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  When he regained control of himself, he was appalled to find a row of houses not far below his dangling feet. On Earth, so soon? Another thousand yards and he would at last be touching the soil of the planet he had watched so long. Down … down…

  By now Glair would have landed. He tried not to think about her fate. It was Mirtin he had to find, the sooner the better, and together they’d await the rescue crew that shortly would be here to pick them up. Meanwhile the problem was survival. He cursed the luck that had brought him down in civilization, with all this good wilderness about. Vorneen did what he could to steer himself away from the houses, toward the flat scrubby plateau just beyond.

  Now the ground was rushing toward him. He had never expected the landing to be like this. Didn’t one waft gently to the ground? No. No. He was falling like a bomb. He would smash right through the roof of the last house in that row. He would—

  He swerved, but only by a matter of feet.

  Then the most savage pain he had ever experienced, in a life that had been almost wholly free from pain, struck him and stunned him, and the man from the stars toppled heavily forward and lay still, more dead than alive.

  Tree

  At the Albuquerque office of the Atmospheric Objects Survey, everything was ready to roll half an hour after the fireball had been sighted. The maintenance men had loaded fully charged batteries into the six electric half-tracks; the computer had already produced a vector chart showing possible landing sites for the space debris, if any; Bronstein, Colonel Falkner’s adjutant, had summoned the off-duty men. Now they stood in an uneasy semicircle around the glow-board in the main office, staring at the streaky red line that marked the plotted path of the Atmospheric Object.

  Fifteen feet away, behind the locked and bolted door of the bathroom, Tom Falkner was trying hard to sober up.

  On the jeep ride over here from the officers’ lounge Falkner had swallowed an antistim tablet. They were handy little things, guaranteed to clear the cobwebs out of an alcohol-woozy mind in half an hour or so. But the process wasn’t pleasant. What the pills did was to deliver a neat double jolt to the thyroid and the pituitary, temporarily deranging the hormone balance and putting the metabolism into high gear. All bodily processes were accelerated, including the one that burned the alcohol out of the blood. Under antistims, you lived six or seven hours in a realtime environmental situation lasting about ten minutes. It was rugged, but it worked. When you had settled down to a leisurely evening of stupefying yourself, and suddenly discovered that it was vital to destupefy yourself at once, there was no alternative but to use the tablets.

  Falkner crouched on the bathroom’s tiled floor, gripping the towel rack with both hands. He was shaking. Great blotches of sweat darkened his uniform. His face was red, his pulse rate was over a hundred and climbing, and the terrible thunder of his heart was like a drum pounding in his rib cage. He had already vomited, getting rid of the last four or five ounces of Scotch before it had had a chance to filter very far into his system, and this violent inner purge was taking care of the rest. His brain was clearing. This was only the fourth or fifth time in his life he had found it necessary to take the antistims, and each time he hoped it would be the last.

  After a long time he rose.

  His fingers, extended experimentally before him, waggled as though he were typing a letter. He fought to steady them. The blood had drained from his face now. Falkner eyed himself in the mirror, and shuddered at what he saw. He was a big man, blocky-shouldered, with close-cropped black curly hair and a little bristly mustache and bloodshot eyes. In his astronaut days he had been careful not to let his weight get above 165, but those days were long gone, and now he had fleshed out to the full capacity of his frame and then some. In uniform he looked burly and massive. Stripped of that khaki exoskeleton, he tended to sag and bulge a little. He wasn’t proud of what he had become in his middle years. But he hadn’t asked for any of this, neither the inner-ear problem nor the flying saucer detail.

  He felt a little better now. He dabbed cold water on his face, wiped the sweat, adjusted his collar. Though not wholly sober even now, he no longer felt the worse effects of his binge. That prickly sensation at the tip of his nose was gone; his ears no longer felt like slabs of cardboard; his eyes worked as eyes were supposed to work. Moving with great care, Falkner opened the bathroom door and went into the office.

  Captain Bronstein seemed to have everything under control, as usual. There he was, briefing the men, speaking crisply, never slurring so much as a syllable. When he caught sight of Falkner, Bronstein turned smoothly and said, “We’re ready to go when you say the word, Colonel.”

  “Everything calculated? The routes allotted?”

  “Everything,” Bronstein said. He flashed a quick, possibly mocking smile. “The board’s lit up like a Christmas tree. We’ve had a thousand reports on the AO so far, and they’re still coming in. It’s a live one this time.”

  “Swell,” Falkner muttered. “We’ll be famous. Extraterrestrial spaceship crash-lands; pilot bails out; brave officers of AOS subdue with bare hands. We—”

  Falkner caught himself. He had begun to run off at the mouth again, a sign that perhaps he wasn’t so sober after all. The warning glance from Bronstein had been explicit. For a moment their eyes met, and Falkner was infuriated to see how sorry for him Bronstein looked. A surge of pure hatred ran through the colonel’s body.

  At times like this Falkner stubbornly insisted to himself that he did not hate Bronstein merely because Bronstein was Jewish. Jewishness had nothing to do with it. He hated Bronstein because the dapper little captain was ambitious, because he was capable, because he was always in full control of himself, and because he believed that the flying saucers came from another world. Bronstein was the only officer Falkner knew who had volunteered for AOS. The department was considered a dumping-ground for career men whose usefulness had otherwise been expended, but Bronstein had clawed his way into the job. Why? Because he believed the saucers were the coming thing, the biggest job the Air Force had ever handled. Honestly. And he wanted to be right there, soaking up the glory and collecting the headlines, when fantasy turned into open reality. To Bronstein the saucer patrol was the gateway to greater things.

  Senator Bronstein. President Bronstein.

  Falkner’s mood grew more foul. He snapped, “All right, let’s get moving. Out into the desert and find that meteorite before dawn! Schnell!”

  The men hurried from the room. Bronstein lingered. In a soft voice he said, “Tom, I think this one’s really it. The bailout situation we’ve been waiting for.”

  “Go to hell.”

  “Won’t you be surprised when you find an interstellar ambassador sitting in the sagebrush?”

  “It was a meteor,” said Falkner frozenly.

  “Did you see it?”

  “No. I was — studying reports.”

  “I saw it,” Bronstein said. “It wasn’t any meteor. It damn near burned my eyes out. That was some kind of fusion generator blowing up, above the stratosphere. It was like a little sun turning on for a couple of minutes, Tom. That’s what the boys at Los Alamos said, too. You know of any Air Force projects that fly fusion generators?”

  “No.”

  “Neither do I. So—”

  “So it was a Chinese spy ship,” Falkner said.

  Bronstein laughed. “You know something, Tom? I think it’s a hell of a lot more probable that that ship came from Procyon Twelve, or someplace like that, from another solar system, than from Peking. So tell me I’m crazy. It’s what I believe.”

  Falkner did not reply. He swung back and forth on the balls of his feet for a moment, trying to persuade himself that he was living this and not merely dreaming it. Then, scowling, he gestured to Bronstein and they went out into the night.

  Four of the half-tracks had already left. Falkner got into one of the remaining ones, Bronstein into the other, and they were rumbling away from the base. Falkner’s cabin contained a
complete communications link that hooked him in to the other search vehicles, to the Albuquerque office, to the main headquarters of AOS in Topeka, and to the various local headquarters under his jurisdiction in the four southwestern states. The board was plenty busy just now, too. A dozen message lights were flashing all at once.

  Falkner keyed in Topeka and watched the face of his commanding officer, General Weyerland, take on form and color in the little screen.

  Weyerland, like Falkner himself, was cosmic debris, a wash-up from the space program who had been transferred to the dead end that was AOS. At least Weyerland had four stars on his shoulder by way of consolation, though. Considering that he held personal responsibility for the deaths of two astronauts who perished in a space experiment, Weyerland was pretty lucky to have a job at all, even with AOS, Falkner figured. But he kept up a good front. Weyerland always acted as though this thing meant something to him.

  The general said, “What’s the story up to now, Tom?”

  “Nothing much, sir. Streak of light in the sky, a lot of citizens upset, and now a standard check. I’m going out with six half-tracks from here, and we’re sending a couple north from Santa Fe. Plus the usual metal-detector sweeps. It’s routine, like all these sightings.”

  “I’m not so sure,” said Weyerland.

  “Sir?”

  “Washington’s been on the phone twice. I mean the big man, too. He’s upset. You know, this streak of light was seen over thousands of square miles? They picked it up in California and it’s driving them wild out there.”

  “California.” Falkner made the word sound unutterably obscene.

  “Yes, I know. But the public’s alarmed. They’re pressuring the White House, and he’s pressuring us.”

  “There’s a One-o-seven already out, isn’t there?”

  “On every channel,” said Weyerland. The designation ‘107’ was the code term for a soft-pedalling announcement that the mysterious object was merely a natural phenomenon and there was nothing to worry about. “But we’ve sent out so many One-o-sevens, Tom, that nobody believes them. We say ‘meteor’, everybody translates it ‘flying saucer’. The time’s coming when we’ll have to start telling the truth.”

  What truth? Falkner wanted to ask. He didn’t.

  He said, “Tell the President we’ll report back as soon as we’ve got anything solid.”

  “Check in with me every hour,” Weyerland said. “Whether there’s anything solid or not.”

  The general broke the circuit. Immediately, Falkner began to key in the others. On four of them he was getting data from the detector nets spotted around the national defense periphery. Sure enough, they had all recorded a massive object coming down across the Pole at an altitude of ninety-thousand feet and climbing still higher over Manitoba, then smashing up completely above Central New Mexico. Well, sure, something had been up there tonight. But there was a rational explanation for it, as well as a fantastic one. The thing had been a heavy blob of iron that had drifted into our atmosphere and burned up. Why conjure up galactic spaceships when meteors were so common?

  Falkner’s half-track crunched steadily onward, now heading northwest out of Albuquerque in the general direction of Cibola National Forest. To his left, the colonel could see the distant headlights of cars swooshing rapidly along Highway 40. He was nearing the Rio Puerco — just a dry wash, right now, after a rainless autumn. The stars seemed exceptionally sharp, hard-edged. It was a good night for snow, but he knew no snow would fall tonight. Moodily, he continued to jab at the control panel before him, going through all the motions of doing his job.

  The public was worried. The public! Let a helicopter buzz by overhead and a million people rushed to their telephones to tell the police about the flying saucer. Tonight’s little heavenly display, Falkner thought sullenly, had probably brought a small fortune in extra revenues to Mountain States Tel and Tel. Jammed lines all evening. The whole deal was just a promotional scheme dreamed up by the phone company. Sure.

  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 Kennedy assassination, saucers spotted all over the place, and since 1966 or so a steadily mounting frequency, tending to bunch into the seasons when the quarrel with China was closest to bursting wide open.

  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 channel. The half-track clunked along westward. On its roof sensitive antennae twirled, seeking data, anything useful. A glint of metal on the desert, and he’d know about it. The thermal detectors were hunting for the infrared radiation of any living body larger than the size of a kangaroo rat. Every thirty seconds a laser beam pinged out, bounced off a focal sphere eighty miles away, and came back newsless.

  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.

  S
itting 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 fanned out from Socorro to Isleta, and as far west as Pie Town. He exchanged brief comments with Bronstein, who was in the forlorn, empty country south of Acoma Pueblo, and heading vaguely toward the Zuni Reservation. Between them, they maintained a total surveillance spread over the entire trajectory area of the alleged meteor, but nobody had found anything. Every hour on the hour Falkner cut in on the commercial radio and video outlets and picked up the news. Evidently a lot of people were yelling “Flying saucer!” tonight, because the announcers were going to great pains to insist that it was nothing but a meteor. Moving from station to station, Falkner heard the same bland assertions. They were all quoting Kelly from Los Alamos. Who was Kelly? An astronomer, maybe? No, just “of the technical staff’, whatever that meant. Probably a janitor. But the media were using the magic of his Los Alamos affiliation as a talisman to reassure the troubled listeners.

  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.