Had Vorneen survived the explosion? Had Mirtin lived?
She had been too busy trying to counteract her own faulty jump to pay any attention to what was happening above her. Glair assumed that her two mates had jumped in time, but she had no way of being certain. Again and again she relived her jump — that stupidly akward stumble, that moment of total paralysis as terror invaded her soul, that horrid unbroken plummeting fall. And then the recovery, after a drop of thousands of feet, and the feeling of relief as the deployment screen took hold and broke her descent. Of course, there was no hope of a smooth landing by then; she had already built up a ferocious velocity, and the screen couldn’t possibly decelerate her in time. The best it could do was keep her from being smashed to jelly. She had landed — though she had choked off consciousness before the moment of impact came. She had been badly hurt. She had been found. Glair was sure of nothing else.
On the fourth day she woke.
She felt a tickling sensation against her arm, first, and though it was something she had felt before in these days of pain, this time it amused her rather than annoyed her. Glair opened her eyes to see what was happening. A muscular Earthman stood above her, pressing a small glossy brown ceramic tube against the fleshy part of her arm. He straightened up instantly when her eyes met his.
“You’re finally awake,” he said. “How do you feel?”
“Ghastly. What were you trying to do to my arm?”
“Give you an intravenous injection. I’m trying to feed you. But I’ve been having trouble finding your veins.”
Glair attempted to laugh. Laughing, she knew, was what the Earthmen did to relieve social stress. But it was a long time since she had gone through her Earthman-customs drill, and her facial muscles did not easily produce the configuration that was laughter. She had to struggle, and the result must have seemed more like a grimace of anguish than like a laugh, for it drew a sympathetic sigh from the Earthman.
He said, “You’re in pain. I have some paindamp here — ”
Glair shook her head. “No. No, I’m going to be all right. Is this a hospital? Are you a doctor?”
“No. And no.”
She was relieved and puzzled. “Where am T, then?”
“At my home. In Albuquerque. I’ve been taking care of you since I found you that night.”
Glair studied him. He was the first Earthman she had ever seen in the flesh — as opposed to the solidograph recordings that every Dirnan watcher dealt with during the training period — and the sight of him fascinated her. How thick his body was! How heavy his shoulders! Her sensitive nostrils picked up the scent of his body, fragrant and exciting, against the sharper scent of Earth’s air. He looked almost as much like a beast as like an intelligent creature, so primor-dially powerful was his frame.
And it seemed to Glair that this man, her rescuer, was in mortal pain. Inexperienced as she was with Earthmen, she could read the signs of distress on their faces. This man held his jaws clamped so tensely that the muscles bunched and rippled in his cheeks. His tongue moved swiftly and ceaselessly over his lips; his nostrils were rigid. His eyes, rimmed with dark lines, bore the red tracks of sleeplessness. There was something terrifying about the sight of such strain on the face of a sentient being. Forgetting her own difficulties for the moment, her injuries, her isolation from her own kind, her fear of discovery, Glair tried to radiate warm sympathy for this man’s problems, whatever they were.
She looked about the room. It was small, austere, with a low ceiling and modest furnishings. Through a translucent part of one wall sunlight flooded in. She was lying on a narrow bed, unclothed, a light blanket drawn up as far as her waist. The firm globes of her breasts were exposed, which was of no concern to her but which seemed to be causing some sexual disturbance to her host, considering the obvious conflicting pull that drew his eyes to her chest and away from it again instantly. The Earthman appeared to be suffering from half a dozen different sorts of tension at once.
She lay still, exhausted from the effort of translating theoretical terms learned long ago into realities. She had been well prepared, like any watcher, for the likelihood that she might have to make a forced landing on Earth. All the same, it required conscious effort to adapt herself to her new environment, to think: This is a bed, these are blankets, that is a wall, the Earthman is wearing a gray shirt and brown trousers. It was not just a matter of finding Earthman equivalents for Dirnan words, but of identifying whole concepts. Dirnans did not use beds, blankets, shirts, or trousers. Or many other things that had abruptly become of vital concern to her.
He said, “Both your legs were broken. I’ve set them. I’ve been able to get some food down your throat. I’ve watched over you for three days and nights. I thought you were going to die, the first day and a half. But you said ‘Help me,’ do you remember that? You were conscious when I found you, and that’s what you said to me. Those were the last words I heard from you until just now. I’ve helped you, I hope.”
“You’ve been very kind. Probably I would have died without your help.”
“But I’m a lunatic. I should never have brought you here. I should have driven you right to town, to the military hospital. Under tight security.” He was quivering as if every muscle in his huge body were at war with every other muscle. “I’m inviting a court-martial doing this. It’s pure madness.”
She did not know what a court-martial was, but the Earthman seemed obviously close to collapse. Soothingly she said, “You need rest. You must not have slept at all, talcing care of me. You look unhappy.”
He knelt beside the bed. He flipped the blanket up, covering her to the chin, as though the sight of her breasts were disturbing or perhaps disgusting to him. His face was close to hers, and Glair saw the torment in his eyes.
In a low, edgy voice he whispered, What are you?”
Her improvised cover story flowed easily to her lips. “I’m a student pilot,” she said. “1 took off with my trainer from the Taos airport right after dinner and we developed engine trouble over Santa Fe — ”
His hands balled into massive fists. “Look, that sounds very slick, but I’m not going to buy it. You’ve been lying here three days naked in my house. I’ve been doctoring you. I’ve had a good chance to look you over. I don’t know what you are, but I know what you aren’t. You aren’t a sweet little girl from Taos who happened to bail out when your jet went haywire. You aren’t human at all. Don’t pretend. For God’s sake, tell me what you are, where you’re from! I’ve been living in hell for the whole time you’ve been here.”
Glair hesitated. She knew what the rules were that governed accidental contact with Earthmen. You were supposed to guard at all costs against being found out for what you were, particularly against discovery by any sort of governmental authority. But the rules were not inflexible. You were entitled to take what steps you could to preserve your own life, and in certain cases a judicious disclosure of your true identity might be deemed permissible. The object was to survive, and get off Earth as fast as you could. But in her injured state she could go nowhere, and this man was her only means of survival. Glair construed the regulations to mean that she could confide in him for the sake of staying alive, under the assumption that once she had made good her escape no one would believe his story, anyway.
“What do you think I am?” she said.
“You landed in the desert after the damnedest fireball anybody’s ever seen in the sky. You didn’t have a parachute, only a kind of rubber suit full of weird tools and equipment. You were muttering to yourself in a language I Had never heard before. All right, I could still believe that you were a spy from some foreign country. But I took you home. I shouldn’t have done it, and I don’t know why I did, but I did it, and I had my half-track driver transferred to Wyoming so he wouldn’t say anything, and I put you in bed and got that suit off you, and your rubber underwear too. All the time I was doing that, I was trying to tell myself that you were a human being.”