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.