The information flow on the various channels was slowing down. To fill in the time, Falkner ran off the taped playback of the fireball a few times. By this time, he had picked up half a dozen relayed shots of it from several points along its trajectory. He studied them carefully, and had to admit that the sudden glowing streak must have been an impressive sight. Too bad he had been indoors tanking up and had missed it. But it still looked like a meteor track, Falkner told himself stubbornly. A big meteor, but what of that? How about the one that had slashed its way through the Siberian forest in 1908 and cut such a swath? Or the giant meteor crater in Arizona? What were those, if not natural phenomena?
And the ferocity of the actinic radiation?
Simple. He had been arguing about that with Bronstein two hours ago.
“Postulate a lump of contraterrene matter dropping into our atmosphere,” Falkner said. “A couple of tons of anti-iron, say. A great slew of antiprotons and antineutrons meeting and annihilating terrene matter.”
“That’s old hat, Tom.”
“So what? It’s plausible, isn’t it?”
“Not plausible enough. It involves the necessity to postulate a large mass of antimatter somewhere in our part of the universe,” said Bronstein, “and there’s no real evidence that such a mass exists, or even can exist. It’s a far simpler hypothesis to postulate an intelligent extraterrestrial race sending observers here. Just apply Occam’s Razor to your antimatter idea and you’ll see what a lousy theory it is.”
“Apply Occam’s Razor to your throat, Bronstein. And press hard.”
Falkner liked the idea despite Bronstein’s objections. Sure, it violated the law of the least complex hypothesis. But Occam’s Razor was a logical tool, not an inflexible condition of the universe, and it didn’t hold good in all conditions. Falkner blinked hard, and wished he had some Scotch. Pale streaks of dawn were beginning to strain the eastern sky. In the nation’s capital it was morning already, and they were up and forming their traffic jams. Now, if we look at this notion of antimatter in a rigorous fashion, we find—
Something went ping on one of the half-track’s external detector systems.
“Stop the truck!” Falkner yelled to the driver.
The vehicle halted. The pinging didn’t. Very carefully, Colonel Falkner examined his inputs and tried to discover what the hell was going on. He isolated the cause of the disturbance. The detectors were picking up the thermals of a human being with a mass of some eighty to one hundred pounds within a radius of a thousand yards. Sure enough, the metal-detectors were confirming it, coming up with plenty of data. Someone was out there.
The nearest town was twenty miles away. There wasn’t even a road within a dozen miles. This was lonely country, nothing but lots of sagebrush, a few tufts of yucca and bear grass, here and there a misplaced juniper or pinon tree that belonged to the highlands. No streams, no ponds, no houses. Nothing. And nobody belonged out here. This land wasn’t good for anything. Falkner told himself that his detector was picking up an Eagle Scout camping for the night, or something equally innocuous. Nevertheless, he had to check. Leaving the driver in the half-track, Falkner got out.
Which way?
A thousand yards to cover — that was plenty, when you converted radius to circumference and started thinking in terms of area. He switched on the mercury beacon at his hip, but it didn’t do much good; in this gray predawn light, artificial illumination was little help. He decided to look around for fifteen minutes and then call for a copter to bring a search party. The trouble with these fancy detecting systems was that they didn’t function well at really close range.
He chose a direction at random and picked his way over the rough, sandy ground. When he had gone fifty paces, he saw what looked like a bundle of old clothes lying in a clump of sage, and ran toward it, feeling a kind of wild, fearful excitement that he could not understand.
When he reached the bundle of old clothes, he saw that it was a woman, blond, young, a pretty face except for the smears of blood on her lips and chin. She was alive. She didn’t seem to be conscious. She was wearing some sort of spacesuit of a design Falkner had never seen before, with elaborate personnel-transport jets, a sleek faceplate, and fabric of a shimmering, oddly lovely texture. Instantly he suspected that the girl must be a Chinese or Russian observer who had been forced to bail out from some kind of overflight. Racially, of course, she was anything but Chinese, but there was no reason why Peking could not hire a blonde from Brooklyn as a spy, if necessary. If this was what a Chinese spacesuit looked like these days, you had to take your hat off to them.
She had clearly had a bumpy landing, though. He couldn’t see much of her body, but from the way she was hunched up Falkner suspected that she had a couple of broken legs, for openers, and probably internal injuries. Well, there was a power stretcher in the half-track; he’d scoop her up, get her safely back to town, and turn her over to the medics. At least she wasn’t from some other galaxy, unless there was a galaxy out there that produced beautiful blondes.
Her faceplate had been jarred open in the landing. Falkner saw that she was stirring, that she appeared to be murmuring something, and he nudged the clear plate away from his lips, bending close to listen.
She wasn’t talking Russian: the words were too liquid for that. She wasn’t talking Chinese: the inflection was a monotone. She wasn’t talking any language Falkner had ever heard. That made him a little queasy. He refused to let himself believe that she was speaking a language of another world. This was delirium he was hearing. Mere ravings.
Was that something in English, now?
If they will help . … they speak which here? English. Yes …English…”
He looked the spacesuit over again, saw how alien it was, and his flesh began to crawl;
The girl’s eyes opened. Beautiful eyes. Frightened eyes. Pain-misted eyes.
“Help me,” she said.
Four
As he fell toward Earth, Mirtin knew that he was going to be severely injured. He took that calmly, as he took everything else. The matter was out of his hands. What he regretted was the notoriety that this involuntary exploit would win him at home, not the pain his body would suffer in the immediate future. Sooner or later, some watcher ship had been bound by probability to malfunction and force its crew to make an unscheduled landing on Earth, but Mirtin had never thought the malfunctioning ship would be his own.
There were techniques for calming one’s spirit in a time of stress. He used them as he hurtled toward the dark world below.
The loss of the ship was a minor matter to him. The embarrassment of this accident was also minor. The dangers he would encounter on Earth were less minor, but also no real source of sorrow; he would survive, or he would not survive, and why weep? Nor did he brood over the injuries he was certain to receive in landing. Those could be repaired.
No, what troubled Mirtin now was the disruption of his sexual group. As the oldest, the steadiest, he felt a responsibility for protecting the other two, and now they were beyond his help.
Glair was probably dead. That was a harsh blow. Mirtin had watched her make her clumsy leap, had seen her go pinwheeling out into emptiness in the worst of all possible dives. Perhaps she had pulled out of it, but what was most likely was that she had fallen, stonelike, to a quick and horrid death. Mirtin had lost group partners before, long ago, and he knew the trauma it brought. And Glair was special, uniquely sensitive to the needs of the group, the perfect female bridge to link the two males. She could not easily be replaced.