Those Who Watch

She rushed outside, hoping against hope to see the fluffy black-and-white thing scratching against the doormat. But there was no kitten there; and, abruptly, a streak of light lanced through the sky.

She had no way of knowing that it had already begun to lose intensity. It was the brightest thing she had ever seen in the sky, so bright that instinctively she clapped her hands to her eyes. An instant later, though, she pulled her hands away and forced herself to watch as it completed its fiery trajectory.

What could it be?

Kathryn’s mind supplied an immediate answer: it was the trail of an exploding Air Force jet, one of the boys out of the Kirtland base at Albuquerque going to his death on a training flight. Of course. Of course. And tonight there would be a new widow somewhere, a new set of mourners. Kathryn shivered. To her surprise, tears did not come this time.

She followed the path of light. She watched it curve away toward the south, toward down Albuquerque, and then it disappeared, lost in the haze of brightness that rose from the city. Instantly Kathryn manufactured a new catastrophe, for in her private world catastrophe was always readily at hand. She saw the flaming jet crashing at Mach Three into Central Avenue, plowing up a dozen streets, taking a thousand lives, sending gas mains erupting with volcanic fury. Sirens wailing, women screaming, ambulances, hearses. . . .

Fighting back the hysteria she knew to be foolish, she tried more calmly to assess what she had just seen. The light was gone now, and the world was back to usual again, as usual as it could ever get in these days of her sudden, snowy widowhood. It seemed to her that she heard a muffled boom far in the distance, as of a crash. But all of her experience around Air Force environments told her that that giant streak of light in the sky could not have been an exploding jet, unless there were experimental models with yet-una

What then? An intercontinental rocket, maybe, carrying five hundred passengers to a fiery doom?

She could hear her husband’s voice saying. Think it through, Kate. Think it through.” He had said that a great deal, before he was killed. Kathryn tried to think it through. The brightness had come from the north, from Santa Fe or Taos, heading south. The intercontinental rockets traveled on east-west courses. Unless one of them was badly off course, her theory was faulty. And the rockets weren’t supposed to go off course. The guidance systems were infallible. Think, Kate, think it through. A Chinese missile, maybe? The war begi

The sky seemed peaceful now, as though nothing at all had happened.

She drew her wrap closer around her. At night, here at the edge of the desert, the wind ripped in as if it came straight from the Pole. Kathryn lived at the northernmost house of her subdivision; she could look out and see only the dry wasteland of sagebrush and sand ahead of her. When she and Ted had bought the house, two years ago, the agent had solemnly told her that new houses soon would be built to the north of theirs. It hadn’t happened. Financial problems, shortage of money, something like that, and Kathryn still lived on the boundary between somewhere and nowhere. South of her lay the town of Bernalillo, a suburb of Albuquerque, and civilization was spreading in an ever-widening strip along Highway 25 up from Albuquerque to here. But out to the north was nothing, open country full of coyotes and God knows what else. The coyotes had probably devoured her daughter’s kitten. Remembering the kitten, Kathryn clenched her fists and listened once more for the feeble sounds that had brought her outside in the first place.

Nothing. She heard only the whistling of the wind, or perhaps the mocking song of the coyotes. She looked warily at the sky; then, quickly, she turned and went indoors, closing the door, sealing it, putting her thumb to the alarm switch and waiting until the central office gave her the signal. It was good to be inside, in this well-lit, cozy house. She had loved it here at first, while Ted was alive. Now, the best she could do was hang on, and bar the doors to death, and wait for the numbness of widowhood to leave her. She was only thirty. Too young to remain numb forever.

A sleepy voice. “Mommy, where are you?”

“Here, Jilly. Here.”

“Did you find Kitten-cat?”

“No, sweet.”

“Why’d you go outside?”

“Just to look.”

“Did Kitten-cat go to look for Daddy, Mommy?”

The words stabbed her. Kathryn went into her daughter’s bedroom. The little girl lay snug and well covered in her bed, with the golden eye of the monitor peering solemnly down at her. At not quite three, Jill was old enough to climb out of the bed, not old enough to make a safe landing by herself, and so Kathryn still left the baby-monitor on, the watchful electronic guardian. You were supposed to stop using the monitor once a child was past its second birthday, but Kath-tryn could not bring herself to give up the added security.

Kathryn switched on the night lamp. Jill blinked. She had her father’s dark hair, her father’s delicate features. Some day she’d be beautiful, not a plain jane like her mother at all, for which Kathryn was grateful. But what good was it all, if Ted hadn’t lived to see it? Lost in action over Syria during the Peace Offensive of 1981. What had Syria ment to him? Why had a foreign land taken from her the only thing that mattered?

Correction: almost the only thing.

“Will Kitten-cat find Daddy and bring him back?” Jill asked.

“I hope so, love. Go to sleep and dream about Kitten-cat. And Daddy.”

Kathryn adjusted the monitor’s control console, setting up a gentle vibration in the girl’s mattress. Jill smiled. Her eyes closed. Kathryn nudged the light lower, and then off. As she stepped back into the living room, she decided to see if there was something on the eight o’clock news about that thing in the sky. “Flying saucers have landed—” something like that. She cupped her hand over the wall stud, and the video screen bloomed into vibrant life. She was just in time.

“—reports from Taos as far south as Albuquerque. Also observed at Los Alamos, Grants, and Jemez Pueblo. The meteor was one of the brightest ever seen, according to Dr J. F. Kelly, of the Los Alamos technical staff. A scientific team will begin searching for the remnants of the big fireball tomorrow. For those who missed it, we’ve got a tape replay coming up in just ninety seconds. And we repeat, there’s no cause for alarm, absolutely no cause for alarm over this unusual meteor.”

Thank God, Kathryn thought. A meteor. A shooting star. Not an exploding jet, not a crashing rocket. No new widows tonight. She did not want anyone else to suffer as she had had to suffer.

If only the kitten would return now. She could not hope that Ted would walk through the door, but the kitten might still be alive, perhaps safe somewhere, living in a garage down the block. Kathryn switched off the video. She listened for meows. Everything was silent out there.

Colonel Tom Falkner did not see the fireball. While it streaked across the sky he was in the officers’ lounge at the Air Force base, drinking too much cheap Japanese Scotch and watching without interest a televised basketball game between New York and San Diego. He heard, above the buzz of the a