Voyagers I (17 page)

Reynaud stared at the joint. “That’s marijuana?”

Laughing, Schmidt propped himself up on one elbow, sand sticking to his damp hair. “I forgot. Your generation is into alcohol, isn’t it? You’d be afraid to try pot.”

“Well…” Reynaud watched as his hand reached out for the joint. He put it to his lips and inhaled deeply. And coughed.

Schmidt collapsed back on the sand with laughter.

“It…it’s been many years,” Reynaud croaked, eyes tearing, “since I’ve been able to smoke anything.”

He handed the joint back to Schmidt, who puffed on it contentedly.

“Don’t stare at me so disapprovingly,” the young astronomer said. “I know I could be helping them out. Those Americans and the Russians. They’re so busy, so industrious. But why should I help them? I
discovered
the damned signals. If it weren’t for me they’d all be home with their families and friends. I’d be home with my Katrina. We’d be making plans for our wedding. I’d be getting laid. Instead, I’m here and she’s probably screwing with somebody else.”

Reynaud plopped down on his backside and stretched his stumpy legs out in front of him. “I know how you feel. This thing has uprooted all of us.”

“The hell you know,” Schmidt grumbled. “What do you know about wanting to get laid?”

With a bitter laugh, Reynaud reached for the joint again and took a deep drag on it. This time he didn’t cough.

“Every time one of those Americans looks at me,” Schmidt muttered, “I can feel the hostility, the anger. They blame me for making them come here, to this island.”

“Nonsense. Most of them are glad to be here. This is an exciting project for them.”

“Not for me,” said Schmidt.

“Or me, either.” Reynaud shaded his eyes and looked out across the lagoon. Not a sail, not a sign of life clear out to the horizon. They might have been maroooned, as far as the eye could tell.

“You’re bored too?”

With a shrug, Reynaud answered, “There’s nothing for a retired cosmologist to do here.”

“Invent new theories!” Schmidt said. “That’s what cosmologists are for, isn’t it?”

“Perhaps. But I’m so badly out of date…I feel like a fossil, a mummy that’s just been exhumed after thousands of years in the dark.”

“What’d you do to get sent out here? Rape a nun?”

Reynaud looked down at the golden angel’s face. “Hardly.”

They shared the joint until there wasn’t enough left to hold without scorching their fingers. Schmidt carelessly flicked it into the lagoon.

“Plenty more where that came from,” he said, his voice lazy, relaxed.

Reynaud’s head was spinning. Shakily, he climbed to his feet. “I think I’d better be getting back…”

“Stay here. Maybe the damned spaceship will drop right into the lagoon and then we can all go home.”

“It’s still more than fifty million kilometers away.”

“All right then!” Schmidt suddenly hiked himself up to a sitting position. “Let’s go meet the damned thing halfway.”

“What do you mean?”

With a knowing grin, “In my room…I’ve got some pills that can take you right out to the stars,
zoom
! Just like that. Bought them from one of the civilians who runs the Post Exchange.”

“No, I don’t think…”

But Schmidt struggled to his feet and grabbed Reynaud by one arm. “Come on, I’ll show you. Nothing to be afraid of. Better than alcohol. Come on with me.”

Reynaud let the young man drag him up the beach, toward the BOQ.

Stoner paced back and forth across the hot, stuffy control center, threading his way around the jumble of chairs and standing men and women. A dozen technicians sat at their humming electronics consoles, headsets clamped over their ears, eyes riveted to their green-glowing screens.

The room was dark except for the glow from the screens and the lighted buttons on the console keyboards. There were too many people standing around, radiating heat and anticipation, overpowering the rumbling air conditioners.

Stoner prowled ceaselessly, like a caged jungle cat, scowling at the backs of the seated technicians and the shimmering numbers on their readout screens.

The outside door opened and a painful spear of sunlight lanced into the room. Everyone flinched and squirmed. Vampires, thought Stoner. We’re like a pack of goddamned vampires, hiding from the light of day.

It was Markov. He closed the door quickly and tiptoed, in his gangly, loose-jointed way, to Stoner’s side.

“Anything?” he whispered.

“Zilch,” Stoner said. “It’s been damned near six hours and no reaction from them at all.”

Markov peered at the nearest screen. “I don’t know whether to be happy or sad.”

“Sad,” snapped Stoner.

The Russian shrugged. “I have a message for you from the photo lab. They have received the latest high-resolution photographs from Greenbelt.”

Stoner pulled his attention from the screens. “From Big Eye? Did they take a look at them? How do they look?”

“They said…not good.”

What did you expect? Stoner asked himself. Nothing is going right. Not a goddamned thing.

“I’d better go over and take a look at them.”

Markov said, “They told me that the photos still don’t show anything except a blur. It looks almost like the head of a comet.”

“Christ! Don’t say that around McDermott. That’s all he’ll need to renege on the rendezvous mission.”

Dr. Marvin Chartris leaned back in his padded swivel chair and looked through the heavily barred window of his ground floor office. Outside on the scruffy, patchy lawn of the museum, a pair of dogs were enthusiastically humping, tongues lolling out of their toothy mouths, while a dozen children stood around watching.

Ah, springtime in Manhattan, thought Dr. Chartris.

His phone rang.

Chartris glanced out the open office door. As usual, his secretary was nowhere in sight. He had once replied to a visitor’s question as to how many people worked at the museum, “About a third of the staff.” His secretary was among the majority.

With a sigh, he picked up the phone. “Planetarium,” he said.

“Marv,” crackled the voice on the other end, “this is Harry Hartunian.”

“Hello, Harry. How’s everything in San Diego?”

“Great. Getting good crowds. How about you?”

“Almost breaking even.”

“Been mugged lately? I hear New York’s worse in good weather.”

“When do we get good weather?” Chartris countered.

Hartunian chuckled. “Hey, Marv, you got any information about unusual sunspot activity? Or solar flares? I been trying to get Kitt Peak Observatory to tell me what’s going on, but they won’t say a word.”

“You too?”

“Whattaya mean, me too?”

Chartris shifted in his chair, squirming like a precocious schoolboy who was being ignored by the teacher.

“I’ve been getting calls from all over the map,” he explained, “since last Tuesday. Everybody’s seeing aurorae…”

“Yeah. There was a big display here last night.”

“As far as I know, there’s no unusual solar activity. I’ve checked Kitt Peak, the Smithsonian, even some friends at NASA. No solar flares, not even much in the way of sunspots right at the moment.”

“Then what the hell caused last night’s aurora? We don’t get the Northern Lights down here—I mean, it just doesn’t happen here!”

Scratching his head, Chartris said, “Darned if I know, Harry. But you’re not the only one who’s got them. Denver, Salt Lake City, even Las Vegas saw them during this past week. Through the neon.”

“You seen it in New York?”

“Are you kidding? We’re lucky when we see the full Moon around here.”

Hartunian didn’t laugh. “What’s going on, Marv? Any ideas?”

“Not the slightest. Whatever it is, it’s extremely unusual.”

“Unusual? It’s damned scary!”

The conference room in the computer building was too small to accommodate the entire Project JOVE staff, and Ramsey McDermott liked it that way. He wanted only the top echelon people, not the flunkies.

“Keep the peons at their work,” he muttered to himself as he walked the few steps down the corridor from his office to the conference room.

McDermott had taken the most spacious office on the ground floor of the computer building for his own. It was the most impressive and comfortable office on the island, except for that of the Navy captain who commanded the military staff. Captain Youngblood had a larger office, but it was in the old military administration building, with its leaky window air conditioners and the airstrip right outside. Lieutenant Commander Tuttle had a broom closet next door to his captain’s office.

But McDermott had the central air conditioning and restful quiet of the computer building. His office befitted the project director, a respected senior scientist who reported straight to the White House, who was in line for a Nobel Prize, if everything worked out well.

He always made certain to arrive late enough for these weekly staff leaders’ conferences so that everyone else was already present: Zworkin and his two top aides, plus their linguist, Markov; Cavendish, representing NATO; the three rotating dark-skinned types from the UN; the three Chinese, who had yet to utter their first word at these conferences; Reynaud, the Vatican’s representative; and Thompson, representing McDermott’s own group from the United States, with two of his aides.

One of them was Stoner.

McDermott frowned at Stoner’s presence. The man was a troublemaker and had been from the start. He was always insisting on planning for a manned space flight to meet the approaching spacecraft.

He wants to take the leadership of this project away from me, McDermott knew. Well, that’s something he’ll never do. I’ve got his girl and I’m top dog on this project…and I’m going to stay on top! Of both of them!

He was chuckling to himself as he strode into the conference room and went to the head of the table. He pulled his pipe, lighter, tobacco, reamer, pipe cleaners from various pockets of his suit and spread them on the table before him, then sat down and acknowledged his staff leaders’ hellos with a single nod of his head. He was the only man to wear a suit or even a jacket; the others were all as unkempt as beachcombers. Even the Russians were in short-sleeved shirts.

That’s why I’m at the head of the table, McDermott told himself. I know how to maintain my dignity.

He looked over the table. “Where’s Dr. Reynaud?”

No one seemed to know.

McDermott glared at his secretary, a middle-aged Navy civilian employee, sitting in the corner to his left with her tape recorder ready.

“He knew about the meeting,” she said apologetically.

“Phone his quarters,” McDermott commanded. “Find him.” Turning back to the group, “We’ll have to start without him.”

The secretary clicked the tape recorder on, then scurried from the room.

“Well,” McDermott rumbled, “where do we stand?”

The others around the table glanced at each other, wondering who should start first.

Markov tugged at his beard, then said, “We began beaming a variety of radio messages to the spacecraft this morning…”

“Yes,” Zworkin took over. “I have a slide that shows the types of messages broadcast and the frequencies we are using.” He touched a button set into the side of the table at his seat, and a list appeared on the projection screen at the back wall of the room.

“There’s been no response,” McDermott said.

“Not yet,” replied Zworkin. “It has been only a few hours, however.”

“We’ve got the laser system coming in from Maui,” Jeff Thompson said.

“What frequency is it?”

“Infrared…one-point-six microns.”

“Then it’s not a CO
₂
laser.”

“No. Neodymium.”

Stoner asked, “Can’t we use the laser as a radar, as well as a communications channel? That could give us really high-resolution data about the bird.”

“We’d need a high-resolution receiving system,” Thompson said.

“Which costs time and money,” McDermott added.

“But they have the receiving system at Maui, don’t they, Jeff?” Stoner countered. “They’ve been using that laser to track satellites.”

A born troublemaker, McDermott repeated to himself. Aloud, he said, “We’re getting good information about its shape and size from the radar returns, aren’t we?”

Thompson glanced at Zworkin, sitting across the table from him.

“Go ahead,” said the Russian, gesturing with both hands.

The sandy-haired Thompson pushed his chair back slightly and fingered the projector control buttons at the table’s edge.

“Just like Keith said,” he started, “we’ve been using the communications frequencies as radars, too: monitoring the echoes we get off the spacecraft. The results we’re getting are…well, puzzling.”

A new slide appeared on the screen. It showed an oval shape, rather like an egg. Inside it was an elongated oval, like a fat cigar.

“What the hell is that?” McDermott grumbled.

“Our visitor,” answered Thompson. “At the lowest frequencies the thing looks like a fuzzy, irregular egg shape. There’s some evidence that the shape pulsates, but that might be just equipment anomalies. We’re checking that. At any rate, the pulsations—if that’s what they are—don’t come on any regular basis. I think the chances are that they’re just noise in our equipment.”

“But it is fuzzy, not solid,” said Cavendish.

“That’s right.”

“Like a gas cloud,” McDermott said.

“A plasma cloud,” Thompson corrected. “An ionized gas that reflects low-frequency radar.”

“How large is the cloud?”

“Oh, about a hundred meters, hundred-twenty. On the order on a football field’s length.”

“And the thing inside it?”

“That gives a pretty solid reflection on the higher frequencies. It’s twenty meters by five. Reflection spectrum like metal, from the preliminary analysis, or like highly metallic rock. It’s pretty smooth, apparently.”

“Looks like a comet to me,” McDermott rumbled.

“No tail,” answered Thompson.

“How do the Big Eye pictures look?”

Thompson turned to Stoner.

“Could you douse the overhead lights, please?” Stoner called, loudly enough for the technician in the next room, who baby-sat the automated slide projector, to hear.

He’s always got to be different, McDermott groused to himself.

Stoner flicked on a slide that showed a faint fuzzy blob against a black background. He got up from his chair and walked to the ceiling-high screen.

“Not much structure is visible…”

“It looks like a damned comet,” McDermott repeated, loudly, in the darkness.

Stoner’s jaw clenched, then he went on, “There’s an old astronomer’s trick—Jeff, will you hit the button for my next slide, please?”

The same photograph appeared on the screen, but this time in negative. The sky background was now a grayish white, the fuzzy blob a dark gray.

“Here in this negative print you can see some structure within the cloud,” Stoner said. “In particular, if you squint a little, you can make out the cigar-shaped object that the radar has picked up.”

“What is the cloud?” Zworkin asked.

Stoner said, “So far, spectral analysis has given us nothing more than a reflected solar spectrum. Whatever that cloud is composed of, it’s reflecting sunlight almost like a perfect mirror.”

“A fuzzy, pulsating mirror,” Cavendish mused.

Stoner made his way back to his seat, tapped his projector control button again. The screen went blank and the overhead fluorescent panels went on again.

“It is an enigma,” Zworkin said.

“It’s a comet,” insisted McDermott.

“Too small…”

“A cometary fragment,” said Big Mac. “We’re sitting here thinking we’re looking at an alien spacecraft and all the time it’s just a chunk off a comet.”

Markov shook his head. “I cannot believe that.”

“Look at it!” McDermott thundered. “It’s a ball of gas surrounding a chunk of metallic rock.”

“It doesn’t behave like a comet,” Stoner said. “There’s no coma, no tail. It’s much too small. It doesn’t have the spectrum of a comet.”

“It’s an anomalous chunk that was spit off by a bigger comet,” said McDermott. “Remember Kohoutek, back in seventy-three? Supposed to be the ‘the comet of the century,’ and it never developed into much of anything. This thing is just a chunk of rock with some gas around it. We’re on the trail of a red herring.”

Zworkin glanced puzzledly at Markov, who explained in Russian what a red herring was.

“I do not agree,” Zworkin said at last. “But even if you are correct, Professor McDermott, we must study this object very carefully. Even if it is a natural body, it can still tell us much about the nature of the solar system.”

“Hard to justify spending this kind of talent and money on a little cometary fragment,” McDermott replied.

“It’s not a comet!” Stoner snapped. “No comet ever outgassed a cloud that reflects sunlight like a polished mirror. No comet ever changed course after flying past Jupiter—not that abruptly.”

McDermott shrugged. “The course change was probably the result of some outgassing—the thing burped a little gas, which caused a jet action and set it on a course toward us. We all jumped at the conclusion that it was
purposefully
aiming at us.”

“Ockham’s razor,” Thompson muttered to himself.

“It’s not actually coming that close to Earth,” McDermott went on. “It’ll pass us about four times farther out than the Moon’s orbit, won’t it, Stoner? Am I right?”

“If it doesn’t change course again.”

“What, and land on the White House lawn? Want to make any bets on that?”

“What about the radio pulses from Jupiter? What caused them?”