Robert Silverberg: Those Who Watch

He elbowed out of his vibrator chair and walked stiffly over to the bar. The obliging young noncom on bar duty gave him a bright smile.

“Sir?”

“Another Scotch. Make it a double.”

Was that a hint of reproach in the bartender’s eyes? A flicker of contempt for the boozy colonel? Barkeeps weren’t supposed to be patronizing toward their customers, even if the barkeep happened to be a clean-cut Oklahoma kid who wouldn’t touch the stuff except on a direct order from an officer. Falkner scowled. He told himself that he was too sensitive, that he was reading much too much into everybody’s expressions and words and even their silences these days. He was just a bundle of raw nerve endings, that was the trouble. And he drank this stinking ersatz-san pseudo-Glenlivet to ease his tensions, only it just left him with a new load of guilt and misery.

The boy pushed a glass toward him. Spray cans weren’t fashionable here in the officers’ lounge. So long as there was personnel around to pour, officers who were gentlemen liked to have their alcoholic beverages poured decently into glasses, not squirted like medicine in the approved 1982 manner. Falkner grunted in acknowledgment and slid a hairy-knuckled hand around the glass. Down the hatch. Foosh. He winced.

“Pardon my inquisitiveness, sir, but how is that Japanese stuff, anyway?”

“You’ve never had it?”

“Oh, no, sir.” The bartender looked at Falkner as though the colonel had just suggested some particularly foul form of self-abuse. “Never. I’m just not a drinking man at all. I guess that’s why the computer put me on bar duty here. Heh. Heh.”

“Heh,” Falkner said sourly. He eyed the Scotch bottle, so-called. “It’ll do, I guess. It’s got spirits in it and it tastes almost like the real thing, only terrible. And until we can do business with Scotland again, I’ll just have to go on drinking it. This damned crazy embargo. The President ought to have his—” Falkner caught himself. The boy grinned shyly. Despite himself, Falkner grinned too, and made his way back to his seat.

He stared at the glowing screen. That San Diego center, the seven-foot-six fellow, went high to dunk the ball through the net. You just wait, you lousy long-legged goon, Falkner told him silently. Next season there’ll be a couple of eight-footers in the league, I bet. They’ll knock you off your high horse.

A wisp of talk drifted his way: “If there are aliens from space watching us, how come they haven’t contacted us yet, eh?”

“Maybe they have.”

“Sure, and Frederic Storm is the prophet of the century, too. Don’t tell me you belong to a Contact Cult!”

“I didn’t say…”

Falkner kept his head rigidly trained toward the television wall. He would not, could not, let himself think about flying saucers during his free time. He hated even the very name of the things. It was all a bad joke, this saucer thing, and the joke was on him.

He was 43 years old, though he sometimes felt 143. He could remember, vaguely, when flying saucers first had come into the news. That had been in 1947, right after the Second World War. Falkner couldn’t remember the war itself — he had been born in 1939, on the day Poland was invaded, and he’d been in first grade when the war ended — but he did remember the flying saucer thing, because it had scared him. He had read about it in one of the slick magazines, and it had left him chilly with terror to think that a man out in Oregon or wherever was seeing ships from other worlds. Little Tommy Falkner had always been curious about the planets, about space, the original space bug himself at a time when such things were mysteries to the general public, but it had given him a crawly feeling and a week of nightmares to think about those 1947 saucers.

Saucer stories had come and gone. Crackpots had crept out of the woodwork to talk about their rides in space. Tom Falkner was also after a ride in space, but a real one. By the time he entered the Air Force Academy in 1957 he had forgotten all about the saucer craze, had thrown his science fiction magazines away. He was going to enroll in the American space program, if it ever got started. He was going to be a spaceman.

Falkner took an angry gulp at his drink.

A couple of weeks after he became a cadet, the Russians had a sputnik in orbit. Eventually an American space program materialized, lame, overdue, but authentic. Funny how the word spaceman dropped from the vocabulary, once science fiction started to turn real. Astronauts, that’s what they were called. Lieutenant Thomas Falkner enrolled in the astronaut program. He was a lot too young for Project Mercury, he watched in envy as the Gemini astronauts went up and came down; but there was room for him in Project Apollo. He was down on the list for a trip to the Moon in 1973. With luck, he figured, he might even make it to Mars before he turned forty.

In those years, space was real, space was earnest. He spent his days in flight simulation, his nights wrestling with mathematics. Flying saucers? For lunatics. ‘California stuff’, Falkner called the stories, even when they came from Michigan or South Dakota. In California they’d believe anything, including purple people eaters from the stars. He worked at his trade. His trade was space. Along the way, he got married, and it wasn’t a bad marriage, except there were no children.

He remembered a night in 1970 when he and a couple of the’ other Apollo boys did too much justice to a fifth of Scotch, the authentic item, twelve-year-old Ambassador. And Ned Reynolds, looped and incautious, turned to him and said, “You aren’t going to get off Earth, Tom. You want to know why? It’s because you don’t have any kids. Bad public relations. The astronaut’s got to have a couple clean-cut kids waiting for him to come home, or it spoils the TV part.”

Falkner had been amused, in a strained sort of way. It wasn’t the sort of thing a sober man would say to a friend, or the sort of thing a sober man would take from a friend, but he had laughed. “You aren’t going to get off Earth, Tom.” In vino veritas. Six months later, in a routine physical, they had discovered something awry in his inner ear, something out of kilter in the thing that governs the body’s equilibrium, and that was the end of his career with Project Apollo. Serenely they flunked him out, explaining with all regret that they couldn’t put a vertigo-prone man into orbit, even if he had so far displayed no overt tendencies… …

They found him a job. It was with Project Bluebook, the Air Force’s three-bit program that was set up to reassure the public that the flying saucers didn’t exist after all. That was a decade ago. Project Bluebook had expanded after the manner of any bureaucracy, and now was AOS, the Atmospheric Objects Survey. And poor old Tom Falkner, the flunked astronaut, was the AOS stringer for Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, and Colorado. He was a colonel in the flying saucer brigade. If he gritted his teeth and held on long enough, he’d be the next flying saucer general the Air Force would have.

He finished the drink he was holding. At the same moment he became aware that the basketball game had been interrupted, half a minute ago, for a local news bulletin. Something about a meteor, a big streak of light… no cause for alarm, absolutely no cause for alarm…

Falkner tried to focus his mind. Out of its depths an unwelcome thought came swimming upward. Saucer sighting. At last. The blue-faced bastards from Betelgeuse are here. No cause for alarm, but they just ate Washington, DC. Everything’s all right. Only a meteor.

He heard the telephone’s insistent chiming back of the bar.

And then the bartender came over and said, “It’s for you, Colonel Falkner. It’s your office calling. Somebody sounds awfully upset, sir!”