Those Who Watch

by Robert Silverberg

  By one in the afternoon he was back at San Miguel after his empty morning at school. In the afternoon he had different jobs, depending on the time of the year. Spring was planting time, of course. All children, all women worked in the fields. In the summer the tourists came. Charley was supposed to stand around and look helpful and let them take his picture and hope that they’d toss him a quarter. In the fall the crops were harvested. In the winter came the holy rituals, beginning now here in December with the Fire Society dance, and continuing on through the whole calendar of festivals until the spring. The festivals meant work for everyone; the pueblo had to be cleaned up and draped with bright decorations, the men had to repaint their costumes, the women had to bake a lot of pottery to sell. Supposedly the rituals were what brought the kind rains of springtime, but Charley knew that the only thing they really brought were the winter tourists. The white people never tired of watching the quaint primitive rituals of the natives. They started their season up in Hopi country, with the snake dance at the end of summer, and they kept on going, down through Zuni and over here to the pueblos of the Rio Grande.

  The Fire Society dance was still a few days away. Charley made a pretense of working half the afternoon. Meanwhile, he quietly collected a little stack of cold tortillas, wrapping them in an embroidered cloth and taking care that no one saw what he was doing. When the early nightfall began to descend, he hid the tortillas by the old abandoned kiva on the far side of the village, where nobody went because there were supposed to be evil spirits there. He filled a plastic canteen with clear water from the spring and hid it beside the tortillas. Then he waited for darkness. He played with his dog and had a fight with his sister Lupe and studied his library book about the stars. He watched the priest trying to round up a few parishioners for evening prayer. He saw Marty Moquino grab Rosita and take her behind the gift shop and put his hand under her skirt. He had a quick, unsatisfying dinner, punctuated by the blare of the television set and the angry bickering of Lupe and Uncle George.

  It was night at last.

  Everyone was back at work. The important men of the pueblo were giving orders: the cacique, the lifetime chief, stood by the ladder to the kiza, talking to a priest of the Fire Society, while Jesus Aguilar, the newly elected governor of the village, strutted around giving everyone orders. This was a good time to slip away to Mirtin. Casually, Charley sauntered down to the end of the street of square two-story adobe buildings on which he lived, looked in every direction, ducked into the old kiva to pick up the tortillas and the canteen, and ran off into the scrubby underbrush that bordered the pueblo.

  He moved in swift, loping strides. He pictured himself as a grown man, running like the wind; but his legs were so short that it took him a long time to get anywhere, and he had to halt, puffing for breath, when he was no more than half a mile from the village. He rested next to the power substation, looking up admiringly at it. The power company had built it two years ago, because everyone in the pueblo of San Miguel now had a television set and electric lights, and the village needed more electricity. They had taken care to put the substation well back, though, so it wouldn’t harm the appearance of the pueblo. The tourists liked to pretend that they were traveling in time, back to the year 1500 or so, when they visited a pueblo. The television aerials and the automobiles didn’t seem to bother them much, but a power substation would have been too much. Here it was, then. Charley eyed the big transformers and the glistening insulators, and thought dreamily of the generating plant, someplace far off, where exploding atoms turned steam into electricity to make the pueblo bright at night. He wished his school would take him to visit the power plant some day.

  Feeling a second wind, he began to run again. Now he moved effortlessly, threading a path between the clumps of sagebrush and yucca, scrambling down the side of the first arroyo and up the other side, streaking across the wide plain until he came to the second arroyo, the big one, with the cliff on the far side and the man from the stars lying in the cave in the cliff. Charley paused on the brink of the deep gully.

  He looked up. The night was moonless again; new moon wasn’t due until the night of the Fire Society dance. The stars were extraordinarily bright and sharp. Charley found Orion at once, and his eyes fastened on the star at the eastern end of the belt. He didn’t know its name, though he had searched in his book for it, but it seemed the most beautiful star he had ever seen. A tremor of awe shivered down his back. He thought of big planets going around that star, strange cities, creatures that were not men buzzing around in jets and rockets. He tried to imagine what the cities of that other world might look like, and then he sensed the irony of his thought and his nose wrinkled in bitter amusement. Why look to the stars? What did he know of the cities of his own world? Could he imagine Los Angeles and Chicago and New York, let alone Mirtin’s city? He had never been anywhere at all.

  In sudden furious energy he raced into the arroyo and up its far side, and across the little plateau to the cliff. He entered the cave. It was no more than a dozen feet high and perhaps twenty feet deep. His eyes adjusted to the darkness, and he saw Mirtin lying where he had left him, on his back, arms and legs carefully outspread. The star-man did not move. His eyes were open, and they glistened in the faint starlight that penetrated the cave.

  “Mirtin? You all right, Mirtin? You didn’t die?”

  “Hello, Charley.”

  Limp with relief, Charley knelt beside the injured being. “I brought you food, water. How you feeling, anyway? I came soon as I could get away.”

  “I’m much better. I feel the bone healing. I may be strong again sooner than I thought.”

  “Here. Here. I got tortillas for you. They’re cold, but they’re good.”

  “The water first.”

  “Sure,” said Charley. “Sorry.” He unscrewed the top of the canteen and put it to Mirtin’s lips. Water trickled slowly into the star-man’s mouth. When Charley thought Mirtin had had enough, he took the canteen away, but Mirtin asked for more. Charley watched in surprise as he drained the entire canteen. How much he drank! How fast!

  “Now the tortillas?”

  “Yes. Now.”

  Charley fed Mirtin steadily. No part of Mirtin’s body moved except his lower jaw, which went snap, snap, snap, biting steadily. Mirtin gobbled five tortillas before he indicated that he had had enough for now.

  He said, “What are those made off?”

  “Cornmeal. You know corn? The plant we grow.”

  “Yes. I know.”

  “We grind it up, we bake it on a hot stone. Just like they did long ago. We do a lot like they did long ago.”

  “You sound angry about that,” Mirtin observed.

  “Why not? What year is this, 1982 or 1492? Why can’t we be civilized like the others? Why we have to go on doing everything the old way?”

  “Who makes you do things that way, Charley?”

  “The white men!”

  Mirtin frowned. “Do you mean, they force you to use old-fashioned methods? They pass laws about it?”

  “No, no, nothing like that’ Charley groped for the right words. “They let us do what we like, as long as we stay peaceful. We can elect our own governor for the pueblo, our own policemen, everything. If we wanted, we could tear the pueblo down and build a new one out of plastic. But then there’d be no tourists. No cameras. Look, we’re a museum. We’re the funny men out of the past. You follow me?”

  “I think so,” Mirtin murmured. “A deliberate retention of archaic ways.”

  “What ways?”

  “Old-fashioned.”

  “That’s it. We voted it ourselves, the people. We got to put on a good show for the tourists. They bring the money. We don’t have money ourselves. A few of us, they left the pueblo, they run stores in Albuquerque or something, but most of us, we’re poor, we need the money the tourists bring. We dance for them, we paint our faces, we do everything the old way. But it’s phony, because we forgot what it all means. We got the secret soc
ieties, only we don’t remember the initiation words, so we made up new ones. Phony! Phony!” Charley shook with anger. “You want another tortilla, maybe?”

  “Yes. Please.”

  In satisfaction, Charley watched the paralyzed star-man eat.

  He said, “We ought to have refrigerators, heat, pavement, real houses, roads, everything. Instead we live in mud. We got television and cars, that’s all. Everything else like it was in 1500. That’s how they voted. It makes me sick. You know what I want, Mirtin? I want to get out. Go to Los Angeles and learn to build rockets. Or be a spaceman. I know lots of things. And I could learn lots more.”

  “But you’re too young to leave home?”

  “Yeah. Eleven! Hell, who wants to be eleven? I leave home, they arrest me fast. You don’t learn electronics in reform school. I’m stuck here.” He scooped up some cool earth from the cave floor and hurled it at the far wall. “Look,” Charley said, “I don’t want to talk about my little mud village. Tell me about your world, will you? Tell me everything!”

  Mirtin laughed. “That’s a great deal to ask. Where should I begin?”

  Pausing a moment, Charley said, “You have big cities there?”

  “Yes, very big.”

  “Bigger than New York? Than L.A.?”

  “Some of them.”

  “You got jet planes?”

  “Something similar,” said Mirtin. “They use—” he chuckled “—they use fusion generators. You saw one explode in the sky, remember?”

  “Oh. Yeah. What a dope I am! The flying saucers! What drives them? Like sun energy?”

  “Yes,” said Mirtin. “A small fusion generator that creates a plasma we house in a strong magnetic field. What happened to our ship was that the magnetic field weakened.”

  “Oh, oh! Boom!”

  “A very big boom. But that’s how we travel, in flat, round ships. That you call flying saucers.”

  “How fast they go?” Charley asked. “Five thousand miles an hour?”

  “More or less,” Mirtin answered, literally but obliquely.

  Charley took this as an affirmative. “So you can go from here to New York in an hour, huh? And on your planet you get around just as fast. How many people you got on your planet?”

  Mirtin laughed. “I shouldn’t be telling you any of this. It’s — what do they say? — classified information. Top secret.”

  “Come on! I won’t tell the newspapers!”

  “Well — ”

  Charley dangled a tortilla over the star-man’s lips. “You want another one, or don’t you?”

  Mirtin sighed. His eyes twinkled in the darkness. “We’ve got eight billion people,” he said. “Our world’s somewhat larger than yours, although the gravity’s about the same. Also, we don’t take up as much room as you do. We’re quite small. I’ll have that tortilla, now.”

  Charley gave it to him. While Mirtin chewed, Charley puzzled over his last remarks.

  “You mean, you don’t look like us, really?”

  “No.”

  “That’s right, you said you were different inside. But I figured you had different bones, maybe your heart and your stomach in different places. You’re more different than that?”

  “Much more different,” said Mirtin.

  “Like how? Tell me how you’d look without the disguise.”

  “Small. Three feet long, I guess. We have no bones at all, just a stiffening of cartilage. We—” Mirtin stopped. “I’d rather not describe myself, Charley.”

  “You mean, right now, inside you, inside what I see, you got a thing like that? No bigger than a baby, all curled up in you? Is that it?”

  “That’s it,” Mirtin admitted.

  Charley rose and walked to the mouth of the cave. He felt shaken/by that, and he couldn’t say why. In the short time since he had known Mirtin, he had come to think of the man from the stars as just that, a man, someone who had been born on another planet the way some people are born in other countries, but not too different, really. Smarter than an Earthman, but not all that different except in the way his insides were arranged. But Mirtin seemed to be some kind of big worm, really. Or worse. He hadn’t actually described himself. Charley looked up at the three bright stars, and it seemed to him that for the first time he knew what an alien thing he had befriended.

  “I could use another tortilla,” Mirtin said.

  “This is the last one. I didn’t think you’d be so hungry, you being hurt and all.”

  “You’d be surprised.”

  Charley fed it to him. Then they talked some more. They talked of Mirtin’s planet, whose name was Dirna, and they talked of the watchers and why they watched Earth, and they talked of stars and planets and flying saucers. When Mirtin grew tired of that, the conversation turned around, and they talked of San Miguel. Charley tried to explain what it was like to grow up in a village that still kept to prehistoric ways. The words bubbled from him as he tried to express the frustration he felt, tried to communicate the seething impatience within him, the hunger to learn, to know, to see, to do.

  Mirtin listened. He was a good listener, who knew when to be silent and when to ask a question. He seemed to understand. He told Charley not to worry, just to go on looking at things and asking questions, and a time would come when he’d get away from San Miguel into the real world. That was encouraging. Charley stared at the little man with the friendly eyes and the gray fringe of hair, and it was impossible for him to accept the fact that Mirtin was a rubbery thing without bones, underneath it all. Mirtin seemed so human, so kind. Like a doctor or a teacher, except he wasn’t absentminded and distant, the way the doctors and teachers Charley knew were. The only one who had ever talked to Charley like this before was the good teacher, Mr Jamieson; and there were times when Mr Jamieson forgot Charley’s name, and called him Juan, or Jesus or Felipe. Mirtin would never forget my name, Charley told himself.

  After a while he decided that he must be tiring the star-man out. And he couldn’t risk staying away from the pueblo for long. “I got to go now,” he said. “I’ll be back after dark tomorrow night. I’ll bring more tortillas, lots of them. And we can talk again. All right, Mirtin?”

  “It sounds fine, Charley.”

  “You’re sure you’re okay? You’re not too cold, or anything?”

  “I’m quite comfortable,” Mirtin assured him. “I simply need to lie here until I mend. And if you come to me, and bring tortillas and water, and we talk a little while every night, I think I’ll mend much faster.”

  Charley grinned. “I like you, you know? You’re, like, a friend. It isn’t so easy, finding friends. So long, Mirtin. Take care, now.”

  He backed out of the cave, spun around, and went running full tilt back to the pueblo, leaping and prancing in his happiness. His head was dizzied with talk of the other world and its superscience, but more than that he tingled with the excitement of having been sitting there talking, actually talking, with the man from the stars. Charley felt warm all over despite the December chill that was in the air. The warmth came straight from Mirtin. He isn’t just passing the time with me because he needs me to bring him food, Charley thought. He likes me. He likes talking to me. And he can teach me things.

  Happiness made Charley’s legs move more swiftly. In no time at all, he was approaching the pueblo. He was at the power substation, now, and he ran with his head in the air, looking up at the thick high-tension line that came looping in from the tower across the arroyo. He wasn’t bothering to watch where he was going, and that was how he happened to stumble upon the couple making love by the substation’s wire fence.

  In the coldness of the night, they both were fully clothed, but there was no doubt at all about what they were doing. Charley was familiar with the facts of life; he had no interest in spying on anyone, and even less interest in being seen returning from the direction of the arroyo. When he ran into the outstretched leg, therefore, he gasped and clawed the air for balance, and tried to make a quick, unobtrusive get
away.

  The girl shouted something filthy at him. The man, rolling over, glared and shook his fist. Charley noticed, in the quick clarity of the single instant that he saw them, that the girl was his sister Rosita’s best friend Maria Aguilar, and that the man was Marty Moquino. He was sorry that he had interrupted their fun, but he was much more sorry that he had let himself be seen this way by the one person who could make real trouble for him. A shaft of fear cut through Charley Estancia’s slim body, and he ran off worriedly toward the village.

  Nine

  The distress signal sent out by the doomed Dirnan ship in the moments before its destruction had been received in a thousand places at once. Every Dirnan ship on watcher duty over Earth had picked the signal up, for the broad-band Dirnan communication system was not hampered by line-of-sight problems or in need of an ionospheric bounce, and it pervaded that entire region of space at the speed of light. The twenty watchers over China learned of the ship’s fate. So did the eighteen watcher ships currently patrolling the skies over the Soviet Union, the other nineteen in various orbits over North America, and the isolated groups of watchers keeping tabs on India, Brazil, the African Federation, Antarctica, Japan, and other high-technology nodes throughout the world. All in all, close to four hundred Dirnan watcher ships were on duty in atmospheric levels, and all of them learned about the catastrophe within the first few moments.

  As the signal spread, it came to the attention of the four ships stationed permanently around Earth’s moon. It reached the roving ships that regularly checked the artificial space satellites of the Earth nations to make sure that no lethal weapons had been placed in orbit. It impinged on the detectors of the Dirnan ships posted in the vicinities of Mars and Venus. It aroused attention at the Dirnan ground base on Ganymede, Jupiter’s plant-sized moon, where some ninety watcher ships were parked while their crews enjoyed their allotted holidays. It was noticed by the fifty-odd Dirnan relief ships on their way from Ganymede to other posts in the systems now occupied by crews awaiting vacation. The wave spread, minute by minute, to the ships currently located out by Neptune’s orbit, and as far out as Pluto. In time — a great deal of time — that imperishable signal would reach as far as the home world itself.