“A dozen if we have to.”

“Get them moving, then. The cover story is that they’re investigating the so-called giant meteor. Some of them can be scientists who claim to be hunting the debris. And reporters who interview people who saw the fireball. Cover the state. We’ll continue to prod the computer here, refining the landing vectors as we get a clearer notion of the actual trajectory of the ship before it exploded.”

“You know where we can get the best trajectory figures?”

“Where?”

“U.S. Air Force. I bet AOS taped everything.”

“Good thought. Call our man in AOS right away and have him checking the data banks.”

“AOS is probably looking for the ship’s wreckage now too.”

“But they don’t know about the crew. We’ll find them first.”

“It’s going to be tough. What’s that Earthman proverb? Needle in a smokestack?”

“Haystack.”

“Yeah. Haystack. Where are the new vectors? Get that man moving!”

“You’re sure they’re alive?”

“I know they are.”

Vorneen seemed to be sleeping now, Kathryn thought. She couldn’t be sure of it, though. In the four days she had sheltered him in her house, the one certain thing she had learned about him was that she couldn’t be sure of anything about him.

She stood beside the bed, watching him. Eyes closed. No motion of the eyeballs beneath the lids. Slow, deep, regular breathing. All the symptoms of sleep. But sometimes it seemed that he only pretended to sleep, because she expected it of him. At other times he went to sleep in a fantastic way, evidently turning himself off as though he were a machine, click! Either way, the effect was far from human.

Kathryn was convinced now that she was playing hostess to a being from another world.

It was such a bizarre concept that it was taking a long time to sink in. She had played with the thought from the first night, when it had occurred to her that the meteor had been a flying saucer and that this man might have dropped from it. The evidence had been overwhelming, right from the start. And it had grown, day by day, as she watched him closely.

The orange tinge to his blood. The strange suit in her closet. The strange tools that had fallen from it, like the little flashlight-thing that was a disintegrator ray. The smoothness and coolness of his skin. The nonsense words he spoke while he was delirious. Delirium without fever. The peculiar fractures of his leg that had been so easy to set. The curious lightness of his body, which weighed forty or fifty pounds less than a man of his size ought to weigh.

How could she pretend that all these things were mere oddities?

In four days, he had not used the bedpan at all. He had quietly put it under the bed, empty, and it was still there. She checked it from time to time while he seemed to be asleep. How could a man go four days without moving his bowels or passing urine? He was eating regularly, he was drinking plenty of water, yet he neither excreted nor perspired. Kathryn could overlook a lot of odd things about Vorneen, but not that. Where did the waste products go? What kind of metabolism did he have? She was not by nature a woman who had speculated much about other worlds, other forms of life; such notions had simply never been part of her intellectual furniture. But it was hard to avoid the conclusion now that Vorneen came from far away.

Even the name — Vorneen. What kind of name was that? He had volunteered it, half shyly, on the second day, and she had frowned and made him spell it, and he had stumbled a little over the spelling as if he wasn’t accustomed to thinking of it in terms of an alphabet, but only in terms of sound. Vorneen. Was that his first name, or his last name, or his only name? She did not know. She was afraid to ask too many questions. He would tell her what he chose to tell her, all in his own good time, and she would have to be grateful for that. She studied him as he slept.

He seemed so peaceful. He had not left the bed since she had lowered him into it, the first night. Kathryn slept on the sofa, poorly, although Vorneen had suggested rather bluntly that she share the bed with him. “It’s big enough for two, isn’t it?” he asked. Yes, it was. She wondered whether he was being deliberately innocent about the significance of a man and a woman sharing the same bed, or whether, because he was not a man, it had never occurred to him that there might be any significance to it at all. Possibly he did not think in terms of sex.

She had turned away, reddening like a silly virgin, when he had suggested she share the bed with him. Her own reaction puzzled her. She had been widowed for a year, now, and she owed nothing to Ted’s memory. She could sleep wherever she chose, exactly as she had done when she was nineteen and single. Yet she was mysteriously prudish, suddenly. During her months of mourning it had been unthinkable to get involved with a man; she had withdrawn from the world almost completely, making a little warm nest here for herself and Jill in this house, and rarely going beyond the local shopping center, but she had been telling herself since the summer that it was time to begin emerging from that and finding a new father for Jill. Well, this man who had dropped from the skies was hardly a candidate for that responsibility, but even so there was no reason why she couldn’t allow herself to get close to him, even to make love with him if his inclinations inclined that way and his broken leg permitted any such strenuous activities. The leg seemed to be healing with fantastic swiftness, anyway; she had it taped, and the swelling had gone down, and he no longer indicated feeling any pain in it.

Why, then, did she shy back from the bed with such maidenly reserve?

Kathryn thought she understood. It was not because she was afraid of sleeping with Vorneen. It was because she was afraid of the intensity of her own desires. Something about this slim, pale, improbably handsome man called out physically to her. It had been that way from the first moment Kathryn did not believe in love at first sight, but desire at first sight was a different story, and she was in the grip of it. She drew back, terrified by the intensity of what she felt for Vorneen. If she allowed the barrier between herself and him to slip, even a little, anything might happen.

Anything.

She had to know more about him first.

She adjusted his coverlet and picked up the notepad that lay on the night table. I’ll be back in a couple of hours, she wrote. Going into Albuquerque to shop. Don’t fret. K. Pinning the note to the unused pillow beside him on the double bed, she tiptoed from the room and went into her daughter’s playroom. The little girl was making something sinister and ropy out of the flexiputty Kathryn had bought her, and the thing was writhing like an octopus. Or like a Martian, if there were any Martians. Kathryn was seeing unearthly beings all over the place.

“Look, Mommy, it’s a snake!” Jill cried.

“Snakes don’t have legs, honey,” Kathryn said. “But it’s beautiful, anyway. Here, let me put your coat on.”

“Where are we going?”

“I’ve got to drive into town. You’ll go over to play at Mrs Webster’s for a little while, all right?”

Uncomplainingly, Jill let Kathryn pull her coat on. She had a three-year-old’s easy adaptability to changes in surroundings and circumstances. She still remembered her dead father, but only vaguely, remembering more the fact that she had had someone called “Daddy’ than anything specific about him; if Ted were to walk through the door now, Jill probably would not recognize him. The strayed kitten was fading into memory the same way, in a far shorter time. As for the abrupt and inexplicable arrival of Vorneen in the household, Jill did not seem to worry about it at all. She had accepted it as a phenomenon of the universe, like the setting of the sun or the coming of the postman. Shrewdly Kathryn had not warned Jill about mentioning Vorneen to other people, for then the girl surely would. To Jill, Vorneen was a visitor, someone staying with the family, and after the second day she lost all apparent interest in the man in the bed.