Voyagers I (16 page)

As if he could read minds, Borodinski looked up at precisely that moment.

He smiled paternally. “I’m sorry to have kept you waiting, Academician Bulacheff, but the press of urgent business has been almost overwhelming these days.”

Bulacheff hesitated a moment, then asked, “The Comrade Secretary? He is well?”

“Oh yes, quite well.” Borodinski’s smile waned. “But extremely…busy. You must excuse him.”

“I had expected to see him personally. We have always discussed this matter between ourselves, face to face…”

“For security reasons, I know. But our friend has asked me to meet with you today.”

“I see.” Bulacheff wondered how far he could trust this younger man.

“The reports coming from Kwajalein indicate that it may be desirable to send a team of cosmonauts to meet the alien spacecraft,” Borodinski said. “Are preparations being made toward this end?”

He knows, Bulacheff realized. No sense trying to stall him off. “The appropriate departments of the Academy are keeping track of the spacecraft and preparing the necessary navigational plans for a rendezvous mission.”

“Good.”

“It is not within our jurisdiction, however, to force the Army to allocate the necessary rockets and cosmonauts.”

“I understand.” Borodinski nodded. “These steps are being taken, I assure you. What we need from you, for now, is continuously updated tracking information for an interception flight.”

“Interception?”

“If the spacecraft is hostile, or about to fall into unfriendly hands…”

“You would destroy it?”

Borodinski flicked both hands upward. “Poof! With an H-bomb. Didn’t our friend tell you of that possibility?”

“He mentioned it once, yes, but…”

“Then you understand that we need the necessary tracking data. Only your long-range radio telescopes have the power to provide such data, I’m told. The Army’s anti-missile radars haven’t the required range.”

“Of course.”

Borodinski smiled pleasantly and fingered his trim little beard.

“Comrade…” Bulacheff began, then hesitated.

“Yes?”

“There…have been rumors…of arrests, interrogations. Is the General Secretary safe and well?”

The younger man’s eyes narrowed and the slightly smug smile left his lips. “Comrade Academician, I assure you that the General Secretary is safe, and well, and most vitally interested in this alien visitor. As for rumors of…changes within the Kremlin—don’t let that bother you. It does not concern you, I promise.”

Still, Bulacheff felt an old familiar weight pressing against his heart.

Rising from behind his desk, Borodinski said, “All you have to worry about, my dear Academician, is the tracking data we require.”

“For making rendezvous with the spacecraft.”

“Or for intercepting it with a missile.” Borodinski pointed a forefinger toward the scientist. “We will either board that spacecraft or blow it out of the sky.”

Cavendish was having the nightmare again. The tropical weather seemed to leach all the energy out of his frail body, and he had been going to bed earlier and earlier each night since he’d arrived on Kwajalein. But his sleep was far from restful.

They were standing over him again with their needles and the lights. He was very small and he had been very wicked to resist them. They were giants and to resist them was not only foolish, but wicked. He could see the gold in their teeth when they smiled and he wanted to run, but his body was frozen and the needles were sinking into his flesh and he could feel the burning juices as they all bent closer over him…

He sat up in bed, shivering with cold sweat. His head throbbed. The muscles of his neck were so taut he could barely turn his head.

Alone in his single room in the Bachelor Officers Quarters, Cavendish pulled on his faded old robe, stuck his slippers on his bony feet and took a towel and a bar of soap from the rack by the room’s sink. He flap-flapped down the bare wooden hallway floor to the washroom.

It was empty at this hour of the night. He got into a shower stall and stood under the taps for several minutes. The water was only lukewarm, more frustrating than relaxing.

Back in his room, he stared at the rumpled, sweaty bed for long moments, then found himself pulling on an old shirt and a pair of slacks. He felt utterly weary; his eyes wanted to close. But mechanically he donned his only pair of sandals, buckled them across the instep and walked out of the BOQ like a sleepwalker, into the late night darkness.

He went directly to the bungalow where the Markovs lived, went up the cement steps and opened the front door without knocking.

Maria sat on the rattan sofa in the front room, an open suitcase beside her. Its innards were filled with knobs and dials. It hummed faintly, and a single red light glowered in it like an angry evil eye.

Maria’s face was an anxious mixture of awe, disbelief and fear.

“Dr. Cavendish?” she whispered, as if afraid of waking him.

“Yes,” he said. Somewhere deep inside him Cavendish wondered who this woman was and what she wanted of him. Only one lamp was lit in the room, over by her, next to the open suitcase filled with electronic equipment.

“Sit down,” Maria said.

Cavendish took the easy chair and crossed his ankles. He folded his hands in his lap and stared ahead blankly.

Maria licked her lips anxiously. She knew Kirill would be coming back soon; it had taken her hours to get the equipment to summon Cavendish—partly because she had been afraid to dial the power setting high enough, she realized now.

“You will remember nothing of this meeting tonight, will you?” she asked, her voice trembling slightly.

“Not a thing,” he said calmly.

“The reflexes are still there, even after all these years,” she marveled. “I was only a young girl when I first met you, Dr. Cavendish. You don’t remember me at all, do you? It was at a place called Berezovo.”

“The…hospital…”

“Yes, yes. You were a difficult patient. But you won’t be difficult now, will you? You won’t force me to…to do what they did…in the hospital.”

“I won’t be difficult.”

“You will be very co-operative, won’t you?”

“Co-operative.”

Maria sighed with relief. “Now then…about this American, Stoner.”

“My orders were to find out how much he knew and then, if possible, to eliminate him.”

“You did not follow those orders.”

“I sent out the necessary information. Eliminating him proved impossible. We were constantly guarded.”

“Is that the only reason?”

Cavendish licked his lips. “I felt the orders were foolish. Why eliminate him when we can use what he knows, what he discovers?”

“You did well, Dr. Cavendish.”

His hands unclenched, his eyes brimmed with tears. “I want to do well. I really want to. Honestly I do.”

Maria felt her stomach wrenching within her. She closed her eyes to blot out the sight of the weeping old man.

It was well past midnight but neither Stoner nor Markov had left the electronics building. Outside, on a clear sweep of denuded, treeless land, two giant antennas pointed up into the windswept night.

Stoner and Markov hunched over the back of the radar technician who sat at the main console. All three of their faces were reflected dimly in the faint green glow of the circular screen that dominated the console’s front panel. Other men and women had left their tasks and were crowding around them.

“It’s a blip, all right,” the technician muttered. “Damned weak, though.”

The screen sparkled and scintillated almost as if it were alive. Concentric circles of hairline-thin yellow made a sort of bull’s-eye against the screen’s sickly green background. High in the upper right quadrant of the outermost circle, a flickering orange dot glowed faintly.

“Can you center it?” Stoner asked.

The technician checked a clipboard hanging beside the screen. “Not yet. Still some satellite traffic in the way. You’ll get scatter off them and lose the bogey you want.”

“Is that
it
?” Markov whispered, staring fixedly at the screen.

“That’s it,” said Stoner.

The little group behind them seemed to sigh collectively. Markov tugged at his beard and saw his own reflection in the screen’s smooth glass: baggy-eyed, purse-lipped, nervous, awed, afraid.

“What do you have for a velocity vector?” Stoner asked the technician. To Markov, the American seemed calm, intensely calm, as if he was holding himself together for fear that if he let go for one single instant he would explode.

Wordlessly, the technician touched a set of buttons on the keyboard before him. Numbers and letter symbols sprang up on the screen next to the glittering orange blip.

“Where’s a computer terminal?” Stoner snapped. “I can’t tell if that’s within our prediction envelope…”

“There’s a terminal right over there, sir,” said one of the women technicians. She pointed to an empty desk with a computer screen and keyboard atop it.

Stoner slid into the chair and punched up the proper code. The screen flashed a long set of equations momentarily, then replaced it with a shorter list of alphanumerics. Stoner swiveled his chair to peer at the radar screen and its list.

“Zap!” he yelled. “Right on the money! That’s our bird, all right.”

Markov looked at the featureless blob of light on the radar screen and then back at Stoner’s satisfied grin. They were all smiling now, as if they had just witnessed a birth. All Markov saw was a featureless flicker of light and some numbers.

“What’s your frequency again?” Stoner asked the radar operator.

Markov let his attention wander as the two of them plunged into a discussion that was more numbers than any human language. He tried to get the significance straight in his mind. They had sent out a radar beam from the antennas outside this building, more than an hour ago. The beam had gone deep into space, reached the approaching spacecraft and been reflected back to the same antennas. That little gleam of light on the radar screen represented the alien spacecraft.

Later, when they stopped congratulating themselves and realized lamely that no one could find a bottle of champagne at this hour of the night, the triumphant little group broke up. Two of the technicians remained at their posts; the others headed homeward.

As they walked through the night, Markov asked Stoner, “What do we know now that we didn’t know before?”

The American shrugged. “Nothing. Not a damned thing. Except that it’s there, where we thought it would be.”

“Then why the excitement?”

“Because we’ve locked onto the bird,” Stoner said as they passed a row of darkened house trailers. “We’ve got a new way of examining it, like a new pair of eyes focused on it. Precisely calibrated eyes, too. Now we can get the other radars locked onto it—the big dishes at Roi-Namur, for instance. Goldstone and Haystack, back in the States. Even Arecibo. They’ll look at it in different frequencies—different wavelengths.”

“And what will that tell us?”

Stoner waved a hand in the night air. “Length, size…maybe the bird’s mass, if we’re clever enough. Put the radar measurements together with optical photos and maybe we can start to get some idea of what it’s made of—its material and shape.”

Markov nodded. “And when do we attempt to signal it?”

“I don’t know. That’s your end of the game. Big Mac will make that decision. But—in a way, we’ve already signaled it.”

“The radar beam?”

Nodding, Stoner said, “If there’s any kind of intelligence aboard that spacecraft—either a live crew or a smart computer—they’ll have sensors aboard that will tell them we’ve bounced a radar beam off them. They’ll know we’ve spotted them.”

Markov looked up toward the stars.

“If they don’t want to make contact with us,” Stoner went on, “they’ll start to maneuver away from us.”

Or if they are hostile, Markov thought, they will take some other form of action.

The Lincoln sped through the dark Nevada night, arrowing along I-15, across the flat salt desert. On every horizon craggy mountains loomed pale and silent in the cold silver light of the crescent Moon.

“It’s gonna peak,” Charles Grodon was saying. “We can’t keep kidding the people along much longer.”

Willie Wilson sat slumped, eyes closed, chin on chest, in the velour rear seat of the Lincoln. Beside him sat his brother and manager, Bobby. Grodon was on the jump seat, facing them.

“Come on, Charlie,” whispered Bobby. “He’s wiped out.”

Bobby was three years younger than his brother, several inches shorter, twenty pounds heavier. Where Willie was blond and intense, Bobby was a pleasant-faced, freckled redhead. They joked about being twins.

“We’re all tired,” Grodon answered. “Battin’ around the country, working our butts off. I just don’t wanta see it all go down the drain.”

Grodon was wire-thin, sharp-featured, with nervous hands that were never still. He drummed his fingers on the razor-sharp creases of his pinstriped trousers. He toyed with the buttons of his vest. He rubbed at his nose.

“We got the biggest crowd Vegas ever seen,” Bobby said, keeping his voice low to avoid disturbing his brother. “National TV coverage on all three network news shows.
Time
magazine sniffing around. What more do you want?”

“We gotta give them something more than ‘Watch the Skies,’” Grodon said. “Willie’s got to take the next step, tell them something they haven’t heard before. Otherwise they’re gonna get tired of it and stay away.”

“We’re booked solid in Washington and Anaheim,” Bobby pointed out.

“Lemme tell you something,” Grodon said, jabbing a finger toward Bobby. “First big national promo campaign I worked on was for Mark Spitz…”

“Oh, the swimmer?”

“Yeah. We made Mark Spitz a household name. Everybody knew who he was, how he won seven gold medals in the Olympics. He was on every TV show there was. He was on posters. Wheaties boxes. Milk cartons. You name it. And six months later nobody knew who the fuck he was.”

Bobby’s round face pulled into a frown.

“Because,” Grodon explained, “the big schmuck had nothing to offer. He was a terrific swimmer, so what? He couldn’t sing. He couldn’t act. He couldn’t even read a joke off the cue cards. All he could do was take off his clothes, jump in the fuckin’ water and swim like a dolphin.”

“I don’t see…”

Grodon leaned forward on the jump seat until he was nearly touching noses with Bobby. “The thing is this—it’s easy to get attention. We’ve done that. Willie’s got everybody watching him, waiting for his Big Event. ‘Watch the Skies,’ he’s telling ’em. So they’re watching. But they ain’t seeing anything.
Nothing’s happening
.”

“It will.”

“Yeah?”

“If Willie says it will, it will.”

Grodon made a sour face. “Come on, Bobby. This is me, Charlie the Jew. Remember? Willie might believe all this crap he’s spouting but we can’t go off the deep end with him, for Chrissakes. Somebody’s gotta keep his head screwed on straight.”

“It’ll happen,” Bobby repeated stubbornly. “If Willie says it’s going to happen, it’ll happen.”

“When?”

“When it happens.”

“It better be soon. Damn’ soon. Because if something spectacular doesn’t happen soon, all those big crowds and those media people are gonna disappear…like that.” He snapped his fingers.

“It’s going to happen,” Willie said.

Both men turned toward him.

“It’s going to happen,” Willie repeated. “I know it will, just as sure as I know my heart’s beating. I don’t know what it’s going to be, or when it’ll come…”

“It better be soon,” Grodon muttered.

“Don’t worry so-much, Charlie. It’ll happen soon enough. Whenever the Lord decides it to be, that’ll be soon enough.”

“The Lord don’t have to worry about gate receipts.”

Willie laughed and called to the driver, “Hey, Nick, pull over, will ya? I gotta take a leak.”

The Lincoln slowed smoothly and pulled over onto the shoulder of the broad, empty highway.

Willie ducked out the rear door, shivering in the sudden desert chill. The nearest cover was a straggling bush a dozen yards from the car, but the whole moonlit plateau was empty this late at night. Nothing but the moaning, cutting wind and the distant glittering stars.

Willie unzipped his fly and urinated onto the desert ground. He imagined his piss soaking into the porous sand so quickly that it didn’t even leave a momentary puddle.

As he zipped up again and rebuttoned his jacket he glanced up at the sky.

“Jesus Christ Almighty,” he whispered, goggling. Then he shouted it. “Jesus Christ Almighty! Look!
Look!
”

Bobby bounced out of the car in an instant while his brother danced and yelled and pointed upward. Grodon climbed out after him. Then the driver. They all stared up.

Eerie green and pink flickers of light were playing across the sky, glowing fingers of radiance that danced and shimmered among the stars.

“Wh…what is it?” the driver asked, his voice hollow.

“It’s coming!” Willie howled. “I told you it’s coming and it’s coming!”

Bobby stood open-mouthed, staring at the display.

“It’s just the Northern Lights,” Grodon said. “It happens sometimes this far south. Must be sunspots or something causing ’em.”

“It’s a sign,” Willie insisted. “It’s a sign!”

Grodon shook his head. “Too bad you can’t arrange to have ’em on during the rally in Washington.”

Willie laughed. “Who knows? The Lord works in mysterious ways.”

Bobby stood rooted to the ground beside the car, slack-jawed, gaping, awed by what he saw and by his brother’s ability to predict that it would happen.

Jo woke early. The Kwajalein sun streamed into her room, even though she had tacked a blanket over the window. Bright sunlight etched the edges of the window and made the thin blanket glow like molten metal.

She had insisted on having her own room at the hotel, with the other single women in the group. McDermott had groused at first, but as long as she spent part of the night with him, he seemed satisfied. He didn’t want sex, Jo quickly realized, as much as a sense of ownership.

She rose, showered, dressed quickly while mentally debating whether she wanted to take the free breakfast at the dingy government mess hall or buy something slightly better at one of the island’s three restaurants. With a shrug, she decided to skip breakfast altogether.

I can make tea at the office, she told herself as she finished combing her hair. She put on her lipstick, nodded to herself in the dresser’s time-fogged mirror and went to the window to take down the useless blanket.

She saw Stoner striding along the street, heading for the mess hall, his face set in its usual impersonal scowl. Always in his own world, Jo thought, with no time for anyone else.

With a shake of her head, she turned away from the window, found her purse and headed for the computer complex.

The computer building was constructed around a massive IBM facility. The big, boxy computer consoles—each of them larger than a full-sized refrigerator—stood in long rows inside a central well that rose three stories high. Offices surrounded this well, which the workers called the Pit. Balconies ran along its four sides.

Jo had wangled a private office on the second floor, overlooking the balcony and the Pit. It was little more than a cubbyhole; the walls were bare and painted a ghastly institutional green. The desk was a strictly functional metal affair, dented and dulled from long use. The swivel chair squeaked and tipped over if you leaned too far back on it, according to the warning of the sailor who delivered the furniture to the room. The file cabinets rattled. But the computer terminal atop the desk was sparkling new and worked perfectly. For Jo, that was enough.

Her electric teakettle was just starting to whistle when Markov appeared at the open doorway and tapped on its wooden frame.

She turned, kettle in one hand. “Oh! Hi!”

He blinked at her. “My swimming instructor. So this is where you hide during the daytime.”

“I’m not hiding, I’m working,” Jo said. Motioning him into the office with her free hand, she asked, “Do you want some tea?”

Markov smiled and nodded as he took one of the two metal-and-plastic chairs that stood against the bare office wall.

Jo took a plastic cup and an extra tea bag from the bottom file cabinet drawer and poured tea for Markov. She set the cup amidst the computer sheets and typing paper littering her desk.

“I don’t have any milk or sugar,” she apologized.

“This will be fine,” said Markov.

She sat on the other chair, beside him, close enough for him to smell the fragrance of her skin, the shampoo she had used on her hair.

Clearing his throat, Markov announced, “I am here on official business.”

“Not for another swimming lesson?” Jo teased.

He broke into a grin. “Perhaps later.”

“Okay.”

He seemed flustered, like a young boy going out on his first date. “Yes. The, ah…the radio astronomers are going to begin beaming messages to the spacecraft this morning, as soon as it rises above the horizon.”

“I know,” Jo said.

“Several different kinds of messages will be sent, on a variety of frequencies.”

“Will they try laser beams, too?”

Markov said, “Stoner has requested a very powerful laser system from an observatory in Hawaii. It will be sent here within a week or two.”

So he’s getting his way on the laser, Jo thought. I figured he would.

“They have also decided,” Markov went on, “to follow my suggestion of transmitting the Jupiter pulses we recorded back at the spacecraft.”

“That’s a great idea,” Jo said.

“Really?” He beamed.

“Of course. A really terrific idea.”

He reached for the tea, took one scalding sip, then said, “Well, I’m afraid that we’re going to need a good deal of computer time to translate the tapes we have back into signals that the radio telescopes can transmit. They sent me to find someone in the computer services group who could help us with the problem.”

“These are audio tapes?” Jo asked. “Didn’t Dr. Thompson bring the original computer analyses of the tapes when we moved here?”

“Yes, I have spoken with Thompson about this. He says he has both.”

With a slight toss of her head, Jo said, “Then it’s no problem. We just need a little time to check out the computer tapes and make sure they’re compatible with the machine language we’re using here. Filling in the requisition forms will take more time than doing the job itself.”

Markov gave a relieved sigh. “How soon…?”

“How quickly do you need it done? Everything I’m working on here right now is pretty routine. I could get to work on this today and have it for you tomorrow.”

“Wonderful!”

She grinned at him. “After all, we’re old swimming partners, aren’t we?”

His face reddened. “I…you must accept my apologies for that evening. We Russians are not noted for our swimming abilities, you know.”

“No need to apologize,” Jo said.

He was certain that she could hear his heart thumping in his chest. “Jo…dearest lady, I would fight dragons for you.”

“On land.”

“Uh, yes…preferably on land.”

“You’re very sweet, Dr. Markov,” she said.

“Kirill.”

“Kirill. If I run into any dragons, I’ll let you know.”

He took her hand in both of his and kissed it. “I love you madly, dear lady.”

“Oh no,” Jo said, her face turning grave. “You shouldn’t think that.”

He gave a helpless shrug. “It’s much too late for such advice. I love you. Totally.”

Very seriously, Jo said to him, “If we had met a year ago…or even six months ago…”

“I know, I know,” he said, gazing soulfully into her eyes. “Professor McDermott has his claim on you. But surely you can’t be serious about him.”

“I’m not.” Jo’s voice was so low that he could barely hear her.

“Then you can be serious about me!” Markov said, trying to make her smile.

She didn’t answer. Her whole body seemed to droop.

Taking her chin gently in one hand, Markov raised her face so that he could look into those marvelous eyes once again.

“There is someone else,” he realized.

Still she remained silent.

“Someone who does not return your love,” the Russian went on. “Or…perhaps he does not even know you love him?”

For some unfathomable reason, Jo knew she could trust this gentle, boyish man. She nodded slowly.

Markov sighed wistfully. “He is a fortunate man, whoever he is,” he said softly. “And a fool.”

Reynaud was trudging along the beach, his bare feet sloshing in the gently lapping waves, his black trousers rolled up to expose his chubby knees, his shirt clinging wetly to his back.

He blinked against the afternoon sunlight. A body lay sprawled on the sand up ahead, half in the water.

Reynaud ran, puffing, to the body. It was Hans Schmidt.

“Hello,” said the young Dutch astronomer, squinting up at Reynaud. “What are you running for?”

With a final gasp of exhaustion, Reynaud sank to his knees beside the lad. “I thought you were unconscious, or dead, laying here like this.”

Schmidt was still stretched out flat, his blond head on the sand, his shirt open and stirring slightly in the breeze, his trousers and sandaled feet in the water.

“I’m not dead,” he said, grinning crookedly. “I’m not even unconscious.”

“Then why…?” Reynaud made a gesture.

“Why not? What else is there for me to do?” Schmidt raised the hand he had been holding at his side. There was a brownish cigarette smoldering between his fingers.

“Isn’t there any work for you to do? You’re an astronomer, after all.”

Schmidt took a long drag on the cigarette. I wasn’t sent here to work. I’m in exile. This is a prison. I’ve been sent here for knowing too much.”

“But surely…”

Offering the cigarette to Reynaud, the young man went on, “But it’s not a bad prison, as prisons go. The scenery is lovely. And they have some very good grass. Here, try it. The sailors sell it cheap; they fly it in from the Philippines.”