delirium of extreme pain? She struggled to catch even a syllable, without success. One sound seemed to flow into another.

  The wind howled around them. Kathryn looked up, half expecting to find the neighbors watching. But all was still. She was puzzled by her own attitude to this unexpected visitor. Something fiercely protective was welling up within her, something that told her, Take him into your house, nurse him back to health. But that was nonsense. He was a stranger, and she feared and disliked strangers. There were hospitals available. She had no business with this man who had dropped from the sky, this agent of some Communist nation. How could she even consider taking him inside for a moment?

  She did not understand any of this. But she leaned close, studying the seamless fabric of the man’s suit, struggling to learn something of his origin. Idly she picked up the tools that lay beside him. One looked something like a flashlight, with a stud at one end. Casually Kathryn touched the stud, and gasped in shock as a golden beam flicked out and sliced across a limb of a nearby tree. The limb fell to the ground. Kathryn dropped the little metallic tube as though it had burned her. What was it? Some kind of hand-laser? A heat ray?

  Where does this man come from?

  She did not touch the other tools. She could not begin to guess their function, but suddenly they seemed incredibly strange and . . . otherworldly. She felt lightheaded. This encounter was becoming unreal.

  She knew that she had to get him into the house, get that suit off him, and find out what help he needed. It did not seem to her that this man, injured as he was, posed any threat to her or to her sleeping child. Last year in Syria a man had fallen from the skies just as this one had. Her husband, Ted. Had he been alive when he landed? Did anyone help him? Or did they let him lie alone in the desert until all his life had trickled away? Kathryn wondered how she could bring him inside. You weren’t supposed to move an injured person at all, of course. But it wasn’t far. Could she lift him?

  She slipped one arm around his shoulders and put the other behind his knees. She didn’t intend to pick him up, simply to see how he reacted to being moved. To her bewilderment, she found him improbably light. Although he was the size of a full-grown man, he seemed to weigh no more than seventy or eighty pounds. Without quite realizing what she was doing, Kathryn rose to her feet, holding him in her arms with effort but without intolerable strain, and moved toward her house. She nudged the door open and carried him within, and, gasping a little, hurried into the bedroom.

  She set him delicately down on the only convenient place — her bed, the big double bed that she had shared for six years with a husband who now was only a fading memory. The injured man moaned again and spoke rapidly in his strange language, but he did not awaken. Nor did he show any ill effects from having been carried. Good. Good. Kathryn rushed from the room, her heart pounding, her body suddenly ablaze with bewildering sensations, her mind thick with confusion.

  What now? Lock and seal the door again, first. Switch on the alarm. And then—

  She checked ‹her daughter’s bedroom. Jill was still sound asleep. Kathryn adjusted the monitor so that it would vibrate her mattress and keep her from waking up for a while.

  Into the bathroom now. She scooped things from the medicine cabinet, almost at random. Bandages, tape, scissors, quickheal, antiseptic spray, a bottle of paindamp, and seven or eight other things, stuffing them into the pockets of her robe. The man on her bed had not moved. She had to get that suit off him first. She searched for a zipper, a catch, a button, anything. She could find none. The fabric was smooth and unbroken. Kathryn pinched some of it between two fingers and tried to cut it, but it resisted the scissors as easily as if it had been a sheet of steel. She did
not dare roll him over to search for the zipper that might be on the other side.

  He stirred. “Glair?” he said clearly. “Glair?”

  “Don’t try to move. You’ll be all right. Just lie still and let me help you.”

  He subsided again. More anxiously now, Kathryn fumbled for a way to get the suit off him. But it was as snug as a second skin, and she despaired of the job until she noticed a tiny, almost imperceptible button at the throat. Pressing it did nothing, but when she twisted it gently to the left something beneath the surface of the suit appeared to yield, and then, quite rapidly, she found the suit opening of its own accord, splitting down a fissure line from head to foot. In moments it was open, and she could lift the upper half away to reveal the man within.

  He was nearly naked, wearing only a rubbery yellow wrapping around his loins. His body was slim, very pale, hairless, and . . . beautiful. The word thrust itself unbidden into Kathryn’s consciousness. There was an almost feminine kind of beauty about him, a sleekness, a smoothness, a slenderness; his skin was virtually translucent. But even without removing the loincloth Kathryn knew he was undeniably male. Powerful muscles, flexing and coiling now in pain, lay beneath the ivory skin. His shoulders were wide, his hips narrow, his chest and belly flat and firm. He could have been a Greek statue come to life. Only the pain evident in his features, the streaks of blood on his chin, the distorted pose of his anguish-racked body, marred the Athenian serenity and symmetry of his form. How badly hurt was he, Kathryn wondered? She touched him gently, probing for the injuries. Hospital skills she had not used in many years flooded back from the vault of her memory. Her hands passed over his cool skin. She saw that his left leg was broken; it was only a simple fracture, though, and that troubled her. From the way the limb was bent and crumpled, there surely should be a jagged spear of bone thrusting through the skin, and yet the skin was whole. Could a bone snap that way, cleanly, while not penetrating the flesh? How could he have avoided a com-: pound fracture, with the leg askew like that?

  She could not find any other fractures, though he was bruised in a dozen places. Doubtless there were internal injuries. That would explain the blood around his lips and chin. That blood, Kathryn saw plainly under the bright light of the bedroom, definitely had an orange tinge. She looked at it in disbelief, and at the twisted leg once again, and she examined the open suit on which he still lay, noticing the assortment of mysterious compartments and instruments along the suit’s inner surface. She did not want to leap immediately to the wild conclusion that this man came from some other world, and so she thrust that line of speculation aside and concentrated on examining him.