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.

Sitting 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.

His ingrained obstinate skepticism about the Atmospheric Objects was matched only by his ingrained obstinate skepticism about official Government announcements. If the Government was going to all this trouble to keep people calm, then there had to be something big to worry about. That much was axiomatic. On the other hand, trained as he was in interpreting the phoniness of official handouts, Falkner had a deep and abiding need to believe in the futility and emptiness of his own assignment. He could not let himself believe in real saucers. But he did not believe the Government, either. It was well past midnight now. He peered at the thick neck of his driver, sealed off from him in the front compartment, and fought back a yawn. He would ride all night. There was nothing waiting for him back in Albuquerque but an empty bed and a day of crushed cigarette butts. His wife was vacationing in Buenos Aires with her new husband. Falkner had grown accustomed to being alone by now, but he did not like it much. Other men soothed themselves in their work at such times, but Falkner’s work was no work for a grown man, he often said.

At three in the morning he was right up at the edge of the mountains. There was a logging road through the national forest that he could take if he wanted to take it, but he ordered the driver to swing around. He would return to Albuquerque on a big loop, around the Mesa Prieta, skirting Jemez Pueblo, and down the western side of the Rio Grande to home. They were still awake in Topeka, and probably in Washington as well. Good for them, the heroes.