Robert Silverberg - Those who watch

VIP免费

2024-12-19 0 0 387.64KB 106 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

Those Who Watch

ROBERT SILVERBERG

Other books by this author available from New English Library:

DYING INSIDE THORNS

NEW ENGLISH LIBRARY

TimesMirror

First published in the United States by The New American Library Inc., T967 © by Robert Silverberg in

1967

FIRST NEL PAPERBACK EDITION SEPTEMBER 1977

Conditions of sale: This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or

otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any

form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including

this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

NEL Books are published by

NewEnglish Library Limited from Barnard's Inn, Holborn, London F.C1N 2JR Made and printed

in Great Britain by Hunt Barnard Printing Ltd., Aylesbury, Bucks.

45003260 4

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

One

The explosion was painfully bright against the dark back-drop of the moonless New Mexico sky. To

those who looked up at that precise moment - and there were many who hap-pened to look up - it was

as though a new star had momentarily blossomed in blue-white incandescence.

The brightness moved in a track from northeast to south-west. It came sputteringly alive in the sacred

mountains east of Taos, and grew more fierce as it carved a track roughly over the valley of the Rio

Grande, passing above the dusty little pueblos and the bustling city of Santa Fe. Just south of Santa Fe

the brightness became unbearable, and eyes were averted as the sudden radiation stabbed at retinas. But

now the actinic peak was past. Was the savage flare burning itself out, or was the blaze simply damped

by the city lights of sprawling Albuquerque? No matter. The arc of light speared past Isleta Pueblo and

was lost somewhere over the Mesa del Oro.

Darkness returned, rolling back over the New Mexico sky like the returning tide.

In the broad plaza of San Miguel Pueblo, forty miles south of Santa Fe, Charley Estancia put his

knuckles to his eyes a moment, crushed away the pain, and grinned up at the inverted black bowl of

night.

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

'Shooting star!' he whispered sharply. 'Shooting star! Beauty! Beauty!' He laughed. He was eleven years

old, skinny and smudge-faced, and he had often seen the ragged tails of the meteors as they sped across

the sky. He knew what they were, even if no one else in the pueblo did. But Charley had never seen one

like that before. He could still feel the track of it sizzling in his skull. When he blinked, the line of

whiteness remained.

Others in the village had seen it too. The plaza was a crowded, busy place tonight, for in another week

came the Fire Society dance, and many white folk would travel out from the cities to watch and take

pictures and, perhaps, spend money. Charley Estancia heard the gasps, saw the pointing arms of his

uncles and cousins and sisters.

'Maiyanyi!'someone muttered. 'Spirits!'

Talk of demons, whispers of bad magic, anguished excla-mations of doubt and fear crisscrossed the

plaza. Charley saw two of his maternal uncles rush toward the tall round windowless kiva, the ceremonial

house, and clamber quickly down the ladder to take refuge within. He saw his sister Rosita pull forth the

crucifix that hung between her breasts and clasp it against her cheek like some sort of amulet. He saw his

father's brother Juan make the sign of the cross, and three more men rush into the kiva. They were all

talking of evil spirits, now. The pueblo bristled with television aerials, and shiny automobiles stood outside

the adobe houses, but it took nothing more than a shooting star to send everybody wild with superstitious

awe. Charley kicked at the dusty ground. His sister Lupe flashed past him, looking terrified. He reached

out and caught her thin wrist.

'Where are you going?'

'Into the house. Devils are in the sky!'

'Sure. Thekachinas are coming. They're going to do the Fire Society dance because we don't do it right

anymore,' Charley said. He laughed.

Lupe was in no mood for Charley's brand of sarcasm. She twisted at his grip. 'Let go! Let go! She was

twelve, and only a girl, but she was much stronger than he was. She planted her hand in the middle of his

shallow chest and pushed hard, yanking her arm from his grasp at the same time. Charley went over on

his back and lay in the dust, looking up at a sky that now had returned to normal. Lupe fled, sobbing.

Charley shook his head. Crazy, all of them. Crazy with fear, crazy with religion. Why couldn't they think?

Why did they have to be Indians all the time? Look at them, running around madly, scattering cornmeal,

blurt-ing out prayers whose words were only empty sound to them, diving into the kiva, sprinting toward

the church!

'Shooting star!' Charley shouted. 'Nothing to be afraid of! Just a big shooting star!'

As usual, no one paid attention to him. He was thought to be a little crazy in the head, a skinny boy full

of dreams and white man's ideas. His voice was lost in the night wind. He picked himself up, shivering,

and brushed the plaza's dust from his jeans. It would be funny, this superstitious panic, if it were not so

sad.

Ah! There was the padre now! Charley grinned.

The priest came out of the whitewashed little church andheld up both arms in what Charley supposed

was intended tobe a comforting gesture. He called out in Spanish: 'Don't be

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

afraid! It's all right! Into the church, everyone, and staycalm!'

Some of the women moved toward the church. Most of the men were in the kiva, now - and, of course,

women were forbidden there. Charley watched the priest. Padre Herrera was a small, bald-headed man

who had come up from El Paso a few years ago, after the old priest had died. He had a hard time here.

Everybody in San Miguel was a Roman , Catholic, but everybody also believed in the old pueblo

religion, and in a way nobody believed much in any religion,

So at a time of stress like this, people ran in all directions, very few of them into Padre Herrera's church,

and the padre did not look pleased.

Charley went up to the priest. 'What was it, Padre? A shooting star, is all?'

The priest glowered.'Perhaps a sign of Heaven, Charley.'

'I saw it with these eyes! A shooting star!'

Padre Herrera flashed a quick, hollow smile and turned away, going about the business of shepherding

his worried flock into the house of God. Charley realized he had been dismissed. The priest had once

told Rosita Estancia that her younger brother Charley was a damned soul, and Charley had found out

about it. In a way, he was rather flattered.

Hopefully, Charley looked to the sky. But there were no more shooting stars. Now the plaza was

empty; the dozens of Indians who had been in it a few minutes ago had taken refuge. Charley looked

across the way, toward the gift shop. The door opened and Marty Moquino came out. He was holding a

little spray can of liquor, and a cigarette drooped from the corner of his mouth.

'Where'd everybody go?' Marty Moquino asked.

'They ran away. Scared.' Charley forced a chuckle. 'You should've seen them go!'

He was a little afraid of Marty Moquino, and despised him a good deal; yet at the same time Charley

looked up to him as a man who had done things and gone places. Marty was nineteen years old. Two

years ago he had left the pueblo and gone to live in Albuquerque, and he was supposed to have been all

the way out to Los Angeles, too. He was a mocker, a troublemaker, but more than anyone else around

here he had lived in the white man's world. Now Marty was back because he had lost his job. People

whispered that he made love to Rosita Estancia these days. Charley hated him for that; Still, he felt that

he had much to learn from Marty Moquino. Charley hoped to escape from San Miguel himself, one day.

They stood together in the middle of the empty plaza,' Charley short and thin, Marty tall and thin. Marty

offeredhim a cigarette. Charley took it and expertly flipped its ignition cap. They grinned at each other

like brothers.

'Did you see it?' Charley asked. 'The shooting star?'

Marty nodded. He gave the spray can of whiskey a squirt into his mouth. 'I was out back,' he said after

a moment. 'I saw it. But it wasn't any shooting star.'

'It was thekachinas coming to visit, huh?'

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

Laughing, Marty said, 'Kid, don't you know what that thing was? You never saw a shooting star like

that. That was a flying saucer blowing up over Taos!'

Kathryn Mason saw the light in the sky only by accident. Ordinarily on these dark winter nights she

stayed indoors after nightfall. The house was warm and bright, purring with its array of electrical

appliances, and she felt comfortable indoors. Anything might lurk outside. Anything. But her daughter's

kitten had been missing for three days now, which was the biggest crisis in the Mason family for a. long

time. It seemed to Kathryn that she heard faint meows outside. Finding the kitten was more important to

her than remaining locked indoors in this cozy shelter of an automatic house.

She rushed outside, hoping against hope to see the fluffy black-and-white thing scratching against the

doormat. But there was no kitten there; and, abruptly, a streak of light lanced through the sky.

She had no way of knowing that it had already begun to lose intensity. It was the brightest thing she had

ever seen in the sky, so bright that instinctively she clapped her hands to her eyes. An instant later,

though, she pulled her hands away and forced herself to watch as it completed its fiery trajec-tory.

What could it be?

Kathryn's mind supplied an immediate answer: it was the trail of an exploding Air Force jet, one of the

boys out of the Kirtland base at Albuquerque going to his death on a train-ing flight. Of course. Of

course. And tonight there would be a new widow somewhere, a new set of mourners. Kathryn shivered.

To her surprise, tears did not come this time.

She followed the path of light. She watched it curve away toward the south, toward down Albuquerque,

and then it disappeared, lost in the haze of brightness that rose from the city. Instantly Kathryn

manufactured a new catastrophe, for in her private world catastrophe was always readily at hand. She

saw the flaming jet crashing at Mach Three into Central Avenue, plowing up a dozen streets, taking a

thou-sand lives, sending gas mains erupting with volcanic fury. Sirens wailing, women screaming,

ambulances, hearses. . . .

Fighting back the hysteria she knew to be foolish, she tried more calmly to assess what she had just

seen. The light was gone now, and the world was back to usual again, as usual as it could ever get in

these days of her sudden, snowy widow-hood. It seemed to her that she heard a muffled boom far inthe

distance, as of a crash. But all of her experience around Air Force environments told her that that giant

streak of light in the sky could not have been an exploding jet, unless there were experimental models

with yet-unannounced characteristics. She had seen jets blow up a couple of times, and they made a

gaudy burst of light, but nothing like that.

What then? An intercontinental rocket, maybe, carrying five hundred passengers to a fiery doom?

She could hear her husband's voice saying. Think it through, Kate. Think it through.' He had said that a

great deal, before he was killed. Kathryn tried to think it through. The brightness had come from the

north, from Santa Fe or Taos, heading south. The intercontinental rockets traveled on east-west courses.

Unless one of them was badly off course, her theory was faulty. And the rockets weren't sup-posed to

go off course. The guidance systems were infallible. Think, Kate, think it through. A Chinese missile,

maybe? The war beginning at last? But she'd have seen the night turn into day, then. She'd have felt the

terrible explosion as the fusion bomb ripped New Mexico apart. Think. . . . Some kind of meteor,

maybe? How about a flying saucer, coming in for a landing at Kirtland? People talked so much about the

saucers these days. Creatures from space, so theysaid, watching us, snooping around. Green men with

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

ropy tentacles and bulging eyes? Kathryn shook her head. There might be something about it on video,

she thought.

The sky seemed peaceful now, as though nothing at all had happened.

She drew her wrap closer around her. At night, here at the edge of the desert, the wind ripped in as if it

came straight from the Pole. Kathryn lived at the northernmost house of her subdivision; she could look

out and see only the dry wasteland of sagebrush and sand ahead of her. When she and Ted had bought

the house, two years ago, the agent had solemnly told her that new houses soon would be built to the

north of theirs. It hadn't happened. Financial problems, shortage of money, something like that, and

Kathryn still lived on the boundary between somewhere and nowhere. South of her lay the town of

Bernalillo, a suburb of Albu-querque, and civilization was spreading in an ever-widening strip along

Highway 25 up from Albuquerque to here. But out to the north was nothing, open country full of coyotes

and God knows what else. The coyotes had probably de-voured her daughter's kitten. Remembering the

kitten, Kath-ryn clenched her fists and listened once more for the feeble sounds that had brought her

outside in the first place.

Nothing. She heard only the whistling of the wind, or perhaps the mocking song of the coyotes. She

looked warily at the sky; then, quickly, she turned and went indoors, closing the door, sealing it, putting

her thumb to the alarm switch and waiting until the central office gave her the signal. It was good to be

inside, in this well-lit, cozy house. She had loved it here at first, while Ted was alive. Now, the best she

could do was hang on, and bar the doors to death, and wait for the numbness of widowhood to leave

her. She was only thirty. Too young to remain numb forever.

A sleepy voice. 'Mommy, where are you?'

'Here, Jilly. Here.'

'Did you find Kitten-cat?'

'No, sweet.'

'Why'd you go outside?'

'Just to look.'

'Did Kitten-cat go to look for Daddy, Mommy?'

The words stabbed her. Kathryn went into her daughter's bedroom. The little girl lay snug and well

covered in her bed, with the golden eye of the monitor peering solemnly down at her. At not quite three,

Jill was old enough to climb out of the bed, not old enough to make a safe landing by herself, and so

Kathryn still left the baby-monitor on, the watchful electronic guardian. You were supposed to stop using

the monitor once a child was past its second birthday, but Kath-tryn could not bring herself to give up the

added security.

Kathryn switched on the night lamp. Jill blinked. She had her father's dark hair, her father's delicate

features. Some day she'd be beautiful, not a plain jane like her mother at all, for which Kathryn was

grateful. But what good was it all, if • Ted hadn't lived to see it? Lost in action over Syria during the

Peace Offensive of 1981. What had Syria ment to him? Why had a foreign land taken from her the only

thing that mattered?

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

Correction:almost the only thing.

'Will Kitten-cat find Daddy and bring him back?' Jill asked.

'I hope so, love. Go to sleep and dream about Kitten-cat. And Daddy.'

Kathryn adjusted the monitor's control console, setting up a gentle vibration in the girl's mattress. Jill

smiled. Her eyes closed. Kathryn nudged the light lower, and then off. As she stepped back into the

living room, she decided to see if there was something on the eight o'clock news about that thing in the

sky. 'Flying saucers have landed - ' something like that. She cupped her hand over the wall stud, and the

video screen bloomed into vibrant life. She was just in time.

' - reports from Taos as far south as Albuquerque. Also observed at Los Alamos, Grants, and Jemez

Pueblo. The meteor was one of the brightest ever seen, according to Dr J. F. Kelly, of the Los Alamos

technical staff. A scientific team will begin searching for the remnants of the big fireball tomorrow. For

those who missed it, we've got a tape replay coming up in just ninety seconds. And we repeat, there's no

cause for alarm, absolutely no cause for alarm over this unusual meteor.'

Thank God, Kathryn thought. A meteor. A shooting star. Not an exploding jet, not a crashing rocket.

No new widows tonight. She did not want anyone else to suffer as she had had to suffer.

If only the kitten would return now. She could not hope that Ted would walk through the door, but the

kitten might still be alive, perhaps safe somewhere, living in a garage down the block. Kathryn switched

off the video. She listened for meows. Everything was silent out there.

Colonel Tom Falkner did not see the fireball. While it streaked across the sky he was in the officers'

lounge at the Air Force base, drinking too much cheap Japanese Scotch and watching without interest a

televised basketball game between New York and San Diego. He heard, above the buzz of the

announcer's voice, two lieutenants talking in low tones about saucers. One man was pretty passionately

convinced that they were the real thing, ships from space. The other man took an orthodox skeptic's

tack: show me a man from another world, show me a piece of a saucer's landing gear, show me anything

I can touch, and I'll believe it. Not until then. They were both a little liquored up, Falkner knew, or they

wouldn't be talking about saucers at all. Not with him in the room. As it was, they thought they were

keeping their conversation to themselves, sparing Colonel Falkner the em-barrassment of having to hear

the silly words 'flying saucer' once again. Everyone was very tactful to poor Colonel Falkner around the

base. Everyone knew that he had been handed a slicing by fate, and they tried to make things as easy as

possible for him.

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

every-body'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

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

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 howis 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 throughthe 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 thereare 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 night-mares 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

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

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 pro-gram materialized, lame, overdue, but authentic. Funny how the wordspaceman 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 mathe-matics. Flying saucers? For lunatics. 'California stuff', Falkner called the stories,

even when they came from Michi-gan 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

mar-ried, 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 himto 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 man-ner 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 inter-rupted, half a minute ago, for a local news bulletin. Some-thing 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

sight-ing. 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.

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

And then the bartender came over and said, 'It's for you, Colonel Falkner. It's your office calling.

Somebody sounds awfully upset, sir!'

Two

Aboard the Dirnan craft trouble had started over the Pole. It was a standard watcher ship, of the kind

that had been patrolling the Earth for decades now, and the possibility of malfunction was so slight that a

sane person did not think of such things. The ships worked well; that was all there was to it. But aboard

this one there was a failure.

The first indication of problems came at ninety thousand feet, when the safety lamp began to glow. At

once, warning signals throbbed beneath the flesh of the three members of the ship's crew. Among the

various useful circuits implanted in their bodies was one that let them know instantly if technical difficulties

were arising. The essence of the mission called for the watchers to keep aloof from the watched, and the

last thing any Dirnan wanted was a crash landing on Earth.

The crew was busy. It consisted of a standard three-facet sexual group, in this case two males and a

female. They had been together for close to a century as Earth calculates time,and for the past ten of

those years they had been performing watcher duty above Earth. The female, Glair, presided over the

recording equipment that sought out information from the planet below. Mirtin processed and analyzed

the infor-mation. Vorneen transmitted it to the mother world. In addi-tion, they had various other duties

that they shared on an informal basis: ship maintenance, food preparation, contact with other watchers,

and such. They were a good team. When the warning signals came, each looked up from his own work

instantly, ready to take whatever action was necessary for the safety of the craft.

Mirtin - the oldest, the calmest, wearing as his chosen disguise the body of a middle-aged Earthman -

was the first to reach the analysis board. His fingers moved swiftly. He gathered the data and turned to

the others.

'The plasma pinch is giving out. We're going to blow within six minutes.'

'But that's impossible,' Glair protested. 'We - ' Vorneen smiled gently. 'It's happening, Glair. Itis

pos-sible.' He wore a younger man's body, and he was perhaps too vain about his looks. But, of course,

a Dirnan on watcher duty had to adopt the outer form of an Earthman, and it was merely sane to choose

the configuration that best expressed the inner being. If Vorneen chose to look slightly too hand-some, if

Glair had erred in the direction of voluptuousness, if Mirtin wished to be self-effacingly unglamorous,

those all were permissible options.

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

摘要：

ThoseWhoWatchROBERTSILVERBERG OtherbooksbythisauthoravailablefromNewEnglishLibrary:DYING INSIDETHORNSNEWENGLISHLIBRARYTimesMirrorFirstpublishedintheUnitedStatesbyTheNewAmericanLibraryInc.,T967©byRobertSilverbergin1967FIRSTNELPAPERBACKEDITIONSEPTEMBER1977Conditionsofsale:Thisbookissoldsubjecttothe...

展开>> 收起<<

Robert Silverberg - Those who watch.pdf

共106页,预览22页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Robert Silverberg - Those who watch

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: