Voyagers I (14 page)

The lecture hall was about half filled. It had originally been a movie theater for the military personnel of Kwajalein, and Stoner found himself hoping they would show films in it again. But this evening it was a lecture hall, a gathering place, a social focus for the scientists and technicians of Project JOVE.

Nearly a hundred and fifty men and women sat uncomfortably on the government-issue metal folding chairs. Jeff Thompson sat next to Stoner, in one of the rearmost rows. Jo Camerata was nowhere in sight. Big Mac and Tuttle were down in the front row, within one step and a hop of the speaker’s podium.

The buzzing of scores of conversations died away as McDermott climbed heavily up onto the little platform at the front of the hall. Cavendish stepped spryly up alongside him, carrying his own chair. He opened it and sat down behind McDermott, who leaned ponderously on the shaky little podium. An older Russian came up alongside Cavendish and took the chair that had already been placed there.

“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen.” Big Mac’s rasping lecture-hall voice was met by a shrill scream of feedback from the microphone.

He glared at the audio technician sitting off to one side of the room behind a deskful of black boxes, while everyone else winced at the loudspeakers set into the rafters of the hall’s wooden ceiling.

“Mac doesn’t need a microphone, for god’s sake,” Stoner muttered. Thompson grinned and nodded.

McDermott used the microphone anyway, which amplified his voice into a booming, echoing thunder that rattled the walls of the building. He introduced Academician Zworkin, the astronomer who headed the Russian team. The old man—gray thinning hair, grayer pallor to his face, rumpled gray suit despite the heat—got slowly to his feet and came to the podium. He pulled the goosenecked microphone down to his own level.

“Thank you, dear Professor McDermott,” he said in a high, thin, singsong voice. His English was quite good: the accent was from Oxford.

Addressing the seated crowd, Zworkin said, “Although I have attended two of the SETI conferences over recent years, I am far from being an expert on extraterrestrial intelligence. But then, who is?”

A polite murmur of laughter rippled through the audience.

“My own field of specialization is planetary astronomy. I am not an astrophysicist or an astrochemist. I am, if such a word is possible, an astro-geologist. I am not quite sure what I am doing here, among you, except that I was too old and slow to avoid being picked for this job.”

The audience laughed once again, but Stoner realized, He’s warning us not to expect any great ideas out of him. He’s beyond his depth here and he wants to get back home as soon as possible.

Zworkin then began introducing each of the fifteen Russian scientists. All but one of them were men, although several of them were accompanied by their wives. Who were pointedly not introduced.

A lanky, gangly Russian stood up, looking slightly flustered and boyish despite his scraggly, graying beard. Zworkin introduced him as Professor Kirill Markov, of the University of Moscow, a linguist.

He’s the one I wrote to! Stoner realized. I’ve got to talk with him.

The introductions finished, McDermott took over the podium again.

“We’re going to be working together on this project for some months,” he said in the tones of a high school football coach. “I’d like to ask Dr. Cavendish to summarize where we stand right now.”

Cavendish smiled his way to the podium.

“Right,” he said, like a ritual throat-clearing. “I haven’t prepared any slides or graphs…thought that we’d all be digging into the details quickly enough.” He hesitated a moment, as if gathering his thoughts. “The, ah
…object
that entered the solar system last summer and engaged in a rather lengthy flyby of Jupiter, is now approaching Earth. It has been accelerating as it comes toward us, and our current projection is that it will reach its nearest distance to Earth on or close to fifth July.”

“The acceleration,” one of the Russians asked, “is this normal—I mean, natural?”

“Quite. In essence, the object is falling freely as it comes closer to the Sun, you see, and the solar gravitational pull is accelerating it. No, it has not shown any signs of life or purpose since it left Jupiter’s vicinity and altered its course to head our way.”

“Then it is inert now?”

“Dead as a rock, as far as we can tell,” Cavendish said. “It’s just coasting along.”

“What size is it?”

“Any data about its shape?”

“Surface brightness?”

Cavendish held up both his long-fingered hands to stop the questions from coming faster than he could answer them.

“Well, it’s rather larger than a breadbox…”

The Americans in the audience laughed. The Russians exchanged puzzled glances with each other.

“Actually,” Cavendish went on, “we don’t know very much as yet about its true size, mainly because we haven’t a firm fix on its intrinsic brightness. If it’s made of highly reflective material, then it must be rather small—on the order of a hundred meters or less.”

“What is the maximum size it could be?”

Cavendish hiked his eyebrows and searched through the audience for help. “Anyone care to make an educated guess?”

Stoner called out, “It can’t be more than a few hundred meters across, at most. From the mass measurements we made during the Jupiter encounter, it must be very small, with negligible mass—about what you would expect if you put three or four Salyut or Skylab space stations together.”

Zworkin turned in his chair. “Then it is large for a spacecraft.”

“But tiny in comparison to an asteroid or even a very minor meteor,” Stoner said.

“I see.”

Cavendish tapped the microphone and all eyes focused back on him. “The object is still too far out for accurate radar measurement of its size, although within the next few weeks it should get close enough for a go at it.”

“Why not use the Goldstone or Haystack radars?” someone asked.

“Why not Arecibo?”

McDermott got to his feet and said from where he stood, “Security. Our governments have agreed to keep this project as quiet as possible, to protect the people from undue shock and panic.”

“We can track it with the Landau facility,” Zworkin said, his voice barely audible without the microphone.

“Actually,” Cavendish broke in, trying to regain control of the discussion, “since the object is rushing toward us, all we need do is wait for a few weeks and we should be able to snap its photograph with Brownie cameras.”

“One question on my mind,” said a woman—not one of the Russians—from her chair, “is this: how do we go about making contact with it?”

“By radio, I should think,” Cavendish answered.

“What about lasers?”

“What wavelength should be used for the contact attempt?”

Cavendish shrugged. “As many as we can, I suppose. We really have no idea of which wavelengths it communicates in.”

“If any.”

Stoner rose to his feet and said, “We ought to try to physically intercept it—go out and meet it, rendezvous with it, board it.”

“I suppose we could consider that, of course.”

But McDermott bellowed, “Out of the question! It’d take months to prepare a manned space shot, years, and this thing will whiz past us before we’d be ready. Besides…”

“If we pushed hard,” Stoner countered, “we could set up a Space Shuttle launch in time.”

“And what would we use for the upper stages,” McDermott taunted, “a slingshot?”

“If we have to.”

“Actually,” Cavendish stepped in, “I suppose we should attempt radio contact first, don’t you think?”

Markov stood up, his slightly reddish face set in a puckish grin. He glanced back at Stoner as if he recognized him.

“I am not a physical scientist,” he said, turning toward the podium. “However, in the question of communicating with the spacecraft, may I make a suggestion?”

“Yes, certainly,” said Cavendish.

“If you have made tape transcriptions of the radio signals issued from Jupiter during the spacecraft’s encounter with that planet, perhaps it would be useful to play these recordings back to the spacecraft as it approaches the Earth.”

McDermott scowled. Cavendish knitted his shaggy brows together. “Play back the radio pulses from Jupiter?”

“Yes,” said Markov. “That would immediately tell the alien that we observed the radio pulses that he caused. It would immediately be recognizable to him as an artificial signal from our world.”

“H’mm. Striking.”

“What makes you think it’s a
him
?” a woman’s voice called out.

“Shouldn’t we be more cautious?” Jeff Thompson said, getting to his feet beside Stoner. “I mean, maybe we ought to wait for
it
to signal us before we start bombarding
it
with radio waves or laser beams. It might not like being bathed in electromagnetic energy.”

“If we wait too long,” Cavendish countered, “it just might sail right past us and leave the solar system entirely, just as Professor McDermott said.”

“That’s why I think we should try to make physical contact with it,” Stoner said, still on his feet. “If it’s unmanned we could even try to capture it and bring it into an orbit around the earth.”

“Absolutely not!” McDermott snapped.

“Why so?” asked Cavendish.

“Too risky. Too many unknowns. It’s one thing to make radio contact, we’ve got the equipment and personnel for that. We are
not
going to play space pirates—boarding and seizing an extraterrestrial spacecraft. If they want to put that thing in orbit around Earth, they’ll do it themselves.”

“So what’ll happen,” Stoner said, his voice rising, “is that we’ll spend the next few months trying to get an answer out of it, and it’ll sail right on past us and out of the solar system forever. Why wave bye-bye to it when we might be able to get our hands on it?”

“It might not
want
to be captured,” somebody said.

Cavendish, leaning his elbows on the rickety podium, responded, “That’s assuming there’s a crew aboard, isn’t it?”

“Or a smart computer.”

“Damned smart computer, to take the bird across interstellar distances.”

“We have no authority,” McDermott insisted, hunching his shoulders like a football player about to make body contact, “to attempt to intercept the spacecraft.”

“Then get the authority,” Stoner insisted, “before it’s too late and the thing sails right on past us.”

“We should try to establish radio contact first,” Zworkin said. “If there
is
a crew aboard…”

“Of course,” Stoner agreed. “But let’s start making the necessary plans for a rendezvous with the bird.”

McDermott’s face was getting splotchy with anger. “Do you have any idea of the magnitude of such a task?”

Stoner let himself grin at Big Mac. “As the only experienced astronaut in this group, yes, I think I do.”

“We don’t have time to play space cadet!”

“You don’t have time for anything else. If that spacecraft just zips past us without our learning anything from it…”

“We’ll make radio contact,” McDermott said.

“And what happens if it doesn’t respond? What if we don’t hit the right communications frequency and it just ignores us?”

Zworkin stood up and made a little bow toward McDermott, almost apologetically. “I believe the young man is correct,” he said, his singsong voice barely carrying back to the row where Stoner stood.

McDermott started to reply, but the Russian went on, “We should, of course, be preparing to meet this alien craft in space and, if it is at all feasible, to bring it back to Earth for careful scrutiny. I will recommend such a course of action to the Soviet Academy. Perhaps the Soviet Union can make rocket boosters and cosmonauts available, even if the United States cannot.”

McDermott looked as if he was choking, but he managed to say, “I understand. And I will recommend to the White House that NASA be alerted to the possibilities of such a mission.”

Stoner resumed his seat, but not before receiving a venomous glare from Big Mac.

You’ve won the first battle, Stoner said to himself. But it’s going to be a long, dirty war.

Edouard Reynaud sipped at his fourth brandy while he reclined as far back in his seat as the chair would go. It seemed to him that he’d been inside this chartered airplane forever: Rome, Amsterdam, New York, San Francisco, Honolulu and now—would it ever stop? Was this purgatory, perhaps? A millennium or two of being locked inside an aluminum canister, able to do nothing except eat, sleep and eliminate?

It’s like being a baby again, he thought to himself, drowsy from the brandy. A flying metal nursery, that’s what they’ve put us in. And the stewards are the nursemaids.

He was fighting off sleep. He knew it would come if he relaxed, and with it would come the bad dreams, the guilt dreams, unless he had the proper level of alcohol in his blood. So he drank brandy after brandy, calling for a fresh one as soon as he finished the one in his hand.

The young blond angel in the chair beside him slept innocently, his mouth slightly open, his breath easing in and out of him as calmly as the ebb and flow of the tides.

Reynaud suppressed a desire to touch his sweet face, stroke his beardless cheek.

Instead, he turned to the window and looked out at the dark, starry sky. He recognized Orion, the Bull, the Dogs. Yes, everything is in its place, as usual, he saw. Deep in that infinite sky, he knew, new stars were being born and old ones torn apart by titanic explosions. Galaxies whirled out there in the darkness and quasars burned with a fierceness that no human mind could comprehend.

“How long,” Reynaud whispered to himself, “will you keep your secrets? If God set you in place, when did He do the job? And how?”

It did not occur to him to ask why. That was the province of the theologians. Reynaud was a cosmologist.

He saw his own reflection in the glass of the airplane’s window, and he frowned at it. A fat, round face atop a fat, round body. Sagging jowls and baggy eyes, bloodshot and failing. A man who sought refuge in the monastic life when the world became too much for him to bear, and still managed to stay fat, and drunk, still managed to lapse into homosexuality now and then, despite all the controls and the punishments the Abbot could wield over him.

Reynaud smiled bitterly at his memory of the Abbot’s face, when that stern master of the monastery was told that the Pope himself wanted Reynaud sent to him.

“What His Holiness wants with
you
is beyond my comprehension,” said the Abbot, his hawklike visage grim with self-control, his piercing eyes ablaze. “If the Vatican had seen fit to ask my opinion in this matter, you would spend the remainder of your days cleaning the stables, which is what you deserve.”

Reynaud bobbed his head in agreement.

But the Vatican had asked for him, for Reynaud, the famous cosmologist, the Nobel laureate. What they are getting, he told his reflection in the plane’s window, is Reynaud the drunkard, the pervert, the ruins of the man they believe they are getting.

The boy beside him stirred, sighed softly, opened his sky-blue eyes.

“Did you sleep well?” Reynaud asked in French.

He answered in some Germanic tongue, and Reynaud remembered that he had gotten aboard in Amsterdam.

With a shake of his head, Reynaud asked, “Do you speak English, perhaps?”

“Yes.” The boy smiled. Feeling old and very, very tired, Reynaud smiled back at him.

“Hans Schmidt is my name. I am from the University of Leiden.”

With a slight nod of his head, Reynaud replied, “Edouard Reynaud. I have no university affiliation, but I was…”

“Edouard Reynaud!” Schmidt’s eyes went round. “I’ve read your books!”

Feeling ancient and foolish in his shabby black suit and unshaven jowls, Reynaud shrugged. “They were written long ago. They are all outdated now.”

“Yes, of course,” Schmidt answered with the unconscious cruelty of youth, “but they were classics in their field. We had to read them in undergraduate classes.”

“You are an astronomer?”

Schmidt’s enthusiasm turned sour. “I was,” he said, growing gloomy. “Now I am a prisoner.”

“So are we all,” said Reynaud. “But don’t worry, the plane will land soon enough on Kwajalein and then we can walk in the sunlight.”

“You don’t understand,” the young man said. “All the others on this plane—astronomers and astrophysicists from all over Europe—they volunteered for this assignment. They are happy to be going to Kwajalein, to study the alien signals.”

“You are not?”

Schmidt shook his head slowly. “I
discovered
the radio signals. But I’ll never get credit for it.”

Reynaud made a sympathetic noise.

“I was working for Professor Voorne at the big dish in Dwingeloo, last summer. I picked up the signals before the Americans or anyone else did,” Schmidt explained, his voice going almost sulky. “We checked on their dates; I had the signals before they did.”

“Then you should get the credit,” Reynaud said.

“Fat chance! Voorne is so slow and conservative that your grandmother could run circles around him. He refused to let me send a note in to the astrophysics journal until we had triple-checked everything. By that time the NATO bureaucrats came around and put secrecy stamps on every piece of paper I had. They wouldn’t let me publish anything, not one word.”

“Too bad,” said Reynaud.

“And now they’ve exiled me to this blasted little island. I don’t want to go. They forced me to! I have my girl in Leiden; we were going to be engaged in another few weeks. But the government said either I go to Kwajalein or I go into the Army and get sent to Kwajalein anyway.”

Reynaud shook his head.

“It’s the Americans,” Schmidt muttered. “They’re behind all this. They want to get all the credit for themselves and make sure that I don’t get any.”

Reynaud pursed his lips, then replied, “Don’t you think that the matter of finding an intelligent extraterrestrial race is the really important thing?”

“Sure! That’s why the Americans want all the credit for the discovery.”

“Well…I’ve been ordered to Kwajalein, too. I had no desire to go, but my superiors have sent me anyway. That’s why I’m on this plane, just as you are. But I don’t think it’s an American plot, really.”

Schmidt said nothing.

“I’ve been sent on this mission by the Holy Father himself,” Reynaud added.

“The Pope?”

“Yes.”

“Why is he interested in astronomy?”

Reynaud chuckled, bitterly. “He isn’t. Nor are the cardinals that surround him. They are merely interested in preserving their power, and keeping the truth from the people.”

Schmidt stared at him in disbelief. “You are a priest and you say such things?”

“A priest? Me? Oh no! Not a priest. I’m not even a monk, really. I’ve taken no vows.”

Confused, Schmidt said, “I thought…we had heard that you had retired to a monastery…”

“Yes. Yes, I had. But His Holiness has brought me out of retirement. Here I am in the world again—and it’s a very different world from the one I left, years ago.”

The two men talked as the night faded from the sky and the sun rose over the endless gray waters of the Pacific. The other passengers slowly stirred out of their sleep, stretching cramped muscles, yawning, groaning, lining up at the plane’s lavatories.

Stewards started moving along the aisle, helping people get rid of their blankets and pillows. Over Schmidt’s shoulder, Reynaud noticed that the stewards were all young men. Eventually they brought little plastic trays of breakfast. Reynaud couldn’t bear to look at the stuff once it was set before him: it was gray and dead, as plastic as the receptacles on which it was served.

The pilot came on the intercom and cheerfully announced that in a few hours’ time they would be landing at Kwajalein.

“If I can find it,” he added with a chuckle.

Reynaud shuddered a little. He looked over at Schmidt, who had eaten every scrap of food on his tray and closed his eyes to sleep. With a sad shake of his head, Reynaud turned to stare out at the featureless gray expanse of ocean so far below them, wishing that he could sleep without dreaming.

He awoke with a cold, gasping start as the plane thumped and banged.

“Landing gear,” said Schmidt, now wide awake. “I was going to wake you…”

Reynaud thanked him and looked out the window. A ring of islets showed green and white against the sea.

The plane circled the largest island of the group and finally landed with a thump that seemed more like a controlled crash than a true touchdown. But Reynaud was grateful for small miracles: purgatory was over and he could enter paradise.

The scientists were ushered off the plane and into the blindingly hot sunlight of the equatorial island. The airport seemed to be filled with Americans, many of them in military khakis, the rest in open-necked shirts and shorts.

Smiling, efficient, broad-shouldered young men led the scientists across the crushed coral rock rampway and into a cement block building. It was air-conditioned to the point of chilblains. Americans, Reynaud thought. Always so extravagant. Papers were examined, luggage picked up. Reynaud let himself be bundled into a jeep with Schmidt and another man.

“Your luggage’ll be on th’ truck,” said their driver, an energetic-looking sailor. He put Reynaud on the seat beside him; the other two had to crawl into the rear seats.

As he gunned the jeep’s motor to roaring life, the sailor asked, “You a Catholic priest, sir?”

“No,” Reynaud replied in English. “I am a lay brother of the Order of St. Dominic.” The Order of Thomas Aquinas, he added silently. And of Torquemada.

The jeep lurched into motion. “Oh. I was wonderin’, with your black suit and all,” the driver yelled over the motor’s howl. “We got a chaplain on the island but he ain’t Catholic. They fly the Catholic padre in on Sundays from Jaluit to hear confessions and say Mass.”

“You are a Catholic?” Reynaud asked, clutching the edge of his seat as the jeep barreled along the dusty road.

“Ah, well, sometimes, yeah,” the sailor stammered. “You know how it is.”

Reynaud said nothing, but thought, I know exactly how it is.

After a few terrifying minutes of racing past featureless blurs of cement block buildings, the driver pulled the jeep over to the side of the road in a grinding, squealing, skidding stop.

“Kwajalein Hilton,” he announced.

Reynaud saw a three-story gray drab building.

“Bachelor Officers Quarters,” the sailor explained as a swirl of coral dust drifted past the jeep. “BOQ is the way most people say it. Not for you, Father…” He tugged at Reynaud’s sleeve and said to Schmidt and the other scientist, “You two guys are gonna be stayin’ in here.”

They climbed out of the jeep as Reynaud remained in his seat.

“Yer luggage’ll catch up with you in a couple minutes.” The sailor put the jeep in gear and left them standing in a spray of dust. “You rate special, Father. You got a whole trailer to yerself.”

“I’m not a priest,” Reynaud said. “You should call me Brother.”

The driver gave an embarrassed little laugh. “Sounds kinda funny. But if that’s the way you want it…okay, Brother, here we are.”

He skidded the jeep to a stop and pointed grandly to a house trailer, one of a dozen standing in a row on the sandy soil, gleaming metal under the hot sun.

“All for you, Fa…eh, Brother.”

The sailor came into the trailer with Reynaud, showed him the sink and the refrigerator, the narrow, cotlike beds, the built-in cabinets, the toilet.

“By Kwaj standards, this is the Ritz.”

Reynaud nodded and mumbled his thanks. The sailor grinned and turned on the air conditioner.

“Linens are in here.” He opened a closet door. “I can make your bed for you.”

“Oh no, please. I can do it for myself.”

“Well, you got privacy and runnin’ water. What more can you ask for? See you Sunday, at Mass.”

Reynaud nodded absently and the sailor left, shutting the flimsy metal door behind him carefully. It felt as if a small, playful puppy had just gone away. Reynaud stood there, feeling bewildered, listening to the air conditioner rattle and groan and fill the trailer with a clammy, morguelike chill.

Exiled, he thought to himself. That’s what young Schmidt said, and he’s right. We’ve all been exiled to this horrible place. I sought the peace and protection of the monastery and the Pope himself pulled me away from it, exiled me here in this wretched island. Whatever becomes of me is their fault, not my own.

Stoner stalked out of the air-conditioned chill of the administration building, into the enfolding warmth of the setting sun. It was muggy, but the heat felt good after the artificial dryness of the air inside—and McDermott’s stubborn obstructionism.

Go take a long walk, Stoner commanded himself, seething. Find an empty spot on the beach and do an hour’s worth of exercising—before you punch out Big Mac’s stupid face.

McDermott was dragging his feet about the rendezvous mission. He had not yet sent his recommendation to Washington, and wouldn’t allow anyone else to make such a recommendation. Stoner had spent an hour arguing with the old man, to no avail.

Why won’t he go for it? Stoner asked himself for the twentieth time. What’s wrong with him that he can’t…?

Then he saw Jo, coming down the “company town’s” only street from the computer center, heading toward him.

“Hi, Keith,” she said brightly as she approached him. “How’re y…?” She saw the thundercloud expression on his face. “Wow! What’s got you pissed?”

“Your pal McDermott,” Stoner growled.

Jo’s own face stiffened with anger. “My pal, huh? What’s he doing now?”

“The same old crap—delaying until it’s too late to do what needs to be done.”

She eyed him tauntingly. “I think it’s the heat. It’s got old Mac down. Literally.”

Ignoring her implication, he muttered, “I’d like to put him down. Literally.”

“He’s still not going for the rendezvous flight?” Jo asked.

“He won’t even sign a memo about it.”

“Well, it
is
a long shot,” she said.

“We’re here to make contact with an intelligent extraterrestrial visitor, and you talk about long shots?”

“You take everything so seriously,” Jo said, reaching up to tap a fingertip against the end of his nose. “Relax. Loosen up. We’re here, we might as well enjoy it.”