Those Who Watch

One of the things that bothered Falkner about the flying saucer stories was the ascending grapth line of reported sightings. Saucer sightings seemed to fluctuate in keeping with the temperature of international events: the first ones just after the Second World War, in the new atomic tensions of the U.S.-Russian rivalry, and then a lull for a while in the Eisenhower years, followed by a fresh flareup of the things about 1960. Then, after the Ke

You couldn’t correlate meteor showers with global politics. You could, though, blame the saucer stories on private anxieties, to some extent. Perhaps 99 percent of the sightings, Falkner figured, were inspired by edgy nerves.

But the others—

The trouble was that the quality of the sighters was changing. At first, most of the saucer stories had come from menopausal matrons and goitrous, slab-jawed rustics with steel-framed eyeglasses, but gradually there had been a shift away from the obvious crank segment of the population and toward those whose words carried intrinsic weight. When bank presidents, policemen, congressmen, and physics professors all began seeing round shapes in the sky, the thing was past the crackpot stage, Falkner had to admit. And, particularly since 1975, the number of sightings and the number of respectable sighters had risen sharply. The lunatic fringe, the i-rode-in-a-flying-saucer fringe, was always around. Falkner ignored them. He could not ignore the others. Still, he had a deep and abiding emotional commitment to his work, of a negative sort. He could not allow himself to believe that the so-called saucers were anything more than natural phenomena. If they really were ships from space, then his assignment to AOS was really important, and the pang of bitterness that pricked him would withdraw. Tom Falkner needed that pang as his spur. And so he growled with hostility at any suggestion that his job might really be concerned with actual events, or that it might have any relevance to his country’s security.

He jacked out the data banks and keyed in the news from the metal-detectors.

Nothing. No unusual objects seen on the desert.

He talked to Bronstein, who by now was eighty miles south of him, in the vicinity of Acoma Pueblo.

“Any news? Any reports?”

“Nothing from here,” said Bronstein. “They saw the sky-streak at Acoma, though. Also at Laguna. The chief says a lot of his people are scared.”

“Tell them there’s nothing to worry about.”

“I did. It doesn’t help. They’re spooked, Tom.”

“Tell them to do a spook dance, then.”

“Tom — ”

“Okay, I’m sorry. Sir.” Falkner hit the sarcasm heavily. Yawning, he said, “You know, the White House is spooked too? Poor Weyerland’s been getting the needles for the last hour. He wants results, or else.”

“I know. He called me.”

Falkner frowned. He didn’t like the idea of his superior officer conferring with his adjutant. There was a chain of command to deal with such situations. He broke off and switched to a different cha

Restlessly, Falkner pushed buttons, twisted dials, jacked circuits in and out. On each of these fruitless search trips through the desert after some kind of sighting, he took a dry pleasure in letting his hands rove over the intricate control panel, making full use of his electronic gadgetry even though he was firmly convinced that he would never find anything. A couple of months ago it had finally dawned on him what he was doing when he fiddled with the equipment in this compulsive way. He was playing astronaut.

Sitting here hunched in his warm half-track, he might just as well be hunched in a space capsule orbiting four hundred miles up. Except, of course, that his buttocks registered the jolting crunch of track against sand. But he had the whole array of bright lights and tiny screens, a child’s dream of spaceman’s hardware, and he could punch in data to his heart’s content. He had not been happy to draw the parallel, because it brought home to him the futility of these saucer searches, and his own shattering failure of career. Yet he went on, randomly stabbing buttons.

He talked to Topeka again. He chatted with the boys in the two northern half-tracks, one out past Taos by now and the other cruising near the Spanish towns on the other side of Santa Fe National Forest. He monitored the four southern half-tracks that were fa

And now they were tossing in a few astronomers, too. A, certain Alvarez, from Mount Palomar, had released a statement. So had one Matsuoko, a leading Japanese astronomer. Had Alvarez seen the fireball himself? Nothing in his words indicated that. Had Matsuoko? Of course not. Yet both of them were speaking learnedly of meteors, prissily drawing the distinction between meteor and meteorite, smothering any anxiety in a torrent of comforting verbiage. By midnight, the Government was releasing selected bits of information from the detector nets and the eye satellites. Yes, the eyes up there had seen the meteor. No, there was nothing to fear. Purely natural phenomena. Falkner felt sick.

His ingrained obstinate skepticism about the Atmospheric Objects was matched only by his ingrained obstinate skepticism about official Government a

At three in the morning he was right up at the edge of the mountains. There was a logging road through the national forest that he could take if he wanted to take it, but he ordered the driver to swing around. He would return to Albuquerque on a big loop, around the Mesa Prieta, skirting Jemez Pueblo, and down the western side of the Rio Grande to home. They were still awake in Topeka, and probably in Washington as well. Good for them, the heroes.