Those Who Watch

The amiability left the stranger’s face. “Do you have to do that?”

“What?”

“Get a doctor. Can’t you take care of me?”

“Me? But I-you-”

“Is it forbidden morally? The formerly married woman accepting a strange man in her dwelling? I can pay you. There’s money in my suit. Just let me stay here until my leg is better. I’ll be no trouble for you, I promise that. I—” A spasm of sudden pain racked him. He knotted his hands together, interlocking the fingertips and pulling outward from the center.

“Drink some of this,” Kathryn said, holding out the paindamp.

“It won’t do any good. I can— deal with it—”

She watched, mystified, as he went through some silent i

“May I stay here?” he asked.

“Perhaps. For a while.” She did not dare to ask now where he had come from or who he was. “Does your leg hurt you very badly?”

“I’ll manage. I think the real injuries may be inside. I took a bad jolt when I— when I came down.” He seemed very calm about it, she thought. He went on, “You won’t have to do much for me. I need rest, food, a little help. I’ll burden you only for a few weeks. Why were you taking off my waistband?”

Color stippled her cheeks. “To make you more comfortable. And— and in case you had to go to the bathroom. But I couldn’t get it off. It wouldn’t open, and I wasn’t able to cut it. And then you woke up.”

His hand went to his left hip and did something Kathryn could not follow, and the yellow garment snapped open and fell away, all so swiftly that she put her hand to her lips in sudden surprise. Oddly, there was nothing strange about his nakedness. She did not know what she had expected to see some alien organ, perhaps, or more likely a smoothly sexless expanse of doll-like skin — but he was quite conventionally constructed. Kathryn looked, and looked away.

“You have a strong nudity taboo?” he asked.

“Not really. It’s just that — oh, all of this is so peculiar! I ought to be afraid of you, but I’m not, and I should be calling the police, but I won’t, and—” She checked herself. “I’ll give you a bedpan. Do you want me to cook something for you to eat? Some soup, some toast, maybe? And here, let me try to get that suit out from under you. You’ll be able to sleep better without it there.”

He showed a flicker of pain as she eased the suit off the bed, but he said nothing. She drew the waistband out the same way. Lying slim and nude on her bed, he smiled gratefully up at her. Kathryn covered him. He was keeping very calm, but surely he was in greater pain that he was letting her know about.

He said, “Will you put the suit in a safe place? A place where no one is likely to discover it?”

“Is the back of my closet all right?”

“For now,” he said. “I would not want anyone but you to come upon it.”

She hid the suit behind her summer clothes. His eyes did not leave her. Pulling the coverlet up over him, she said, “Now, how about something to eat?”

“In the morning, I think.” His hand touched hers briefly. “What’s your name?”

“Kathryn. Kathryn Mason.”

He did not offer his own name, and she could not bring herself to ask for it.

“Can I trust you, Kathryn?”

“In what way?”

“To keep my presence here a secret.”

She chuckled thinly. “I’m not looking for a neighborhood scandal. No one’s going to find out you’re here.”

“Excellent.”

“I’ll get you the bedpan now.”

She felt a certain relief at escaping from him. He frightened her, and her fear was growing, rather than lessening, as the moment passed. His very calmness was the most terrifying thing of all. He seemed unreal, synthetic; everything about him struck a false note, from his too-pretty face to his too-smooth voice with its too-bland accentless tones. And to recover from delirious unconsciousness to rationality within fifteen minutes, that way, was even weirder. It was as if he had thrown a switch inside himself that shunted the pain impulses elsewhere.

Kathryn trembled. She drew the bedpan from the kitchen closet and rinsed it out.

There was a strange man in her house, which was upsetting.

There was a stranger in her house who might not be a man, and that was far more upsetting.

She returned to him, and he smiled as she slipped the bedpan under the sheets. Trying to regain her old nursely objectivity, Kathryn said, “Is there anything else I can do for you now?”

“You could give me some information.”

“Of course.”

“On the radio, the television, tonight. Was there any unusual news in this neighborhood?”

“The meteor,” she said. “I saw it. The big ball of fire in the sky.”

“It was a meteor, then?”

“That’s what they said on television.”

He digested that for a moment. She waited, hoping for some revelation, waiting for the blunt admission of his origin. But he was giving nothing away. He regarded her in silence.

“Would you like me to turn out the light?” she asked.

He nodded.

She darkened the room. Only then did she realize she had left herself no place to sleep. He had the bed, and she could hardly climb in alongside him.

She curled up on the living-room couch. But she did not sleep at all, and when she returned to his room, several hours before dawn, she saw that his eyes were open too. Once again his face was fixed in the rigid lines of pain.

“Glair?” he asked.

“Kathryn. What can I do for you?”

“Just hold my hand in yours,” he whispered, and she took it, and they remained that way until morning.

Six

The spectacular destruction of the Dirnan watcher ship was observed by many eyes that night, not all of them human. At the instant the generator in the ship went critical and exploded, a Kranazoi scout was swinging through its assigned surveillance arc above Montana, bound on an eastward route. The first flaring light of the blowup impinged on the sensors of the Kranazoi vessel, and only moments later the event came to the awareness of the pilot, who swung quickly into action.

The pilot’s genetic designation was Bar-48-Codon-adf. For the purposes of this mission he cloaked the angular, rough-ski

“I know. The photon screens are going crazy.” Bar-48-Codon-adf ran his fingers over the Kranazoi ship’s sensor inputs, while Bar-51-Codon-bgt began to check the roster of known Dirnan watcher ships in the vicinity. By the time she-it had identified the particular ship on the master chart, he had found the bit of information he most feared to find: three shapes of approximately Dirnan mass, bailing out and dropping Earthward.

This is some kind of trick,” he muttered. “They’re staging a landing. Three of them just dropped from that ship before it blew!”

“Are you sure they’re alive?” Bar-51-Codon-bgt asked.

He scowled at her-it. “They got away moments before the explosion. It’s a deliberate landing! They’re violating all the covenants! We’ve got to get after them and trace them, or we’re in the stew!”

Calmly, calmly. You aren’t making sense. If they were pulling a deliberate landing, why would they let their ship explode? That splash might be registered on every screen the Earthmen have. If you’d been ordered to land on Earth, would you do it so publicly?”