Robert Silverberg - Those Who Watch

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.

The other group, working its way up from Albuquerque, had nothing at all to go by except the assurance of the computers that they should look in this area. Their instruments remained totally silent. They had to use other methods: asking careful questions, studying police and military reports, placing cunningly worded advertisements in the newspapers. There were no results.

This group was led by a male named Sartak, who affected a rugged, excessively virile Earthman body. His companions were two Dirnan females, one of them somewhat his senior, the other a young one on her first watcher assignment and also in her first sexual group. Their names were Thuw and Leenor. Leenor had an agreeably innocent air about her that made her useful as an asker of questions. Sartak sent her down to the Albuquerque office of the Contact Cult to see if she could find anything worthwhile there. Like all Dirnans, Sartak had a hearty contempt for the cynical emptiness of Frederic Storm’s organization; but it was just remotely possible that some local citizen, having discovered an injured galactic alien, would choose to report that fact to the cult instead of to the military authorities. Sartak could not afford to ignore any leads.

He was programming one of his detecting instruments later that day when Leenor phoned, greatly agitated.

“I’ve just left the Contact Cult,” she gasped. “They don’t know anything about anything there. But — oh, Sartak, we’ve got to do something!”

“About what?”

“About the Kranazoi spy!”

Sartak glared into the telephone screen. “The what?’”

“He was at the cult place too. I could smell him across the room. He calls himself David Bridger, and he’s fat and horrible, and he’s looking for the survivors too!”

“How did you find that out?”

“By eavesdropping. I didn’t speak to him at all. I don’t think he noticed me. I’m sure he didn’t, Sartak.”

Sartak let his breath out in a long, slow snort of disgust. A member of the enemy mixed into this too! Wasn’t life hard enough?

He said, “Do you know where he’s staying?”

“A motel not far from ours. The name is — I’ve got it written down here — “ -

“What is it?”

She found the slip and told him. Sartak made a note of it. Then he said, “This is annoying, but we’ll make the most of it. Leenor, get over to his motel and let him pick you up. Pretend to be a moron — your usual act. I doubt that he’ll try to take you to bed, but if he does, cooperate. And find out everything he knows. He may already have information that’s of use to us.”

“What if he finds out my real nature?”

“He won’t. Kranazoi don’t have our sense of smell. He’s got no way of knowing what’s under your skin, and most likely he isn’t familiar enough with real Earthpeople to know that you’re a fake. Just stay very calm, giggle a lot, and listen carefully to everything he says.”

“But what if he does, find out, Sartak?”

“You’re carrying an antipersonnel grenade, aren’t you? We’re acting under the covenants here, and he isn’t. If he makes any hostile moves, kill him.”

“Kill him?”

“Kill him,” Sartak repeated with deliberate brutality. I know, I know, we’re all civilized beings here. But we’re rescuers, and he’s an obstructor. Put the grenade in his fat belly and let him sizzle, Leenor. If necessary, that is. Clear?”

The girl looked a little dazed.

“Clear,” she said.

Charley Estancia kept the Dirnan laser strapped to his belly all the time, even when he slept. He did not dare let it get away from him. It was small enough so that it didn’t bulge beneath his clothes, especially if he let his shirttails hang out. The cool metal against his skin was reassuring.

He knew that he shouldn’t have stolen it from Mirtin. But he hadn’t been able to resist. The little tool had been so fascinating that he had pocketed it while Mirtin looked the other way. He hoped that the man from the stars would forgive him for the theft, but he wasn’t sure.

The worst thing was that Charley couldn’t find a way to leave the village just now. The Fire Society dances were going on, and it was too risky to slip away. Everyone had to be present. They were staging the initiations, picking the new candidates and taking them into the kiva to mumble the half-forgotten words over them, then emerging to do the fire dance and the stick-swallowing dance. Charley did not expect to be selected for membership of the Fire Society; everybody in the pueblo knew that he was a troublemaker, and trouble-makers were best kept out of the secret societies. But there was always the crazy chance that they had picked him for initiation this year, and if they had, and couldn’t find him, he would be in real trouble.

So he had to sit tight, leaving Mirtin to shift for himself. He doubted that Mirtin would starve or die of thirst; what really worried Charley was the thought of Mirtin lying there imagining that Charley had stolen his laser and abandoned him, after all their friendly conversations. Charley hadn’t had a chance to explain about the Fire Society dance. He had miscalculated, thinking it would start a day later; he had planned to let Mirtin know about it ahead of time, but now he could not. Miserably, he skulked around the village, hoping for some way to slip off. The place was full of tourists, now. Cameras everywhere, fat white women telling the children how cute they were, bored-looking husbands. The tourists went everywhere, even right into people’s houses. They’d go into the kiva, too, if the governor of the pueblo hadn’t posted a couple of muscular boys to guard the entrance.

In the few secret moments Charley had, he examined the tool he had stolen.

He hesitated to try to open it; not yet, anyway. Mirtin’s talk about an Earthman learning things he was not supposed to learn did not bother Charley, but he was afraid that in opening the laser he would break it. First the wanted to study it in details from the outside, to see how it worked.

He used it to cut a thick log in half. He turned it on a rock and watched the sandstone melt into a puddle. He dug a ditch a foot deep and ten feet long. He made some mistakes, overshooting his target or covering too wide an area, but in an hour he had mastered the fine controls. Quite a gadget, he thought. It was like a little miracle. These star people, they were really something! He wished he could go off to Mirtin’s planet and see it. And go to school there.