He rose and walked to the window and folded one big hand inside the other. Glair heard a popping, crackling sound as he applied pressure to his knuckles.
He went on, “I examined you. Both legs broken. While I was examining one of your legs, just touching it a little to find out how bad the damage was, I felt the bone sliding back into place. What kind of bones do you have, anyway? They must have broken clean across, and they popped right back. You don’t perspire, either. And you don’t excrete. The equipment’s there, but you don’t use it. Your body temperature is eighty-five degrees. I couldn’t figure out your pulse rate at all. When I tried to give you intravenous injections of food, I couldn’t find any of the right veins, so I had to slop the food into your mouth. But I don’t even know if you needed the food.” He walked over to her again and stared levelly into her eyes. “You aren’t a human being. You’re the perfect plastic shell of a beautiful girl, wrapped around God knows what. You’re human from the skin out. So what are you?”
In a quiet voice Glair said, “I’m a watcher. I come from Dirna. That’s a distant planet of another sun. Does it make you happy to know that?”
He reacted as though she had plunged a dagger into his body. He stepped back, hissing briefly, his face becoming harsh with confusion. His hand came up stiffly and clapped against his breast, and he rubbed it as if in pain. His tone was leaden as he asked, “You’re from a flying saucer, is that it?”
“You call our ships that, yes.”
“Say it! You’re from a flying saucer! Say the whole silly sentence!”
“I’m from a flying saucer,” Glair murmured, feeling foolish as she used the foolish phrase.
The Earthman turned away from her again. “I could go downtown and preach to the Contact Cult now,” he said hollowly. “I could tell them all about the beautiful saucer woman I found in the desert, how I took her home and nursed her to health, how she told me stories of her planet far away. The whole lunatic business, just like the others. Except you’re real, aren’t you? I’m not hallucinating any of this! Do you understand what I’m saying?’-
“Most of it.”
“Is all of this really happening?”
“Yes,” Glair said softly. “Come here.”
He went to her. She put her hand against the hard, powerful piston that was his arm. She had never touched the flesh of an Earthman before. Her fingers dug in, and the solid flesh resisted her grasp.
“Touch me,” she said.
She brushed the blanket away from her body and whipped it to the floor. The Earthman blinked his eyes as if blinded by sudden light. Looking down at herself, over the hills and valleys of the body that had become so familiar to her in the past ten years, Glair saw the light brown wrappings that covered her legs from ankles to knees. He had cared for her well, tenderly doing what he could do to heal her broken limbs.
He touched her.
With a timidity that seemed out of place in so mature-looking a man, he rested his hands on her shoulders and ran them along her arms. Lightly and only for a moment he touched the resilient mounds of her breasts. He caressed the sides of her abdomen and the taut columns of her thighs. His breath was coarse, ragged, irregular; his hands trembled, and she sensed the acrid odor of his perspiration cutting across the earlier, more pleasant odor of his flesh. She had mastered the technique of smiling now, and her smile did not waver while his hands searched her flesh. Finally he withdrew from her, picked up the blanket, put it back over her.
“Am I real, or am I a dream?” she asked.
“Real. Your skin’s so smooth … so convincing.”
“Watchers must look like Earthmen. Sometimes it becomes necessary for us to come among you. Not often. When it is, we must seem to be of your kind. But there is always a chance that one of you will come too close and discover what lies beneath the skin. We have no way of changing our inner nature to duplicate yours.”
“So it’s true, then? Beings from space have been watching Earth from — from flying saucers?”
“It has been true for many years. We have watched Earth longer than you have been alive. Longer than I have been alive. The first patrols came here many thousands of years ago. Today we watch more closely than ever.”
The Earthman’s hands swung limply at his sides. His mouth worked, but no words came forth.
Finally he said, “Do you know what the AOS is? The Atmospheric Objects Survey?”
Glair had heard of it. “It is the organization that you American Earthmen have established. To watch the watchers, so to speak.”
“Yes. To watch the watchers. Well, I work for the AOS. It’s my job to track down any reports of what these idiots call flying saucers, and see if there’s substance to them. I draw a paycheck every month to hunt for alien beings. Don’t you see, 1 can’t keep you here! It’s my duty to turn you over to my Government! My duty, dammit!”
Eight
All day long Charley Estancia had gone about his business as though everything were perfectly normal. He had awakened at dawn, as usual; no one could sleep late in the two rooms of whitewashed adobe that housed the four adults and five children of the Estancia family. The baby, Luis, began howling the moment the roosters started to crow. That usually drew a stream of curses from Charley’s maternal uncle George, who was a drunk and slept badly anyway; Charley’s sister Lupe would answer with curses of her own, and the morning was under way. Everyone moved about at once, sleepy, bad-tempered. Charley’s grandmother heated the stove for the tortillas; Charley’s mother looked after the baby; Charley’s other brother, Ramon, switched on the television set and planted himself before it, while Charley’s father quietly slipped out of the house until breakfast was ready, and his sister Rosita, looking sluttish and thick-bodied in her torn nightgown, got down in front of the altar and prayed in a dull voice, no doubt asking to be pardoned for whatever new sins she had added to her total the night before. It was the same thing every morning, and Charley Estancia hated it. He wished he could live by himself, so that he did not have to put up with Lupe’s mischief and Ramon’s stupidity and Luis’ bawling and Rosita’s half-naked body paraded about the place, so that he did not have to listen to his mother’s shrill complaints and his father’s apologetic, defeated replies, so that he no longer had to be subjected to his grandmother’s senile fantasies of a time when the old religion would be followed again. Life in a living museum was not very pleasant. Charley loathed everything about the pueblo: its dusty unpaved streets, its squat mud buildings, its mixture of muddled old customs and unpleasant new ones, and above all the hordes of white-faced tourists that showed up every July and August to stare at the people of San Miguel as though they were beasts in a zoo.
Now, at least, Charley had something to take his mind off his troubles. There was the man from the stars, Mirtin, living in the cave out near the arroyo.
As he went through the drab routine of his day, Charley clung fervently to the wonder and excitement of knowing that a man from the stars was waiting for him out there. It was just as Marty Moquino said: that flash of light in the sky had been no meteor, but a flying saucer that had blown up. What would Marty Moquino say if he knew about Mirtin?
Charley Estancia was determined not to let that happen. He could not trust Marty. Marty thought only of Marty; he would sell Mirtin to the Albuquerque newspaper for a hundred dollars, and the next day he would buy a bus ticket for Los Angeles and disappear. Charley did not plan to give Marty Moquino even a hint of what might be living in that cave by the arroyo.