Those Who Watch

Seventeen

“Two alien races watching us,” Tom Falkner said. “Well, I suppose that’s logical enough.”

“And watching each other, too,” said Glair. She stood by the opaqued window of Falkner’s bedroom, shamelessly nude, balancing herself on two canes. She took an experimental step, and another, and another. Her legs felt stronger each time she moved. She was cautiously optimistic. “How am I doing?” she asked.

“Marvelous. You’re in fine shape.”

“I wasn’t asking about my shape. I’m asking about the way I walk.”

“That’s fine too,” Falkner said. He laughed and came over to her and ran his hands quickly, possessively, over the firm contours of her body. His fingertips dug into the yielding bounciness of her breasts. He murmured, “I could almost start to believe that this stuff is real!”

“Don’t lose your perspective, now,”

“I love you, Glair,”

“I’m a creepy-looking thing from another planet, and I rode here in a flying saucer.”

“I love you anyway.”

“You’re a madman.”

“Very likely,” said Falkner complacently. “But don’t let that worry you. Do you love me, Glair?”

“Yes,” she whispered.

The strange thing was that she knew she meant it. She had begun this relationship by feeling sorry for Falkner — the poor Earthman had tied himself into so many psychological knots — and, because he had taken her in and nursed her back to health, she felt grateful to him and wanted to do something for him. He seemed so lonely, so troubled, so confused. A little warmth and reassurance was what he appeared to need, and those commodities were Glair’s specialties. Pity and gratitude are never very solid foundations for real love, Glair knew, even when the people involved belong to the same species. She did not expect anything binding to develop out of them here. Yet as he extended his sick leave to be with her day after day, she found herself sliding imperceptibly into a feeling of real affection for Falkner.

He had strength, underneath all the bitterness. His life had taken a bad turn when he had failed as an astronaut, and nothing had ever been right for him since then, but he was not fundamentally the weakling he seemed to be. The drinking, the outrageous self-pity, the deliberate creation of obstacles for himself — these were effects, not causes. They could be reversed, and once they were, the result would be a reasonably happy, healthy, sound human being. Once Glair saw that, she stopped looking upon him as a broken thing that needed to be fixed, and began seeing him in a more immediately equal relationship.

Of course, there could never be anything permanent. She had been a hundred Earth years old when he was born; she would live for hundreds of years after he died. She had experienced vastly more than he could imagine. Even an Earthman of middle years was really a blank-souled child beside the most i

Then, too, the physical union was unreal. Glair felt pleasure in his embrace, yes, but mainly it was the pleasure of giving pleasure, coupled with a faint, insignificant throb-: bing of her outer nervous system. What she and Falkner did in bed together was amusing to her, but it was not sex in any form that was meaningful to her as a Dirnan. Naturally Glair had not let him know this, though probably he suspected it. She had known women who toyed with pets in this fashion.

Yet Falkner was more than a pet to her. Despite her edge in years and maturity, despite the alie

“Walk across the room once more and sit down,” he said to her. “Don’t strain yourself too much at the begi

Glair nodded and gripped her canes and started out across the bedroom. A spasm of weakness came over her midway, but she waited for it to pass and continued successfully toward the bed. Sinking down on it, she let the canes fall to the floor.

“How do the legs feel now?”

“Better and better.”

He massaged her calves and the backs of her knees. She lay back, relaxing. The bruises and bumps that had dis-figured her face for the first few days were all gone now. She was radiantly beautiful again, and she liked that idea. Falkner stroked her in an oddly chaste way, not at all as though this were the prelude to making love. He said, “Two races of watchers? Tell me more,”

“I’ve already told you too much.”

“The Dirnans and the Kranazoi. Which of you got to us first, anyway?”

“No one knows,” Glair said. “Each side claims that its scouts were the first to spot Earth. It was all so many thousands of years ago that we can’t honestly say. I like to think that we were the first, that the Kranazoi are just interlopers. But perhaps I’m just starting to believe our own propaganda.”

“So the flying saucers have been looking at us since Cro-Magnon man,” Falkner muttered. “That explains the wheel Ezekiel saw, I guess, and a lot of other things. But why has it been only in the last thirty or forty years that we’ve noticed the watchers regularly?”

“Because there are so many more of us now. Until your nineteenth century, one Dirnan ship and one Kranazoi ship watched Earth, and that was all. As your technology developed, we’ve had to increase the number of watchers. By 1900 we had five ships apiece in your skies. After you got wireless transmission, we added a few more ships to monitor your broadcasts. Then came atomic energy, and we knew we had something special on our hands. I think we had about sixty watchers on duty here in 1947.”

“And the Kranazoi?”

“Oh, they always keep pace with us, and we with them. Neither side lets the other get ahead even an inch.”

“Mutual escalation of watchers, eh?”

Glair gri

She stopped.

“You can tell me,” he said. “You’ve already told me so much.”

“Hundreds of ships apiece,” she replied. “I don’t know the exact figure, honestly, but it’s probably a thousand of ours and a thousand of theirs, spread out all over the system. We have to. You people have moved so fast. And so it’s no surprise that you keep getting reports of Atmospheric Objects. We’re pretty thick in your skies, and you’ve got sophisticated sensing devices. You have access to the files of AOS, Tom. Did you honestly believe the watchers were hallucinations, knowing what your own Government has observed?”

“I tried to wish it all away. I didn’t want to believe. But now, I’ve got no choice, do I?”

Laughing, she said, “No. You don’t”

“But how long are you and the Kranazoi going to keep on watching us?”

“We don’t know, Tom. Frankly, we don’t know how to handle you at all. Your race is unique in galactic history: the first people who learned how to get out into space before they learned how to control their own belligerence. We’ve never had an immature race before that could build space vehicles and fusion weapons. Usually the ethical maturity comes a couple of thousand years before the technological maturity. But not here.”

“To you, we’re a bunch of dangerous children, is that it?” Falkner asked, reddening.

Glair tried to sound playful as she said, “I’m afraid that’s it. Lovable children, though. Some of you.”

He ignored her tender caress. “You keep watching us, then. Each of you has your own galactic sphere of influence, and each of you would love to draw us into the right sphere, but you don’t dare. And each side is afraid that the other side will somehow come to terms with us. So you aren’t really watching us at all. You’re watching each other.”

“Both. We have an agreement concerning Earth, though. A covenant. Neither Dirnans nor Kranazoi are allowed to land on Earth at all, or to make contact with Earthmen from space. It’s strictly hands off, while we wait for Earth to attain the degree of maturity we think is minimal for entry into interstellar civilization. Once you reach that stage, the ambassadors will start landing. They’ll unroll their mats and begin talking business. Until then, the covenants restrict us from approaching you.”