Those Who Watch

Two

Aboard the Dirnan craft trouble had started over the Pole. It was a standard watcher ship, of the kind that had been patrolling the Earth for decades now, and the possibility of malfunction was so slight that a sane person did not think of such things. The ships worked well; that was all there was to it. But aboard this one there was a failure.

The first indication of problems came at ninety thousand feet, when the safety lamp began to glow. At once, warning signals throbbed beneath the flesh of the three members of the ship’s crew. Among the various useful circuits implanted in their bodies was one that let them know instantly if technical difficulties were arising. The essence of the mission called for the watchers to keep aloof from the watched, and the last thing any Dirnan wanted was a crash landing on Earth.

The crew was busy. It consisted of a standard three-facet sexual group, in this case two males and a female. They had been together for close to a century as Earth calculates time, and for the past ten of those years they had been performing watcher duty above Earth. The female, Glair, presided over the recording equipment that sought out information from the planet below. Mirtin processed and analyzed the information. Vorneen transmitted it to the mother world. In addition, they had various other duties that they shared on an informal basis: ship maintenance, food preparation, contact with other watchers, and such. They were a good team. When the warning signals came, each looked up from his own work instantly, ready to take whatever action was necessary for the safety of the craft.

Mirtin — the oldest, the calmest, wearing as his chosen disguise the body of a middle-aged Earthman — was the first to reach the analysis board. His fingers moved swiftly. He gathered the data and turned to the others.

“The plasma pinch is giving out. We’re going to blow within six minutes.”

“But that’s impossible,” Glair protested. “We—” Vorneen smiled gently. “It’s happening, Glair. It is possible.” He wore a younger man’s body, and he was perhaps too vain about his looks. But, of course, a Dirnan on watcher duty had to adopt the outer form of an Earthman, and it was merely sane to choose the configuration that best expressed the i

Glair, recovering from her momentary foolishness, was all business. “If we shunt the current around the opaquer circuit, that might keep the plasma together, right?”

“Try it,” Vorneen said. But Glair’s hands were already at work.

Mirtin laughed. “We’re visible now. It gives one a naked feeling, doesn’t it? Like standing in the marketplace at noon, stripped to one’s bones.”

“We can’t stay visible for long,” said Vorneen. “We’ll be smashing into every detector net the Earthmen have. There’ll be warheads flying.”

“I doubt it,” said Glair crisply. “They’ve seen our ships before and haven’t attacked them. Give them credit. They know we’re up here. At least, the governments do. Five minutes without our opaquer won’t be that serious.”

Vorneen knew that she was right. What was important now was to avert the explosion, not to fret about the fact that they had exposed themselves to every kind of Earthly detection system from the neutron screen to naked-eye observation. He pried open the hatch and wriggled into the power department.

The Dirnan ship was designed for indefinite flight without refueling. Its hull, a flattened sphere, tapered below to a cupola in which a fusion generator was mounted: nothing more nor less than a miniature sun, from which the ship drew all its necessary power. At the core of the system was a plasma — a fiercely hot soup of electrons and stripped atomic nuclei — kept in check by a powerful magnetic field. Nothing solid could contain that plasma without itself becoming part of the plasma, for what was there in the universe that could serve as a bottle for a gas whose heat was measured in the hundreds of millions of degrees? But the magnetic field set up a pinch effect that controlled the plasma, keeping it apart from anything it might devour. So long as the fiery plasma remained in check, the Dirnans could tap power from it forever, or as close to forever as made no difference to living beings. But if the pinch gave way, the three would find themselves living a dozen feet away from a full-fledged sun. Briefly.

Entering the crawl space, Vorneen approached the power core and saw to his dismay that five of the control rods had fused already, and ominous bluish arcs were flickering back and forth over the housing of the generator. He had no particular fear of dying, and of all ways to die this would surely be the quickest, but the professionalism in his nature drove him to try to reverse the situation if at all possible. About all he could do, he realized, was to try to draw power from elsewhere in the ship and shore up the magnetic pinch, and hope that the system would stabilize itself through the homeostatic controls that supposedly came into automatic play at times like this.

Already, the opaquer circuit had been killed, rendering the ship visible to Earthman eyes. That was regrettable, but it had happened before, too often for Vorneen to worry about it now. There’d be a new “flying saucer’ story on the video down there tonight, he thought. But if the fusion generator blew up, and happened to take a couple of cities with it, it would be a news story bigger than he cared to create.

“Cut the transmitter circuits,” he called.

“They’re cut,” Mirtin answered. “Twenty seconds ago. You didn’t notice?”

“No effect.”

“I’ll knock out the lights,” said Glair.

“Better knock out everything,” Vorneen shouted. “I’m not getting any gain. I’m losing pinch steadily!”

The ship went dark. The poor Earthmen would be deprived of the flashing red and green lights they loved so dearly; in fact, they’d be unable to see the saucer at all now, except on governmental detection equipment. Sourly Vorneen realized that he was writing a new chapter in the vast archive of secret documentary information on the watcher ships that the governments down there were known to possess. He hated the thought that he had joined the legion of bunglers giving the show away. But it was hardly his fault. What was happening now was purely a statistical phenomenon: given so many watcher ships in orbit above Earth, at least one was bound to malfunction in some spectacular way. And it happened to be theirs.

By now, of course, a distress signal had gone booming out across the galaxy. The moment a crew cut its transmitter circuits, breaking contact with the mother world, an SOS was automatically registered. Because of the light-year lag between Earth and Dirna, a couple of decades would pass before anyone at home knew that this particular ship was having problems, but the same distress signal was reaching hundreds of other Dirnan craft closer at hand. That was some comfort.

Vorneen came back into the heart of the ship. “No use,” he said. “She’s going to blow. We’ve got to abandon ship.”

Glair looked flustered. “But—”

Mirtin was at the controls. “I’ll take the ship higher. We want to be above the danger range. Thirty miles up, yes?”

“Higher,” said Vorneen. “As high as you can manage. And keep on course. We ought to be over desert country, anyway.”

“Can we take anything?” asked Glair.

“Ourselves,” said Vorneen.

The ship had been their home for many years. It was painful to leave it now: more painful for her, perhaps, than for us, Vorneen told himself. It was Glair who tended the little garden of Dirnan flowers they kept aboard, Glair who added all the little feminine touches to the harshness of the ship’s decor. Now they must leave garden and ship and all to their fate, and hurl themselves down onto the dark bosom of Earth. It was something every watcher had to live with, this possibility, but it had never seemed quite real to Vorneen, and he knew what an upheaval this must be for Glair. Only Mirtin seemed wholly detached from the calamity.