Voyagers I (4 page)

“And the psychological effects,” McDermott went on. “The religious effects!”

“And the military implications,” said Tuttle.

Stoner frowned at him.

“The gravity on Jupiter is more than three times higher than Earth’s, isn’t it?” the lieutenant commander asked.

“Not quite three,” Thompson corrected, “at the top of the cloud deck.”

“Okay,” Tuttle said. “But down below the clouds the gravity must be even stronger. Do you have any concept of the technology it would take to loft an artificial satellite against that gravity? And that spacecraft you found is in a very high orbit, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Stoner admitted.

“We couldn’t launch a satellite under those conditions. Take it from me, I know that for a fact.”

Grimacing, Stoner said, “And while we sit around here stamping everything Secret, some other observatory stumbles onto the radio pulses and publishes the data. So then where are we?”

“But we’re the only ones who know about the spacecraft,” Tuttle said, excitement shaking his voice. “Nobody else has access to Big Eye and nobody will, I can guarantee that!”

“But somebody else could beat us into print with the radio pulses,” Thompson said glumly.

McDermott shook his head. “Who? Haystack? Goldstone? They’re not working down below six hundred megahertz, the way we are.”

“What about Arecibo?” Stoner asked. “That’s the biggest radio telescope of them all, isn’t it? And Sagan’s connected with it. Him and Drake. They’ll be into print in ten seconds flat.”

“Get yourself an ephemeris,” said McDermott, smirking. “Arecibo can’t point anywhere near Jupiter for another four months.”

Stoner blinked and then remembered that the huge Arecibo radio telescope—a thousand feet across—was carved into a hillside and couldn’t be steered or aimed the way the smaller radio dishes were.

“But we owe it to the rest of the scientific community to let them know what we’ve found,” Stoner insisted. “It’s only fair…”

“I am not going to risk my reputation, or my observatory’s reputation, or the university’s reputation,” McDermott said, his voice steadily rising, “on the million-to-one chance that you’re right!”

Tuttle added, “And there
is
the pressing military necessity to keep this under wraps. You can understand that, can’t you?”

The hell I can, Stoner thought. But he said nothing.

“There’s one additional factor,” Thompson said. “Somebody overseas might have already picked up the pulses. The Australians, the Russians, Voorne at Dwingeloo…”

Tuttle nodded curtly. “We’re looking into that.”

“And what do we do in the meantime?” Stoner asked. “Go to Leavenworth and wait until the Navy decides it’s okay for us to return to work?”

“Nosir,” said Tuttle. “The radio telescope observatory will continue to work as normal. All the staff have signed security oaths, and we’ve briefed them all on the need to keep this information absolutely secret. You’ll have to agree, too.”

“No, I won’t,” Stoner said flatly. “I’m just a consultant on this job. NASA pays my salary, not the Navy.”

“Dr. Stoner, you are in the Air Force reserve. You could be recalled to active duty. This is an extraordinary circumstance. A real emergency.”

McDermott chuckled. “They’ll probably ship you to Greenland. Or maybe the South Pole.”

“If you co-operate,” Tuttle went on, “we’ll set you up right here, in this house. You’ll be incommunicado for a while, until we move the entire project staff to a more secure, government-owned facility.”

Stoner realized they had him; there was no use arguing.

Glancing at his wristwatch, Tuttle said, “Well, I’ve got to get back to Washington. Lots to do. Dr. Stoner, I hope you appreciate the seriousness of this situation.”

Without waiting for an answer, the little Navy officer strode briskly from the room. McDermott got up and lumbered out after him.

Stoner sagged back on the sofa, icy waves of anger creeping along his veins. Turning to Thompson, he asked, “Jeff, am I crazy, or are they?”

Shrugging, the astronomer answered, “Maybe none of you. Or maybe we all are. I don’t know; insufficient data.”

“McDermott’s an asshole. He can’t ride roughshod over people like this. He’s
using
that kid. When the real Navy finds out what they’re doing…”

Smiling tiredly, Thompson said, “That kid
is
the real Navy. And Big Mac isn’t riding roughshod over anybody but you. The rest of us signed our security oaths as meek as lambs.”

“You too?”

“Sure, me too. I can’t afford to lose my job. Do you know how many openings there are for a second-rank radio astronomer? I’d have to start all over again, at the bottom.” He shook his head.

“And you’re willing to sign away your freedom to publish, just to hold on to your tenure at the university?”

“Look, Keith, I’ve got three kids to feed. And a wife. And a dog that eats as much as she does.”

Stoner said nothing, but thought, I had a wife and two kids and if I stop working they lose the alimony and child support.

Thompson slapped him playfully on the shoulder. “Don’t look so goddamned grim! This is all routine red tape. It’ll all straighten itself out. We’ll publish sooner or later.”

“But how the hell did Big Mac find out about me?” Stoner wondered. “How did he know I was going to Washington?”

“Did you ask one of the secretaries to make plane reservations for you?”

Frowning, Stoner said, “No. I deliberately steered clear of them. Figured they’d go straight to McDermott with the information. I got one of the students to make my reservations…what’s her name, the tall one with the good figure?”

“Jo Camerata?”

“Yeah. Jo. That’s the one.”

Thompson gave a low whistle. “Then she must’ve told Big Mac herself. Or at least, one of the regular secretaries.”

“But I specifically told her not to.”

Thompson shrugged. “And here I thought she was after your body.”

“What?”

“She’s had her eye on you for quite a while. Coming around the observatory, cutting classes, trying to catch your attention.”

“Don’t be silly,” Stoner said. “She’s just a kid.”

“Some kid,” Thompson grinned. “She’s got the hots for you.”

Kirill Markov stood squinting under his fur hat as the wind gusted down the street. No matter how long he lived, he would never become accustomed to the cold. It knifed through his fine coat and iced his bones.

Maria was speaking to the driver of the car parked at the curb in front of their apartment building, while Markov stamped his feet and waited at the doorway. Neighbors were peering out of their windows, discreetly of course, but Markov could see their shadowy forms behind the curtains. Even though the automobile was unmarked, everyone sensed that it was a government car. Markov could feel the mixture of curiosity and terror that rippled through the apartment blocks like an electric current.

“It’s the professor!”

“They’re taking him away? In broad daylight?”

“Look for yourself.”

“His wife, too?”

“No, it doesn’t seem so.”

“They don’t look upset, either one of them.”

“Perhaps it’s not what we think, then.”

“Usually they come at night.”

“Pah! I know how they work. The professor may
think
he’s being taken to the airport or to some fancy university campus. Even his wife may think so. But take a good look at him. It’s the last you’ll ever see of him.”

“No!”

“That’s the way they took my brother, Grisha. Told him he was being transferred to a new job, in Kharkov. He went with a smile on his face. Into a cattle car that took him straight to Siberia. Eight years, they kept him there. He was a broken man when they let him back home to die.”

“But what could the professor have done…?”

“He’s a thinker. It doesn’t pay to think certain kinds of thoughts.”

Markov smiled to himself as he sensed their whispered conversations swirling through the apartments all around him.

No, my neighbors, he wanted to say. It’s not what you think. The government values me for my ability to think.

Maria finished her talk with the driver, straightened up and turned toward Markov. She was wearing only her regulation uniform, with nothing but the thin jacket to protect her blocky body. How she stood the cold was something Markov could never understand. Yet her feet were always like icebergs when she got into bed.

“Well, come on,” she called impatiently.

Markov picked up his briefcase, trotted down the steps to the curb and reached for the car door.

“In the back,” Maria said. “You sit in the back seat.”

“Oh. I see.” He pulled the rear door open and hesitated. Maria was standing next to him with her usual scowl on her face.

Markov looked into her eyes. “I…may not see you again for quite a while.”

She nodded matter-of-factly.

“Well…take good care of yourself, old girl.”

“You too,” she mumbled.

He put a hand on her shoulder and she turned her face so that he could kiss her cheek. He pecked at it, then quickly ducked into the car. She slammed the door shut and the driver started the motor with a horrible screech of the ignition.

As the car pulled away from the curb, Markov turned to wave at his wife. She had already started back inside the apartment building. For some inexplicable reason he felt a lump in his throat.

The Naval Research Laboratory lies along the Potomac River, almost directly in the glide path of the commercial jetliners coming into Washington’s National Airport.

Ramsey McDermott, squeezed into one of the Eastern shuttle’s narrow seats between the window and the hyperthyroid businessman who had spent the entire forty-minute flight shuffling papers and tapping out numbers on a pocket calculator, smiled grimly to himself as the plane flashed past NRL. Atop the central riverfront building was the venerable dish antenna of NRL’s fifty-foot radio telescope.

They can’t pick up the Jovian pulses with that piece of crap, McDermott told himself.

He had “double shuttled” in his haste to get to a personal meeting with Tuttle, taking one Eastern 727 from Boston to New York and then immediately getting on to the New York-to-Washington plane.

Tuttle’s office was not at NRL, or at the Pentagon. He had lucked into a plush new office building that the Navy leased in Crystal City, one of the high-rise glass and steel towers that had given the area its name.

McDermott phoned the lieutenant commander from the airport, and they agreed to meet at a restaurant downtown.

Impatiently drumming his fingertips on the rickety little table out on the chilly sidewalk in front of the Connecticut Avenue restaurant, Ramsey McDermott waited for Lieutenant Commander Tuttle to select his lunch from the oversized menu.

They bombed Pearl Harbor with less attention to detail, the old man groused to himself.

Tuttle had insisted that they meet at an outdoor restaurant. “Less chance of being bugged,” he had whispered, quite seriously.

They discussed the problems of moving the staff to Arecibo, Tuttle clamping his mouth shut whenever a waiter or another customer drifted close to their table. McDermott, uncomfortable in the damp chill and the traffic noise from the street, struggled to keep his temper.

“If we need Arecibo,” Tuttle said finally, “we’ll get Arecibo, even if I have to get the President to declare a national emergency.”

“You can do that?”

Tuttle nodded solemnly. “If I have to.”

For the first time, McDermott felt impressed with the young officer’s powers.

“But this man Stoner,” Tuttle went on. “He’s the key to it all. We need him to correlate the optical sightings with the radio signals.”

“He’ll do it,” McDermott promised.

“He hasn’t called for a lawyer or tried to get away from the house where we’ve stashed him?”

“No. He’s going through a divorce; I think he’s kind of glad to be safely tucked away where the lawyers and his ex-wife can’t find him.” McDermott chuckled to himself. “And underneath it all, he’s got that old scientific curiosity—a fatal dose. It’s an itch he can’t scratch unless he plays ball with us.”

“I don’t want to call in anybody else if we can avoid it,” Tuttle said. “God knows there’s enough people involved in this project already. I don’t want to let anybody else know what we’re onto. Not yet.”

“Stoner will co-operate.”

“And he can get more photographs from Big Eye?”

“He helped design and build it. The telescope is being checked out by the NASA people at Goddard, before they officially turn it over to the university consortium that’ll run it. The official hand-over date is January first. Until then, the Goddard people are happy to help out an old pal. Stoner worked with those people for five years. They think they’re just helping out a guy who got laid off by shipping him some photos of Jupiter.”

“And Stoner himself won’t cause any trouble for us? He’ll stay where we’ve put him?”

“Yes.”

“You’re sure? Absolutely certain?”

McDermott leaned his heavy forearms on the wobbly little table. “Listen to me. He’s got everything he needs up there at the house. But I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll get a girl for him—one of the students, a kid named Jo something-or-other. Hot stuff. She’ll go prancing up there and we’ll let nature take its course. She’ll keep him busy. And happy to stay where he is.”

Tuttle scowled disapprovingly. “That’s sinful.”

“It sure is.”

“Well,” the Navy officer said, “I hope she’s signed a security agreement, at least.”

Markov drowsed in the back seat as the car hummed through the gray October afternoon along the endless highway, kilometer after kilometer of flat, empty countryside. A thin coating of snow lay over the ground. The fields were bare. The trees stark and leafless against the dull sky.

Mother Russia, Markov mused, half asleep. The real strength of our nation: the soil, all its vastness, all its timeless power.

The sun was a dull yellowish blotch on the horizon when the car finally stopped at a chain link fence. A pair of soldiers stood by the gate. Except for their little wooden sentry house, Markov could see no structure anywhere. The fence seemed to be guarding emptiness, as far as the eye could roam.

The driver exchanged words with the soldiers and Markov opened his briefcase to show them his papers. They were very polite to him and quickly swung the gate open.

As the car accelerated along the blacktopped road, Markov realized that he hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast. The dreary landscape stretched in all directions, empty and gray. His stomach rumbled. I might as well be going to Siberia, he thought. This land is exile for a Muscovite like me.

It was fully dark by the time they came to the second fence. The guardhouse there was bigger, and made of stone. Again soldiers looked over his papers, by the glow of a flashlight.

“Professor Markov, you are expected. One moment, please.”

The guard disappeared into the stone building. In a few seconds a young lady came bouncing out to the car, long hair flying, fur-trimmed coat unbuttoned.

“Professor Markov!” she exclaimed, opening the car door and scrambling in beside him. “We were getting worried about you; you’re quite late.” She tapped the driver on the shoulder. “Go straight ahead and take the second left.”

Before Markov could say anything, she turned back to him. “I am Sonya Vlasov…I am only a graduate student here, doing my doctoral thesis work, but the director asked me to be your guide.” She was almost breathless with excitement.

Markov paid no attention to the row upon row of huge radio telescopes that glinted metallically in the lights from the road. He saw only that Sonya Vlasov was young, eager, a little plump, and had enormous breasts.

“My personal guide?” He smiled at her in a fatherly way.

“Oh yes. Whatever you want or need, it will be my pleasure to see that you get it.”

“How very thoughtful.”

She pushed back her long, light brown hair with one hand, a motion that made her coat open even more.

“Welcome to the Landau Radio Astronomy Institute, Professor Markov!” she said happily.

Markov nodded graciously. Exile might not be so bad after all, he thought.