Those Who Watch

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

“This is go

“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 off? 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 a

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.