Those Who Watch

She covered him with her warmth.

He knew the anatomy, but not the method of effecting consummation. Very shortly he learned it. The next thing he did not know was the increment of pleasure: when was he supposed to stop? He learned that, too, when Kathryn cried out in ecstasy and his reflexes supplied the final answer.

Afterward she clung to him, weeping, kissing his cool skin.

After that, she drew back and lectured him for having left the bed. “You could have hurt yourself! What did you think you were doing?”

“Testing my leg.”

“You shouldn’t be walking for weeks yet.”

“I’m not so sure. My bone has knit. I ran into trouble because I got dizzy.”

“Healed so fast?”

“That’s right.”

“But that’s impossible! It couldn’t have — no broken bone could—”

“No human bone.”

“But you’re not“

“No.”

“Say it”

“I’m not human, Kathryn.”

“Yes. I wanted you to say it.”

“And if I hadn’t left the bed, you wouldn’t have come in and caught me, and we wouldn’t have—”

“No.”

“I’m glad, Kathryn. I don’t repent at all.”

“Neither do I.” Defiantly. “Only— I’m afraid, Vorneen.”

“Of what?”

“I don’t know.” She took his hand and put it to her breasts. “What we did — what you are — if you aren’t human, how could you make love?”

“The people who built my body knew what they were doing, I guess.”

“Who built your body?”

“My outer body. My disguise. Inside it’s different.”

“Vorneen, I’m lost. Tell me—”

“Later. We’ve got a lot of time to talk. Not now.”

“I feel so strange, Vorneen. As though I’ve crossed a river into a strange land, a place I’ve never been before, and I don’t know where it is, I don’t know where I am.”

“Do you like where you are now, wherever it may be?! “I think so,” she said.

“Then why worry? You can pick up a map of the country-side some other time.” She laughed. She embraced him. “Do you still feel dizzy?” she asked. Tor different reasons, now.”

“And your leg? You didn’t hurt it again while you were standing on it?”

“No.”

“Nor while we were—”

“No. Especially not then.”

He kept her close to him. He felt more relaxed than at any time since trouble had begun aboard the ship. And he had answered most of his questions about the body he wore. It responded; it could give pleasure. Functionally he was sufficiently Earthlike to meet the present needs. He found that quite remarkable. He found it even more remarkable how tempestuous Kathryn could be, once she allowed herself to show her emotions.

They got little sleep that night, and Vorneen learned a “good deal more about North American erotic techniques. Toward morning he heard Kathryn murmuring sleepily, “I love you, Vor, I love you, I love you!”

Well, that could be part of the ritual too, he told himself. He wondered if he should reply in kind and decided against it. As a being from another world, he was not required to follow the local rituals, and he might look too insincere if he tried. The successful seducer, he had learned in his youth, is always sincere . . . where sincerity is appreciated.

After that, Kathryn slept in his bed every night, and they were lively nights indeed. By day she helped him learn to walk again. She got him a stick to lean on, though he preferred to lean on her arm; he shook off his dizziness, rebuilt his muscles, began to move about with some assurance. His leg was still lame, but that would clear up. Kathryn gave him a robe to wear, evidently so that propriety would be observed in front of the child; Kathryn herself no longer seemed bound by any taboos whatever. He watched her become more radiant day by day, night by night.

She talked a good deal of how much she loved him. She talked very little of where he had come from and what he might be doing on Earth.

Vorneen accepted the talk of love casually, as part of the game. But then, somewhere, he discovered that he had unknowingly crossed a bridge himself, and what had been for him a sport had turned into an emotional union. He realized it when he considered that he might be returning to his own people at any time. That was splendid — and then he felt the unexpectedly powerful pang at the awareness that it meant parting from Kathryn. He did not want to part from her. He wished actively to remain with her. He looked with dismay on the idea of a separation. Which meant he had fallen in love with her.

How had it happened?

It was unthinkable. He was biologically different from her. He had gone to bed with her merely to find out if it were possible. Those thrustings and gruntings — how could they have created an emotional bond between an Earthman and a Dirnan? The whole idea was inexpressibly bewildering. He knew there were some Dirnans who would regard this relationship as perverse, while others would have him brainburned at once. He felt helpless in the fact of events. He had never meant this to happen at all.

In love? With an Earthwoman?”

The covenants did not specifically prohibit sexual relationships between the watchers and the watched, because those who had drawn the covenants had never entertained the possibility that such relationships might develop. Vorneen took small comfort in knowing that what he had done was not illegal, technically. Soon, he suspected, he would be leaving Earth. What would happen to Kathryn then? And to him?

Fifteen

The rescue mission consisted of six Dirnans, two teams of three. Each comprised a complete sexual group: male-female-female in one case, male-female-male in the other. They entered New Mexico the day after the explosion, and began to comb the state for the three possible survivors. The task would have been easier if they had had communicator signals to guide them.

All they had to go by were probabilities, plus one extremely distorted signal. The computers, weighing all the likelihoods, had decided that all three Dirnans must have come down approximately in the center of the state: one in the vicinity of Albuquerque, one closer to Santa Fe, and one west of the line co

The rescue team led by Furnil and his two mates had a slight advantage over the other group. Coming down from the north, they were guided by the dim, uncertain bleeping of the damaged communicator, and so they had at least an initial clue. The communicator’s signal was emerging as a bleary smear, spread over too many wavelengths, but it provided a clue of sorts. It told them that one of the three Dirnans who had fallen to Earth had almost certainly landed within a few miles of the Rio Grande somewhere not too far south of Santa Fe, and that he was still alive — for the communicator had to be reactivated every time a signal was sent out.

Finding him was a tall order, though. The Dirnans immediately established their local command post in a motel on the lower outskirts of Santa Fe and set up their portable detecting instruments in the hope that they could clean up that blurred signal and trace it to its source. They attempted to factor out the distortion and narrow their search vectors. Their first calculation showed that the missing watcher could have come down in the vicinity of Cochiti Pueblo, but that proved to be incorrect — or, if the Dirnan had landed there, the Indians were keeping it well concealed. A radical correction in the vectors placed the watcher’s location across the Rio Grande, out by the ruins of Pecos Pueblo; a quick trip there produced nothing, and some reexamination showed that it had been a mistake. The signal was corning from the western bank of the river. They kept looking.