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Authors: Ben Bova

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BOOK: Voyagers I
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“Naval Intelligence,” said the man by the window. He fished a wallet from his inside jacket pocket and dangled it over the desk. It held an official-looking identification card.

“Will you come with us, please?”

“What do you mean? Where…?”

“Please, Dr. Stoner. It’s very important.”

The big agent by the door gripped Stoner’s arm around the biceps. Lightly but firmly. The smaller man came around the desk and the three of them started down the hallway in step.

Jo Camerata stood by Stoner’s office door, gaping at them. The expression on her face was not shock or even anger. It was guilt.

…Jansky had unexpectedly recorded radio waves from the Galaxy while investigating…crackles and noises that interfere with radio communication. Jansky’s discovery in 1932 marked the first successful observation in radio astronomy. It is indeed strange that it took so long to recognize that radio waves were reaching us from celestial sources.

J. S. HEY
The Evolution of Radio Astronomy
Science History Publications
1973

CHAPTER 3

In Moscow it was nearly 11
P.M.
A gentle snow was sifting out of the heavy, leaden sky, covering the oldest monuments and newest apartment blocks alike with a fine white powder. By dawn, old men and women would be at their posts along every street, methodically sweeping the snow off the sidewalks for the lumbering mechanical plows to scoop up.

Kirill Markov glanced at the clock on the bed stand.

“That tickles,” said the girl.

He looked down at her. For a moment he could not recall her name. It was hard to make out her face in the darkness, but the golden luster of her long sweeping hair caught the faint light of the streetlamp outside the window. Nadia, he remembered at last. Sad, a part of his mind reflected, that when you pursue a woman you can think of nothing else, but once you’ve got her she becomes so forgettable.

Woman! he snorted to himself. She’s only a girl.

“You’re tickling me!”

Markov saw that his beard was the culprit and, moving his chin in a tiny circle, ran the end of the whiskers around the nipple of her right breast.

She giggled and clutched him around the neck.

“Can you do it again?” she asked.

“In English,” Markov said to her in a gentle whisper. “Our bargain was that all our lovemaking will be done in English. It is the best way to learn a foreign language.”

She pressed her lips together and frowned with concentration. Her face is really quite ordinary, Markov thought. Vapid, even.

Still frowning, she said slowly in English, “Are you able to fork me another time?” Her accent was atrocious.

Suppressing a laugh, Markov said, “Fuck…not fork.”

She nodded. “Are you able to fuck me another time?”

“That word is considered to be in bad taste by the English and the Americans. Not so by the Australians.”

“Fork?”

“No. Fuck. They usually employ a euphemism for the word.”

“Euphemism?”

Markov’s eyes rolled heavenward. She’ll never pass the exams, no matter whose bed she flops into. As he explained in Russian the meaning of the word, he mentally added, Unless she can fuck the computer.

“Now I understand,” Nadia said in English.

“Good,” he said.

“Well, can you?”

“Can I what?”

“You know…”

“Ah!” Realizing that her mind had not deviated from its carnal goal, he replied, “Make love to you once again? Gladly! With white-hot passion. But not now. It is time for you to get back to your dormitory.”

In Russian she bleated, “Must I? It’s so cozy and warm here.” Her fingers traced lines down his shoulder and back.

“It won’t be cozy much longer. My wife will be returning very soon.”

“Oh, her!”

Markov sat up on the bed. The room felt cold to his bare skin.

“She is my wife, dear child, and this is her apartment even more than it is mine. Do you think a mere university professor of languages would be given such an elegant apartment, in such a fine part of town?”

The girl got up out of the bed and padded naked to the bathroom without another word. Watching her, Markov saw that she was heavy in the thighs and rump. He hadn’t noticed that before they had gone to bed together.

Sighing, he pulled himself out of the bed and stripped off the sheets. He kept two sets of bedclothing: one for the marriage and one for fun. His wife had a keen sense of smell and was fastidious about certain things.

Nadia re-entered the bedroom, tugging on her quilted slacks and stuffing her blouse into the waistband.

“What does she do, this wife of yours, to rate such a fancy apartment? A private bathroom, just for the two of you!” It was almost a reproach.

“She works in the Kremlin,” said Markov. “She is a secretary to a commissar.”

The girl’s eyes widened. “Oh, I see. No wonder she is treated so well.”

Markov nodded and reached for his robe. “Yes. In our progressive society, the commissars work so hard and give so much of their lives for the good of the people that even their secretaries live like…like we shall all live, once true communism is established throughout the world.”

She nodded without acknowledging the irony in his words. He walked her through the little sitting room to the hallway door.

“This is a wonderful way to learn English,” she said, “but I’m afraid I’ll need many lessons.”

Markov patted her shoulder. “We’ll see. We’ll see. In the meantime it might be a good idea for you to study the regular lessons and spend more time with the tapes in the language lab.”

“Oh, I will,” she said earnestly. “Thank you, Professor.”

He leaned down to kiss her lips, then swiftly ushered her through the door and out into the dimly lit hallway.

Closing the door behind her, Markov leaned against it for a moment. Hopeless, he told himself. Forty-five years old and you still play childish games.

But then a grin broke out on his bearded face. “Why not?” he mused. “It’s fun.”

He was an inch over six feet in height, lanky in build with long legs and arms that swung loosely at his sides when he walked. His reddish hair was starting to fade and his scraggly beard was almost entirely gray. But his face was still unlined and almost boyish. The ice-blue eyes twinkled. The full lips often smiled.

When he lectured at the university his voice was strong and clear; he needed no microphone to reach the farthest rows of the auditorium. When he sang—usually at small parties where the vodka flowed generously—his baritone was remarkable for its fine timbre and lack of pitch.

He pulled himself away from the front door abruptly, hurried into the bedroom and finished changing the sheets. The soiled ones he stuffed into the special suitcase he kept behind his writing desk. Once a week he laundered them in the machine in the basement of the student lounge at the university. It was a good place to meet girls who didn’t attend his classes.

Finally, he scrubbed himself down, pulled the heavy robe around his tingling skin and sat in his favorite chair in the front room, before the electric heater. He was just picking up a heavy tome and sliding his reading glasses up the bridge of his nose when he heard Maria’s key scratching at the door.

Maria Kirtchatovska Markova was slightly older than her husband. Her family came from peasant stock, a fact that she was proud of. And she looked it: short, heavyset, narrow untrusting eyes of muddy brown, hair the color of a field mouse, cut short and flat. She was no beauty and never had been. Nor was she a secretary to a commissar.

When Markov had first met her, a quarter century earlier, he had been a student of linguistics at the university and she a uniformed guard recently discharged from the Red Army. She was ambitious, he was brilliant.

Their union was one of mutual advantage. He had thought that marriage would make love blossom, and was shocked to find that it did not. She quickly agreed to let him pursue “his own interests,” as he euphemistically referred to his affairs. Maria wanted only his intelligence to help further her own career in the government.

Their arrangement worked well. Maria was recruited by the KGB and rose, over the years, to the rank of major. She was now assigned to an elite unit concerned with cryptanalysis—decoding other people’s secret messages. To the best of Markov’s knowledge, his wife had never arrested anyone, never interrogated a prisoner, never been involved in the tortures and killings that were always darkly rumored whenever anyone dared to whisper of the security police.

Markov was now a professor of linguistics at the same university where he had been a student. His career was unremarkable, except for one thing: his fascination with codes, cryptology and exotic languages. He occasionally wrote magazine articles about languages that alien creatures might use to make contact with the human race. He had even written a slim book about possible extraterrestrial languages, and the government had even printed it. He never bothered to wonder if he would have risen so far without Maria, except now and then in the dead of night, when she was busy at her office and he had no one else to sleep with.

“Aren’t you cold, with nothing on but that robe?” Maria asked as she closed the door and let her heavy shoulder bag thump to the floor.

“No,” Markov said, peering over the rims of his glasses. “Not now, with you here.”

She made a sour face. “Been tutoring your students again?” She knew how to use euphemisms, too.

He shrugged. It was none of her business. Besides, even though she knew all about it, she always got angry when he spoke of it openly. Strange woman, he thought. You’d think she would have become accustomed to the situation. After all, she did agree to the arrangement.

“Why do you have to work so late?” he asked her without getting up from his easy chair. He knew that she would not answer. Could not. Most of her work was so sensitive that she could not discuss it with her husband. But once in a great while, when she was really stumped on a code or a translation, she would let him take a stab at it. Often he failed, but there had been a few times when he’d made a Hero of the Soviet Union out of her.

Maria plopped into the chair closest to the electrical space heater. Little puddles of melted snow started to grow around her boots, soaking into the ancient oriental rug. She glared at the heater. “This thing isn’t working right,” she grumbled.

“It’s the voltage, I think,” Markov said. “They must have lowered the voltage again, to save power.”

“And we freeze.”

“It’s necessary, I suppose,” he said.

She looked him over: her wary, cynical peasant’s gaze of appraisal. Can I trust him? she was asking herself, Markov knew. He could read her face like a child’s primer.

“Do you really want to know what’s keeping me at headquarters so late each night?” she asked slowly.

He pursed his lips. “Not if it involves anything you shouldn’t tell me.” Turning back to the book on his lap, “Don’t let me tempt you into revealing state secrets.”

“I know I can trust you—in certain things.”

Markov concentrated on his reading.

“Kirill! Look at me when I speak to you! I need your help.”

He looked up.

“Nothing like this has ever happened before.”

She was really upset. Beneath her wary exterior he saw something close to fear in her face.

“What is it?” he asked, taking off his glasses.

“You must come with me tomorrow to headquarters. You must be investigated and checked out.”

“Investigated? Why? What have I done?”

She shook her head, eyes closed wearily. “No, it’s nothing like that. Don’t be afraid. It’s a routine security investigation. Before we can show you the data, you must have a security clearance.”

Markov’s heart was thumping now. His palms felt clammy. “What data? If it’s so sensitive, why should I be involved?”

“Because of that silly book you wrote. They want to talk to you about it.”

“My book on extraterrestrial languages? But that was published six years ago.”

Maria opened her eyes and leveled a bone-chilling gaze at her husband. “Nothing like this has ever happened before. The problem was brought to us by the Academy of Sciences.”

“The Academy…?”

“Academician Bulacheff himself. The chairman.”

The reading glasses slid off the book on Markov’s lap and dropped to the carpet. He made no move to pick them up.

“Kir,” Maria asked, “do you know where the planet Jupiter is? What it is?”

“Jupiter?”

“Yes.”

“It’s the largest planet of the solar system. Much bigger than the Earth. But it’s cold, far away from the Sun.”

“There are radio signals coming from Jupiter,” Maria said, her eyes closing again, as if trying to squeeze away the problem. “Radio signals. We need you to tell us if they are a language.”

“A language?” His voice sounded strangely high-pitched, like a frightened boy’s.

“Yes. These radio signals may be a language. From intelligent creatures. That is why we need you to study them.”

Leading Physicist Says Bible Proves…

ADAM AND EVE WERE ASTRONAUTS
BY JAMES MCCANDLISH

Adam and Eve were astronauts from outer space who landed on Earth 6,000 years ago.

They came in a spaceship that so over-awed the primitive people of that time that the legend of the Garden of Eden was born to explain the amazing event.

That is the startling conclusion of Dr. Irwin Ginsburgh, a leading physicist, who has studied the Bible and ancient religious texts for 30 years.

“My research shows that Genesis is not a myth, but a brilliant scientific report that documents the beginning of creation,” says Dr. Ginsburgh, who published a book on his astonishing findings.

And the world-famous researcher Erich Von Daniken—who presented evidence of ancient astronauts in his book, “Chariots of the Gods?”—told The ENQUIRER: “I am convinced Dr. Ginsburgh’s conclusions are true.”

National Enquirer
January 16, 1979

CHAPTER 4

It was small, even by the standards of high school gymnasiums, but it was packed solidly with people. They sat on hard wooden benches and watched the slim, swaying blondish figure down at the center line of the basketball court.

Microphone in hand, held so close to his lips that every intake of breath echoed off the bare tile walls of the gym, Willie Wilson preached his gospel:

“And what is it that Jesus hates?”

“Sin!” cried the eager voices of the crowd. The noise exploded inside the gym, reverberating off the stark walls, pounding at the ears.

“What is it?”


Sin!
” they screamed louder.

“Tell me!”

“SIN!” they roared.

Fred Tuttle, lieutenant commander, United States Navy, clapped his hands over his hurting ears and grinned. He was up on the last row of benches, back to the wall. Unlike the blue-jeaned, tee-shirted crowd around him, Tuttle was wearing neatly pressed slacks and a turtleneck shirt. His jacket was carefully folded on his lap.

“This world is full of sin!” Willie Wilson was bellowing into his microphone. “It’s dying of sin! And who can save such a sinful world? Who’s the
only
one that can save this dying world?”

“Jesus!” they thundered. “JESUS!”

“Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior, that’s entirely right.” Wilson’s voice fell to a hoarse whisper, and the echoes rattling around the tile-walled gym died away. The crowd leaned forward, eager to hear Wilson’s every word. “But Jesus can’t do it alone. Could if He wanted to, naturally, but that is not God’s way. Not God’s way. God isn’t a loner. If God went His way alone, He would never have created man. He would never have created this sinful flesh and this sinful world. He would never have sent His only Son, our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, to come amongst us and show us His Way. Now, would He?”

A murmur of “No” rippled through the crowd.

“Jesus God wants to save this world. He wants to save
you
! He loves you. He made you in His own divine image, didn’t He? He wants you to be just like Him, and with Him, in paradise forever and ever.”

“Amen,” someone called.

“Amen to you, brother,” Wilson answered, and wiped sweat from his brow with his free hand. “Jesus wants to save us. Save the world. But He needs your help. He didn’t design this world for Himself. He designed it for you—each and every one of us. And He won’t save it unless we show Him—prove to Him—that we want to be saved!”

A trim-figured man with close-cropped brown hair pushed along the row of rapt listeners and squeezed down next to Tuttle.

“We got him,” he said, leaning over to speak right into Tuttle’s ear.

The lieutenant commander made a shushing gesture with his lips and held up a hand to silence the other man.

Willie Wilson, sweat drenching his sky-blue denim suit, was finishing his sermon. “This is
our
world. Jesus God made it for us and gave it to us. He made us to live in it, to be happy, to be fruitful and multiply. To worship Him and hate sin. He made us in His divine image, and when we commit sin—when we turn our backs on Jesus—we distort that heavenly image into something evil and ugly.”

He paused and turned a full circle to peer at the crowd.

“Now, that’s something to think about, isn’t it? Something to ponder on. So let us pray. Let’s meditate on how easy it is to commit sin and how hard it is to be righteous. And while we’re meditating, the Sacred Rock Singers will praise the Lord in their own special way.”

The crowd roared its approval, and a platoon of robed young men and women, armed with electric guitars and other implements, trotted out onto center court.

Tuttle turned to the man beside him. “Say again?”

“We got him. Picked him up this afternoon. They’re driving him to the safe house.”

“Good.”

“I hope so. This isn’t the old days, you know. We’re out on a limb with nothing but your say-so.”

“Did he offer any resistance?” Tuttle asked.

“No.”

“Then technically, he went voluntarily.”

“I hope that holds up in court.”

“It won’t go to court.”

“You can’t holler National Security and do whatever you feel like anymore.”

The Sacred Rock Singers began to beat out a heavily amplified gospel song. The crowd immediately recognized it and began clapping in rhythm to it.

“I’ll back you up,” Tuttle yelled over the noise. “It was doggone important to get Stoner before he ran off at the mouth.”

The man beside him said something in reply, but it was lost in the music and clapping.

“What?” Tuttle yelled.

The man shook his head in disgust, got up and pushed his way out of the crowd.

 

Dazedly, Keith Stoner sat on the bed of the room they had put him in. It was a comfortable bed with an old-fashioned tufted white coverlet spread neatly across it. The room was small but snug. An unused fireplace in one corner, a single wingback chair covered with a design of blotchy flowers. The bed table, one lamp, a digital alarm clock, a bureau, doors that led to a closet and a bathroom.

And the door that led into the hallway. Locked.

The two men who had identified themselves as Naval Intelligence agents had bundled Stoner into their unmarked black Plymouth without giving him a chance to say a word to anyone. Only Jo Camerata knew what had happened to him.

They had driven for hours, until Stoner felt they were deliberately trying to confuse him, to make certain he could not retrace their route. It grew dark and still they drove through the New England countryside, mainly along back roads.

“Where the hell are you guys going?” Stoner demanded.

“Just relax,” said the agent sitting beside him on the rear seat of the car. He called himself Dooley. The bigger one was up front, driving, his massive bulk hunched over the steering wheel.

Stoner tried to keep track of the road signs, but they were swerving and lurching along back roads in complete darkness. They could have been passing open fields, or huge buildings, or even the ocean. The sky had clouded over and there were no lights along the roadside.

Finally they pulled onto a crunching, bumpy gravel driveway. Stoner saw thick boles of venerable trees leaning close in the dim light of the car’s headlamps. A house loomed up ahead of them: big and old and boxy. The shingles were unpainted cedar. The car slowed, and in the headlamp glow Stoner could see a garage door swinging up automatically for them. They drove into the lighted garage and stopped.

“Wait a minute,” Dooley said.

Stoner sat still and heard the garage door swing down again. Then the car’s door locks clicked open.

“Okay.”

The driver was out of the car before Stoner could get his door open, and stood waiting alongside as he climbed out.

“You guys don’t take any chances, do you?” Stoner said to them.

Dooley let a slight smile cross his lips. “Against a black belt? We watched you working out.”

Poor scared pigs, Stoner thought. All they’ve got is guns and bullets.

They led him into the house, an old Yankee farmhouse that had obviously been remodeled by a millionaire. The original rooms were small, with low ceilings that sagged so much the timber beams almost touched Stoner’s head. Fireplaces in each room. And radiant baseboard electrical heating units. Thermal windows. A sparkling ultramodern kitchen, and another small kitchen just off the living room that served as a wet bar. The living room itself was all new, wide, spacious, with a high slanted cathedral ceiling. Beyond it were sliding glass doors that looked out onto a sunken swimming pool. Not quite Olympic size, but big enough.

They led him up a narrow staircase to the second floor.

“This will be your room, Dr. Stoner,” Dooley said, opening a bedroom door. “There’s some clothes in the closet that should fit you. Bathroom with shower through there. Socks and stuff in the bureau.”

“How the hell long am I going to be here?” he asked. “Don’t I get a phone call or something?”

Dooley gave another tight smile. “We’ll bring dinner up to you. Somebody will be here to talk to you in the morning. No phone calls.”

So Stoner sat on the bed and watched raindrops start to spatter on the dark window, listened to the rain drumming against the old house.

This must be how they felt when the Nazis bundled them off to Dachau, he thought. Stunned…confused…totally off balance.

There could be only one reason for it, he realized. They wanted to keep him quiet, to prevent him from telling the world what he had discovered.

Which meant he was truly a prisoner.

BOOK: Voyagers I
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