Those Who Watch

They soared high into the night sky.

Strange rumbling sounds were coming from the power compartment now. Vorneen tried not to think of what might be going on in there, or how close they might be to the actual explosion. Glair was getting into her jump equipment. He seized his. Mirtin, locking the controls in place, started to slip his harness on.

“We’re going to be scattered,” Vorneen said. “We may land hundreds of miles apart from each other.” He saw Glair’s frightened eyes. Ruthlessly, he went on, “We may be injured in landing, or perhaps even killed. But we’ve got to jump. Somehow we’ll find each other again.” He yanked the ejection lever, and the hatch they had never expected to use yawned wide. The atmosphere rushed from the ship’s cabin;

but the jump equipment protected them from the airlessness. Hastily they moved toward the hatch.

“Out,” Vorneen said to Glair.

She jumped. He watched in cold horror as she spun away from the ship, arcing out into nothingness with such violence that he feared she had lost consciousness. She had not been trained to jump so clumsily. But it was a long time since they had run a jump drill aboard this ship. Sickened, he knew that Glair must have jumped to her death, and at the loss of one of his mates he felt an anguish far more terrible than he had ever known. Abandoning the ship was nothing, really; but losing Glair …

“Out,” said Mirtin behind him.

And then Vorneen left the ship. For all his torment, he executed the jump perfectly. This was the moment when nightmares became solid; any watcher dreamed hundreds of times of making the jump, but for most it remained just a dream. Here he was, hurtling downward with thirty miles of void beneath him, and Glair probably dead already, and a planet of hostile strangers waiting for him. Yet with strange calmness he cut in his life-support system and felt the sudden impact as his deployment screen steadied his fall. He would live.

And Mirtin?

It was difficult to look up. Vorneen tried. But he was thousands of feet below the ship now, and he could see neither the ship itself nor any sign of Mirtin. Had he jumped? Of course he had. Mirtin made a fetish of rationality; no last-minute panic for him, no staying aboard the doomed ship. No doubt Mirtin was smoothly falling Earthward at this moment. Vorneen looked downward once again.

An instant later the explosion came.

It was more horrifying than he would ever have dreamed it might be. If it had happened a moment before, while he was stupidly looking up, it would have boiled away his eyes. As it was he shook with awe as the heavens above him glowed with the quick light of a sudden sun. There was no hard radiation in a fusion generator, of course; neither he nor the distant towns below would suffer. Nor did the well-spaced atmospheric molecules up here transmit much sound. He felt heat on his back and shoulders, but after all, this had been only a tiny sun, strong enough to power one small spacecraft, and he was not charred, nor would anyone below be aware of warmth. What was frightening was the light, that savage glare passing above him and streaking through the sky. It was as though the universe had cracked open up there, allowing the primal light of first creation to shine through. Closing his eyes scarcely helped. What would it look like, down on Earth, he wondered? Would they experience terror and awe? Or would it seem like no more than a robust meteor trail?

There it went, following the trajectory of what had been the ship. At least there would be no fragments of the craft to arouse mystery on Earth: a small blessing. But that light! That monstrous light!

Vorneen lost consciousness.

When he regained control of himself, he was appalled to find a row of houses not far below his dangling feet. On Earth, so soon? Another thousand yards and he would at last be touching the soil of the planet he had watched so long. Down … down…

By now Glair would have landed. He tried not to think about her fate. It was Mirtin he had to find, the sooner the better, and together they’d await the rescue crew that shortly would be here to pick them up. Meanwhile the problem was survival. He cursed the luck that had brought him down in civilization, with all this good wilderness about. Vorneen did what he could to steer himself away from the houses, toward the flat scrubby plateau just beyond.

Now the ground was rushing toward him. He had never expected the landing to be like this. Didn’t one waft gently to the ground? No. No. He was falling like a bomb. He would smash right through the roof of the last house in that row. He would—

He swerved, but only by a matter of feet.

Then the most savage pain he had ever experienced, in a life that had been almost wholly free from pain, struck him and stu

Tree

At the Albuquerque office of the Atmospheric Objects Survey, everything was ready to roll half an hour after the fireball had been sighted. The maintenance men had loaded fully charged batteries into the six electric half-tracks; the computer had already produced a vector chart showing possible landing sites for the space debris, if any; Bronstein, Colonel Falkner’s adjutant, had summoned the off-duty men. Now they stood in an uneasy semicircle around the glow-board in the main office, staring at the streaky red line that marked the plotted path of the Atmospheric Object.

Fifteen feet away, behind the locked and bolted door of the bathroom, Tom Falkner was trying hard to sober up.

On the jeep ride over here from the officers’ lounge Falkner had swallowed an antistim tablet. They were handy little things, guaranteed to clear the cobwebs out of an alcohol-woozy mind in half an hour or so. But the process wasn’t pleasant. What the pills did was to deliver a neat double jolt to the thyroid and the pituitary, temporarily deranging the hormone balance and putting the metabolism into high gear. All bodily processes were accelerated, including the one that burned the alcohol out of the blood. Under antistims, you lived six or seven hours in a realtime environmental situation lasting about ten minutes. It was rugged, but it worked. When you had settled down to a leisurely evening of stupefying yourself, and suddenly discovered that it was vital to destupefy yourself at once, there was no alternative but to use the tablets.

Falkner crouched on the bathroom’s tiled floor, gripping the towel rack with both hands. He was shaking. Great blotches of sweat darkened his uniform. His face was red, his pulse rate was over a hundred and climbing, and the terrible thunder of his heart was like a drum pounding in his rib cage. He had already vomited, getting rid of the last four or five ounces of Scotch before it had had a chance to filter very far into his system, and this violent i

After a long time he rose.

His fingers, extended experimentally before him, waggled as though he were typing a letter. He fought to steady them. The blood had drained from his face now. Falkner eyed himself in the mirror, and shuddered at what he saw. He was a big man, blocky-shouldered, with close-cropped black curly hair and a little bristly mustache and bloodshot eyes. In his astronaut days he had been careful not to let his weight get above 165, but those days were long gone, and now he had fleshed out to the full capacity of his frame and then some. In uniform he looked burly and massive. Stripped of that khaki exoskeleton, he tended to sag and bulge a little. He wasn’t proud of what he had become in his middle years. But he hadn’t asked for any of this, neither the i