Voyagers II - The Alien Within (35 page)

So now you intend to change the world. No, Stoner corrected himself,
we
intend to change the world. Why? What difference does it make? In all the vast starry universe, does this one little planet with its scurrying, chattering, monkey-descended people make any difference at all? Are we so important? Do we matter in the cosmic scheme of things?

Stoner shook his head. He had no way of knowing. Not yet.

Is there an answer? Did the starship pick out Earth deliberately, from all the myriad worlds it must have encountered? Is this alien in my mind for a specific purpose? Does he have a special reason for being here?

He thought back to one of his first nights after reawakening, when he had still been at the research lab in Hawaii. The night he had briefly escaped from his room and gone out onto the beach. How he had waited for a message, a communication, some sign or signal from the alien who was inhabiting his mind. There had been no sign, no communication. There was still no message to tell him why he had been picked to carry this symbiotic presence from the stars.

There’s got to be a reason! Stoner told himself. All this can’t just be happening because of a blind throw of the dice. There is
order
in the universe, no matter what the quantum theory claims.

But he could see no reason. No message reached him. The plane simply droned on through the deepening night, on its way to Moscow.

The voices behind him had long since stopped their murmuring. Stoner turned slightly in his chair and saw that Baker and An Linh were both asleep, holding hands across the aisle between their chairs. Like two children, he thought. Hansel and Gretel, lost in a wilderness they barely understand.

She’s content to be with him again. An Linh knows she can’t have me, so she’ll settle for Cliff. I hope they can be happy together. I hope she can help him to choose life over death.

The door up at the front of the cabin opened, and he saw Jo coming out, with Markov behind her. She came toward him and took her seat next to his. Markov sat heavily in the seat in front of Stoner’s, with a weary sigh, and swiveled it around to face him.

“I’ve located Everett,” Jo said. Her face looked grave, fearful.

Stoner said, “He’s gone up to the orbiting complex where the starship is, hasn’t he?”

“How did you know?”

“And he left a message for me,” Stoner added.

Jo threw a startled glance at Markov. Then she looked back at Stoner, her eyes filled with fear. “Everett’s message is that if you want to find him, he’ll be up there in orbit, demolishing the alien’s spacecraft.”

Stoner nodded. “That’s what I thought he’d do.”

“He’s gone totally crazy,” Jo said. “He’s really dangerous now, murderously dangerous.”

Looking to Markov, Stoner asked, “Do you think your government might give me another ride into space, Kirill?”

“You want to go back to the alien ship?”

“Yes.”

Jo reached out toward him. “Keith, don’t you understand what Everett’s up to? He
wants
you to come after him!”

“I know.”

“He’s planning to kill you!”

“No,” Stoner corrected. “He’s planning to kill the star traveler, by destroying his ship.”

“What do you mean?…”

“I’ve got to stop him from destroying the spacecraft, Jo.”

“At the risk of your own life?” Markov growled.

“Whatever the risk. The future of the human race is tied up with that starship. If Nillson destroys it, he destroys humanity’s future, too.”

It hung in the black emptiness like a shining golden globe.

Stoner blinked as he stared out the space shuttle window. He had expected to see the small oblong shape of the alien starship surrounded by other spacecraft, like a queen bee attended by glittering metallic workers.

Instead there was a huge, smooth expanse of gleaming gold, like a gigantic polished gemstone. It shimmered subtly, and Stoner realized that it was a screen of energy that now encased the alien ship and all the human structures that had been built around it.

“It’s an energy screen,” Jo said.

She was sitting beside him in the shuttle’s passenger cabin, dressed in the functional coveralls everyone wore in zero gravity. Hers were coral red, and they accented her figure rather than hid it. Jo’s hair was neatly pulled back and tied in a little ponytail that floated weightlessly off the nape of her neck.

Stoner could not take his eyes off the gleaming ovate immensity of it. He felt the shoulder straps of his seat restraint harness cutting into him as he pressed his forehead on the cold plastic of the window.

“It must be miles wide,” he said to Jo.

“Four thousand meters from end to end,” she said. “Same dimension top to bottom. Almost three miles.”

“More like two and a half miles.” Stoner did the math in his mind. “Two point four eight something.”

“But who’s counting?” she joked weakly.

Markov, hovering weightlessly over their chair backs, chimed in, “I’m surprised that you don’t have the metric system ingrained in your very souls. It is such a logical system, so scientific.”

“We have both systems in our minds, Kirill,” answered Jo. “Metric and English.”

“Such confusion.” The Russian wagged his head. It made him float slightly sideways, and he pressed his hand against the cabin’s curving bulkhead to steady himself.

The Russian looked younger in zero gravity. The lines in his face and the pouches beneath his eyes had smoothed out.

Markov, An Linh, and Baker had all started to get sick when the Russian shuttle had coasted into zero gravity. Stoner could see their faces go white, sense the dizziness and nausea each of them was experiencing. He said a few soothing words as he reached into their minds and eased the disorientation that plagued them. What usually took new space travelers hours to achieve, they accomplished in minutes—an inner equilibrium. They found that they enjoyed zero gee and marveled that they had acquired their “space legs” as quickly as any veteran astronaut.

Stoner laughed inwardly at Markov’s disdain of the English system of measure. Kirill’s worried about the confusion of having two mathematical systems in your head. How about having two minds inside you? Two different persons in one body? He suddenly thought of his childhood Sunday school classes. God must find it even more confusing, with three persons inside.

But his eyes never left the curving wall of the energy screen, growing bigger by the moment as their shuttle approached. The huge bulk of the Earth slid into view, ponderous and incredibly bright, with deep, swirling blues and streaming swirls of dazzling white clouds. The energy screen glowed against it, big enough to blot out the subcontinent of India as it glided past.

The Indian Ocean was a wide swath of purest lapis-lazuli blue, decked with a procession of pearl-gray domed thunder-clouds which cast long shadows ahead of them. Stoner saw the coast of Australia coming up, then suddenly squeezed his eyes shut against the unexpected brilliance of the island continent’s interior.

“What’s that?” he asked, opening his eyes again to see a vast glittering swath too bright to look at directly.

Jo leaned against him to peer out the tiny window.

“Oh,” she said. “The Outback Project.”

“Outback Project?”

“The Aussies are converting their desert into solarvoltaic cells. Automated machines scoop up the sand at one end and leave solar cells on the ground on the other. They’ve been going on for years now; must have done several thousand square miles.”

“A solar-energy farm,” Stoner marveled. “Converting sunlight into electricity.”

“It’s not very efficient,” Jo sniffed. “But trust the Aussies to think
big
. Australia’s an electricity exporter now. Vanguard’s been negotiating with them to run a power link all the way to Japan.”

Stoner squinted at the glittering strips of solar cells reflecting sunlight at him like the facets of a continent-wide jewel. Then the golden-hued energy screen slid across his view, so close now that it blotted out Australia and New Zealand both as it swept by in its Earth-circling orbit.

Elly’s on her way back there, Stoner thought. That tiny speck of an island is home to her now. Her children are there. She’ll find a new husband, he told himself. She’s a good woman, warm and intelligent and caring. Maybe someday she’ll get over the hurt I’ve caused her. Maybe someday I can visit her in her own home.

He looked across the curving bulk of the Pacific Ocean toward the coast of California, coming into view. Douglas, he thought. Douglas.

Once they had landed in Moscow, Stoner had put through a call to Los Angeles. With Jo’s help, he’d tracked down the Douglas Stoner who was his son.

Douglas was a man now, with the beginnings of pouches under his eyes and a tight, suspicious downturn at the corners of his lips. He wore a light gray jacket over a silk pullover shirt. His hair was ash blond from the sun, as was the drooping mustache that had surprised Stoner. In the background, Stoner saw a marina filled with sailboats.

Douglas stared out of the phone’s picture screen with narrowed eyes, warily, as if he were facing a trap of some kind. “You’re my father?” His voice was dark with suspicion.

“Underneath this beard, yes, it’s me.” Stoner had tried to sound light-hearted. It was a mistake.

“I don’t have a father. My father’s dead.”

“I’m back, Doug. I’ve been trying to reach you to tell you—”

The thirty-three-year-old stranger reached out and snapped off the connection. The phone screen before Stoner went suddenly blank gray.

He heard Jo’s sharp intake of breath behind him, saw Markov’s sad shake of head. Wordlessly, Stoner touched the button on the phone’s keyboard that redialed the same number. For the span of a heartbeat he wondered what he could say to the son whom he had not seen in twenty years.

The phone screen lit up with the words “CALL REFUSED.” They glowed blackly against the gray background.

Stoner hit the off button and got up from the phone. Neither Jo nor Markov said a word. He stood and waited for some feeling to hit him: anger, pain, remorse, something, anything. But there was no emotion at all. It was as if some stranger had refused to tell him the time of day.

“Well,” he said to his two friends. “At least he knows I’m alive.”

And he walked out of the room, leaving Jo and Markov staring at his retreating back.

Markov tugged worriedly at his thinning beard. “He frightens me.”

Nodding, Jo admitted, “Me, too.”

“He’s not human.”

“He was when he first awoke. In Hawaii…in Italy, Keith was more human, more alive than he’d ever been.”

“But now…”

“Now he’s like a machine, almost.”

The Russian sighed deeply. “Not a trace of emotion in him. Not love or fear or anger. Nothing. As cold as an iceberg.”

“What he did to that Oriental, Temujin…” Jo shuddered.

“He’s not human,” Markov repeated.

“He was always driven,” said Jo.

“But not like this. He had emotions before. Passions. He could get drunk. He could get angry. Now—now he’s like a man possessed.”

She stared at the empty doorway that Stoner had left behind him. “Do you think it’s really a good idea to let him go up to the alien spacecraft?”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know,” Jo said, feeling the tension within her turning to actual fear. “I just think…maybe if he gets in contact with that spacecraft again, with the alien and all…”

Markov stared at her silently.

“Maybe we ought to keep him away from it,” Jo suggested.

The Russian slowly shook his head. “I don’t think we could keep him away, even if we tried. I don’t think there is any way we could possibly stop him from doing whatever he wants to do.”

As Stoner stared at the approaching wall of energy, with the Earth reduced to a beautiful backdrop rather than a world of living, suffering people, he felt as if all the things that had happened to him since awakening had really happened to someone else. It was like watching a video biography of some stranger’s life. The Earth was merely a distant place, a locale, a stage, and those strange people who inhabited it were odd characters in someone else’s struggle.

Here was home. Here, in the clean, empty silence of space.

For an instant Stoner thought he might get up from his seat, go to the airlock, and step out into the void. How simple it would be. How clean and neat. I did it once, he told himself. And he felt the chill of death seeping into him. He shuddered, not from the cold, but from the conflict. Part of him
wanted
oblivion, an end to struggling. Part of him looked forward to returning to the cold and emptiness.

Not yet, a voice within him whispered. We have not come all this way to give it up now.

We. The voice spoke of we. The alien and I. Linked together irretrievably.

“The screen holds in air and heat, and it shields against meteoric dust, even good-sized meteors.” It was Jo’s voice, far in the distance. She was talking to Markov and the others.

He stared at the approaching wall of shimmering energy, and his eyes saw the sarcophagus riding against the glorious sky of the homeworld up at the top of the tower that rose into orbital space. His funeral cortege carried his body with reverence and placed it lovingly on the bier inside the sarcophagus. None of his crèche mates was there, of course. Born on the same day, they had each terminated their lives on the same day, according to the ancient custom. But he was starting a new custom, something unheard-of in all the ages of their civilization. Sending his dead body, preserved by the cold of infinity itself, off among the stars. Some called it foolishness. A few spoke of sinful pride. But he was beyond their words now. His body would ride the starways, perfectly preserved, waiting to be discovered by creatures who could understand, creatures who could care, creatures who could look to the stars and finally
know
.

The space shuttle thumped against an airlock, and Stoner was jarred out of his reverie.

“The airlock projects out beyond the screen,” Jo was saying. “It was easier than trying to open the screen every time we wanted to dock a shuttle.”

Wordlessly, Stoner unlatched his harness and rose to his feet. Stretching an arm upward, he balanced himself a few inches off the floor and eased out into the cabin’s central aisle. Jo and the others were ahead of him. The shuttle was otherwise empty, except for the flight crew up in the cockpit.

The hatch swung open and a pair of technicians ducked their heads inside. One wore white coveralls with the stylized Vanguard monogram on his shoulder. The other, a chunky young woman, was in khaki coveralls that bore a hammer-and-sickle insignia.

An Linh, Baker, and Markov all wore Russian-issue coveralls, plain khaki with no shoulder patches or nametags. Stoner still wore the faded blues he had acquired from the Peacekeepers, partly because Markov could find no coveralls long enough to fit him. Jo’s outfit of coral was the only touch of vivid color among the five of them.

She took an electronic stylus from the white-clad technician and signed his hand-sized display screen. The tech came aboard the shuttle as the Russian woman led them away and into the orbital complex.

Stoner saw that they were in a transparent tunnel that led toward the center of the complex. From inside, the energy screen looked a dull, flat gray. Other transparent tunnels led from different parts of the screen toward the center, with cross tunnels connecting them here and there. It reminded Stoner of a drawing he had studied in a biology class, ages ago, showing blood vessels threading through the human body.

And we’re the corpuscles, he thought as they floated through the tunnel.

“These were built before the energy screen went up,” Jo said, like a tour guide. “They’re airtight, so they give us some redundancy if the screen should blow out.”

“Blow out?” Markov’s voice squeaked.

“Not to worry, Kir,” said Jo, laughing. “This whole complex is built to man-rated specifications. All the safety precautions we can think of. Like the airlock coming up: these tunnels are divided into airtight segments, so if something happens in one area, the rest of the tunnel can be sealed off and kept safe.”

Markov gave her an unconvinced look.

The Russian woman halted them in front of the airlock hatch.

“From this point onward there will be gravity,” she said in British-accented English. “It will be very slight at first, but as we approach the center of the complex it will increase to the full value of gravity on Earth’s surface.”

“Gravity?” Baker asked. “How?”

“It’s fairly new,” Jo replied. “We’ve been experimenting with it for a few months now. Same principle as the energy screen, really, but here we apply the energy to create a gravity field.”

Stoner watched Baker’s face as the new information swirled in his mind. The Australian’s mouth grinned, but his eyes were calculating. He’s trying to figure out how an artificial gravity field could be used as a weapon, Stoner saw. He’s picturing a city being uprooted and flung off into space.

And these are the people you’re trying to save, he told himself. Savages whose first thought is always how to kill their enemies, how to increase their own power.

Why? he wondered. And looking deeper into Baker’s cold eyes he saw the anger that drove the man, and the fear that lay beneath it. Strike first, Baker’s fears commanded him. Hurt them before they can hurt you.

Stoner turned his eyes away from the Aussie. They went through the airlock, and within a few moments he could feel the gentle, insistent tug of gravity. An Linh’s hair, which had been floating wildly in all directions like a mini-Afro, began to settle down. Jo’s ponytail bobbed against her neck. Markov’s face began to sag again and look its age.