Voyagers

Chapter 1

Professor Ramsey McDermott leaned back in his creaking old leather chair and idly looked out his office window. The Yard was the same as it had been since the first day he had seen it, almost half a century ago. Trees bright in their October colors, students hurrying along the cement paths toward their classrooms, or dawdling on the grass in little groups of two or three, deep in earnest conversations.

A soft knock on his door snapped him out of his comfortable reverie. It’s her, he thought.

As gruffly as he could, he called, “Come in!”

Jo Camerata stepped into the musty little office. I didn’t realize she’d be so attractive, McDermott mused to himself. No wonder she’s getting away with murder.

Jo was tall, with the dark, lustrous hair and ripe figure of a Mediterranean beauty. She wore the student’s inevitable jeans and sweater, but they clung to her in a way that sent a surge through McDermott’s blood. Her eyes were deep and midnight black, but wary, uncertain, like a trapped animal’s.

McDermott smiled to himself.

“Put your books down and take a seat,” he commanded. There! That’ll convince her she’s in for a long, tough grilling.

Jo sat in the straight-backed chair in front of his desk and held the books on her lap, as if they could defend her. Looking at her, so young, so luscious, McDermott realized that his office was gray with dust, littered with piles of old papers and stacks of books, heavy with decades worth of stale pipe smoke.

He leaned forward slightly in his chair. “I hear you’ve become quite a stranger to your classes these days.”

Her eyes widened. “Dr. Thompson said it was all right…”

“He did, did he?”

“I’ve been helping him at the observatory—with the new signals they’ve picked up.”

“And flunking out of every class you’re in,” McDermott groused.

“I can’t be in two places at the same time,” she pleaded. “Dr. Thompson asked me to help him.”

“I’m sure he did.” McDermott picked a pipe from the rack, toyed with it, enjoyed the way her frightened eyes followed every move his hands made.

“You’ve been helping Dr. Stoner, too, haven’t you?”

“Dr. Stoner?” She looked away from him, toward the window. “No…not really. I’m working for Dr. Thompson.”

McDermott felt a flush of heat go through him at the way the sweater pulled across her breasts, the helpless look in her eyes.

“You did some typing for Stoner. Don’t try to deny it.”

“Oh…yes, I did.”

“What was it?” he demanded. “What’s he written?”

“I don’t know. I just typed it, I didn’t read it. Not in detail.”

Jabbing the pipe at her, “Don’t try to play games with me, young lady. You’re on the verge of being thrown out of this university. What did Stoner want typed?”

“It’s…it’s a paper. A scientific paper. For publication in a journal.”

“Which journal?”

“I don’t know. He didn’t say.”

McDermott leaned back, and the old leather chair groaned under his weight. “A paper about the radio signals?”

She nodded.

“And this object he’s discovered?”

“That was in the paper, yes.”

For a long moment McDermott said nothing. He sat back in the old leather chair, calmly stripping Jo with his eyes. Enjoying the fact that she obviously knew what he was thinking, but there was nothing she could do about it.

Finally he asked, “And what else have you done for Stoner?”

“Nothing!”

“Nothing? Really?”

“No…”

He pulled his face into its most threatening frown and growled, “Didn’t you ask one of the secretaries in this department about making a hotel reservation in Washington?”

Jo shook her head. “That was only for Dr. Stoner. Himself. Not for me.”

“Then you have done something else for Stoner, haven’t you?”

“I thought you meant typing…mailing…”

“What about this Washington trip?”

“I don’t understand what that’s got to do with my status as a student, Professor.”

He snarled back, “You don’t have to understand, Miss Camerata. All you need to know is that I can toss you out on your pretty little rump if you don’t answer my questions completely and honestly. Instead of getting your degree next June you’ll be waiting on tables in some greasy spoon restaurant.” He hesitated, leaned back, smiling. “Or maybe dancing at a topless joint. You’d be better qualified for that.”

She glared at him, but answered sullenly, “Dr. Stoner is going down to Washington Sunday night. He has an appointment to see his former boss at NASA Headquarters on Monday morning. He wants to take his paper about the new discovery with him.”

“He does, does he?” McDermott rumbled. It was just what he’d feared: Stoner was trying an end run. The ungrateful bastard. “Well, we shall see about that!”

He reached for the phone, picked the receiver off its cradle. “You can go,” he said to Jo.

She blinked, surprised. “Am I still…you’re not going to flunk me out?”

“I ought to,” he growled. “But as long as Thompson vouches for you, I’ll be lenient. Providing you can pass the finals.”

She nodded and quickly got to her feet. As she headed for the door, McDermott added, “But you just keep away from that man Stoner.”

“Yes, sir,” she said obediently.

As soon as the door closed behind her, McDermott started dialing the special number in Washington that he kept taped under the phone’s receiver.

Chapter 2

Jo drove straight to the observatory. Out through the narrow, traffic-clogged streets of Cambridge, past Lexington’s Battle Green, past the bridge at Concord, out into the apple valleys and rolling hills bursting with colorful autumn foliage, her mind seething:

That slimy old bastard is going to hurt Dr. Stoner. I’ve got to warn him. I’ve got to warn him now.

But Stoner was not in his office when Jo got to the observatory. The little cubicle on the second floor of the observatory building was as neat and precisely arranged as an equation, but he wasn’t in it.

Jo saw a stack of photographs carefully placed in the center of Stoner’s otherwise bare desk. They were face down, and the back of the topmost photo bore the blue-stamped legend: PROPERTY OF NATIONAL AERONAUTICAL AND SPACE AGENCY—NOT TO BE RELEASED WITHOUT OFFICIAL WRITTEN APPROVAL.

She turned the pictures over, one after another. The paper was stiff, heavy, very expensive. The photographs showed views of a fat, flattened ball striped by gaudy bands of color: red, yellow, ocher, white. An oblong oval of brick red glowed down in the lower quadrant of the sphere.

The planet Jupiter.

Jo thumbed through all two dozen photographs. All of Jupiter. On some, two or three of the giant planet’s moons could be seen: tiny specks compared to Jupiter’s immense bulk.

She glanced at her Timex wristwatch. No way to get back in time for her first afternoon class. With a resigned shrug, she went to the window and separated the blinds enough to look out.

He was on the back parking lot, doing his karate exercises. Jo watched as he stood rigidly straight, his dark face somber and tight-lipped, his big hands bunched into fists just below the black belt that he was so proud of. For a moment he did nothing, merely stared blankly ahead, a tall, powerful man with jet black hair and brooding gray eyes, flat midsection and long, slim, athlete’s legs.

Then he was all motion and fury, arms slashing and legs kicking in an intricate deadly pattern. It was like ballet almost, but violent, powerful, urgent.

Not a sound came from him as he swirled down the length of the blacktopped lot. Then he stopped just as suddenly as he had started, arms upraised and knees flexed in an alert defensive posture. He straightened slowly, let his arms drop to his sides.

She was afraid for a moment that he would glance up and see her at his office window, watching him. But he turned his back to the building, drew himself together and began another series of violent karate actions, kicking, slashing, punching the empty air all the way back to the far end of the parking lot.

Jo pulled herself away from the window. If she hurried, she knew she could make the last class of the afternoon. But she had to talk to him, tell him about Professor McDermott’s strange interest in his trip to Washington. That was more important than the class.

Briefly she thought about putting a note atop the pile of photos on his desk. But she decided against it. She would wait for him, wait while he showered and changed back into his regular clothes and came back to his office. She would miss the late class, but that didn’t matter. Seeing him was more important.

Not that he cared. She was just another one of the anonymous students who fetched and carried for the famous Dr. Stoner, the former astronaut who now worked at the observatory, alone, aloof, handsome and mysterious.

But he will care, Jo promised herself. He’ll notice me. I’ll make him notice me.

Keith Stoner let his shoulders slump and his arms hang wearily at his sides. He was covered with a fine sheen of sweat; it beaded along his brows and dripped, stinging, into his eyes. But the cool afternoon breeze would soon chill him, he knew, if he didn’t get indoors quickly.

It hadn’t worked. Nothing works anymore, he thought bitterly. Tae kwon do is a mental discipline even more than a physical one. It should help him to reach inner calm and self-control. But all Stoner felt was a burning anger, a hot, unrelenting rage that smoldered in his guts.

It’s all finished, he told himself for the thousandth time. Everything’s gone.

He pulled himself together, took the “ready” stance and heard his old Korean instructor hissing at him, “Focus. Focus! Speed you have. Strength you have. But you must learn to focus your concentration. Focus!”

He tried to blank out his mind, but in the darkness behind his closed eyes he saw the orbiting telescope gleaming, glittering in the harsh sunlight of space, a fantastic jewelwork of shining metal and sparkling mirrors floating against the eternal black of infinity. And scattered around it, like acolytes serving some giant silver idol, were tiny men in space suits.

Stoner had been one of those men.

Ex-astronaut, he thought grimly. Ex-astrophysicist. With an ex-marriage and an ex-family. Part of the team that had designed and built Big Eye, the orbiting telescope. Stuck now in a backwater radio observatory, alone, getting a paycheck that’s more charity than salary.

But I’ll show them. I’ll show them all! He knew he was on to something big. So big that it would have frightened him if he weren’t so determined to startle the whole world with his discovery.

But he was startled himself when the big antenna started to move. The grinding, squealing noise made him look across the empty lot to the sixty-foot “dish” of the radio telescope. It was turning slowly, painfully, like an arthritic old man trying to turn his head, to point itself toward the distant wooded hills.

They should have scrapped this antique long ago, Stoner thought as he watched the radio telescope antenna inch groaningly along. Just like they’ve scrapped me.

The antenna was a big spiderwork of steel frame and metal mesh, a thin shallow circular bowl, like a giant’s soap dish. It had been pointing high up in the sky overhead, drinking in the radio waves emitted by unthinkably distant star clouds.

Stoner frowned at the radio dish. Somehow, it bothered him to realize that the radio telescope worked just as well in daylight as at night. It worked in rain or fog. The only thing that bothered the radio telescope was an accumulation of snow across its broad, shallow bowl. The bigger, more modern telescopes were housed in neat geodesic domes that protected them from snow. This old-timer wasn’t worth the cost of a protective dome. The staff technicians went out and swept the snow off with brooms.

But this old dish has picked up something that none of the newer telescopes has found, Stoner said to himself. When the rest of them find out, they’ll hock their left testicles to get in on the game.

He looked up into the bright, cloudless October sky. Autumn was being kind to Massachusetts. No hurricanes so far. The trees were in splendid color—blazing reds, glowing oranges, browns and golden yellows, with clumps of dark green pine and spruce scattered across the gentle hills.

But above the crest of the wooded ridge, invisible to human eyes in the crisp blue afternoon sky, the planet Jupiter was rising.

And the radio telescope was pointing straight at it.

Stoner shuddered and headed back inside the observatory. He did not notice the unmarked black Plymouth sitting in the tiny visitors’ parking section out in front of the building. Nor the two grim-faced men in conservative gray business suits sitting inside the car.

Showered and back in his open-neck shirt, slacks and sweater, Stoner looked over the main room of the observatory, a slight frown of distaste on his face.

An astronomical observatory should look shadowy, sepulchral, like a domed cathedral with a huge optical telescope slanting upward toward the heavens. Men should speak in awed whispers. There ought to be echoes and worshipful footsteps clicking on a solid cement floor.

The radio observatory looked like the bargain basement of an electronics hobby shop and bustled like an old-fashioned newspaper city room. Desks were jammed together in the middle of the room. Papers scattered everywhere, even across the floor. Electronics consoles tall as refrigerators lined all the walls, humming and whirring to themselves. Men and women, all younger than Stoner, yelled back and forth. The room vibrated at sixty cycles per second and smelled faintly of solder and machine oil.

They were almost all students, Stoner knew. Graduate students, even some post-docs. But the regular staff itself was little more than thirty years old. Old McDermott was the nominal head of the observatory, chairman of the department and all that. The real day-to-day boss was Jeff Thompson, who was waving to Stoner from the far side of the island of desks set in the sea of paper.

“Want to hear it?” Thompson called.

Stoner nodded and started around the desks.

“Dr. Stoner,” one of the women students said to him, reaching for his arm. “Can I talk to you for a minute? Professor…”

“Not now,” Stoner said, hardly glancing at her.

Thompson was a sandy-haired middleweight with the pleasant, undistinguished features of the kid next door. An assistant professor at the university, he was nearly Stoner’s age, the “grand old man” of the regular observatory staff.

“It’s coming through loud and clear,” Thompson said as Stoner approached him. With a relaxed grin he reached across the nearest desk and pulled a battered old set of earphones from under a heap of papers.

“We hardly ever use these,” he said. “But I thought you’d like to actually listen to what we’re getting.”

Stoner accepted the headphones from Thompson and walked with him to the humming consoles along the wall. Thompson held the wires leading from the earphones in one hand. We must look like a man walking his dog, Stoner thought.

Thompson plugged the wire lead into a jack on the console and nodded to Stoner, who slipped the earphones over his head. They were thick with heavy padding.

All the noise of the bustling room was cut off. Thompson’s mouth moved but Stoner couldn’t hear what he was saying.

“Nothing,” Stoner told him, hearing his own voice inside his head, as if he were stuffed up with a sinus cold. “Nothing’s coming through.”

Thompson nodded and clicked a few switches on the console. Stoner heard a whirring screech that quickly rose in pitch until it soared beyond the range of human hearing. Then the low hissing, scratching electronic static of the steady sky background noise—the sound of endless billions of stars and clouds of interstellar gases all mingled together.

He began to shake his head when it finally came through: a deep rumbling bass note, barely a whisper but unmistakably different from the background noise. Stoner nodded and Thompson turned a dial on the console ever so slightly.

The heavy sound grew slightly louder, then faded away. In a split second it returned, then faded again. Stoner stood in the middle of the silenced hubbub of the busy room, listening to the pulses of energy throbbing in his ears like the deep, slow breathing of a slumbering giant.

He closed his eyes and saw the giant—the planet Jupiter.

The radio telescope was picking up pulses of radio energy streaming out from Jupiter. Pulses that were timed more precisely than a metronome, timed as accurately as the clicks of a quartz watch. Pulses that had no natural explanation.

Slowly he pulled the heavy earphones off.

“That’s it,” he said to Thompson over the bustle of the room.

Thompson bobbed his head up and down. “That’s it.” He took the headset from Stoner and held it up to his ear. “Yep, that’s what it sounds like. Regular as clockwork.”

“And nobody’s ever heard it before?”

“No, nothing like it. Not from Jupiter or any other planet.” Thompson unplugged the earphones and tossed them back onto his desk, scattering papers in every direction. “It’s not on the same frequency as the pulsars, or the same periodicity. It’s something brand new.”

Stoner scratched his thick, dark hair. “What do you think is causing it?”

Grinning, Thompson answered, “That’s why we brought you here. You tell me.”

With a slow nod, Stoner said, “You know what I think, Jeff.”

“Intelligent life.”

“Right.”

Thompson puffed his cheeks and blew out a breath. “That’s a big one.”

“Yeah.”

He left Thompson standing there, lost in his own thoughts, and headed for the stairs that led up to his second-floor office. The same young student fell in step alongside him.

“Dr. Stoner, can I speak with you for a minute?”

He glanced at her. “Sure, Ms.…?”

“Camerata. Jo Camerata.”

He started up the steps without a second look at her. Jo dogged along behind him.

“It’s about Professor McDermott,” she said.

“Big Mac? What’s he want?”

“I think it’s better if we talk in your office, with the door closed.”

“Well, that’s where I’m heading.”

“You were out there, weren’t you?” Jo asked, to his back. “You helped build Big Eye, out there in orbit.”

They reached the top of the stairs and he turned around to take a good look at her. She was young, tall, with the classic kind of face you might find on a Greek vase. Black short-cropped hair curled thickly to frame her strong cheekbones and jawline. Her jeans clung to her full hips, her sweater accentuated her bosom.

An astronaut groupie? Stoner asked himself as he replied, “Yes, I was part of the design and construction team for the orbital telescope. That’s why Big Mac invited me here, because I can sweet-talk my old buddies into sneaking some shots of Jupiter to us.”

It was quieter up on the second floor, although the floor still hummed with electric vibrations. Stoner stalked down the narrow hallway, Jo trailing half a step behind him. He opened the door to the tiny office they had given him.

Two men were inside: one by the window where Jo had been standing earlier; the other beside the door.

“Dr. Keith Stoner?” asked the one by the window. He was the smaller of the two. Stoner’s desk, with the photographs of Jupiter scattered across it, stood between them.

Stoner nodded. The man by the window was inches shorter than Stoner, but solidly built. The one beside him, at the door, hulked like a football lineman. Professional football. They were both conservatively dressed in gray business suits. Both had taut, clean-shaven faces.

“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.

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.”

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.

Chapter 5

“Professor Markov, you are a Party member?”

Markov nodded at the woman.

“But you have never been admitted to the Academy?”

“Not yet,” he answered with a frosty smile.

They were sitting in a tiny interrogation room, a cramped, blank-walled windowless chamber. One of the fluorescent lamps in the ceiling was flickering; Markov could feel it tapping against his brain like a Chinese water torture. Deliberate? he wondered. Part of the interrogation? Or simply the usual sloppy maintenance?

The woman sitting across the small wooden table wore the tan uniform with red tabs and insignia of a lieutenant. She could not have been more than twenty-two, and she was taking this interrogation very seriously.

Markov decided to be charming.

“My dear young lady, you have my entire life story in those papers spread before you. It hasn’t been a very colorful life, I admit, but if there is any special part of it that you want me to relate to you…”

She glanced down at the checklist on which her left hand rested. She held a chewed pencil in her right.

“You are married?” she asked.

She’s going to go through the whole damned list, Markov groaned to himself. This will take hours.

“Yes. My wife is Maria…”

“Not yet,” the lieutenant said, diligently making another check mark in the appropriate box. “Children?”

“None.”

“Wife’s first name?”

“Maria.”

“Maiden name?”

“Kirtchatovska.”

It made no impression on the lieutenant. She apparently had no idea that Major Markova had the power to make a lieutenant’s life very uncomfortable.

“How long have you been married?”

“All my life.”

She looked up sharply. “What?”

Markov smiled at her. It’s really quite a pretty face, he thought. I wonder what she would do if I leaned across the table and took a nibble of that luscious lower lip?

“Twenty-four years this January,” he said.

She looked down again and wrote on the checklist. Then her eyes rose to meet his. “Twenty-four years and no children?”

“I suffer from a sad malady,” Markov lied cheerfully. “The result of a war trauma, the psychologists say.”

“You’re…impotent?” She whispered the last word.

Markov shrugged. “It’s all psychological. Sometimes, on very rare occasions when I have found someone beautiful and truly loving, I am a tiger. But with most women…nothing.”

“But how does your wife…?”

The interrogation room door was flung open by a stocky man in a captain’s uniform. “Haven’t you finished the forms yet? The colonel is waiting!”

Unfolding his lanky frame so that he had the advantage of height over the young captain, Markov suggested, “If you are certain that I’m not a spy or an assassin, perhaps I could meet the colonel and then return here afterward to finish the forms.”

The lieutenant stood up too. “Or I could complete the interview after the working day is finished.”

Markov said carefully, “I wouldn’t want to put you to any trouble.”

“I often work late,” she said. “And these forms are strictly routine. There’s nothing sensitive about them. We could even complete the interview at your apartment, if that is more convenient for you, Professor.”

The captain snapped, “We don’t conduct security interviews in people’s apartments!”

With a sad shrug, Markov reached for his chair. “Very well then. I suppose we’ll have to finish this here and keep the colonel waiting.”

“No,” the captain decided. “You will see the colonel now, and then return here to complete the interview. No matter how long it takes.”

“Whatever you say,” Markov agreed meekly. But he winked at the lieutenant.

She kept a straight face and said, “I will see you in this room, no matter how late it is.”

It was difficult for Markov to suppress a grin as he followed the stocky captain down the featureless corridors. The walls were bare of decoration and even though they had apparently been freshly painted, the halls looked grim and almost shabby. Men and women, most of them in uniform, hurried through the halls. Although Markov could see no cameras anywhere, he got the feeling that everyone was being watched constantly.

The captain took him as far as an anteroom, in which a doughy-faced middle-aged civilian woman commanded a large desk with an electric typewriter and two telephones. She flashed Markov a disapproving glance, the kind that his wife often gave, the kind that automatically made him raise his hands to straighten his thinning lank hair and beard. Then she nodded to the captain and gestured wordlessly to the door beyond her desk.

The captain, motioning Markov to follow him, went to the door, knocked once and slowly—carefully—opened it.

Does no one speak here? Markov wondered. Are we at a shrine?

The captain would not cross the threshold, but he brusquely motioned Markov to go inside.

He stepped through into a sumptuous office. A broad desk of polished dark wood with crossed flags behind it. Oriental carpet on the floor. Windows that looked out onto Red Square. Plush leather chairs neatly lined against one wall. Gleaming samovar standing on a low cabinet.

The office was unoccupied. But before Markov could turn back toward the captain, the door at the far end of the room opened and his wife stepped through.

“Maria! This is your office?”

She was wearing her tan uniform, which made her look even squatter and heavier than usual. She scowled at him.

“My office? Hah! My office is smaller than the colonel’s desk.”

“Oh.”

“Come on, come on. They’re all waiting for you.”

He crossed the fine carpet and entered the inner room. It was a conference chamber, the air hazy with cigarette and pipe smoke from twenty men and women seated around the long narrow table. Markov sneezed.

At the head of the table sat the colonel, a pudgy little man with narrow, squinting pig’s eyes. Maria introduced everyone to Markov. He immediately forgot all their names except for Academician Bulacheff—the head of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, and an astronomer of first rank.

Feeling somewhat uneasy, Markov took the seat Maria indicated between a slight, bald man who puffed nervously on a long, thin cigarette, and a female secretary who had a notepad on her lap. Markov noticed that her skirt was up above her knees but her legs weren’t worth bothering about.

“Now then,” the colonel said with a single nod of his head that made his wattles quiver, “we can begin.”

Markov remained silent, listening, as they unfolded the story. The planet Jupiter was giving off strange radio pulses, superimposed against the natural radio noises emanating from the planet. Could it be a signal of some sort? A code? A language?

One of the military men sitting near the colonel shook his head. “I think it’s an American spacecraft that’s been sent into a very deep orbit.”

“It couldn’t be,” said the man beside Markov.

“A secret probe on its way to Jupiter,” the officer insisted.

“For what purpose?”

The officer shrugged. “I’m not in the intelligence service. Let them find out.”

“We have no indication of such a launch by the Americans,” said a bleak-faced graying woman halfway down the table from Markov. “I doubt that the Americans could hide such a launch from us.”

“What about the West Germans? They have a launching base in Brazil now, don’t they?”

“It is under constant surveillance,” the woman answered. “And it does not have the capability of launching interplanetary missions.”

“Then it must be the Americans,” the officer said.

Or the Jovians, Markov thought.

“It is not a spacecraft,” Academician Bulacheff said in a mild, soft voice. “The radio pulses are coming from the planet itself. Of that we are certain.”

“Have the Americans picked up the signals?” the colonel asked. Apparently Bulacheff’s word was enough to silence the spacecraft theory.

“We have done a computer search of the American scientific journals,” one of the younger civilians answered. “Not a word about this has been published.”

“Perhaps they haven’t picked up the signals.”

“Nonsense! Their facilities are as good as ours. Better, in some cases.”

“But do they have a radio telescope operating at the proper frequency? After all…”

The man beside Markov shrilled in a high, reedy voice, “We know of at least four Western facilities that are devoted to studying radio emissions from the planets. The Americans are even mapping Venus with radar! Do you have any conception of the kind of equipment needed to accomplish that? No—if we have detected these strange signals from Jupiter, they have detected them also. That is sure.”

“But why haven’t they published any reports? It’s been several months now and the Americans are always in a rush to get into print.”

“Publish or perish,” said Academician Bulacheff with a slow smile. “Under their system, a scientist must publish papers constantly or be left behind in the competition for money and prestige.”

The conversation drifted further and further into a guessing game about what the Americans were doing. Markov slumped back in his chair and studied Bulacheff. He was an elderly man with a thin, sallow face. The little hair that remained on his gleaming dome was pure white and wispy, like a spindrift of snow blown across the tundra. The old man seemed slightly amused by the proceedings. He caught Markov gazing at him and returned a slight smile.

“The signals can be only one of two things,” Bulacheff said. His soft voice quavered slightly, but everyone turned to him and listened.

Raising one finger, the academician said, “It could be some natural process of the planet Jupiter that is giving off these radio waves. Most likely it is exactly that and nothing more. After all, we have been observing Jupiter’s radio emissions for only a few decades. The planet has been in existence for more than four thousand million years. Who are we to say what is natural and what is anomalous?”

No one challenged his statement. The colonel gave a little coughing grunt and reached for a fresh cigarette.

“The second possibility?” Markov asked gently.

“It may be a deliberate attempt at communication by an intelligent race of Jovian creatures. Personally, I find that difficult to accept, but we must consider it as a possibility until we can actually disprove it.”

Everyone around the table nodded. A bit fearfully, Markov thought.

“Professor Markov,” Bulacheff called, “you are a well-known expert on archaic languages—and you wrote a most interesting monograph about extraterrestrial languages.”

Markov felt himself blushing. “The book was merely an amusement. It was not meant to be considered as a serious text.”

Bulacheff smiled approvingly. “Perhaps. Still, it was a thoughtful piece of work. We must have your help. We would like you to review all the data we have obtained and have you tell us if, in your opinion, these radio pulses could be a language of some sort.”

“Or a code,” Maria added.

“I would be happy to do so,” Markov said to the academician. “And more than happy to work with you, sir.”

Bulacheff inclined his head slightly, accepting the compliment. “Now then, Colonel, if you are truly worried about the Americans, I suggest that we pay special attention to the international astronomical conference that will be held in Paris next month. The Americans will have a large delegation there, as usual. We should be able to learn how much they know.”

“They talk that freely?” someone asked.

Bulacheff’s wrinkled old face eased into a tolerant grin. “The Americans have a fixation about freedom of speech. They don’t know when not to talk.”

“But suppose,” Maria asked, “they say nothing about these radio signals?”

The old man’s grin faded. “That in itself would be significant. Very significant.”

The colonel placed both his pudgy palms down on the tabletop. “Very well. Pick the people who should attend the conference,” he said to Bulacheff. “I will add a few of my own.”

Bulacheff nodded.

He’s taken command of the project, Markov realized.

“But remember one thing,” the colonel warned.

Everyone looked toward him.

“If it becomes clear that these signals really are from an intelligent race, we must make certain that it is the Soviet Union—and only the Soviet Union—that makes contact with them. Such an advanced technology must not be allowed to fall into the hands of the West.”

Chapter 6

Stoner’s eyes snapped open like an electric light turning on. He was lying on the bed, still dressed. He had fallen asleep.

It was morning now, gray and dank. Rain drummed against the window.

The hallway door opened and Dooley backed in, carrying a breakfast tray. It had been his single sharp rap on the door that had awakened Stoner. Through the open door he could see the other agent standing in the hall, calmly appraising him, ready for anything.

“Breakfast in bed,” Dooley said cheerfully. “Not bad, huh?”

Stoner nodded blearily and Dooley quickly left. The door closed, the lock clicked.

Despite himself, Stoner found that he had an appetite. Juice, eggs, bacon, muffins, jam and coffee quickly disappeared into crumbs and stains on his paper napkin.

He went to the window, stared outside and tried to figure out where he was. The rain was stripping the last leaves from the trees. Low gray clouds were scudding past, most likely east to west, he thought. So north must be in the direction I’m facing, more or less.

There were no landmarks outside that he could recognize, only wooded hills that might have been anywhere in New England.

With nothing else to do, Stoner showered. He saw there was an electric razor in the bathroom. They’re very thorough, he thought. And careful with their prisoners. Rummaging through the bureau drawers and closet, he found a blue pullover sweater and a pair of tan chinos that almost fit. The sleeves and pants legs were too short. At least they’re not prison gray.

No books in the room. No television. No phone. The bed was a double. Its fluffy chenille spread, the kind a middle-class housewife buys for the guest room, was rumpled and sagged halfway to the floor. The wingback chair was still a decorator’s nightmare. The carpet was thick, beige, ordinary. The night table was some unrecognizable variation of the furniture style carried by mail-order chains.

It was an odd room to be locked in.

Stoner shrugged to himself, thought about doing some warmup exercises, started pacing the room instead. He was by the window when the door’s sudden opening startled him.

Turning quickly, he saw that the man coming through the doorway was the observatory’s director, Professor McDermott.

Ramsey McDermott was a big man, physically big, with the heavy shoulders of a longshoreman and the rugged good looks—even in his sixties—of a campus idol. His blond hair had turned a dull pewter shade of gray long ago, but he still kept it in a bristling crew cut. His cobalt-blue eyes could still snap when he got angry.

Professor McDermott liked to loom over smaller people and convince them that he was right and they were wrong on the strength of precise logic and a booming voice. But to Stoner, Big Mac looked old and flabby, living on past glories and younger men’s achievements.

Stoner stood between the window and the chair as McDermott came into the bedroom. The hall door closed behind him.

“How are they treating you, Stoner?” No handshake. McDermott kept his heavy, blunt-fingered hands at his sides. He was wearing a tweed jacket, comfortable old slacks that bagged slightly at the knees, a checkered shirt with a hideous green tie.

“Rotten,” Stoner snapped. “What’s this all about?”

Looking over the room and seeing that the only chair was the little upholstered thing that Stoner stood in front of, the old man went across to the rumpled bed and gingerly lowered himself onto it.

“Damned arthritis,” he grumbled in a deep, surprisingly rich voice. “Weather like this really gets to it.”

“What’s happening?” Stoner demanded. “Why have I been locked up here?”

“Your own damned fault,” McDermott said, reaching into his jacket for a blackened briar pipe. “I know you were going to run down to Washington.”

“I’m still a NASA employee…”

“Only technically,” McDermott said. “You’re on loan to me, and by God you’ll take orders from me!”

“You can’t push me around like this.”

“The Navy can. The observatory’s funded by the Office of Naval Research, sonny. At my suggestion, ONR has slapped a Confidential classification on what you’re doing.”

Stoner sank down into the chair. “How in hell can you classify a natural phenomenon? What I’ve discovered…why would the Navy want to keep it secret?”

Puffing blue clouds of smoke that smelled like burnt pencil shavings, McDermott answered, “You have no idea what’s involved in all this, do you?”

“I’ve found extraterrestrial life, dammit!”

“Phah.” The old man looked completely unimpressed. “Listen to me, sonny. I saved your career. If it weren’t for me you’d be an unemployed ex-astronaut with a useless degree in astrophysics, teaching in some jerkwater college in Texas. Don’t forget that.”

“What does that have to do with it?”

McDermott puffed on his pipe. “Jupiter’s giving off some strange radio pulses, the likes of which we’ve never seen before. So I get the inspiration of bringing an optical astronomer into the observatory, somebody who can get us access to the first pictures Big Eye is taking, from orbit.”

“Okay, it was a good idea. A great idea.”

“You bet it was.”

“And it paid off,” Stoner went on, “with the biggest discovery in history.”

The old man snorted. “And you want to run down to Washington and tell your old buddies in NASA about it.”

“For a start.”

“And become a big hero. Publish a paper in Icarus. Get your picture on the cover of Time magazine. Become another goddamned Sagan and get on the Johnny Carson show.”

“What’s wrong with you?” Stoner asked. The man was talking in riddles.

McDermott blew a jet of smoke toward the ceiling. “What have you discovered, Stoner? What do those Big Eye photographs really show?”

“A spacecraft orbiting Jupiter, for Chrissake!”

“Bullcrap!” the old man bellowed. “It’s a natural satellite. Another moon. The damned planet’s got fifteen of ’em that we know about. This makes sixteen.”

“With the kind of UV-to-blue indices we’ve measured?” Stoner countered. “It’s much too bright to be a natural moon.”

“How the hell do you know? It could be a chunk of ice that’s been captured…”

“It’s metal,” Stoner said, quietly, firmly.

McDermott took the pipe from his teeth and shook his head sorrowfully. “You’re grasping at straws, sonny. All you’ve got is a couple of photographs that show a tiny speck of light nobody’s noticed before.”

“Big Eye picked it up because it’s too faint for telescopes on the ground to see.”

“So why should you think it’s artificial?”

Eagerly hunching forward in his little chair, Stoner ticked off points on his fingers. “First, your people pick up these radio pulses—something brand new. Nothing like them have ever come from Jupiter before.”

“That we know of.”

“Second, you bring me into the game so you can acquire the use of Big Eye before it’s officially turned over to the universities. I get them to look at Jupiter and we find…something new.”

“A sixteenth moon,” McDermott muttered.

“Too much of a coincidence,” Stoner insisted. “The new radio signals and the new…object. It’s extraterrestrial life. Intelligent extraterrestrial life.”

“No.”

“Yes! Face it!”

Big Mac sucked on his pipe. It had gone out. Fumbling in his pockets for his lighter, he said, “Listen to me. Even if you’re right it’s too early to go running around yelling about it. It’s a million-to-one shot, and if you’re wrong about it, you’d be ruining yourself and the observatory by blabbing about it now.”

“But other facilities must be picking up the radio pulses. We can’t sit here and let them take the credit for discovering them.”

“They don’t have the Big Eye photographs,” McDermott said. “That’s our ace in the hole.”

“For how long?”

“Long enough. That’s why I got the Navy to classify everything.”

Stoner got to his feet and paced the length of the bedroom. “We’ve got the greatest discovery in the history of science…”

“Maybe.”

“…and you want to keep it a secret.”

McDermott gave a grunt that might have been a chuckle and, heaving himself up from the bed, jabbed the pipe stem-first toward Stoner. “It’s out of our hands anyway, sonny. Come with me. Come on.”

They went out the unlocked bedroom door, along the upstairs hallway of the old house and down the steep narrow stairs to the spacious new living room that bordered on the indoor pool.

Someone was swimming, methodically plodding his way slowly along its length in an overhand crawl stroke. Stoner couldn’t be sure, but he thought the swimmer was Dooley.

Then he noticed that two men were sitting in the living room, in front of the empty dark fireplace. They got to their feet as Stoner and McDermott approached. Stoner recognized one of them as Jeff Thompson, from the observatory.

“Jeff,” he said as he came toward the fireplace. “So they dragged you in, too.”

“Not exactly,” Thompson said, smiling a little guiltily. “I came voluntarily.”

“Everybody’s volunteered to keep this thing quiet,” McDermott rumbled from behind Stoner. “You’re the only one who’s giving us trouble.”

I’m the only one who’s not on your direct payroll, Stoner answered silently.

The other man stuck out his hand to Stoner. “Hi. I’m Fred Tuttle.”

McDermott explained, “Lieutenant Commander Tuttle is our contracting officer in the Office of Naval Research.”

Tuttle was in civvies: a neat tan corduroy suit with brown suede patches on the elbows. He was a small man, with the round freckled face of a Mark Twain character. But his grip was strong in Stoner’s hand, self-assured. A salesman’s grip, with the winning smile that they teach you in confidence courses.

“You’re Air Force, aren’t you?” the lieutenant commander asked.

“Inactive reserve,” Stoner replied. “Very inactive reserve.”

Tuttle’s smile widened, showing even white teeth. “Well, we may be forced to put you back on active status, you know.”

“No, I don’t know. I don’t understand what in hell is going on.”

With a gesture Tuttle got them all seated. Stoner took the sofa that flanked the cold fireplace. It smelled of carbon and wet leaves. Thompson sat next to him. McDermott grabbed the big cushioned chair opposite. Tuttle remained standing, in charge.

“What we’ve got here”—the lieutenant commander’s face went serious—“is something that may be vitally important to the nation’s security.”

“Important to the nation’s security?” Stoner echoed, incredulous. “How can ETI be…?”

“ETI?” Tuttle asked.

“Extraterrestrial intelligence,” Thompson explained. “Astronomical jargon.”

“Let’s not get carried away here,” McDermott rumbled. “All we’ve really got is these anomalous low-frequency radio signals and a few photographs showing what’s most likely a sixteenth moon of Jupiter.”

“Even if that’s all there is to it,” Stoner countered, icily, “we should publish the information. In Science. Or Nature. Before somebody else scoops us.”

The old man glowered from behind his pipe. Tuttle clasped his hands behind his back and stared at his shoe tops.

Stoner felt the glacial calm that always descended upon him when he grew angry. Very quietly he asked, “What in hell happened to freedom of speech around here? Whatever happened to Faraday’s dictum: ‘Physics is to make experiments and to publish them’?”

“I’m not going to put my reputation on the line for some radio pulses and a couple of photos!” McDermott blurted. “I’m not going to make a jackass of myself claiming that we’ve discovered ETI and then be forced to retract it all when it turns out to be completely natural.”

“Then publish what we’ve got,” Stoner said in a cobra’s whisper. “Forget the ETI conclusion, but at least let Jeff publish the radio pulses. He deserves that much. Get the priority. In print.”

Thompson’s eyebrows went up hopefully.

“The problem is this,” Tuttle took over again. “If there’s any chance at all that we have discovered extraterrestrial intelligence on the planet Jupiter, we’ve got to keep it confidential. It’s important to the national security.”

“How can intelligent life on Jupiter affect the national security?” Stoner asked.

Tuttle responded immediately, as if rehearsed. “If there is intelligent life on Jupiter, it must have a level of technology far ahead of our own to launch a spacecraft against a gravity field that’s much more powerful than Earth’s. We can’t allow other nations—Russia, China, others—to get their hands on that technology. We’ve got to make certain that the free nations of the West get it.”

Stoner felt his shoulders slump. “The same old shit,” he muttered.

Undeterred, Tuttle went on, “Moreover, we’ve got to consider the possibility that the Jovians, whoever they are, might not harbor peaceful intentions. Maybe they intend to…well, invade us.”

“Sure,” Stoner said. “Maybe all those flying saucers the UFO freaks have been seeing for the past thirty years are really scouts from Jupiter, checking us out before they come here to rape and pillage.”

“UFO’s do exist,” Tuttle said seriously. “And if there’s intelligent life on Jupiter…”

“I’m starting to wonder if there’s intelligent life on Earth,” Stoner snapped. He got up from the sofa and headed back toward the stairway.

“Dr. Stoner!” Tuttle called. “You can’t leave this house, you know.”

Stoner glanced back over his shoulder and saw that Dooley was scrambling out of the pool. He stopped and stood where he was, seething.

Thompson was suddenly at his side. “Come on, Keith. Sit down and hear them out. It’ll all work out, one way or another.”

Clamping his teeth together so hard that his jaw throbbed, Stoner went back to the living room with Jeff Thompson.

“What you’ve got to realize, sonny,” said McDermott once he was seated on the sofa again, “is that if you’re right, if we have found extraterrestrial intelligence, the implications are enormous. Enormous!”

“The social impact alone could be incredible,” Thompson agreed.

“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.”

Chapter 7

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.

Chapter 8

Stoner looked up from his frozen dinner and saw Jo standing in the kitchen doorway, a thick manila folder clutched in her mittened hands.

For a moment he didn’t know what to say. Dark anger rushed through him; he could feel its heat in his face.

“What are you doing here?”

She stood her ground. “I brought the latest packet of photographs from Goddard Space Center.” Her voice was low but steady.

“Brought me my homework. Thanks a lot.”

Taking a step into the kitchen, Jo said, “Professor McDermott needed somebody to carry things from the observatory to you. He told me to do it.”

Stoner said nothing.

“I had to get special clearance from the Navy.”

“I’ll bet.”

“Look—I didn’t think they’d do this to you.” Jo’s voice didn’t tremble, but he could sense the tension in it. And there was something in her face, something in those dark eyes of hers: guilt, or fear, or…what?

“What did you think they’d do?” he asked.

She shrugged inside her heavy wool coat. “I don’t know. I tried to warn you…to tell you that McDermott was uptight about you going to Washington…”

“How’d he find out, Jo?”

Her face fell. In a voice so low he could barely hear it, she answered, “I told him.”

“Yeah. I know.”

“He pressured me. I’ve been cutting a lot of classes to be out at the observatory. He said he’d flunk me out if I didn’t tell him what you were up to.”

He studied her. If she’s lying, she’s good at it. Anger was seething inside him. Or was it something else, something more? Anger usually left Stoner cold, his mind became as unemotional and unfeeling as an electronic computer. But now his hands wanted to grab and tear, his insides were jumping, blood pounding. Jesus, Stoner realized, it’s been months since I’ve gotten laid.

“Come on in,” he said, trying to make it sound calm. “Take your coat off. Sit down. Have some coffee.”

Hesitantly Jo entered the kitchen. She put the thick manila folder on the Formica-topped counter, pulled off her mittens, slipped out of the coat. Stoner went to the range, where the glass coffeepot sat, half empty.

“No coffee for me, thanks.” She took the stool across the counter from his and watched him pour himself a cup. “Are they treating you all right here? Is there anything I can bring you?”

“My car and the keys to it.”

“They won’t let me.”

He carried the steaming mug back to the counter and sat down facing her. “That old car’s the only thing I’ve got to show for sixteen years of marriage.”

“Oh.”

“I’ve become kind of attached to it.”

“But they’re treating you okay? They’re not giving you any hassles?”

“Sure. Everything’s fine—once I signed the security agreement. Now I’ve got the run of the house. Eight rooms. Or is it nine? I’ve lost count. Plenty of food. I have to cook it for myself, though. I’m a lousy cook.”

“I could cook for you, sometimes.”

He ignored it. Reaching for the manila folder, Stoner pulled out the latest stack of photographs. They showed the fat, flattened, gaudily striped beach ball that was the planet Jupiter. He could see exquisite details of the streaming bands of clouds that flowed across the planet: eddies and whirlpools the size of Earth, in burnt orange, brick red, dazzling white.

“Where are the background field pictures I asked for?”

“In the next batch,” Jo replied. “They’re still being processed.”

“I need them,” he said. “And a computer terminal.”

She nodded. “Anything else?”

“Books. Every book on extraterrestrial life you can find. Empty the libraries. I want everything on the subject.”

Another nod. “Anything else?”

He looked into her deep, lustrous eyes. “Why did you come here tonight, Jo?”

“Professor McDermott told me to. I’m a courier now.”

“Why did you accept the job? You didn’t have to.”

For a moment she didn’t answer. Then, “I wanted to see you. To tell you I’m sorry. If I’d stood up to Big Mac…maybe…” She looked away from him. “I’m sorry it turned out this way. Truly I am.”

He reached across the table and grasped her wrist. “Prove it.”

Without another word he led her out of the kitchen, through the tiny, close rooms of the old part of the house, up the narrow stairway to his bedroom.

He closed the door firmly. No need to turn on a lamp: cold moonlight filtered through the gauzy curtains of the window.

For a moment Jo stood in front of the bed. Then she turned toward him. Stoner leaned his back against the heavy wooden panels of the door. Neither of them spoke.

He could see her face etched by the moonlight. She wasn’t smiling. Her expression was strangely placid, tranquil. She began unbuttoning her blouse. Stoner watched. She unhooked her bra and tossed it aside. Reaching down, she pulled off her shoes, then slithered the jeans down her long legs. And finally the skimpy flowered bikini panties.

“Is this what you want?” she whispered.

His throat was dry. “Yes,” he said, with an effort.

She stepped to him and started to unbutton his shirt. He stood there and let her do the work. Finally she was on her knees in front of him and he was naked. She kissed his erect penis.

“Is this what you want?” she asked again. But she didn’t wait for an answer.

Just before he thought he would explode, Stoner dug his fingers into her thick black hair and pulled her away from him. Bending down, he scooped her into his arms and carried her the four strides to the bed. He put her on the coverlet and tented his body over hers.

Jo twined her arms around his neck and pulled him down onto her. He kissed her as he entered her and she was warm and ready and moving in rhythm with him.

It was like being in space again, floating weightlessly, drifting, drifting through the dark eternities while the stars solemnly, silently gazed down.

She clung to him as they convulsed together and then gasped out a single word: “Keith!”

For long moments they lay locked together, hearts racing, breath gasping. He lifted his face from the tufted coverlet and looked into her eyes again.

She smiled up at him. “That’s the first time you’ve kissed me,” she said.

“It’s the first time you called me by my first name.”

They laughed together.

He sat on the edge of the bed. His insides still felt fluttery. Jo traced a fingernail along the length of his spine.

“Is there anything else I can do for you, Dr. Stoner?” she teased.

Turning back toward her, “Stay the night.”

“I have a class tomorrow morning.”

“Oh.” He frowned in the shadows. “Where in hell are we, anyway? Where is this house?”

“In New Hampshire…not far from White River Junction.”

“White River Junction? Then how in hell can you drive to campus in time for a morning class?”

“So I’ll miss the class,” Jo said easily. “It won’t be the first time.”

“That’s what got you under McDermott’s thumb, isn’t it?”

“I can handle Professor McDermott. He’s just a big bully.”

“White River Junction,” Stoner mused. “Maybe you ought to bring up a pair of skis the next time you come.”

“We won’t be here for the ski season, from what Professor McDermott says.”

“What do you mean?”

“He said the whole observatory staff will be heading south in a few weeks.”

“Including me?”

She nodded. “And me. I’m going too.”

“Where?”

“He wouldn’t say. Just that the climate wouldn’t be so cold.”

“Green Bank?” Stoner wondered. “No, it’s just as cold in those West Virginia hills as it is here. It can’t be Arecibo. Not even Big Mac could swing Drake and Sagan out of there.”

“What’s it like to be an astronaut?” Jo asked.

He blinked at the sudden shift in subject. “Huh? I wasn’t really an astronaut…not like the real rocket jocks. They used me as a construction engineer. I just rode up into orbit and helped put Big Eye together.”

“But you spent months in space, didn’t you?”

Shrugging, “Sure. And once they got the telescope working, NASA figured they didn’t need an expensive astrophysicist who did construction work anymore. So I got RIFfed.”

“What does that mean?”

“Reduction In Force. Laid off. Bounced. Fired.”

“And that’s when you came to the observatory?”

“Yes.”

“And your family…where are they?”

So she’s pumping me, Stoner told himself, knowing that sooner or later she would have asked him about his wife and children.

“My wife took the kids back to her parents in Palo Alto,” he said flatly. “The day I got the RIF notice, as a matter of fact. Strictly coincidence; poetic timing. We hadn’t gotten along in years.”

“How old…?”

“Fifteen and twelve,” he answered automatically. “The boy’s the oldest. I don’t see them at all. Last time I flew out to Palo Alto they wouldn’t even come to the front door to say hello to me. Let’s change the subject.”

Jo reached over and pulled him down to her and kissed him. “I’m sorry,” she said softly. “It must hurt a lot.”

“It should, I guess. But mostly it just feels kind of numb.”

“You’re covering it over.”

“With work. Right. My work comes first. Doris always said that it did, and she was right.”

“And now?”

“Now I’m onto the biggest goddamned discovery in history. Nothing else matters. I’m going to prove that we’ve found extraterrestrial intelligence. No matter what Big Mac or the Navy or anybody else does—I’m going to prove it to the world.”

Jo leaned her head against his shoulder and made long, soothing, soft strokes of her fingertips down his chest.

“So fierce,” she said in a whisper. “Do you know, you’re just like me? We’re two of a kind.”

“You? You’re kidding.”

“I want them to notice me, too, Keith. I want to be somebody. I want to make the whole world know who I am.”

He found himself grinning. “Well, you’re on the right project for that.”

But Jo said, “Who’s going to notice a little technical assistant, next to the famous Dr. Keith Stoner or Professor McDermott. No. I’m going to become an astronaut. A real one.”

“NASA isn’t hiring.”

“They will be, sooner or later. And women will get special preference, you’ll see.”

“It’s not a romantic life. It’s more like being a bus driver. Just a lot of hard donkey work. And risk.”

“But you went into space. You became famous.”

“And unemployed.”

“Imagine making love in zero gravity!”

“Waterbeds are almost as good. Besides, astronauts don’t make love in orbit. They’re too damned busy. And scared. And exhausted.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“It’s a dull life, I tell you.”

“No duller than being a computer programmer.”

“Is that what you’re studying?”

He could sense her smiling in the darkness, cradled next to his body. “That’s what my parents think I’m studying. They want me to go to school and learn a nice, sensible trade until I meet a nice, sensible guy and get married and start having babies.”

“And they’re paying your way…”

“The hell they are! I got myself a partial scholarship. And I work weekends and summers. How do you think I got into the observatory? I get paid for helping out.”

He grinned at the determination in her voice. “So now you’ve joined Big Mac’s supersecret ETI project. I hope he’s paying you well.”

“I get a full technician’s salary.”

“Not bad.”

“And I’m transferring to the Astronautics Department,” Jo added. “I’m going to be an astronaut and nothing’s going to stop me.”

“Fine,” Stoner said, fighting back a yawn. “But in the meantime let’s not freeze to death.” He peeled back the covers on his side of the bed.

“Don’t worry,” Jo answered. “We’re going to be nice and warm this winter. We’re going to Arecibo. I’m sure of it.”

“McDermott can’t swing that much weight,” Stoner said, sliding into the bed. The sheets were already warm from the press of their bodies.

But Jo was on her feet, searching through the moonlit room for her scattered clothes.

“What’re you doing?”

“I brought an overnight bag with me,” she said, yanking on the jeans without bothering about the panties. “It’s in my car. I’ll be back in a minute.”

She was still buttoning her blouse as she went out into the hall, heading for the stairs.

Stoner yawned and wondered briefly how she knew so much about McDermott’s plans. Then he thought about the overnight bag. The cocky little bitch! He didn’t know whether to laugh or be angry. Yawning, he decided to do neither. He turned over on his side and drifted to sleep.

Chapter 9

A cocktail party in official Washington has an inbred hierarchical cast to it. Senators usually outweigh congressmen, of course, but there are all sorts of gradations among both senators and congressmen. A committee chairman is obviously more important than a subcommittee chairman—most of the time. But what about a junior Republican who happens to be an attractive woman? What about a congressman’s aide who happens to be related to the governor of the congressman’s home state?

Lieutenant Commander Tuttle was sensitive to the subtlest nuances of these parties. He knew that lieutenant commanders were slightly lower, in cocktail party echelons, than the average bartender. Still, much good work could be done at the right party if the lieutenant commander properly briefed his commanding officer. Besides, this party had a special extra dimension to it: the guest of honor was Willie Wilson, the Urban Evangelist who was the brand new “catch” of the young social season.

The party was taking place in the old Sheraton-Park Hotel, still desperately trying to cling to its former elegance. The gilt decorations of the function room were worn thin, the old draperies dusty and frayed. But the rumor was that Wilson had arranged the party for himself and gotten a special low price from the hotel. The ostensible hostess had been dragooned into fronting for the Urban Evangelist.

Tuttle’s post for the evening was in a corner of the ornate, gilded function room, dutifully chatting with the wife of his commanding admiral.

“These parties are such a bore, don’t you think?” bellowed Mrs. Admiral O’Kelly. She held a heavy Bourbon on the rocks in one beringed hand and was fingering her rope of artificial pearls with the other.

Tuttle nodded. He was in dress uniform and felt slightly stiff and foolish standing next to this old matron with her bluish hair piled high atop her wrinkled, sagging face. But the admiral’s orders had been firm: “Let me do the talking; you keep my wife supplied with drinks but don’t let her get drunk.”

Not an easy task, thought Tuttle.

The big room was only half filled with guests in tuxedos and evening gowns. Willie Wilson was the newest “in” subject of Washington society, but the Sheraton-Park was not an “in” hotel anymore.

Still, the noise level was climbing to the point where you had to shout to make yourself heard by the person standing next to you. The admiral’s wife had no trouble with that: she had the voice of a Marine drill instructor.

“Who is this Wilson, anyway?” she roared, leaning slightly toward Tuttle so she could yell directly into his ear. “Some preacher, isn’t he?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Tuttle answered, wincing. “He’s called the Urban Evangelist. His mission is to reach the people in the inner cities—the poor and disadvantaged.”

“I saw him on television last week. He’s a good-looking rascal!”

Across the room, Admiral O’Kelly was locked in earnest conversation with one of the President’s Whiz Kids.

“My people over at Justice have picked up something that smells funny,” said the earnest young man from the White House. He wore a three-piece beige suit with an open-necked pastel green shirt. “Have you guys been pulling any fast ones up in New England?”

Admiral O’Kelly let his impressive eyebrows rise. “Why, what on earth are you talking about, boy?”

The Whiz Kid’s face went stiff with suppressed anger. “Don’t play games with me, Admiral. And I don’t have to be a hundred years old to know that something fishy is happening up there.”

“It would help,” O’Kelly said, lowering his voice a notch and putting some iron into it, “if you told me what you’re referring to.”

“Forcible abduction of a NASA scientist, that’s what I’m talking about! Ring a bell?”

The admiral grinned at him, his face a leathery network of creases. “Can’t say that it does. Sure you’re not confusing my boys with CIA?”

“There haven’t been any complaints,” the White House aide admitted, “so you’re in the clear—so far. But if I were you…”

“Let’s put it this way, son.” O’Kelly laid a heavy hand on the young man’s shoulder. “If I were you, I’d pay attention to what’s in my In-basket. I’ve been trying to get the attention of you West Wing boys for the past ten days.”

“You have?”

“If you search diligently through your incoming memos, you’ll find three of ’em from me. Last one’s stamped Urgent and Top Secret. Dated three days ago. I thought sure you’d look at that one.”

The Whiz Kid frowned. “I should have seen it…”

“I suppose you get so many Urgent and Top Secret memos that they just pile up on your desk,” the admiral said, straight-faced.

“Yeah. Well, okay…let’s get together, then. Tomorrow. I’ll phone you first thing in the morning.”

The admiral nodded cheerfully. “Good. I think you’ll find what I have to tell you quite interesting. And important enough to bring to the President’s attention—without any further delays.”

The young man from the White House nodded. Admiral O’Kelly turned his back on him and let the natural tides of the party pull them in opposite directions.

That takes care of that target, O’Kelly told himself. One down and one to go.

He glanced across the noisy room and saw that Tuttle, stubby and loyal as a bullterrier, was still standing resolutely beside his wife. Alma didn’t look too drunk. Still time to find Target Number Two.

And there he was, gliding toward the bar like a well-oiled smiling insurance salesman. O’Kelly headed for the bar.

Todd Nickerson had the bulbous red nose of a drunk. His eyes were always glazed over, even at important committee hearings and during vital votes on the floor of the House of Representatives. At parties he was loud, laughing, often lewd.

But Nickerson was the key man on the House subcommittee that examined ONR’s budget every year. Not the subcommittee chairman. The chairman was an ancient party warhorse from Missouri whose only real interests were pork barrels and buxom black women.

Despite being half drunk most of the time, Nickerson was the real power of the subcommittee. And O’Kelly had to make certain that the subcommittee would not rise up to haunt him once he had put Tuttle’s plan into action. The admiral elbowed his way through the crowd, stalking Nickerson like a submarine trailing an oil tanker.

They made a funny pair, once they started talking to each other in the middle of the party. O’Kelly, all steel gray with his bushy brows and piercing eyes, his uniform immaculate and pressed so well that the creases on his trousers could cut glass; Nickerson, weaving blearily, a tall, lank, alcoholic Ichabod Crane leaning over to hear what the stockier admiral had to say.

“The National Radio Astronomy Observatory?” the congressman yelled. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

Partygoers turned to stare, saw that it was Nickerson, and politely returned to their own conversations.

O’Kelly, feeling the collar of his uniform rasp against his neck, took the civilian by the arm. “Now, don’t get crazy on me, Congressman. This is important. Very important. I’m not even certain that we can bring it up before the subcommittee; I’m afraid of leaks.”

Nickerson focused his eyes on the admiral with an obvious effort. “Arecibo?” he asked, his voice lower. “That’s what you want? D’you know what kind of headlines it’d make if the Navy takes over a peaceful research facility?”

“We already fund a large part of its operation,” O’Kelly reminded the congressman. “We only need it full time for a short while.”

Nickerson waved his glass in the air, miraculously without spilling a drop or hitting any of the people standing nearby.

“And what will the National Science Foundation do?” he demanded with a lopsided smile. “They’ll go running to the media, tha’s what they’ll do. They’ll start screaming that the good ol’ Navy’s screwing them outta the world’s biggest radio telescope.”

“That’s why we need your support, Congressman. All of this must be done in utmost secrecy…”

“Secrecy my ass! The media’ll make Golgotha look like a rehearsal. They’ll crucify the Navy in general and you in particular. Ready to hang on a cross? In public?”

Suddenly O’Kelly looked as if he were on the bridge of a destroyer, charging into the enemy’s guns. “If I have to,” he answered firmly.

Nickerson blinked, then stared at him, mouth hanging open stupidly. The party babbled around them: raucous laughter, shrill voices, smoke, a blur of colorful women’s gowns and men’s somber formal suits.

“You’re serious,” Nickerson said at last.

“You bet I am.”

The glaze left Nickerson’s eyes. He was cold sober and alert. “Maybe you’d better tell me about it. In detail.”

The admiral shook his head. “Not here.”

“Outside then,” Nickerson said. “I doubt that the grounds are bugged.”

By the time the admiral came to reclaim his wife, the party had wound down considerably. The room was emptying, the noise level was down to a subdued buzz of conversations.

“Time for us to go, my dear,” Admiral O’Kelly said to his wife, taking the glass from her hand and putting it on the table next to him.

“It’s been a dull party,” she said, slurring the words slightly.

“I’m awfully sorry, sweetheart, but it was important for us to be here.” Turning toward Tuttle, “I was able to accomplish a couple of things that might have taken weeks, otherwise. Months, perhaps.”

Tuttle beamed happily.

“I shouldn’t have to go to boring parties,” Mrs. Admiral O’Kelly said as her husband led her by the hand. “I didn’t even get to meet the guest of honor.”

“Some other time, dear. Some other time. Tuttle,” he said over his shoulder, “thanks for taking such good care of the missus.”

“My pleasure, sir.”

“I’ll see you in the office at oh-eight-thirty,” the admiral said, by way of good night.

“Yes, sir!” Tuttle knew the admiral’s tone meant: mission accomplished.

He felt exalted. He had won over the admiral to his plan and the admiral had taken on the White House and Congressman Nickerson. And won. The project was definitely go.

Scanning the dwindling crowd, excitement bubbling within him, Tuttle saw Willie Wilson. The Urban Evangelist was shaking hands, wishing people well as they filed past him on their way out. He pumped the admiral’s hand, and then Mrs. O’Kelly’s. She smiled girlishly at him.

“Thank you kindly, Admiral. The people of the inner city will appreciate your help and understanding.” Wilson turned to the next couple in the impromptu line, as an aide whispered behind him. “God bless you, Senator. Hope you win by a landslide next year…. Thanks for coming…. Good to see you….”

Tuttle hung on the fringes of the dwindling crowd, practically bursting to tell somebody his Good News. It was Top Secret, of course, but he couldn’t keep all this excitement bottled up inside himself. Some of it had to come out.

Finally Wilson noticed him. “Freddie, is that you in that fancy uniform?”

“Hello, Will,” said Tuttle.

The evangelist was in his trademark blue denim suit, with a white shirt and flowery bandana knotted at his throat. He was scarcely taller than Tuttle, and whippet thin. His face was bony, all angles. His hair was angelic golden blond; his eyes the cold gray of an Atlantic storm.

“I haven’t laid eyes on you since—when was it, Freddie? Atlanta?”

“New Orleans,” Tuttle corrected. “After the cops tried to break up your street meeting.”

“Yes, I remember now. Two years ago. The Catholics were getting nervous in the service about me.”

He’s had his teeth capped, Tuttle saw. I guess you have to when you do so much work on television.

“I saw you over in Georgetown,” Tuttle said. “You pulled a good crowd.”

“A high school gym,” Wilson replied. “That’s not much. Next time I come back to this town we’ll fill RFK Stadium.”

“I hope you do.”

“We’re getting bigger all the time.”

“I know. People are starting to notice. Especially the TV spots. You put on a good show.”

A small crowd was piling up at the doorway behind Tuttle, waiting to have their final word with the guest of honor. His aides fidgeted nervously and looked at their wristwatches.

“Well, we’re trying,” Wilson said. “It’s a long, hard road.”

“Yes, I guess it is.”

“So why’s the Navy at my party? Who was that admiral just went by?”

Tuttle laughed and heard himself say, “Maybe the Navy’s getting religion.”

Wilson grinned back at him.

“Something big is happening, Willie,” Tuttle whispered suddenly, uncontrollably. “Something so big that it’s going to blow everybody’s mind.”

“What do you mean, Freddie?”

Gesturing halfheartedly at the others milling around them, Tuttle whispered, “It’s too soon to say. But it’s big. Enormously big. As soon as we can verify that it’s really true, I’ll get word to you.”

Wilson put on his best smile. “That’s fine, Freddie. But what’s it all about?”

Shaking his head, Tuttle said, “You’ll know when I tell you. Nothing like it’s ever been seen before. All I can say is—watch the skies.”

“Lord, you make it sound like the Second Coming.”

“Maybe it is,” Tuttle answered, completely serious. “Maybe it is.”

Chapter 10

Stoner pecked hesitantly at the computer keyboard. The typewriterlike terminal was perched shakily on the dining room table. The video screen readout unit sat next to it, flickering with pale green letters and symbols that danced across its screen. The dining room was littered with stacks of printout sheets and photographs. The entire side wall of the dining room was filled with bookshelves that Stoner had cobbled together out of boards and bricks, with the help of his security guards. Every shelf bulged with books.

He didn’t have the house to himself, though.

In addition to the brawny young Navy guards who patrolled the grounds and prowled periodically through the house, cluttering the kitchen and checking all the doors and windows, there was a growing stream of visitors from Washington and elsewhere taking up the big living room, next to the pool. Military men, most of them, with bundles of logistical plans in their briefcases. Stoner could hear them arguing, sometimes shouting at each other, through the thick sliding doors of the dining room. Arguments about food requirements and bedding, insurance tables and electronic spare parts.

Stoner tried to avoid them as much as he could. They were welcome to the living room as long as they didn’t interfere with his work. He shut their brassy voices out of his mind and concentrated on tracking the orbit of the spacecraft, using the Big Eye photographs and the computer to analyze its path.

It has to be a spacecraft, he kept telling himself. It can’t be a natural object.

McDermott came to the house regularly, and not even the heaviest oaken doors could muffle the old man’s deep, booming voice. Tuttle was there often, as well, but the little lieutenant commander was too deeply engrossed in planning their move to say anything to a mere astrophysicist.

Despite himself, Stoner could hear bits and pieces of their discussions. The project had acquired a code name: Project JOVE. And their arguing was mostly about where to place Project JOVE. McDermott kept bellowing about Arecibo. But more and more the other voices countered with another name: Kwajalein.

“What are you doing?” Jo asked.

She sat up in the bed, tucking the sheet modestly under her armpits. It was early morning, a quiet Sunday in mid-November. Crisp sunshine filtered through the bedroom curtains of the New Hampshire house.

Jo had arrived on Friday evening, as usual, with a heavy folder of photographs from Big Eye under her arm. They were stamped Confidential and addressed to Stoner. The photos were beamed by laser from the orbiting telescope to NASA’s Goddard Space Center in Maryland. From there they were transmitted by secure wirephoto cable to the Navy headquarters in Boston’s virtually deserted waterfront. Jo picked them up at the gray Navy building each Friday afternoon and drove them up to Stoner in New Hampshire. And stayed the weekend.

He was sitting at the little maple writing desk the Navy guards had found for him, bent over a sheet of paper.

“I’m writing a letter,” he replied, “to an old friend of mine. One of my former teachers. He’s an astrophysicist: Claude Appert. Lives in Paris.”

“He’s French?” Jo asked.

“As French as the Eiffel Tower.” Stoner finished addressing the envelope and turned in his chair to face Jo. “I want you to mail this for me when you get back to Cambridge.”

Her brows arched upward.

“They won’t let me mail anything out of here,” Stoner explained. “Especially overseas.”

“What’s in the letter?” she asked.

He folded two flimsy sheets of paper and tucked them into the envelope. “I’m asking him if anybody in the European astronomical community has picked up unusual radio signals from Jupiter.”

“That’s a security violation, isn’t it?” Jo pointed out.

With a shake of his head, Stoner said, “I didn’t say we had found anything. I just asked if he’s heard anything.”

Jo said, “The Navy wouldn’t…”

“Listen to me,” he snapped. “They’re using us, Jo. Do you understand? Using us. We’ve stumbled across an incredible discovery, and all they can think of is to keep it secret and try to turn it to their own military advantage.”

“But…”

“But nothing! We spend our lives squeezing out every drop of knowledge about the universe that we can, and they treat us like civil servants. They take our knowledge and turn it into weapons. They throw us in the gutter whenever they feel like it, whenever they decide to cut down on the money they spend for research. Cattle are treated better! The government spends more money subsidizing the goddamned tobacco industry—causing cancer—than it spends on cancer research.”

“What’s that got to do with the radio signals?” Jo asked softly.

Stoner was on his feet now, lecturing, forgetting that he was naked. “When we come up with some hint of power, with some new idea that might help them control people or kill them, then they put us into harnesses and won’t let us work on anything else.”

“We don’t live in a peaceful world, Keith.”

“I know that. But what’s Tuttle’s first reaction to the possibility that we’ve found intelligent life? Not awe. Not even curiosity. Not even fear! They want to lay their hands on any new technology the aliens might have—so that they can improve their weaponry.”

Jo said nothing.

“That’s why they want to keep this news away from men like Sagan and Phil Morrison. Those men have international reputations. They can get the United Nations or some other international organization to make a united, worldwide program out of this. The military doesn’t want that! They won’t allow it! That’s why they’ve got me bottled up here like a prisoner. That’s why they want to move the whole damned operation off to some military base. They want to keep the whole damned thing a secret.”

“I know that.”

“Well, I’m going to blow the lid off this thing,” Stoner said, waving the envelope in one hand. “That’s what this letter is all about.”

“Keith, you’re only going to get yourself in real trouble.”

“We’re in real trouble now,” he countered, “and as long as they can keep this thing secret, the whole world is in trouble.”

“I don’t know if I should mail this for you, Keith,” Jo said.

He walked over to the bed, sat on its edge beside her. “Mail it. They can’t put me into any deeper trouble than I am now. And it’s important that the whole scientific community learns about what’s going on here.”

Reluctantly, Jo took the letter from his hand. She looked at the address, then turned and placed the envelope on the bed table beside her purse.

Stoner didn’t tell her that the second sheet in the envelope was addressed to one of the authors whose book he had read a few nights earlier. A Russian linguist who had written an interesting monograph about possible extraterrestrial languages: Professor Kirill Markov, of Moscow.

More weeks went by, and Stoner patiently worked by himself while the wrangling went on in the next room.

McDermott promised us a warm winter, Stoner grinned to himself. It’ll be April Fools’ Day before we get out of New England.

Thompson brought the Englishman to the house on a bitterly cold morning, one of those New England days when the sun shines brilliantly out of an absolutely blue sky, but the air is a frigid mass of biting dry polar stuff that slides in from Canada and sends thermometers down to zero for days on end.

From inside the house it looked beautiful: bright sunshine glittering on pristine snow, trees stretching bare limbs into the crystal sky. Stoner spent all of two minutes admiring it when he first arose.

He was quickly down in the dining room, chugging away at the computer keyboard, exasperated because there just weren’t enough early observations of the spacecraft to get a true fix on its origin. A blast of cold air told him that someone had just come in through the door in the rear of the kitchen.

Stoner didn’t bother looking up. The computer terminal was starting to rattle off the answers to his latest equations, typing automatically, chattering across the paper at an inhumanly mad speed, numbers and symbols springing across the sheets faster than his eyes could follow.

Jeff Thompson called, “Hi, Keith. Busy?”

Stoner turned in the dining room chair, an acid reply on his tongue, but saw that Thompson had an older man with him.

“Keith, this is Professor Roger Cavendish.”

Stoner saw a man of about sixty, tall but very spare, thinning white hair, bony skull of a face, deepset eyes, bushy eyebrows. He stood there in his overcoat and scarf, gloves in one hand, and gave Stoner a quizzical half-smile.

“Professor Cavendish?” Stoner asked. “From Jodrell Bank?”

“Yes,” Cavendish said softly. “Quite. Don’t tell me my reputation has preceded me?”

“Your work on organic molecules in interstellar clouds isn’t exactly obscure,” Stoner said, getting up from his chair and extending his hand to the Englishman.

Cavendish’s hand was cold, his grip lukewarm.

“And you’re Stoner, the astronaut, eh?”

“Former astronaut.”

“Yes. Quite.”

Thompson took the coats and yelled in from the kitchen that he would put on a kettle for tea.

“There’s instant coffee, if you prefer,” Stoner suggested.

Cavendish actually shuddered.

Stoner walked into the living room. Cavendish’s impressive brows went up when he saw the pool.

“My god, what splendor. Is it heated?”

“Yes.”

“Of course, how stupid of me. Otherwise it’d be a skating rink in this weather, wouldn’t it?”

Stoner grinned. “Well, there’s a lot of hot air pumped into this room. The military and logistics types have their meetings in here.”

“Ah. I see. Naturally, they’d take the best facilities for themselves.”

Gesturing him to an armchair, Stoner asked, “What brings you to this place?”

Cavendish sat down and stretched pipestem legs. He was the perfect picture of an English academic: baggy tweed suit, sweater beneath his jacket, drooping little bow tie.

“NATO, actually,” he replied. “Your intelligence people have been asking some interesting questions about radio signals, so our intelligence people put two and two together and finally NATO got into the act. One thing led to another, and here I am.”

“You’re representing NATO?”

“Quite.”

“And you’ll go with us when we move to Arecibo, or Kwajalein, or wherever they put us?”

“Lord, I hope not. Spent enough of my life in tropical paradises.”

Stoner sank back into his armchair, thinking, So they’ve brought NATO into it. Maybe my letter to Claude helped. I wonder if he forwarded the note to that Russian linguist?

Thompson came in with a tray bearing three mugs. Stoner took his and saw that it was black coffee. One sip, though, convinced him never to allow Thompson to make coffee for him again.

“Professor Cavendish was a prisoner of war for nearly five years,” Thompson said. “In the Pacific.”

“Burma, actually,” said Cavendish. “Bridge over the River Kwai and that sort of thing. Very nasty. Best forgotten, if you can.”

Within minutes their national origins and earlier lives were forgotten as they started talking shop.

“There’s just not enough data,” Stoner admitted, “to backtrack the thing’s point of origin. I don’t think we’ll ever figure out where it came from.”

“But you have enough to show that it couldn’t have been launched from Jupiter,” Cavendish said.

“I think so,” Stoner said. “We’ve tried every possible launch window. If the spacecraft appeared near Jupiter at the same time the radio pulses started, there isn’t any possible way it could have been launched from Jupiter itself. No way.”

“It’s a negative proof,” Thompson said.

“All the stronger for that,” said Cavendish. “If we can definitely rule out Jupiter as the origin of our visitor, then that’s quite an accomplishment.”

“I suppose the next step would be to rule out the other planets.”

“Easily done. I should think your computer could crunch through those numbers quickly enough.”

Stoner stretched his legs out and slouched back on his chair. He put the steaming coffee cup on his belt buckle and said, “So it’s definite—the thing came from outside the solar system. We have the numbers to prove that.”

“We will have,” Thompson said, “in a few days.”

“But that makes things even more puzzling, doesn’t it?” said Cavendish.

“How so?”

“Well, if it came from outside the solar system, from another star, it must have taken thousands of years for the blasted thing to reach this far. Millions of years, more likely.”

“If it’s an unmanned probe…”

“Even unmanned”—Cavendish waved his emptied teacup—“a piece of machinery that can stay intact and operate reliably for millennia? For eons? Difficult to believe.”

“For human machinery.”

“What if there’s a crew aboard?” Thompson mused. “Our own spacecraft have worked better when astronauts were aboard to repair malfunctions.”

“But it’s the blasted time factor that makes all these arguments so difficult,” Cavendish insisted. “If you have a spacecraft traveling from one star to another it would take so many centuries that the crew would have to be prepared to spend its entire life on the ship…plus the lives of its children, and grandchildren, and great-grandchildren—dozens of whole generations, don’t you see?”

“Not if the ship could fly at the speed of light, or close to it,” Stoner said.

“Relativistic effects,” Thompson muttered. “Time dilation.”

“Not bloody likely,” Cavendish countered. “And your own observations show it poking along at a rather sedate speed, actually, more like your Voyager and Mariner probes.”

Thompson finished his cup and got to his feet. “Well, one thing’s for sure. Whichever way you look at it, the damned thing is impossible.”

“But it’s there,” said Stoner.

“Ahh,” Cavendish said with a growing smile. “That’s what makes science interesting, isn’t it?”

Chapter 11

Walking along the gravel path that skirted the long rows of silvery radio telescope antennas, Kirill Markov pulled his fleece hat down over his tingling ears and reflected on how much of the Russian spirit is shaped by the Russian climate.

A melancholy people in a bleak land that suffers a dreary climate, he told himself.

He stopped and surveyed the scene. Endless vistas of flat, snow-covered country, with hardly a hillock to break the monotony. Heavy, dull gray clouds pressing down like the hand of a sullen god. A cold wind moaning constantly, without even a tree to catch it and offer a lighter, cheerier sound.

Why did they have to build this research station out here in the steppes? Why not by the Black Sea, where the commissars have their summer dachas and the sun shines once in a while?

He shook his head. Admit it, old boy. If you were getting somewhere with this puzzle they’ve handed you, you wouldn’t mind the scenery or the climate so much.

It was the truth. The radio pulses had him stymied. If they were a language, or even a code, he had not been able to make the slightest dent in it during the months he’d been working on the problem.

Wearily, he turned in his tracks and started trudging back toward his living quarters. The wind tugged at his long overcoat. His feet were freezing.

And the radio pulses were as much a mystery to him as they had been when he had first tackled the problem.

He was walking past the gray cinder block of the administration building when Sonya Vlasov’s bright, high voice caught him.

“There you are, Kir! I was wondering where you’d gotten to.”

Inwardly he groaned. Sonya had been an easy conquest, if conquest was the correct word to use with someone so willing. Willing? She was demanding. Markov had a notion that their long nights together in bed had something to do with his inability to crack the Jovian puzzle. She was young, frighteningly energetic, athletic and more inventive than a team of Chinese acrobats.

She rushed up and grabbed his arm. “Have you forgotten that the laboratory director has invited you to tea this afternoon?”

It was already getting dark. The lights atop the buildings and along the paths had been switched on. Markov felt cold and utterly bleak deep inside his soul. Incredibly, Sonya was smiling, bouncy and coatless. She wore nothing more than a sweater, loose-fitting slacks and boots.

Her sweater was not loose-fitting, though, and despite himself Markov felt a tiny glow within. He smiled down at Sonya’s round, happy face.

“Yes, I had quite forgotten about the invitation. Where would I be without you?”

She laughed. “In bed with one of the other girls. They’re all very jealous of me, you know.”

“Ah, my angel of mercy,” he said, sliding an arm across her shoulders. “You are too kind to me. After all, I’m a doddering old man…”

“You are not!”

“Well, middle-aged, then,” he said as they headed toward the wood-frame building where his room was. “There are so many younger men who are sighing and moaning for a chance to bask in your smile. Yet you concentrate all your energies on me.”

And come to think of it, he added mentally, there are indeed other women who’ve been kept away from me by this over-developed sex maniac.

But Sonya would have none of it. She was single-minded in her devotion to Markov. And, sure enough, he ended up making love to her again before he started out for the director’s tea. It came as no surprise to him. As he lay half dozing in her soft, ample breasts, he found himself trying to count how many times he had done it over the past two months.

I must be close to a world record for a man approaching fifty years of age, he marveled.

The director’s tea was very private, very quiet, and mercifully brief. Markov chatted amiably about his studies of oriental languages while the rest of the men and women talked about astronomy and electronics. He didn’t understand them and they didn’t understand him. No one spoke about the radio pulses from Jupiter, because they were supposed to be a secret that only a half-dozen people in the entire station knew about. And no one knew who, among the two dozen guests at the tea, might be reporting conversations back to Moscow.

Markov wasn’t hungry by the time the partygoers bade farewell to their host and headed for their own quarters. He trudged listlessly past the cafeteria building and headed to his room. Sonya would be there, waiting in bed for him.

Maybe she’ll be asleep, Markov hoped. Then he frowned to himself. A fine state of affairs! You’re actually afraid of her. It’s time you told her that you’re a married man and you can’t carry on with her any longer.

He thought of the lean, languid blond electronics specialist he had met at the director’s tea. Big, sleepy eyes. She’d be more restful, at least.

It was a considerable surprise when he opened the door to his room and found his wife sitting in the chair in front of the electric heater.

“Maria!”

She looked up at him, the usual scowl on her face.

Markov glanced at the bed. It was unmade, but empty.

“What are you doing here?” he asked, closing the door behind him and wondering what had happened to Sonya.

“I’ve come for a firsthand report on your progress,” she said. “My superiors thought that I would like to see my husband after a two-month absence.”

Putting on a smile, Markov said, “How thoughtful of them.”

He pulled off his heavy coat and hung it on the hook behind the door. Maria’s plain black suitcase sat on the floor next to the closet.

The closet! Could Sonya be hiding in the closet?

“You must be tired after such a long trip,” he said to his wife. “Would you like some tea? Perhaps dinner?”

“You look tired yourself. There are dark circles under your eyes.”

“I’ve been working very hard.”

“Yes, I know.”

This must be the way a mouse feels when it’s in the paws of a cat, Markov thought. Or the way a prisoner feels when the police take him in.

“I’m afraid I haven’t made much progress…”

“That depends on how you look at it,” Maria said, her voice flat and cold. “The girl who was in your bed seemed quite content with your progress.”

“Girl?” His voice squeaked, almost. “Oh, her. She…well…” He shrugged and grinned sheepishly.

“I hope that you have learned something about the radio signals,” Maria said, deadly calm, “in between your sessions in bed.”

Markov’s grin crumbled. Pulling a wooden chair to sit facing her, he said earnestly, “Maria…I don’t believe there is anything to be learned from the pulses. We have used computer analyses on them and I have studied them faithfully for months now…”

“Faithfully.” She snorted.

“Faithfully,” he repeated. “There is no hint of a periodicity, or a rhythm, or any of the characteristics that one would expect from a language.”

“Are you sure your mind has been clear enough to do your work properly?”

“Have I ever failed you before?”

“You’re getting older, but not any wiser.”

He slapped a palm on his knee. “That’s unfair, Maria Kirtchatovska! I am…”

She leveled a blunt forefinger at him and he lapsed into silence. “We must crack this code, Kirill. Do you understand? My superiors will not accept failure.”

“But I don’t think it is a code.”

“They do.”

Raising his hands to the heavens, Markov demanded, “And if they believe that the Moon is made of green cheese, will they destroy the cosmonauts who bring back rocks?”

She would not move from her chair. To Markov, she looked like a stolid, unyielding mule. Words bounced off her thick hide.

“If it’s not a code, it’s not a code!” he said, his voice rising. “If it isn’t a language how can it be a language?”

Maria’s stare bored into him. “So I am to return to Moscow and tell my superiors that my husband has spent two months studying the radio signals and he has concluded that they are completely natural in origin. And when they ask me what kind of studies he did, I can tell them that he spent most of the two months in bed with some oversexed cow who should be sent out to pasture in Siberia.”

“No!” Markov snapped. “You wouldn’t.”

“If you fail, I fail,” Maria answered. “And before I let that happen, I’ll see your little bitch in hell.”

“Maria, you don’t understand…”

“No, you don’t understand. I will not accept your word on this. Not when I know you’ve been playing instead of working. It’s my career you’re playing with! My life! And your own.”

Feeling desperate, he ran a hand through his thinning hair. “Look…I have done a serious job with these signals. Honestly I have. Let me show them to Academician Bulacheff. If he agrees with me, will that satisfy you?”

Maria gave him a long, deadly stare, then reached down into the bag at her feet and pulled out a single sheet of handwritten paper.

“Read this,” she commanded.

Markov squinted at the letter, patted his pockets until he found his glasses, slipped them on. As he read, his face fell. His hand began to tremble slightly.

Finally he looked back at his wife. “Who…who is this man Stoner?”

“An American scientist, an astrophysicist who helped to build the telescope that the Americans placed in orbit earlier this year.”

Shakily, Markov made his way to the bed and sank down onto it. “And he thinks there is an artificial spacecraft in the vicinity of Jupiter, causing the radio signals.”

Maria said, “Why would he write you such a letter?”

Glancing at the flimsy sheet, Markov answered, “He says he read my book on extraterrestrial languages…”

“Your notorious book.”

“But…do you believe what he says, Maria? Perhaps it’s an American trick of some sort.”

“Many Americans do not understand the nature of the struggle between communism and capitalism. They believe that the two systems can coexist in peace.”

Markov nodded.

“This man Stoner is an idealist. He is also a scientist who wants to be recognized for discovering alien life. That is why he has written to you.”

“But why me? Why not the International Astronomical Federation? Or the Soviet Academy of Sciences? Why to me?”

“Who can tell?” Maria replied. “Our agents in America are looking into the matter.”

Markov tried to pull himself together. Too much was happening, too quickly.

“Do you still believe,” Maria asked, “that the signals are not a language?”

He took a deep breath, then, “They are not a language. At least, they are not any kind of language that I can understand.”

She reached out and took the letter from his limp hand. Placing it carefully back in her bag, she said, “A few moments ago you expressed a desire to see Academician Bulacheff. Well, he wants to see you, too. Immediately. We go back to Moscow tonight.”

Chapter 12

“It’s just too fantastic to be believed!”

“I assure you, Mr. President, it’s quite true.”

The President got up from the polished mahogany table and walked toward the fireplace. The regular Cabinet meeting had ended in its usual bitter wrangling, and he had gladly left the cold formality of the Cabinet Room for the smaller intimacy of the Roosevelt Room.

Standing by the small bronze bust of Teddy Roosevelt on the mantel above the fireplace, the President looked haggard: tie loosened, collar opened, hair tousled, fists jammed into the pockets of his jacket.

The press secretary watched him worriedly. An old friend and adviser, he knew that the pressures were inexorably grinding the President into despair.

The President looked wistfully at the painting of Teddy the Rough Rider that hung above the sofa. “Things were a lot simpler in his day, weren’t they?”

The Defense Secretary shook his gray-maned head. “It only seems so from this distance in time, sir.”

“You work so hard to get this job,” the President murmured, more to himself than to the others in the room, “and once you’ve got it, you wonder why you ever tried.”

“Somebody’s got to do it,” the press secretary joked. “They hold an election every four years.”

The President smiled weakly at him. Turning to his science adviser, he asked again, “Intelligent life on Jupiter? You’re sure of that?”

“No, sir,” she answered firmly. “Not totally sure. But it’s a strong enough possibility that we should be prepared to face up to it.”

With a sigh, the President muttered, “Why does everything have to happen during my Administration?”

The Secretary of Defense, a former industrialist, cleared his throat as he always did before delivering an opinion. “Mr. President,” he said in his flat Oklahoma twang, “Sally and I don’t always see eye to eye on things…”

The science adviser glared at him from her seat across the small room. “You can say that again! Joey.”

He grinned at her. “All right, I’m a male chauvinist pig…Ms. Ellington.”

“Dr. Ellington.” She did not grin back.

The President looked pained, but said nothing. So his press secretary chided, “Hey look, there’s only the four of us in here, so let’s drop the squabbling for a while, huh? This is too important for cheap shots.”

“I totally agree,” said Defense. “The point I was going to make is that Dr. Ellington and I are convinced that we must turn over the Arecibo radio telescope facility to studying these radio signals.”

“Why Arecibo?”

“It’s the biggest and most powerful radio facility we have,” the science adviser explained. “The biggest radio telescope in the world, as a matter of fact.”

“What about the telescope up in orbit?” asked the press secretary.

“That’s an optical telescope, like Mount Palomar.”

“We need Big Eye, too,” Defense added. “In fact, that’s how we got the photographs of this thing in orbit around Jupiter.”

“If it really is in orbit,” muttered the science adviser.

“You think it’s artificial?”

She nodded, grim-faced. “Yes, I do. But we don’t have enough numbers on its trajectory yet to tell if it’s truly in orbit around the planet or merely making an extended flyby. It could be a flyby…from beyond the solar system.”

The President sank into the chair next to his Defense Secretary. “It’s hard to believe, either way.” He looked across the table at the press secretary. “Intelligent creatures from another world. Scary, isn’t it?”

“Scares hell out of me,” Defense said.

“We’ve got to be absolutely sure about this,” said the press secretary. “If word about this leaks out before we’re ready to absolutely confirm or deny it…there’ll be pandemonium.”

“I realize that,” Defense said. “We’re taking every security precaution, I assure you.”

But the science adviser said, “We’re going to have a peck of trouble with the Arecibo regulars. We can’t just walk in there and tell them to pack up and leave for an indefinite period of time. They’d raise the roof.”

“Suppose we explained the situation to them and asked for their co-operation…”

Defense shook his head. “You’ve got a lot of academic superstars down there who believe that their freedom of expression comes first and everything else—including the national security—comes afterward. Try to get their co-operation and they’ll go running to the Post.”

“The Pentagon Papers, all over again,” said the press secretary.

But the President persisted. “Carl Sagan’s one of the people in that group, isn’t he? I know Carl. He worked on my election committee. I could explain it to him. He’d want to help us, I know he would.”

“Sure! He’d want to run the show,” the science adviser said.

“And we can’t let that happen,” said Defense.

“Why not?”

“He’s much too well known. He’d be a terrible security risk. Pulitzer Prize—winning author. Television star. We couldn’t let him wander around free if he’s going to work on this, and we can’t lock him up inside a security compound—his absence would tip off the Russians that we’re on to something.”

“He’s damned friendly with Russian scientists, too, isn’t he?” the press secretary asked.

“Don’t you think the Russians already know about this?” the President asked. “I mean, they have radio telescopes too, don’t they?”

“I don’t know if they have anything operating down below six hundred megahertz right now,” answered the science adviser. “After all, we stumbled onto the signals only because one of our older facilities was working out at the end of the spectrum.”

“And we’ve got Big Eye,” said Defense. “The Reds don’t have a comparable telescope in orbit. Ground-based telescopes, no matter how big they are, just can’t pick up this thing near Jupiter. We’ve checked that. You can’t see it from the ground, it’s too faint to be picked up.”

“What about a space probe?” the President suggested. “We could send a probe out there to see if this object is natural or artificial.”

The science adviser hiked her eyebrows. Defense made a sour face.

“It would take several years to design, build and launch a suitable probe,” the science adviser said. “We simply don’t have spacecraft sitting on shelves, waiting to be picked up and used. And it would take almost a year before a probe could reach Jupiter’s vicinity, even on a high-thrust boost.”

“Besides,” Defense said, “we’ve fired Pioneers and Voyagers past Jupiter for years now and they’ve never picked up a trace of anything like this.”

“Let’s get back to the main point,” said the press secretary. “No matter what you do, with Arecibo or anything else, this thing has got to be orchestrated carefully. Very carefully. The public’s got to be prepared for this before we actually release any news.”

“Can we keep it from being leaked?” the President asked.

“You’re assuming,” Defense murmured, “that we can’t prevent leaks?”

“Prevent them?” The press secretary laughed. “We can’t even slow them down!”

“The Department of Defense…”

“Leaks like a sieve.”

Defense glowered but did not reply. The science adviser suppressed a giggle.

“We’ve got to play this game right,” the press secretary insisted. “We’ve got to set up the public…”

A knock on the door brought him up short. The President’s appointments secretary took a single step into the room.

“Excuse me, sir. The delegation from the National Farm Bureau,” she said softly.

“Oh…yes.” The President got up from his chair, smoothed his jacket. “Is the Secretary of Agriculture in there with them?”

“Yes sir.”

Sighing, the President turned back to the three at the table. “Work out a plan of action and let me see it. Tonight, if you can.”

They stood as the President left the room. Then they dropped back into their chairs.

“Well, what do you think?” Defense asked.

The press secretary grimaced. “The Cabinet won’t support him and the Congress spits in his eye every chance it gets. The Senate’s got four presidential candidates in it, the Cabinet’s got at least two more, the economy’s sliding into oblivion, we still have oil troubles, and now he’s got Martians coming at him.”

“Jovians,” corrected the science adviser.

“Whatever. We’ve got to prepare for the worst. I mean…can you imagine what the saucer nuts will do when word of this gets out?”

The science adviser corrected, “You mean the UFO researchers.”

“I mean the saucer nuts! And the religious crazies. My god, they committed suicide by the hundreds in Jonestown a few years back over nothing! What’ll they do when we tell ’em we’re going to be invaded by alien monsters?”

“Where’s Orson Welles when we really need him?”

“This isn’t a joke, Sally.”

“What about other nations?” the press secretary asked no one in particular. “Don’t we owe it to our allies to give them some advance word on this?”

“NATO’s already been clued in,” Defense responded. “The Dutch have apparently picked up the radio signals at one of their own facilities.”

“Dwingeloo,” the science adviser said.

Loosening his tie, the press secretary wondered, “What if we start a big flap about this and it turns out to be a false alarm? Those very same UFO people and religious cults won’t believe us. They’ll think we’re covering up.”

“They already think we’re covering up UFO visitations,” said the science adviser.

“Suppose they’re right?” Defense asked.

“What?”

“Suppose…well, what if this thing really is an alien spacecraft and—and they’re hostile? Dangerous?”

The science adviser shook her head crossly at him. “That’s exactly what we need around here: paranoia.”

Chapter 13

Ramsey McDermott swiveled his creaking old leather chair back and forth as he puffed steadily on his pipe, thinking, worrying, trying to plan out the best course of action.

Suppose he’s right? the old man asked himself. If it really is extraterrestrial intelligence, there could be a Nobel in it for me. After all, I’m the head of the project. I’m the one who brought Stoner into the observatory. He was just a washed-out astronaut before I asked NASA for him.

The office was dark in the late afternoon. Outside, the sun was already down behind the red brick buildings that lined the Yard.

They’ll put a plaque on the building after I’m gone, McDermott told himself. Professor Ramsey McDermott, the discoverer of extraterrestrial life. He pictured the Nobel Prize ceremony, the speech he would give in Stockholm, the interviews with the press. Frowning, he realized that he would have to share the prize with Stoner and Thompson, perhaps one or two others.

Stoner will make trouble, he knew. The man’s a born troublemaker.

Maybe it isn’t ETI, he thought. It’s most likely just some natural object, maybe a new comet or a captured meteor that’s been pulled into an orbit around Jupiter.

But what about the radio pulses? How do you account for them? Coincidence? Some influence between this object Stoner’s found and Jupiter’s radio emissions, like the moon Io affects the radio bursts?

His pipe had gone out. McDermott took it from between his teeth, never noticing the thick clouds of blue-gray smoke that hung in layers through the office, permeating the books, the stacks of papers, the drapes on the window.

It was dark. He switched on the goosenecked desk lamp. And saw the report from Washington again.

Damn that man! He rapped the pipe bowl sharply against the big, dottle-filled ashtray on his desk. The aged, brittle stem snapped.

Double damn him! McDermott snapped to himself. And where the hell is that girl? She should be here by now.

As if in answer, there was a knock on the door. Without waiting for him to answer, Jo opened the door and stepped into Professor McDermott’s office.

“You’re late,” he growled.

“I just got out of class,” she replied.

“Oh, you’re attending classes these days,” he shot back sarcastically.

“When I can.”

She seemed completely unflustered. She kept her coat on and her books in her lap as she sat in the chair before his desk. With a disapproving frown, she waved her free hand to push some of the smoke away.

“Having a good time in New Hampshire? I understand you spend every weekend up there with Stoner.”

“That’s my business,” she said.

“I’m making it mine,” McDermott snapped. “It’s Project JOVE business, you know.”

Her back stiffened. “You told me to do what I could to make certain he stays at the house up there without making any more trouble. So I’m doing what I can.”

McDermott drummed his fingers on the report resting on his desktop. “Does that include mailing letters overseas for him?”

She hesitated for just a fraction of a second. “What do you mean?”

“Somehow, Stoner got a letter out. To Russia, no less. To some Russian linguist, according to Washington.”

“I don’t know anything about that,” Jo said.

“You’re the only one who could have smuggled a letter out for him.”

She shook her head stubbornly. “I didn’t mail any letters to Russia for him or anyone else. I wouldn’t do that.”

“You’re certain?”

“How does Washington know he sent a letter to this Russian?”

McDermott chuckled. “They don’t tell me where their information comes from. I imagine we have spies in the Kremlin, just as they have spies in Washington.”

“What’s in the letter?”

“Enough to put Stoner into a federal prison for a long, long time.” McDermott realized that it was true, as he spoke the words. His heart lightened. With Stoner out of the way…

“You wouldn’t do that!” she said.

He shrugged. “It’s not up to me. It’s a Navy problem.”

“But…you said you need him for the project.”

Smiling, McDermott said, “I imagine we can get along without him now. He’s been more trouble than he’s worth, actually.”

“No. You can’t.”

Her voice was almost pleading. McDermott realized that she was suddenly tense, leaning forward in the chair, her face tight with concern.

“Stoner did it to himself,” he said, as he felt his blood stirring, the heat starting to build inside him.

“He wouldn’t do anything wrong,” she was saying. “This must be some kind of misunderstanding…”

But McDermott was barely listening. He heard the tone of her voice, saw the anxiety in her eyes, and realized with an inward shock of discovery that he wanted her for himself. Very much. For himself and no one else.

“There must be something you can do!” Jo begged.

He still had the broken stem of his pipe in his hand. Dropping it into the ashtray, he took another pipe and wordlessly began to fill it, working methodically, silently, watching her watching him, waiting for her to break the stretching silence.

“Couldn’t you…do something? Help him?”

“He’s broken the security laws,” McDermott said slowly. “He signed a security agreement and then dashed off a letter to Soviet Russia.”

“Maybe it’s an old letter. Maybe he wrote it before he signed the agreement.”

McDermott tamped the tobacco down and put the pipe in his mouth. “It’s still a federal crime.”

Jo glanced around the room, as if looking for help. “There must be something you can do.”

Trembling inside, McDermott heard himself tell her, “I suppose I could tell the Navy that he’s too valuable to the project to be sent to jail.”

Jo nodded eagerly.

“But why should I? Why should I risk the project’s chance of success for him? What’s in it for me?”

For several moments she said nothing. McDermott could hear his pulse pounding in his ears.

Finally he could stand it no longer. “If I…saved his neck, what would you do?”

Understanding dawned in her eyes. She sat up straighter in the chair. “What would I do?”

“For me.”

She almost smiled. “What would you want me to do?”

Taking the pipe out of his mouth, still unlit, McDermott said shakily, “Stop seeing him. Spend your time with me instead.”

She nodded slowly. “And what do I get out of that?”

He felt confused. “What do you mean…?”

“I want a letter of recommendation from you, to NASA. A letter recommending me for a position in the astronaut training corps.”

“You want…”

“I’ll give you what you want, if you give me what I want.”

“And Stoner?”

“He stays with the project. I’ll stop seeing him. You write the letter.”

Swallowing hard, McDermott answered, “When…when the project is finished. I’ll write the letter then. We have a lot of work ahead of us, you know.”

“You could still send the letter off to NASA. Now. I’ll stay with the project until it’s finished.”

His head was throbbing. “It’s not that simple, young lady. If you expect me to…”

“I’ll do what you want,” Jo said. “But first you write that letter.”

“I…we’ll see about that. I have to think about this.”

Jo got up from her chair and clamped the books under her arm, against her hip. “Okay, you see about it. When you give me the letter and guarantee that Dr. Stoner will stay with the project, I’ll live up to my end of the deal.”

She went to the door, turned back to him. “Uh, just so we understand each other…I’m not into bondage or S&M, but anything else you want I can give you.”

McDermott sat in a hot sweat as she left his office and shut the door firmly behind her.

Markov sat like a guilty schoolboy in the anteroom, waiting, waiting endlessly. Academician Bulacheff’s secretary, a portly woman of fifty or more, glared at him now and then. Men shuttled in and out of the academician’s office. But no one spoke to Markov.

Outside it was snowing. Markov watched the white flurries paste themselves against the windowpanes. Little by little, Moscow disappeared from sight beneath the snow-filled gusts. Even the spires and walls of the Kremlin became indistinct blurs.

A real blizzard, Markov told himself. It will be a long walk home.

Finally, when he had nearly hypnotized himself into a snow-induced slumber, the secretary’s nasal voice rasped, “Kirill Vasilovsk Markov?”

He snapped to full alertness. There was no one else in the anteroom, but still she made a question of his name.

“Yes, that’s me,” he said.

“Academician Bulacheff will see you now.”

Markov got to his feet, a trifle unsteadily, and walked to the plain wooden door of the academician’s office.

Bulacheff is the key man, he heard his wife’s voice warning him. He is the one you must satisfy. If you can convince him that the signals are not a language, then all may be well. But if he is dissatisfied with your work…. Maria had let the sentence dangle, like a noose over Markov’s head.

Bulacheff’s office was neither spacious nor imposing, but a cheerful gleaming samovar chugged away in one corner of the neat little room. And the academician came up from behind his desk and greeted Markov warmly.

“Kirill Vasilovsk! It was good of you to come in person. I hope you are not caught by the snow on your way home.”

Markov smiled and nodded and mumbled polite inanities, thinking, I had to come in person, you summoned me. And how can I avoid being caught in the snow, unless we stay here until spring?

“I have read your report,” the academician said, returning to his desk. “Most interesting. Most interesting.”

He winked at Markov, then reached down to the bottom drawer of his desk and produced a bottle of vodka and two glasses.

“It’s not iced,” he said apologetically.

Markov grinned at the old man. “Not to worry. I am already chilled quite thoroughly.”

Bulacheff gestured his guest to the worn leather sofa at the side of the room. Portraits of Mendeléev, Lobachevski, Oparin and Kapitza hung in gilt above the sofa. The inevitable portrait of Lenin was over the academician’s desk. But no contemporary politicians, Markov noted.

He accepted a thimble-sized glass of vodka. Bulacheff toasted, “To understanding.”

They both downed their drinks in a single gulp.

As Bulacheff wheeled his swivel chair to refill Markov’s glass, the linguist said, “It was good of you to find time for me. I know you must be very busy.”

Bulacheff’s bald pate gleamed in the light from the panels in the ceiling. “Actually,” he said, “I am very glad to see you. I want to discuss this Jupiter business with someone who is not in the Academy, not part of the official apparatus.”

“Oh?”

With an almost sheepish smile, Bulacheff eased back in his chair. “It is only too easy to become isolated in a position such as mine. The people I see are all members of the Academy or the government. Sometimes we become too ingrown; we lose sight of the important things because we are so concerned with the immediate problems of the moment.”

Holding his refilled glass in front of him, Markov nodded. “I see.”

“It is good to discuss this matter of”—Bulacheff inadvertently glanced ceilingward—“of ETI with a man of science, rather than an apparatchik.”

Is he looking to the heavens or for microphones in the ceiling, Markov wondered. He said, “It’s a matter of grave importance, true enough.”

“Yes,” Bulacheff agreed. “And the Americans are a jump ahead of us—as usual.”

“What do you mean?”

“This man Stoner…this idealist who wrote you that letter—do you know who he is?”

Markov shook his head.

“Our embassy in Washington reports that he was one of the astronomers who helped design and build the orbiting telescope that the Americans launched recently: they call it the Big Eye.”

“A telescope in orbit? Like a sputnik?”

“Exactly. No doubt the Americans are using it to study Jupiter very closely…much more closely than we can, since we have no such equipment in orbit.”

Markov stroked his beard with his free hand. “So they have found things that we cannot see.”

“Exactly! They have eyes and we are blind.”

“That’s…too bad.”

Bulacheff knocked back his vodka and put the glass carefully on his desk. “Science depends on politics. It has always been so. Capitalist or socialist, it makes no difference. We want to study the universe but we must beg for the money from the politicians.”

Markov agreed. “Even in the beginnings of science, great men such as Galileo and Kepler had to cast horoscopes for their patrons if they wanted to be supported for their true work.”

“Yes. And nowadays we have to invent weapons for them.”

Peering ceilingward himself, Markov said, “But that is necessary for the defense of the Motherland.”

“Of course,” Bulacheff said brusquely. Then he added, “And for the triumph of socialism.”

“It’s too bad we don’t have an orbiting telescope of our own,” Markov said.

“It would take ten years to get one into space—nine of them wheedling and begging.”

“I wonder…is there any way we can get to use the American telescope? Or to see the photographs they have taken?”

Bulacheff fixed him with a beady look. “When they won’t even admit publicly that they’ve discovered something? When they’re keeping the entire matter secret?”

“H’mm. Yes. That would be difficult.” Markov took half his drink down, felt the vodka burning its way through him.

“If it wouldn’t lead to war, I’d be tempted to ask our Cosmonaut Corps to seize the Big Eye,” Bulacheff muttered.

Markov almost laughed, but managed to control himself.

“No,” Bulacheff said gloomily. “Our only chance is co-operation with the Americans. But with the international situation the way it is, our political leaders will never accept being forced to ask favors from Washington.”

“It would be humiliating,” Markov agreed.

“But there must be some way to do it!”

Markov looked closely at the bald little man. Frail though he appeared, Bulacheff’s voice had iron in it. His eyes were glowing, and not merely from the vodka.

“About my report,” Markov began slowly, waiting to be interrupted.

“Yes?”

“I presume you’ve read it?”

“Thoroughly.”

Markov nodded. “If these radio signals from Jupiter are not a language, doesn’t that mean that the chances of there being intelligent life there are rather…well, nonexistent?”

“I would agree, certainly,” Bulacheff said, hunching his shoulders in something approximating a shrug, “except that the Americans are working like fiends on the problem.”

“They are?”

Bulacheff began ticking points off on his fingers. Markov noted that they were long, slender, delicate hands: pianist’s hands.

“First, your friend Stoner is working on the problem. He has left the American space agency to work for a small, out-of-date radio telescope facility.”

Markov began to say, “He is not a friend of…”

But Bulacheff went on, “Second, Stoner has influence with the space agency people who run the Big Eye. It seems that they are processing photographs from the orbital telescope and sending them to Stoner, through secure channels.”

Markov nodded.

“Third, the entire staff of this radio telescope facility—including your friend Stoner—has been forced to sign new security oaths by the United States Navy…”

“Navy?”

Bulacheff smirked. “The Americans are very sloppy administrators. Somehow their Navy is in charge of this project.”

“I don’t understand.”

“It makes no difference. The conclusion is that they are working on the Jupiter problem in secrecy. It seems that they have put a code name to their work: Project JOVE. They have told their NATO apparatus about the problem, apparently.”

“Maybe they will make a public announcement, once they have proof…”

Bulacheff shook his head. “No. They will want to make contact with the aliens. And keep the information from us.”

“Then perhaps we should announce to the world that we have received their signals, also!”

Again Bulacheff flicked his eyes ceilingward. “That would be against our government’s policy.”

“But we can’t keep it a secret forever,” Markov insisted. “And since the Americans already know, and are ahead of us, it would be to our advantage to make the whole thing public and force a worldwide co-operative program.”

“I agree, Kirill Vasilovsk,” Bulacheff said. “I have considered that possibility.”

Markov nodded eagerly.

“Our ambassador to the United Nations could reveal our discovery of the radio signals,” Bulacheff said, steepling his fingers, “and then we would get credit all around the world for discovering intelligent life.”

“And we could recommend an international program to study the signals,” Markov added, his pulse racing. “The Americans would have to go in with us.”

“But that doesn’t mean the Americans would share their Big Eye photographs. They could claim that they have never used the telescope on Jupiter. They could still keep the information for themselves.”

“Oh,” said Markov, crestfallen.

“Which is why you are so important to us,” Bulacheff went on.

“I am?”

“Of course! The American, Stoner, apparently trusts you enough to write to you and reveal that he is working on the problem.”

“He never said in so many words…”

“Between the lines, Kirill Vasilovsk, between the lines.”

“Yes. I see.”

“Now you must write back to him. You must gain his further trust. Perhaps we can arrange for the two of you to meet—in America, perhaps.”

“Me?” Markov gulped with surprise. “Go to America?”

“Suitably escorted, of course. I understand your wife would be an admirable bodyguard for you.”

His heart sank again. “Yes…naturally…”

“It’s only a suggestion. The germ of an idea. But I think it’s important that you correspond with this man Stoner. Write him a long and friendly letter. Tell him how fascinated you are with the problem of extraterrestrial languages. Imply much, but reveal nothing.”

“I can try…”

“We will help you to compose the letter,” Bulacheff said cheerfully. “And, naturally, we will make sure that it is exactly correct before we send it overseas.”

“Naturally.”

“Good!” Bulacheff got to his feet so suddenly that Markov thought he had been stung in the rear. “I knew we could depend on you, Kirill Vasilovsk.”

Markov rose from the couch and started toward the door, Bulacheff alongside him.

“It’s time we put your name in for nomination to the Academy,” Bulacheff said, gesturing grandly. “After all, you are one of the Soviet Union’s leading linguists…and a very important man to us all.”

Markov bobbed his head meekly and took the academician’s proffered hand. He could hardly contain himself as he pulled on his coat, out in the anteroom, and pulled his fur hat down over his ears. Not even the glower of the fat secretary bothered him.

Out on the street, it was snowing harder than ever. Nothing was moving. No one else was in sight. The drifts were piling across the building’s front steps, head high. But Markov laughed, dug his gloved fingers into the snow and patted a snowball into shape. He threw it at the nearest streetlamp, nearly lost to sight in the swirling storm. The snowball flew unerringly upward through the slanting flakes and hit the lamp. The light winked out.

Startled, Markov glanced around to see if anyone had seen him destroy state property. Then he doubled over with laughter, nearly fell on the snow. Straightening up, he leaned into the wind and started the long trek back to his apartment, a boyish grin on his face, his beard beginning to look like an icicle.

“It’s all right, Maria Kirtchatovska,” he shouted into the falling snow. “Your fears were groundless. I am an important man. I will be elected to the Academy!”

Up in his warm office, Bulacheff watched Markov disappear into the snowy evening shadows.

“Fool,” he muttered. Swiveling his creaking chair away from the frost-crusted window, he poured himself another vodka. “Impressionable fool.”

The trouble is, the old man thought to himself, he is a thoroughly likable man. Immature, perhaps, but likable.

Bulacheff sighed and gulped down the vodka. Well, he told himself, if it all works out the way I want it to, Markov will become an academician. If not…it’s just as well that he likes to play in the snow.

Chapter 14

“How did you get the letter out?” asked Lieutenant Commander Tuttle. He was standing, in uniform, before the fireplace.

Stoner looked at him for a long moment. The only sound in the room was the crackling of the flames, and the occasional pop of a knot in the firewood. McDermott sat across the coffee table, in the New England rocker. Stoner had the sofa to himself; he was in his sweat suit, they had caught him in the middle of his warm-up exercises, out by the pool.

“I slipped it into a letter I sent to a friend,” he answered carefully, “slapped a stamp on it and tossed it in with the reports and other crap that your couriers carry out of here every day.”

“You didn’t give it to Jo Camerata to mail for you?” McDermott asked, a tense edge to his raspy voice.

Stoner’s mind was racing. He made himself shrug. “She might have been the one who took that batch out; I really don’t know.”

Tuttle’s round face was grimly serious. “You realize that this is a security breach of prime magnitude.”

Stoner shook his head. “I didn’t tell them anything about what we’re doing. I merely wrote to a Russian author and asked if he’d heard anything about ETI lately.”

“You mentioned Jupiter!” McDermott growled.

“And radio pulses,” added Tuttle.

“And a lot of other things,” Stoner countered. “If you guys read that letter in its entirety, you’ll see that I didn’t really tip our hand—unless the Russians already know about the Jovian radio pulses, in which case there’s no breach of security.”

Tuttle gave an exasperated sigh. “You just don’t understand the security laws, do you?”

“Or won’t,” McDermott said.

“Maybe I just don’t care,” Stoner snapped.

“You could go to Leavenworth for this,” Tuttle said.

Feeling the icy calm that always came over him when he got angry, Stoner said, “Fine. Try it. You’ll have to put me on trial, and I swear to whatever gods there are that I honestly look forward to having a day in court. At least I’ll have a defense attorney; that’s more than you guys have allowed me so far.”

The little lieutenant commander shifted uneasily on his feet and glanced at McDermott, who said nothing.

“I’m going to get myself a drink,” Stoner told them, getting up from the sofa.

“Good idea,” Big Mac called after him as he headed for the kitchenette-bar. “Fix me a bloody mary while you’re there.”

Stoner grumbled to himself. Why can’t he want something simple, like a scotch on the rocks? As he searched through the cabinets over the sink for a can of mix, he heard Tuttle call, “Got any orange juice? I’ll take it with some ice.”

“Sure thing,” Stoner said. I work cheap, he added silently.

He could hear the two of them conversing between themselves while he built the drinks. By the time he had all three glasses on a tray, Tuttle and McDermott had a large map spread across the living room carpet and were studying it intently. Stoner looked down at the legend on the map as he put the tray on the coffee table. It said, Kwajalein Atoll.

“Don’t you guys have families?” Stoner asked, taking his own Jack Daniel’s. “I mean, it’s Sunday afternoon, five days before Christmas, for god’s sake.”

“We have work to do,” Tuttle said without taking his eyes from the map.

“You want to watch football on television?” McDermott asked derisively.

“I want to see my kids in Palo Alto,” Stoner said.

“You’ll be lucky if we let you put a phone call through to them on Christmas Eve,” McDermott snapped.

Stoner slumped back on the sofa again. “So they’re sending you to Kwajalein after all. Good. You don’t deserve Arecibo. Puerto Rico’s too lush for you bastards.”

“There’s no call for that kind of language,” Tuttle said.

“I’ve already been deprived of my liberty. Don’t try to take away my freedom of speech.”

“You’ve sent classified information to the Soviet Union,” Tuttle said, his round face going slightly red. “That’s a violation of the security laws. If we wanted to we could slap an espionage charge on you.”

“And I told you before, any half-decent lawyer would put your ass in a sling over illegal detention, duress, harassment…hell, nobody even read me my rights.”

Tuttle glared at him and Stoner realized that the mild profanity bothered the little guy more than the legal position he was in.

McDermott broke up their staring match. “Now, look here, Stoner. You’ve got to realize that what we’re sitting on here is so important that we’re not going to allow little legal quibbles to get in our way.”

“Try telling that to a judge. Or a jury.”

“You won’t get in front of a judge,” Tuttle said smugly. “You’re going to Kwajalein with us and you’re going to sit on that island until we’re ready to turn you loose.”

“Which won’t be until Project JOVE is completed,” McDermott added. “Listen to me, sonny. You can be either with us or against us, but either way you’re going to Kwajalein.”

“So what difference does it make?”

“Plenty! If you co-operate with us, work with us, then the Navy’s willing to forget any charges of security violation or espionage. Right, Fred?”

Tuttle nodded. “But if you won’t co-operate, we’ll convene a federal court on Kwajalein, try you there, and keep you in a Navy brig until we’re good and ready to transfer you to a federal prison on the mainland.”

Stoner took a swallow of Jack Daniel’s. “So it’s heads you win, tails I lose.”

“Exactly,” said McDermott.

“Military justice.”

“It’s legal,” Tuttle insisted. “I checked it out.”

Stoner laughed. “Legal. Military justice is to justice as military intelligence is to smarts.”

Tuttle took it seriously. “Don’t you go maligning military intelligence. I worked in Naval Intelligence. Nothing wrong with the smarts there. And we caught you, didn’t we?”

“Yeah, I know. You guys are so smart we won the war in Vietnam,” Stoner taunted.

“That was Army Intelligence! Westmoreland. All he wanted was good news. I know plenty of Army G-2 officers who got pushed further and further out into the boondocks every time they brought in a realistic intelligence report. After enough of them got knocked off by the VC, they started to realize that all Westmoreland wanted was high body counts and optimistic pipe dreams. So that’s what they sent in, and they always got rewarded with softer assignments, closer to headquarters, where it was safer.”

“And we lost the war.”

Tuttle nodded, a bit sullenly. “But that was the Army, not us. Why, if it wasn’t for my intelligence background this whole Project JOVE might never have gotten started. When Professor McDermott first told me about the radio pulses I was the one who thought of using Big Eye to search for anything unusual. It was my idea.”

McDermott’s face went splotchy, but he didn’t contradict the lieutenant commander.

Stoner said, “And that’s how I got drafted into this game, is it?”

“That’s right,” Tuttle said. “And you are in, for keeps. There’s no getting out.”

“So are you going to be with us or against us?” McDermott asked.

Stoner looked down at the floor again, at the map spread across the carpet. But his mind’s eye was seeing the photographs of Jupiter, the speck of moving light that was the alien spacecraft which had invaded the solar system.

Invaded? Stoner was startled at his own use of the term. Then he realized the importance of the question behind it. What is this—thing—doing here? Where did it come from? Why is it here?

Who sent it?

“Well?” McDermott demanded. “What’s your answer?”

Instead of replying, Stoner got to his feet and headed for the kitchen. “Get your coats,” he said over his shoulder. “I want to show you something.”

Puzzled, grumbling, they followed Stoner out to the back door of the house. They pulled on their heavy coats while Stoner slipped into a lined windbreaker.

It was cold outside, but clear and dry. The sun gave no heat, but the bulk of the house kept the wind off the tiny fenced-in area behind the kitchen.

“Hi, Burt,” Stoner said to the Navy guard out there. McDermott and Tuttle watched in mystified silence.

Burt was a civilian Navy employee who normally sat in an office in Boston. He was paid double time for standing by the chain link fence that surrounded the house’s rear patio. Stoner smiled at him. Burt was fiftyish, portly, with a body that had been strong once but now held more beer than muscle.

“Burt guards the house on Sundays,” Stoner explained to McDermott and Tuttle, “while guys like Dooley and the younger boys take the day off.”

“Hey, Dr. Stoner,” Burt said, grinning, “I been thinkin’ about those boards you broke with your bare hands last weekend. Next time I need some kindlin’ broke up, I’ll know where to go.”

Stoner smiled back at him. “You do that, Burt. You do that.”

He pulled himself to a ready stance and forced his body to relax. Tae kwon do is a discipline, Stoner told himself. The true disciple does not seek to fight.

He walked slowly, metering his breathing rate with deliberate care, to the chain link fence, his back to the three other men. Stopping in front of one of the steel posts that anchored the fence to the ground, Stoner gave the fiercest yell he could push out of his lungs and sprang up to kick the very top of the post.

The metal pole bent and twanged like a guitar string. The fence vibrated.

Stoner did it again, screaming savagely, with his left foot this time. And then again. The pole visibly sagged.

“Hey, Dr. Stoner! What the hell you doin’?”

Stoner turned a deadly serious gaze on the guard. “Just practicing, Burt.”

“Cheez, for a minute there I thought you was tryin’ to knock the fence down!”

Looking straight at Tuttle, Stoner replied, “I could if I wanted to.”

“I can see that.”

“Imagine what one of those kicks would do to a man’s head. Even Dooley’s.”

McDermott licked his lips, glanced at Tuttle.

“Do you carry a gun, Burt?” Stoner asked.

His hand involuntarily twitched toward the holster underneath his coat.

“Do you think you could get your gun out before I kicked your head in?”

Burt stared at him. Then grinned shakily. “Hey…Dr. Stoner, you’re kiddin’ me, ain’tcha?”

Stoner closed his eyes momentarily and nodded. “Sure, Burt. I’m kidding.” Then he stared into Tuttle’s frightened eyes and added, “Any time I want to break out of here, I can. I could pulverize Dooley and two other men with him before they could even react. The only reason I’m here is because I want to be here.”

Tuttle began, “I never thought…”

But Stoner stopped him with a pointed finger. “I don’t like being treated as a prisoner, but I decided the very first day to accept it, because I know—I knew long before he did”—he gestured to McDermott—“how important this project is.”

“Now, see here, Stoner,” Big Mac groused.

Stoner ignored him. “I’m here and I’ll stay. So don’t try to threaten me. I’m not some little kid who scares easily. Remember that.”

For several moments no one said a word. McDermott and Tuttle glanced uneasily at each other. Stoner listened to the wind sighing past the house, the bare trees whispering.

“You’ve made your point,” Tuttle said at last, his eyes on the bent fence post. Then he grinned slightly. “I’m glad you’re on our side.”

Stoner nodded and started for the kitchen door.

“But we still have to maintain a tight security control on everybody in the project,” Tuttle said, following after him.

“I understand that. But don’t make any cracks about my not being allowed to phone my kids.”

“All right…as long as you don’t try to smuggle any more letters out of here.”

“I won’t.”

They went into the kitchen and Stoner peeled off his windbreaker. Tuttle and McDermott headed straight for the front door, and the car outside in front of the house, waiting for them. Stoner went with them to the door, looked outside at the driveway that led to the road. No fences there.

Tuttle went to the car and started its engine. McDermott hung back by the doorway, an uncertain scowl on his beefy face.

Finally he turned to Stoner and said, “Don’t expect Jo Camerata to come waltzing up here anymore. I’ve taken her off courier duty.”

“You…what?”

“I know she took care of that letter for you,” McDermott said, his voice a low rumble, “no matter how much either one of you deny it.”

“That’s no reason to…”

McDermott broke into a malicious grin. “Listen, sonny. She’s just as happy to be out of this courier routine as she can be. She’s gotten everything she can get out of you—which is nothing but trouble. But I can get her into the Department of Aerospace Engineering at the university. She wants to be an astronaut, you know.”

Stoner wanted to punch that leering, grinning old face. Instead he merely said, “I know.”

“So she’s after me now. You’re out of her game plan.”

Tuttle honked the horn once, lightly. McDermott started toward the car. Over his shoulder, he said to Stoner, “Don’t worry. I’ll take good care of her.”

Stoner stood trapped in the doorway, unable to move, seething.

Chapter 15

Sally Ellington kicked off her sensibly low-heeled shoes, reached across her cluttered desk and picked the phone receiver off its cradle. For a long moment she hesitated. Then, with a glance at the locked door that connected to the empty outer office, she quickly punched out his number on the phone’s keyboard.

His voice sounded sleepy, grumpy, when he answered.

“It’s me,” she said. “Sally.”

“At this hour?”

“Be quiet and listen,” the President’s science adviser commanded. “I’ve got something that will make your boss the next President.”

No reply from the other end. I wonder if he’s alone in that waterbed of his? she wondered.

“Well?” he demanded.

“The President’s decided to inform the Russians about…you know.”

“JOVE?” he asked immediately.

“Yes. He’s going to use the Hot Line.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“When that becomes public knowledge, his chances of winning next November are gone.”

“I don’t know. He…”

“I do know,” Sally Ellington said. “Better than you. He’s finished, if and when this news leaks to the press.”

“So why are you telling me? If I tell the Secretary about it…”

She smiled to herself. “That’s your decision to make. I just wanted to be sure you knew.”

“I see.” His voice faltered momentarily, then, “I appreciate this, Sally. I owe you one.”

She nodded, picturing in her mind how he would repay her. In that waterbed.

In Massachusetts during the winter the sun sets by four o’clock. It was nearly six and as black as midnight outside the observatory windows as Jeff Thompson pored over the computer printouts that covered his desk.

Jo Camerata sat alongside him, tracing with her finger a long column of numbers. Thompson could smell a trace of herbal scent in her dark hair. Her fingernail was unpainted, but carefully shaped.

You’re a happily married man, Thompson told himself. Then he added, But you’re not dead!

“I know the figures look screwy,” Jo was saying, “but that’s what the computer is spitting out at us. I ran through the program three times, just to be sure, and the numbers came out the same each time.”

Thompson could feel the warmth of her body. She was almost rubbing her shoulder against his. Forcing himself to concentrate on the work in front of him, he asked, “And this is the latest run?”

“Yes,” she said. “All this column is the data from the latest set of Big Eye photographs.”

Thompson frowned at the numbers. It had been years since he’d been faced with a problem in orbital mechanics. Not since he had received his doctorate and gone to work at the observatory under McDermott’s direction had he been forced to calculate orbits and trajectories. That’s what graduate students were for: they did the dog work.

But this latest batch of numbers churned out by the computer made no sense. It looked so crazy that he had to give it his personal attention.

Thompson shook his head. “You’d better hand this set to Keith. It’s more in his line than mine.”

Jo moved slightly away from him. “I’m not allowed to go up there anymore. Professor McDermott doesn’t want me to see him.”

“You’re not a courier anymore?”

“No. Mac doesn’t even want me to talk to him on the phone.”

Pushing his eyeglasses back up over his brows, Thompson gave her a long look. “How do you feel about that? I thought you and Keith were, well…”

Jo shook her head. “I’d rather not talk about it, if you don’t mind.”

“You can’t even phone him?”

She made a helpless gesture with her hands. “The phone at the house is tapped. Mac gets a record of all the incoming and outgoing calls.”

“Jesus Christ, we might as well be in Russia.”

Jo said nothing.

“Well,” Thompson said, “I guess somebody else’ll have to deliver this can of worms to him.”

“Or we could send it over the computer line,” Jo said softly. “He’s got a terminal up there at the house.”

“Yeah, that’s right.”

“Am I doing something wrong?” Jo asked, looking back at the printouts. “Or is the computer glitching on us?”

“Damned if I know. I’ll have to work all night on this to figure out what’s wrong,” Thompson said.

“I must’ve made a mistake somewhere.” A gloomy note of self-criticism crept into her voice.

“You’ve been under a lot of pressure.”

“That’s no excuse.”

Thompson pushed his chair away from the desk slightly and straightened up from his usual hunched-over position. “Mac’s really leaning on you, huh?”

Jo smiled sadly. “More than you know.”

He could feel his blood pressure rising. She looked so helpless, so vulnerable.

“It’s a shame Keith dragged you into his crackpot scheme. It wasn’t very smart, writing to the Russians.”

“He didn’t tell them anything he wasn’t supposed to say!” she flared.

“That’s not what the Navy thinks.”

“He’s a good man,” she insisted. “He wouldn’t do anything to hurt anybody.”

Thompson grinned at her. “Neither would Chamberlain.”

“Who?”

“Neville Chamberlain, the British Prime Minister who caved in to Hitler at Munich.”

“Oh,” she said. “History.”

Suddenly Thompson felt very old.

They pored over the computer runs for another hour, but Thompson found he couldn’t concentrate on it. He wanted to work on Jo, instead. Finally, with an enormous effort of will, he pushed his chair away from the desk and stood up.

“Look, kid, you’d better go home. It’s going to take the rest of the night for me to figure out where the glitch is.”

She looked concerned. “I’m willing to stay here and help you…”

“No,” he snapped, a bit desperately. “Go on home. Get some sleep. I’m going to phone my wife and tell her to tuck the kids in and keep supper warm for me. I’ve got three kids, you know.”

“Yes. I know.”

“Okay. Off you go. See you tomorrow.”

She got up from her chair, almost reluctantly, Thompson thought, and went to the door of his cubbyhole office. “I’ll check the data recorders downstairs before I go,” she said.

“Fine. Good night, Jo.”

He stared for a long while at the doorway after she left. Then he phoned home, but the line was busy. Nancy and her goddamned girl friends.

He turned his full attention to the computer printouts, trying to get the vision of Jo out of his mind.

But he heard her call, “Dr. Thompson!”

Looking up from the desk, he saw that she was back at the doorway, her face a mixture of worry and surprise.

“What’s wrong?”

“The signals,” Jo said, breathless with agitation. “They’ve stopped!”

“What?”

He bolted from his chair, barked his shin on the corner of the desk and hurried downstairs with her.

The big room was strangely quiet. No one else was there; the night shift wouldn’t come on for another hour. The big electronics consoles hummed softly to themselves. The tracing pens were strangely still, inking out dead-straight lines on the graph paper that unrolled slowly beneath them.

Thompson dashed around the cluster of desks in the middle of the room, found a headset and plugged it into the proper console.

He clapped one earphone to the side of his head.

Nothing.

Only the background hiss of the universe, laughing at him. The radio pulses were gone.

Chapter 16

Gritting his teeth against the pain, Cardinal Otto von Friederich began the long climb up the marble steps that led to the papal apartment. To the messengers and monsignors proceeding through the halls of the Vatican on the eternal business of Holy Mother Church, the cardinal seemed an austere, aloof symbol of majesty: silent and stately, slowed perhaps by age and arthritis, but the very picture of a Prince of the Church, with his pure white hair, ascetic angular features and swirling red robes.

Cardinal von Friederich knew better. His power within the Vatican was illusory. This new Pope had no time for an old man wedded to the traditions and training of the past. His audiences with the Holy Father were strictly formal nowadays; his days of influence and true power were over.

Silently he prayed the rosary as he climbed the cold marble stairs. The pain grew worse each day. It was a penance, of course, and he knew that God would not send him a Cross that he could not bear. Still, the pain raised a fine sheen of perspiration across his brow.

An elderly monsignor, chalky-white as dust, met the cardinal at the top of the stairs and silently ushered him into a spare, chilly little room.

Cardinal Benedetto was already there, of course, his red cape wrapped around his stocky body. Benedetto always reminded Von Friederich of a Turkish railway porter: squat and swarthy, almost totally bald even though he was nearly twenty years Von Friederich’s junior. But he was the Pope’s strong right arm these days, the papal Secretary of State, confidant and adviser of His Holiness. While Von Friederich’s position as head of the Propaganda Fide, had become little more than a sinecure for a dying old man.

How different it had been in the old days, Von Friederich thought. All my life I have served Italian Popes and battled the Italians dominating the Curia. Now we have a Polish Pope, and the Italians have overwhelmed me at last.

“My Lord Cardinal,” Benedetto said in Italian.

Von Friederich inclined his head in the slightest of bows. Even that tiny movement caused him pain.

The room was almost bare of furnishings. A small wooden desk, a few plain chairs. The only light came from the lamp on the desk. Out beyond the windows, the Vatican garden was already draped in the shadows of dusk.

In the gloomy darkness, Von Friederich could see that the walls were covered with frescoes by Titian. Or perhaps Raphael. He never could tell them apart. Vatican wallpaper, he said to himself, keeping his distance from Cardinal Benedetto.

Part of the painting on the wall he was facing—a congregation of saints piously praising God—suddenly swung away, revealing a door cunningly set into the wall. The Pope strode into the room, strong, sturdy, smiling at them both.

The room seemed to brighten. The Holy Father was wearing white robes, of course. But despite himself, Von Friederich had to admit that it was His Holiness’ beaming, energetic features that charged the room with light. It was the open, rugged face of a worker, a common man elevated to greatness, the kind of face that might have been St. Peter’s. A fisherman, not an aristocrat. But he rules the aristocrats and the workers alike, Von Friederich knew.

The cardinals knelt and kissed the papal ring. The Pope smiled and motioned for them to seat themselves.

“Come, come,” the Pope said in Italian. “No formalities today. We have too much to consider.”

Within moments they were deeply into a discussion of the strange radio signals from Jupiter that the American hierarchy had reported to the Vatican only the day before.

“My scientific adviser,” said the Pope, “Monsignor Parelli, is beside himself with excitement. He believes this is the most wonderful thing to happen to mankind in two millennia.”

“It is a danger,” said Von Friederich.

“A danger, my brother?”

Von Friederich’s voice had always been high, almost girlish. As a child he had fought many schoolyard battles because of it. Now he struggled to keep it calm, even, logical—and to keep his pain from showing in it.

“When the news of this alien…thing…reaches the general populace—as it will, sooner or later—they will be stunned and fearful. Does Your Holiness recall the uproar some twenty-five years ago over Sputnik?”

The Pope nodded. “Yes, but that was mainly in the West.”

“It will be as nothing compared to the public reaction to news of an alien intelligence in our solar system. Who are they? What are they like? What do they want? Whom do they worship?” He hissed the last question in an urgent whisper.

The Pope started to reply, then hesitated and stroked his broad chin thoughtfully.

“I agree, Your Holiness,” said Cardinal Benedetto. “This alien presence could be a great danger to the faithful.”

The Pope sat back in his chair and tapped his blunt fingertips on his knees.

“It is a test,” he said finally.

“A test?”

He nodded. “A test of our faith, my brothers. A test of our courage, our intelligence. But most of all, a test of our faith.”

“It could be so,” Benedetto quickly agreed.

Von Friederich said nothing, but thought that the Italian was toadying again.

“The Americans have discovered these radio signals and something they believe to be a spaceship, if I understand the information we have received,” the Pope said.

Benedetto nodded. “Radio signals from the planet Jupiter, yes. And in space near the planet, an alien…artifact.”

“Artifact!” The Pope smiled broadly. “An excellent word, Benedetto! A scientific word. Noncommittal. Unemotional. Excellent!”

Von Friederich clamped his teeth together.

“I believe,” the Pope went on, “that science leads to knowledge and therefore toward the perfection of man’s intelligence. This alien artifact”—he smiled again—“can help the scientists to learn more about the universe, and therefore to learn more about God’s works.”

“Ah, I see,” said Benedetto. “If we can converse with these alien creatures, we have the opportunity to learn more of God’s handiwork, more about His creations.”

The Pope nodded to him.

“But Holy Mother Church has the responsibility of protecting her children from error and from danger,” Von Friederich said, as strongly as he could manage. “Especially from danger to their immortal souls.”

Benedetto turned toward him. “I don’t see how…”

“This space artifact,” Von Friederich said, feeling his voice weaken as he spoke, “will startle many of the faithful. Most of our flock still live in very backward regions of the globe: Latin America, Africa, Asia—even in parts of Europe and North America many Catholics have only a dim knowledge of the modern world. They fear modern science. They cling to their faith for support in their troubled lives.”

“Of course,” said the Pope.

“And their Church,” Von Friederich went on, “has always let them think that we are God’s creatures. We and we alone.”

“But the Church has never denied the possibility of other creatures elsewhere in the universe,” Benedetto said.

“Never formally denied,” Von Friederich pointed out. “But Holy Mother Church has never urged her children to prepare themselves for meeting other creatures from space, either.”

“Quite true, my friend,” murmured the Pope. “Quite true. Even in Redemptor hominis I said that man has been given dominion over the visible world by his Creator.”

“If the world is suddenly told that there are other intelligent creatures in space, from other worlds, other suns, and that they are in some physical ways superior to us”—Von Friederich closed his eyes to hide the pain—“the faith of many Catholics will be strained to the utmost.”

Benedetto nodded reluctantly. “The entire foundation upon which their faith is built could be shaken. It could be the greatest blow to the Church since Luther.”

Von Friederich shook his head. “Not Luther. It was Galileo and the scientists who destroyed the authority of the Universal Church. Luther was nothing without them. Rome had dealt with schisms and heresies before the scientists led to the Protestant movement.”

“A harsh view of science,” the Pope said, smiling.

“Heretics we can convert, given time,” Von Friederich said, his voice trembling. “It was the scientists who subverted the Church.”

The Pope raised a hand. “We are not here to reopen centuries-old schisms. Science has found this alien artifact. What should Holy Mother Church do about it?”

“Pray that it goes away,” said Von Friederich.

“Apparently,” said Benedetto, “both the Americans and the Russians are trying to keep the information secret, for the time being.”

“Good!”

“They are hinting at the possibility of working together in investigating the artifact,” Benedetto went on, “but both of them really want to seize the alien knowledge for themselves, for their own military purposes.”

The Pope’s face went somber. “Of course. What else would they think of? But how long can they keep this knowledge secret from their own people?”

“Someone is bound to speak up sooner or later,” Benedetto agreed.

“We must decide on how to handle the situation when the news is made public,” said the Pope.

“We could make the revelation ourselves,” Benedetto suggested.

“No!” Von Friederich snapped.

“It would give the Holy Father great prestige,” Benedetto argued, “and also show the faithful that our Pope is unafraid.”

Von Friederich thought for a moment, then replied, “But if the Americans and Russians are both trying to keep this a secret, wouldn’t they deny everything if we tried to make the news public? After all, the Americans have not made a formal announcement of their discovery. We have learned of it through the most circumspect of channels. And the Russians…!”

Benedetto said, “The American and Soviet governments may wish to keep this a secret. But their scientists do not, I’m certain. And there are many other scientists, in other nations, who could confirm the truth once His Holiness revealed it.”

“You are sure of that?” the Pope asked.

“Reasonably sure, Your Holiness.”

“Reasonably,” Von Friederich sneered.

“But have we decided,” the Pope asked softly, “that the time is right to release this news to the public?”

“We must consider this carefully before plunging into a precipitous course of action,” Von Friederich said.

The Pope cocked an eyebrow in his direction. “The Propaganda Fide wants a few weeks to think about it?”

“Yes, Your Holiness.”

“Or a few months?”

Von Friederich tried to shrug, almost failed.

“We don’t have months,” Benedetto urged. “We may not even have weeks. We must decide now. Quickly!”

The Pope turned toward him. “My friend, I have learned in my time here that nothing is done very quickly in the Vatican.”

“There is one thing that we can do immediately,” Benedetto countered. “With your permission, of course, Your Holiness.”

“And what is that?”

“The Americans are inviting the Russians and scientists from many other countries to join them in a co-operative research program, to study these signals and attempt to make contact with the alien artifact.”

“Yes?”

“So our people in Washington tell me,” Benedetto said, a bit smugly, Von Friederich thought.

“What has this to do with us?” the Pope asked.

“We should send a scientist to join this group, if the Americans actually are sincere in their words.”

“A scientist from the Church? Now, who…”

“We have just the man,” Benedetto said, with the air of a magician pulling a rabbit from his hat. “A Dominican lay brother in a monastery in Languedoc. He was a world-renowned cosmologist who received the Nobel Prize for his theories…”

Von Friederich interrupted, “A cosmologist who received the Nobel and then retired to a Dominican monastery?”

Benedetto spread his hands in an Italian gesture of regret. “He wished to get away from the world. He had a problem with alcohol. There were also other rumors…about carnal excesses…”

“This man should represent the Vatican?”

“He is much older now,” Benedetto said. “The monastic life has purified him.”

“Will he be able to face the temptations of the outer world, beyond his monastery’s walls?” the Pope wondered.

Smiling, Benedetto answered, “At some scientific research station? I should think so.”

“What is his name?”

“Reynaud. Edouard Reynaud.”

“I never heard of him,” Von Friederich muttered.

“He is a very famous scientist.”

“Very well,” said the Pope. “Ask his Order for his services. He should come here first, to discuss the matter with you in detail.”

“Yes, Your Holiness.” Bendetto bowed his head meekly.

Von Friederich gathered his strength and said firmly, “But we will make no public announcements. We must not alarm the faithful.”

The Pope nodded. “I agree, my Lord Cardinal. If the Americans and Russians remain silent, we must keep silent, also.”

The pain washed over him, but with it Von Friederich felt a profound sense of relief, almost gratitude. At least I have accomplished that much, he thought. I’ve stemmed the Italian tide one more time. I’ve protected Christ’s Vicar on Earth from making a fool of himself.

Even through the red haze of his suffering, Von Friederich relished the look of discomfort on Benedetto’s swarthy face.

Chapter 17

A storm was coming.

Stoner had lived in New England long enough to know the warnings. The eleven o’clock news on television—two bland men so alike they might have been clones, in their gold blazers, teamed with a carefully coiffed Hispanic woman who traded inane small talk with them—had given a weather forecast of “clear and colder, with an overnight low around zero, winds from the west light and variable.”

But now, just past midnight, the wind was moaning and roaring outside the New Hampshire house. A look through the dining room windows showed clouds scudding across the face of the Moon. Trees were swaying and clacking their frozen branches together. The house began to creak like an old wooden ship laboring through heavy seas.

Cavendish, who now shared the house with Stoner, shivered as he stared out the window. “My god, to think that the Puritans faced this kind of weather. They must have been totally unprepared for it.”

Stoner laughed to himself. This is the winter that Big Mac was going to save us from. The winter we were going to spend in Puerto Rico.

As he sat at the dining room table, surrounded by Big Eye photographs of Jupiter and computer printouts, Stoner studied the Englishman. Cavendish was smoking a pipe. He wore a sweater beneath his tweed jacket. He turned back from the window and peered from beneath his bushy brows at the photos strewn across the table.

Tapping at the pinpoint of light at the center of one photo, he asked, “You’re really quite certain that this thing is from beyond the solar system?”

Stoner said, “Yes.”

“Mathematically certain?”

“Check the numbers yourself. It’s a tourist, a visitor, from outside this solar system.”

“H’mm.” Cavendish puffed a cloud of smoke ceilingward. “And the radio pulses have stopped.”

Nodding, “It’s been nearly a week now. Nothing.”

“Just abruptly…turned off, eh?”

“That’s what Jeff Thompson told me. And now the spacecraft is spiraling out from Jupiter, moving away from the planet.”

“Moving away? Really?”

“That’s what the numbers from the computer show. It’s taken a look at Jupiter, and now it’s going away. Maybe it’s heading back home.”

Cavendish said nothing for a few moments. The pipe smoke smelled pleasant to Stoner, comforting.

“Nothing close enough to us to be a reasonable home for the beast, is there?” the Englishman asked.

Stoner shrugged. “Alpha Centauri’s more than four light-years away, but there’s no evidence of planets there.”

“Quite. Nearest star with planets is Sixty-one Cygni, isn’t it?”

“Barnard’s Star,” Stoner corrected, “if you accept Van de Kamp’s work. Not quite six light-years out.”

“Really?” Cavendish puffed reflectively for a few moments, clouds of smoke rising slowly to the low, sagging ceiling of the dining room.

Stoner pulled his chair over to the computer terminal, perched on the far end of the dining room table. His fingers played over the keyboard briefly.

“Where’s the blasted thing heading?”

“That’s what we’d all like to know. The computer’s chewing on it now. Seems to be aiming out of the solar system entirely. If we extend its present velocity vector, it’ll climb way up above the ecliptic and head back out into deep space.”

“You think it’s going back home, do you?”

“Or off to another solar system.”

“But out of our solar system entirely,” Cavendish said.

“Right.”

“Without visiting us.”

Stoner looked up from the keyboard. “We’re not that important to it, I guess. It’s an alien craft. It entered our solar system, went to the biggest planet it could find, sniffed around, and now it’s leaving. Maybe it flew by Saturn before we discovered its presence, I don’t know. But whoever sent it probably came from a giant planet, like Jupiter or Saturn, I would guess. They probably can’t imagine life existing on a small, hot world like Earth.”

“Rather a blow to one’s ego, isn’t it?” Cavendish murmured.

“What hurts most is that it won’t come close enough for us to study in detail.”

“Yes. Pity.”

With a sigh that he hadn’t realized he had in him, Stoner nodded. “No more radio pulses, and our alien visitor is leaving us. Looks like we won’t need Kwajalein after all.”

“Puzzling.”

“Damned frustrating.”

Cavendish paced along the dining room table. “Do you always work this late?”

Leaning back in his chair, Stoner answered, “I was hoping the computer could give us an accurate projection of the alien’s track tonight, so we could get some kind of fix on where it’s heading. But there must be a glitch in the system somewhere. Nothing’s coming through.”

“Perhaps the machine’s gone to sleep?” Cavendish said it with a vague smile.

“It never sleeps.”

“Neither do you, apparently.”

“You’re up kind of late yourself, Professor.”

Cavendish’s smile crumpled. “Yes, quite. You see, sleep is something of a bad show with me. I dream, you know.”

Stoner turned in the heavy dining room chair to follow the old man’s pacing.

But Cavendish changed the subject. “So the thing is actually heading out of the solar system.” He pointed at the silent computer with the stem of his pipe.

“Looks that way.”

“Good. Get rid of it. Godawful nuisance. Something more for the East and West to fight over. Be a blessing if the damned thing would just go away.”

Stoner felt surprised. “But we’ll never find out where it’s from, who sent it, what it’s all about.”

Cavendish shrugged his frail shoulders. “We already know the important part of it, don’t we? We are not alone. It really doesn’t matter who made it or where it’s from or even why it was sent here. The important fact is that we know now, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that there are other intelligences out there, among the stars. We are not alone in the universe.”

“We know it,” Stoner grumbled, “but the rest of the world doesn’t.”

“Oh, everyone will, in time. Don’t be so impatient. The whole world will find out soon enough.”

“Not if Tuttle and Big Mac have their way.”

“They won’t,” Cavendish assured him. “Not for long, at any rate. The news will be out sooner or later.”

Stoner sat back and waited for the old man to say more. But Cavendish merely walked to the window and stood staring out at the tempestuous night, puffing clouds of aromatic blue smoke from his pipe. The wind shrieked out there, and from high above came the trembling whine of a distant jetliner.

With a glance at the strangely quiet computer terminal, Stoner got up and headed for the telephone, in the living room.

“I’ll be back in a minute,” he told Cavendish. “I’m going to call the computer center and find out what the hell’s going on with this machine.”

“Good,” said Cavendish. “In the meanwhile, I think I’ll pour myself a brandy. Good night for it.”

“Fine. Make one for me, if you don’t mind.”

“Certainly,” Cavendish said.

Jo sat in the little secretary’s chair at the main input console of the computer. The glareless fluorescent light panels up in the ceiling gave the huge room a sense of timelessness. There were no windows, no way to tell if it was day or night.

Like a Las Vegas gambling casino, Jo told herself. They want your whole attention devoted to the machines, not to any distractions like sunshine or rain.

The clock on the far wall showed it was well past twelve. Jo knew it was midnight, but a nagging part of her mind warned her that she just might have it all wrong, and it could just as easily be bright noon outside the solid walls of the computer complex.

“Hey, I’m going out for coffee.”

Startled, she looked up to see the other graduate student who was working the graveyard shift this week.

“You want any?” He grinned down at her. Pleasant face, young, unlined. He was trying to grow a beard but only a few wisps of blondish hair marred his jawline.

“No, thanks. I brought a lunch.” She glanced at the big shoulder bag resting on the floor near her chair.

“Okay. I’ll be back in ten—fifteen minutes. Don’t open the door for anybody; I’ve got my key.” He dangled the key from its ring. “Too many freaks out there this time of night to take any chances.”

“I’ll be all right,” Jo said.

“Okay.”

He pranced off, whistling off-key to himself.

Once he closed the heavy steel door behind him, Jo rose to her feet, stretched her cramped legs and arms and started some deep knee bends. The only sounds in the room were the sixty-cycle hum of the lights, the deeper rumble of the computer’s main core and her own rhythmic breathing.

The computer was working on something, a problem that was soaking up a large part of its capacity. It had been humming and blinking to itself without a single line of printout ever since Jo had shown up for her shift, nearly an hour ago.

Maybe it’s working on a problem for Keith, she thought as she bent down to sit on her heels. The corners of her lips tugged down. More than two weeks now and he hasn’t called, hasn’t even sent a message through Dr. Thompson or any of the other people who go up to the house.

He just doesn’t care, Jo realized. He doesn’t give a damn about me. I was just a convenient lay for him.

The phone rang.

Grunting, she got to her feet and went over to the handset built into the console, next to one of its keyboards.

“Computer center,” she said into the phone.

“This is Dr. Stoner,” Keith’s voice replied. He sounded slightly annoyed. “Who am I speaking to?”

“Keith…” She tried to mask the sudden breathlessness of her voice, tried to tell herself it was from the exertion of the exercises.

“Jo? Is that you?”

“Yes.”

“You’re working at the computer center now?”

She nodded, then realized how foolish it was. “Yes. That’s what they’ve got me doing now. I’m on the swing shift this week.”

“How are you?”

“I’m…” she hesitated, put her thoughts in order. “I’m all right, Keith. And you?”

“About the same.” His voice became guarded, too. “Not much we can say over the phone, is there?”

“No. I suppose the security regulations…”

“Yeah, I know.”

Suddenly there was nothing she could say.

After a moment’s silence, he asked, “How’s Big Mac treating you?”

A flash of electricity went through her. Does he know? she wondered.

“I heard from Jeff Thompson that he’s written a letter to NASA for you.”

She could feel the cold anger in his words. Just as coldly, she replied, “That’s right, Keith. He has.”

“Good for you,” he said acidly. “You’re a girl who knows what she wants. I hope you get it.”

You ignorant fool! she wanted to scream. You think I’m doing this for myself?

But she answered aloud, “I’m all right, Keith.”

“I’ll bet you are.”

“Why did you call?” she asked woodenly.

She heard him pull in a deep breath before he replied, “I punched in a trajectory problem a couple of hours ago and my terminal’s been dead silent ever since. What’s going on down there? The problem shouldn’t take that long for the computer to work out.”

“The machine’s been running ever since I came on shift,” she said. “Some of those special trajectory problems of yours have built-in subroutines that take a lot of time.”

“Well, check it out for me, will you?”

“Certainly,” she said. “That’s what I’m here for.”

She waited for him to answer, to say something to her, anything. Even anger would mean that he cared.

Instead, he merely mouthed, “Thanks.”

He doesn’t care, she realized. He never cared. Not for an instant. He’s more worried about his goddamned computer program than about me.

“You’re quite welcome,” Jo said.

And hung up.

Stoner heard her voice, icy, as remote as the farthest star: “You’re quite welcome.”

The phone clicked dead.

The little bitch, he thought to himself. She’ll fuck anybody who can help her get what she wants. Well, I hope she’s enjoying herself with Big Mac.

He slammed the phone down, feeling the fury seething inside him, knowing that he was raging not at Jo, not even at McDermott, but at himself.

You’re quite a man, Stoner, he told himself. You sit here and let them hold you prisoner and tell yourself that your work is more important than personal ties and what you really want to do is kick the fucking door down and go out and grab her and carry her off to your cave.

“Just listen to that wind!”

Stoner jerked away from the phone to see Cavendish standing in the living room doorway, a brandy snifter in each hand.

With a deep, shuddering breath, he brought his raging emotions under control, forced his pounding heart to slow down, smothered the fury he felt burning inside him under a blanket of cold numbness.

“Are you all right?” Cavendish asked, crossing the big room toward him.

Stoner nodded, not trusting himself yet to speak. He accepted the snifter from Cavendish’s outstretched hand.

The old man lifted his glass and smiled wanly. “Cheers,” he offered.

“Cheers,” Stoner said. He sipped at the cognac. It slid down his throat like liquid fire.

Cavendish pulled the rocker up by the crackling fire and sat down with a weary sigh. “Quite a night out there,” he said. “Quite a night. You can hear the wind howling in the chimney.”

Going over to the easy chair that faced the old man, Stoner asked, “Why can’t you sleep?”

“H’mm? What?”

“You said you don’t sleep well.” It was a safe subject. Stoner could feel the anger damping down inside him, fading away to the hidden corner where it could remain without anyone knowing it was there.

“Bad dreams,” Cavendish answered, staring into the bright flames. “I was a prisoner of the Imperial Japanese Army for four years—just about the length of time it takes a photon to travel from Alpha Centauri to Earth.”

“Must have been rough,” Stoner said.

“Oh, that was only the beginning.” A heavy gust of wind rattled branches against the roof and Cavendish glanced up, his eyes haunted. “The Japanese moved us to Manchuria, you see, just in time to allow the Russians to capture us when they finally stepped into the Pacific war.”

“The Russians were on our side then.”

“They were on Stalin’s side. And Stalin decided that any scientist he could lay his hands on—even a young, starved, sick mathematical physicist—was going to stay in the Soviet Union and work for him, whether he wanted to or not.”

“They kept you in Russia?”

“In Siberia, actually. You boys had just set off your bloody atomic bomb, and Stalin was in an absolute sweat to catch up.”

“I thought they got their nuclear know-how from spies…”

“Nonsense! The only real secret about the atomic bomb was that it worked, that you could actually build one and it would explode satisfactorily. You gave that secret away at Hiroshima. Just as the biggest secret revealed by this alien spacecraft is that it exists—it came from somewhere other than Earth.”

“How long did they keep you inside Russia?”

“Years. Until Stalin died and his successors tried to ease tensions a bit. Even then, though, it wasn’t easy. They put me through hell and back before they let me go.”

“How come?”

Cavendish made a wry face. “The bloody KGB took it into their heads that I would make a marvelous espionage agent for them once I got back to England. I was treated to all sorts of brain-laundering techniques—and I do mean all sorts. That’s why I dread sleeping.”

His hands had started to shake.

“But you didn’t break,” Stoner said.

“Of course I broke! And I swore to them that I’d be a good Soviet spy for them. It took a lot to convince them, you know. They’re very thorough.”

Stoner just stared at him, waiting for more.

“Well, once I got home and my head cleared a bit, I went to British Military Intelligence and told them the entire story. They were delighted. MI told me that I could be a double agent, pretending to work for the Reds but actually working for the Crown.”

“Christ Almighty.”

“Quite. I didn’t want to work for any of them, but I’ve been doing both ever since. The reason I’m here, actually, is because both the KGB and British MI want me here.”

“You’re joking!”

“I wish I were. The Russkies have their own people puzzling over the radio pulses, but they don’t have a telescope in orbit that can give them data on the spacecraft. I’m supposed to funnel your Big Eye data to them.”

“Does the Navy know about this?”

“Your Navy? No. Neither does NATO, I believe. MI are curious about what you chaps are up to, you realize. Your Navy people haven’t shared their information fully with their NATO colleagues, as yet.”

“Cloak and dagger,” Stoner muttered.

“Indeed. In this business a man has no friends, you know. Absolutely none. Anyone could turn out to be your enemy. Anyone could turn out to be an assassin.”

“Assassin?” Stoner echoed. “You mean somebody might try to kill you?”

For the first time, Cavendish laughed. It was a thin, harsh, humorless sound. “Not me, dear boy. You. I’m merely a cog in the machine that both sides are working. If there’s an assassin lurking in the bush, he’s after your head, not mine.”

Stoner gaped at him. Slowly, he asked, “Are you trying to warn me, or…?”

The computer terminal suddenly erupted into clattering life. Stoner and Cavendish both bolted from their chairs by the fireplace and rushed into the dining room, where the typing unit was pounding away madly. Line after line of numbers sprouted on the long accordionfolded sheets of paper that passed through the machine’s roller.

“What is it?” Cavendish asked, the brandy snifter still in his fingers. “What’s it saying?”

“The latest fix on the spacecraft…” Stoner yanked the paper up so that he could read the first rows of figures at eye level without stooping over the chattering typewriter.

He gave a low whistle. “No wonder the computer had to chew on the data all night. The damned thing has changed its course.”

“What?”

“It’s accelerating.”

“Can’t be!”

“Look at this.” Stoner pointed to the numbers. “Here. And here again.”

Cavendish snapped impatiently, “It might as well be Sanskrit! I don’t know your language!”

“The spacecraft put on a burst of thrust,” Stoner explained. “Here and here.”

“It’s maneuvering? Changing course?”

“Yes.”

“Then there must be a crew on board!”

“Or a damned smart computer.”

“But where is it heading? What’s its new course?”

With a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach, Stoner bent over the typewriter. Just as abruptly as it had started a few moments earlier, it stopped.

“Well?”

Stoner stared at the final row of figures. He didn’t need to check a reference table. He had memorized that set of numbers weeks earlier, because he had feared, or hoped, or maybe dreamed that they would show up to face him, inevitably.

“Where is the bloody thing heading?” Cavendish demanded.

“Here,” Stoner said.

Cavendish’s mouth fell open. “Here,” he finally managed. “You mean Earth?”

Stoner nodded. “It’s finished looking at Jupiter. Now it’s heading for Earth.”