Voyagers

Chapter 18

The General Secretary stared gloomily out the window of his limousine at the gray snowy morning.

“You know,” he said in a low, heavy voice, “that I am dying.”

Georgi Borodinski gasped. “Comrade Secretary! You mustn’t say such a thing.”

The General Secretary turned awkwardly to face his aide. Both men were wrapped in heavy dark coats and fur hats, despite the limousine’s heating system.

With a halfhearted grin, the General Secretary asked, “Why not? It is the truth.”

“But still…”

“You’re afraid the car is bugged. My prospective heirs might get a little overanxious and try to put me out of misery?” He laughed: a dry, rasping sound.

Borodinski said nothing. By the standards of the Kremlin’s inner elite he was a youngish man, only slightly past fifty, his receding hair still dark, his flesh still firm. He had risen from the ranks of Party functionaries by steady hard work, unspectacular, uninspired, seemingly unambitious. But he had recognized his one chance for advancement twenty years earlier, and had attached himself with the dogged faithfulness of a loyal serf to the man who was now General Secretary of the Party and President of the Soviet Union.

Now Borodinski stood on the verge of becoming General Secretary himself—if he could survive the struggle that would inevitably follow the death of his master.

“Do you know why we are riding through the cold and snow, instead of staying warm and comfortable in my office?” asked the General Secretary.

“I think I do,” Borodinski answered.

Gesturing toward the driver on the other side of the bullet-proof glass partition, the Secretary explained, “A Tartar, from beyond Lake Baykal. He checks the car every day before I step into it. We are safe from eager ears.”

“Yes.”

“I must live like an ancient Roman Emperor, surrounded by my Palace Guard—all foreigners, barbarians, loyal to me personally and not to anyone or anything else. A fine state of affairs for the leader of a Marxist state, isn’t it?”

“Every great leader has enemies, Comrade Secretary. Within as well as without.”

The Secretary’s heavy brows inched upward. “But if everyone within the Kremlin is a good Marxist, why should I require such protection?”

Borodinski saw where he was heading. “They are not all good Marxists. Even some in the Presidium and the Inner Council have their…failings.”

The Secretary nodded grimly. “Now then,” he said, “about this latest offer from the American President…”

Puzzled by the abrupt shift in their conversation, Borodinski blurted, “But what has that to do with…?”

The General Secretary slapped the younger man’s knee and laughed heartily. “You don’t see it, eh? You still have a few things to learn about the art of ruling.”

His laughter turned into a wheezing cough. Borodinski sat still, waves of sadness and fear washing through him. And impatience. But he sat unmoving as his master slowly won his struggle to breathe normally.

“I was saying,” the General Secretary resumed, after wiping his lips and chin with a linen handkerchief, “the American President has made what appears to be another generous offer.”

Borodinski nodded. “They’ve invited us to send a team of scientists to their base in the Pacific. Kwajalein Atoll, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” the Secretary said. “According to all available intelligence, the American offer seems genuine. Their President wants to use this—this alien spaceship—as a symbol to build stronger ties of co-operation between our two nations.”

“Despite everything they’ve done over the past few years?”

“Perhaps because of everything they’ve done over the past few years. They may have finally realized the futility of their so-called ‘get tough’ policies.”

Borodinski considered that possibility for a moment, then asked, “Will you accept their offer?”

Leaning closer to his aide, the Secretary asked, “What would you do?”

It was a test, Borodinski realized, a test to see if he was fit to take over his master’s position. He fought down the fear rising in his throat and kept his long-simmering ambition deep within his heart.

“There is strong opposition within the Presidium,” he said slowly. “The idea of co-operating with the capitalists can cause bitter resentment among our more conservative comrades.”

“The same comrades who insisted that we march into Afghanistan,” the Secretary muttered, “without thinking about how difficult it is to march out again.”

“They have caused us many difficulties, true,” said Borodinski.

“And,” the General Secretary pointed out, “there is strong pressure within the Presidium that we accept the American offer.”

Borodinski nodded and stroked his pointed, Lenin-style goatee. “I have learned that the United Nations is also interested in the American program. And they will certainly bring the Chinese in with them.”

“Then we would be left out in the cold if we refused to co-operate, wouldn’t we?”

“But if we do co-operate, it will infuriate some of the most powerful members of the Presidium. Not to mention the Red Army.”

The General Secretary gave him a smirking grin. “A nice little problem, isn’t it? How would you handle it?”

Borodinski sank into silent thought. The limousine drove on through the snowy gray silence of morning, well beyond the buildings and houses of sprawling Moscow, far beyond the range of rooftop directional microphones and laser snoopers that can record conversations from the vibrations that spoken words make on the windows of a moving automobile.

Finally Borodinski said, “I think we have no alternative but to accept the American offer. Otherwise we will fall behind them and the others. They could obtain enormous amounts of information from this spaceship…” He had more to say, but the pleased expression on the General Secretary’s face told him it was time to stop talking.

“A good, honest, straightforward decision.” The old man patted his knee. “Now allow me to give you a lesson in politics to go with it.”

Borodinski sat up a little straighter.

“I am a dying man, comrade. The doctors have confirmed it. Everyone in the Politburo and the Presidium knows it. This is a dangerous time for me—and for you.”

Borodinski nodded, not trusting his voice to reply.

The Secretary closed his eyes for a moment. Then, “You pointed out, quite correctly, that if we accept the Americans’ offer of co-operation it will infuriate some of our most conservative comrades. It might well enrage them to the point where they might try to—well, hasten my demise.”

“They’d never dare!”

“Oh yes they would,” the Secretary assured him with a grim smile. “It wouldn’t be the first time a ruler in the Kremlin was hurried to his grave. And it hasn’t happened only to the Tsars, either.”

Borodinski made his face look shocked.

“But, comrade,” the Secretary went on, “suppose we prepare a little snare for these hotheads, a little trap to catch them in treasonable activities, eh? Then we can clear the Kremlin of the troublemakers and I can live out my remaining days in peace, knowing that I’m safe from traitors and assassins.”

Borodinski stroked his pointed little beard again. “Then the decision to join the Americans in studying the alien spaceship…”

“Is the bait for our trap, naturally.”

“That’s…brilliant! Absolutely brilliant. No wonder you have been our leader for all these years.”

The Secretary allowed himself a brief smile. “There is something else, as well.”

“Yes?”

“If we are to make contact with another race of intelligent creatures, I want it to be in my lifetime. In fact, it would be the crowning achievement of my career if the Soviet Union could make this contact alone, without the help of the West.”

“But how…?”

“This is what we shall do.” The General Secretary leaned closer to his aide, close enough so that Borodinski could smell the odor of medicine on the old man’s breath.

“I am listening,” he said.

“We will send a small team of scientists to this island. They will work with the Americans. Among them will be a few of our intelligence people, of course. Links to us. To me.”

“I see. Of course.”

“While the scientists study this spacecraft, we will be preparing one or more of our biggest rocket boosters for flights to meet this alien ship as it approaches us.”

“Ahhh, now I see…”

“Our scientists on Kwajalein will have the responsibility of keeping us fully informed. If and when the proper moment arrives, we will send cosmonauts to greet the alien ship.” He paused, took a deep, wheezing breath. “Or…”

“Or?” Borodinski asked.

“Or we will blow the alien out of the sky with a hydrogen bomb missile, if necessary.”

Borodinski felt a shock wave go through him.

The General Secretary’s face was grave. “That is the one thing that the scientists don’t understand. This alien intruder might be hostile. We must be prepared to defend ourselves.”

“But…it’s only one little ship.”

“No, comrade.” The General Secretary shook his head. “It is only the first ship.”

“Where?” Markov asked, blinking.

“Kwajalein,” said Maria. “It’s an island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, they told me.”

“We’re being sent there? Why?” Markov glanced around the familiar surroundings of their living room: the bookcases, the comfortable chairs, the old brass reading lamp that he had rescued from his mother’s house, the sturdy tree just outside the window.

“First, they send me to the research center out in the middle of the wilderness and now…where did you say it is?”

“Kwajalein,” Maria repeated firmly. She was still in her uniform, but she held two big paper bags of groceries in her arms. She hadn’t even bothered to put them down before telling her husband the news.

“No,” Markov protested, his head buzzing. He groped for one of the chairs and sank into it, leaving his wife standing there with the groceries. “I can’t go there. I’m not a traveler, Maria Kirtchatovska, you must make them understand that. I want to stay here, at home…”

“Ha,” she said. It was not a laugh.

He looked up at her.

Stamping the snow off her boots as she walked, Maria headed for the kitchen.

“You want to stay home,” she mimicked in a high, singsong voice. “You didn’t stay home last night. You weren’t even here when I left for the office this morning.”

“I wasn’t on a tropical island, either,” he called after her.

“Where were you?”

“In my office. Working late. I slept on the couch there, rather than walking all the way back here through the snow. The buses stop running after midnight, you know.”

“Sleeping on your couch,” Maria groused, from the kitchen. “With whom?”

“With a volume of Armenian folk tales that I must translate before the end of the semester!” he snapped. “Your superiors demand weeks of my time, but they don’t hire anyone to do my work for me.”

She came to the kitchen doorway, a small sack of onions in her hands. “You were with some slut all night. I phoned your office when I got home.”

Markov made himself smile at her. “Really, Maria, you can’t trap me that easily. I was in the office all night. You did not phone.”

She stared at him for a long moment.

“I was really there, Maria,” he said. “Alone.”

“You expect me to believe you?”

“Of course. Have I ever lied to you, my dear?”

Her face contorted into a frustration that went beyond words. She disappeared back into the kitchen. Markov could hear pantry doors opening, canned goods banging onto the shelves.

She’ll break something, he thought.

With a sigh, he got up from the chair and went to the kitchen.

“Kwajalein?” he asked.

She was on tiptoe, shoving jars of pickled beets into the cabinet over the gas range. Over her shoulder, she grunted, “Kwajalein. Yes.”

“Here, let me.” He squeezed past her in the narrow space between the range and the refrigerator, and took a pair of cans to put away on the topmost shelves.

“Not those!” Maria snatched the cans from him. “They go here.”

He watched her put them where she wanted them, then accepted two other cans from her and stacked them neatly on the highest shelf, asking:

“Why do I have to go to Kwajalein? Why can’t I stay here at home?”

“Bulacheff specifically asked for you. The Academy is sending an elite team of scientists to join the Americans in studying the alien spaceship.”

“Is Bulacheff going too?”

“No.”

“I thought not.”

“But you are.”

Markov leaned his lanky frame against the pantry doors. “But I have nothing to contribute to their studies! Haven’t we been through all this once already?”

“The American astronaut, Stoner, will be there.”

“Ah. My correspondent.”

“Exactly. He knows you, by reputation. That is why Bulacheff picked you to join the others.”

“I should never have written that book,” Markov muttered.

“You are an internationally recognized expert in extraterrestrial languages…”

“Which is to say, nothing,” he said.

“And you will be a part of the Soviet team of scientists that is going to Kwajalein to work with the Americans in studying this alien visitor.”

Markov shook his head sadly. “All I want, Maria, is to remain here in Moscow. At home. With you.”

She eyed him suspiciously. “On that score, you can rest comfortably. I will be going to Kwajalein with you.”

“You’re going!” He felt shocked.

“Of course. You are far too important to be allowed outside the Soviet Union unprotected.”

“Oh, come now, Maria,” he said, “are your superiors so frightened that I might defect to the West? I’m not a flighty ballet dancer, you know.”

“It’s for your own safety.”

“Of course.”

“Of course!” she snapped. “Don’t you think I care about your safety?”

He patted his shirt pockets, searching for a pack of cigarettes. “I think you care about the trouble it would make for you if I defected.”

“And all you care about is finding some young slut to pursue!”

He stood up straight. “Maria Kirtchatovska, I told you that I was alone in my office last night.”

“Yes, you told me.”

He pushed past her and went back to the living room. The cigarettes were on the table beside his favorite chair.

“But you didn’t tell me,” Maria said, following him like a determined bulldog, “that your little cow-eyed student from the research center has followed you back to Moscow.”

“What? Who are you talking about?”

“That Vlasov bitch…the one you were sleeping with at the research center.”

“Sonya?” Markov felt torn between joy and dread. “She’s in Moscow?”

“Look at you!” Maria snarled. “You’re having an erection already!”

He shook his head. “Maria, you don’t understand. She means nothing to me. She’s only a child. An overactive child.”

“Who’ll pull her pants down anytime you ask her to,” Maria said.

Sighing, Markov said, “Maria Kirtchatovska, you know me too well. I can’t resist. She throws herself at me. She’s lively, and rather good-looking.”

And young, Maria added silently. She swung her gaze to the mirror on the wall across the room. She looked at herself: a small, heavy woman with a complexion like bread dough and the face of a potato. In her imagination she pictured her husband with the buxom young beauty she had seen in his bed.

“You won’t have to resist her,” Maria said, her voice low, venomous. “She’ll never be at the university again. She’s on her way to a factory in the Ukraine, where she will study tractor repair.”

Markov’s mouth sagged open. “What have you…?”

“And you’re going to Kwajalein, with me,” Maria said.

His face turned red. “Woman, you go too far!” he roared, lurching toward her, hand upraised to strike.

But Maria held her ground. “You’re too late to do anything about it,” she said. “It’s already done. And you’re not going to be out of my sight for a minute, from now on.”

Markov stood there, flushed, perspiration trickling down his neck and into his collar.

“You just…sent her away? Ruined her chance for a career in astronomy? Just like that?”

Maria said nothing. She turned and walked slowly back to the kitchen, leaving Markov standing there in the middle of the living room, realizing for the first time the power that his wife held in her hands.

Chapter 19

Keith Stoner sat in the hot, high sun and squinted out across the white sand beach. From here the atoll looked like a classic tropic paradise: graceful palms swaying in the sea breeze; breakers frosting white against the distant reef; the incredibly blue-green lagoon, calm and inviting; crystalline sky dotted with happy puffs of fat cumulus clouds riding the trade wind.

All we need is a wahine in a grass skirt, he said to himself.

But when he turned around and looked inward from the beach, he saw that the modern world had lain its unmistakable hand on Kwajalein. Squat gray cinder block buildings stood scant yards from the beach in a clearing that had been bulldozed where once there had been palms and plums and even an island variety of pine tree.

Further along the narrow flat island was the airstrip, garages and maintenance buildings, machine shops clanging in the hot sunshine, jeeps and trucks buzzing along the only road—a crushed coral track that led from the docks at the northern end of the island to the living compound at the south.

Above it all loomed the radio telescope antennas, six of them, a half-dozen huge dishes of metal and mesh that all pointed toward one invisible spot in the sky: the approaching spacecraft.

“Beachcombing?”

Stoner turned to see Jo Camerata walking toward him, shoeless in the sand, wearing cutoff jeans that showed her long legs well and a skimpy halter top. She was already tanned to a deep olive brown.

In the few days since they had arrived on the island, Stoner had managed to avoid her. But you knew you’d have to see her sooner or later, he told himself.

“Sort of,” he answered guardedly.

She smiled. “You’re dressed for it, all right.”

He was in an old pair of jogging shorts and a light shirt that hung loosely, unbuttoned, its sleeves rolled up above the elbow. The Navy’s repeated warnings about infection and jungle rot had convinced Stoner that he’d keep his socks and shoes on at all times.

“How are you?” he asked.

For a moment she didn’t reply. Then, “Do you really want to know, Keith?”

He saw something unfathomable in those deep eyes of hers. “Big Mac treating you well?” he asked.

Her mouth went tight.

“You’re sleeping with him now,” Stoner said flatly. “Everybody knows it.”

Nodding slowly, she said, “He treats me better than you did.”

“Than I did?” He felt genuine surprise. “What’d I ever do to you?”

“Nothing. Not a damned thing,” Jo said, her eyes blazing now. “You treated me like Kleenex: use it and throw it away.”

“That’s not fair, goddammit!”

“But it’s true, Keith.”

“So you just walked off and attached yourself to McDermott. Got yourself a better deal.”

“You’re damned right I did. And I got a better deal for you, too.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

She started to reply, but instead turned her back to him. He grabbed her by the shoulder and spun her around to face him.

“What’re you talking about?” he demanded. “What better deal?”

He had thought she was crying, but she was dry-eyed, in full control of herself.

“What better deal?” Jo repeated. “I left you alone so you could devote all your attention to your work. To your pictures of Jupiter and your computer runs. That’s all you ever wanted, wasn’t it? A few sanitary conveniences and no personal ties to bother you.”

He took a staggering step backward, away from her. “Jesus Christ, you sound like Doris.”

“Doris? Your ex-wife?”

He nodded.

Jo’s shoulders slumped. The fire disappeared from her eyes.

“I didn’t walk out on you, Keith,” she said softly. “I was never part of your life. You never let me be part of you.”

He turned away from her, scanned the horizon and the breakers along the reef, pulling his emotions back under control. Leave her alone, he told himself. She’s too young to get involved with you; you’re in no position to get involved with her.

“Look, Jo,” he said, facing her again, “this is a damned small island and we’re going to see each other every day, just about. Let’s just call a truce and forget about what’s already happened. Okay?”

“Sure,” she said, her voice strained. “Water under the bridge and all that.”

“Yeah.”

“Okay,” Jo said, lifting her chin to stand as tall as she could. “I was just taking a walk around the beach, to see what the place looks like. See you.”

She strode off, leaving him standing there alone. With a shrug, Stoner started walking up the beach in the opposite direction.

Only after several minutes had passed, and she had looked over her shoulder three times to make certain he wasn’t anywhere in sight, did Jo allow herself to cry.

Stoner walked steadily up the beach, cursing himself for a fool but not knowing what else he could have done.

He saw Jeff Thompson sitting on the sand, his back against the bole of a sturdy, slanting palm tree. Jeff scrambled to his feet as Stoner approached.

“How do you like our tropical paradise?” Jeff asked, by way of greeting.

“I was just thinking,” Stoner replied, burying his thoughts of Jo, “how many times I dreamed of coming to an island like this, when I was a kid.”

“Well, here we are.”

“Yeah. We sure are.” Stoner took a deep breath of salt air. “Your family decide to come with you?”

“No,” Thompson said. “Gloria doesn’t want to pull the kids out of school. I agree with that. So I’m on my own for a couple of months.”

“Maybe we’ll be back home before June.”

“Fat chance.”

“Yeah. I know.”

“The Russian plane’s due in this afternoon.”

“How many are they sending?”

“About twenty, from what I hear. Where are they going to put everybody?”

“Dorms. Houses. Trailers. We’ve got room for them, I think, unless they all want to stick together, by themselves.”

“And there’s another couple of planeloads due in tomorrow,” Thompson added. “One from NATO and one from the UN that’s supposed to represent Third World scientists.”

Scuffing at the sand under his shoes, Stoner grumbled, “This place isn’t a research station—it’s a damned political circus. Next thing you know they’ll be bringing in the Queen of England and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.”

“Only on Sundays…”

“ATTENTION. ATTENTION,” blared the island-spanning network of public address loudspeakers. Thompson and Stoner looked up at the horn set on the bole of the palm tree.

“THE RUSSIAN DELEGATION IS NOW ESTIMATED TO ARRIVE AT SIXTEEN-THIRTY HOURS. ORIENTATION BRIEFING FOR THE RUSSIAN DELEGATION HAS BEEN RESCHEDULED TO TWENTY-ONE HUNDRED HOURS, AFTER THE EVENING MEAL.”

The metallic, booming voice stopped as suddenly as it had started, making Stoner feel momentarily as if a hole had been left in the air around him. Then the breeze gusted and a gull screamed and the nearby palms sighed. The island went back to normal.

“They’re late,” Thompson said.

“They must be flying a Russian plane,” Stoner muttered, “with a dependable Soviet crew.”

Markov studied the island intently as the plane circled at altitude.

Maria was sitting on the aisle seat beside him, her hands clutching the armrests with white-knuckled anxiety. The flight had been far from restful. First, they had to circle a huge springtime storm over the Urals. Then they made an extra fueling stop near Lake Baykal—where they were coolly informed that one of the engines was malfunctioning and would have to be repaired or replaced.

That did little to build one’s confidence for the long flight across the Pacific Ocean. Nor did the fact that they were kept locked inside the plane for six hours, with nothing to look at but the sight of Mongol mechanics peering puzzledly into the innards of the engine nacelle.

But now at last they were circling over the tiny sliver of an island, with its black gouge of an airstrip, the way a dog circles his sleeping mat before finally settling down for a snooze.

Markov paid scant attention to the glorious cloudscape that was turning the western horizon into a molten palette of reds and oranges. He studied the island.

There wasn’t much to see. A cluster of buildings at one end. The airstrip. More buildings on the other side of the airstrip. A single road. Some radio telescope antennas.

The other islands scattered along the oval-shaped coral reef seemed empty, abandoned. White beaches and lush green foliage. All of them tiny, barely a few city blocks long, Markov judged. The main island was bigger, but had been almost totally denuded of trees to make room for the buildings and the airstrip.

He reached down under the seat for his satchel.

“What are you doing?” Maria groused.

“Looking for the binoculars.”

“What do you expect to see? Dancing girls in grass skirts?”

Markov sighed. He had given up that particular fantasy when the KGB briefing officer had informed them that the Americans had turned Kwajalein into a military base more than twenty years earlier.

“No, of course not,” he muttered.

“Those antennas”—his wife pointed, her other hand still clutching the seat arm in a death grip—“were once radars, to observe the re-entry of test missiles fired from California.”

“Yes, so they told us.”

“They have been adapted to observe the alien spaceship,” she said.

“Umm,” muttered Markov as he put the binoculars to his eyes and adjusted the focus.

There was no sign of natives at all. No one gathered at the airstrip to welcome them. No dark-hued girls with garlands of flowers to drape around their necks and kiss them on both cheeks. Nothing down there but efficient machines and businesslike Americans and that peculiarly American artifact—house trailers.

He pictured Sonya Vlasov’s face in his mind’s eye and wondered what she was doing now, in Kharkov, in a tractor factory. How she would have loved to come here! Markov realized. There must be something I can do to help her, some way I can get Maria to remove the blot she’s placed on her record.

He glanced back at his wife as the plane lurched into its final approach. The landing gear went down, filling the cabin with a rushing, roaring sound that startled the old man drowsing across the aisle from them into a wide-eyed, frightened awakening.

She says that she will not let me out of her sight for a moment, Markov thought. Very well. I will be the perfect husband. I will charm her as she’s never been charmed before.

But the look on Maria’s face did nothing to encourage him. She was staring straight ahead, stolidly refusing to show fear as the plane shuddered and slewed through the gusting cross winds on its approach to the airstrip. Waves rushed by outside the window.

Markov remembered those furious few moments back in their apartment, the triumphant look on Maria’s face when she announced Sonya’s fall from favor, her loss of her student’s status, her transfer to a factory.

And he remembered the stark hatred he felt in his own heart. It won’t be easy to woo her, he told himself. But it must be done; that girl shouldn’t suffer on my account.

A blur of palm fronds startled Markov and then the plane’s wheels screeched on the cement runway, bounced sickeningly, hit again and rolled the length of the airstrip. The engines roared with thrust reversers out and all flaps extended full.

As the plane slowed and trundled off the runway, heading toward the single building of the airport’s terminal, the color began to come back to Maria’s cheeks.

Turning to Markov, she whispered, “You remember the American who wrote to you, Stoner?”

He nodded.

“You must find him and befriend him. He trusts you.”

“And I am to betray his trust. Is that it?”

Maria scowled at him, her old self again. “You are to do what is necessary, whatever that may be.”

Markov sighed and knew he would do what she told him to. That’s a surer way of wooing her than plying her with kisses, he realized.

Yukon Territory

George Umaniak stowed his rifle under the blankets in the back of the skimobile. Even though he had not even seen a caribou, the white policemen would give him a hassle if they discovered he had been out with a hunting gun.

The wind was picking up, coming down in a cold moaning sigh from the frozen mountains. The sky was dark again, and the wind spoke of ghosts and the dance of the dead. George pulled up the hood of his parka, shivering.

The damned skimobile was slow to start. He twisted the ignition key hard, several times, but the motor refused to catch. George swore to himself. It couldn’t be the battery, he had checked it just the day before.

A flicker of light across the growing darkness caught at the corner of his eye. George looked up and saw the aurora shimmering over the mountains. Green, palest pink, ghostly yellow, the Northern Lights danced over the mountaintops in rhythm with the moaning wind.

George swallowed hard and finally got the motor to cough itself to life. He opened the throttle all the way and raced homeward. This was no night to be out in the cold and dark.

Chapter 20

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A polite murmur of laughter rippled through the audience.

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

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

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

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

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

The introductions finished, McDermott took over the podium again.

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

Cavendish smiled his way to the podium.

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

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

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

“Then it is inert now?”

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

“What size is it?”

“Any data about its shape?”

“Surface brightness?”

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

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

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

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

“What is the maximum size it could be?”

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

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

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

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

“I see.”

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

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

“Why not Arecibo?”

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

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

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

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

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

“What about lasers?”

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

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

“If any.”

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

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

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

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

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

“If we have to.”

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

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

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

“Yes, certainly,” said Cavendish.

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

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

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

“H’mm. Striking.”

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

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

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

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

“Absolutely not!” McDermott snapped.

“Why so?” asked Cavendish.

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

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

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

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

“Or a smart computer.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter 21

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reynaud bobbed his head in agreement.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You are an astronomer?”

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

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

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

“You are not?”

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

Reynaud made a sympathetic noise.

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

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

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

“Too bad,” said Reynaud.

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

Reynaud shook his head.

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

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

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

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

Schmidt said nothing.

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

“The Pope?”

“Yes.”

“Why is he interested in astronomy?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Kwajalein Hilton,” he announced.

Reynaud saw a three-story gray drab building.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“All for you, Fa…eh, Brother.”

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

“By Kwaj standards, this is the Ritz.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Your pal McDermott,” Stoner growled.

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

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

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

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

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

“He won’t even sign a memo about it.”

“Well, it is a long shot,” she said.

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

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

He brushed her hand away as he would swipe at an annoying insect. “We’re here to make contact with that spacecraft.”

“I know that.”

“How’s it going to look if we let the damned thing get away from us?”

“We won’t,” Jo said.

“You’ve got it all figured out, do you?”

“No.” She shook her head. “But I know you. You’ll figure it out, one way or another. You’ll make Mac look good doing it, too.”

“And it won’t hurt your career, either, will it?”

“Why do you think I’m here?”

“Because Mac brought you with him,” Stoner snapped.

For an instant she looked sad, betrayed. “If you only knew,” she said softly.

“You’ll have to tell me about it sometime. Or better yet, put it into your résumé. It’ll impress the hell out of NASA.”

“Keith, you can be a real sonofabitch when you want to be, you know that?”

“It’s the heat. It’s got me down.”

“Go to hell.”

“Don’t tell me you haven’t already rewritten your resume. I know the way your ambitious little brain works.”

“You think so?”

“Sure. I can see it now, right up on the top of the page, where you list your accomplishments: ‘Research assistant, Project JOVE. Worked with elite international research team, in top-priority program to establish first contact with intelligent extraterrestrial life form.’ ”

With a satisfied smile, Jo said, “Sounds terrific. How many girls can include that in their curriculum vitae?”

“I thought you wanted to be called women, not girls.”

“I can say girls,” Jo answered. “You have to call us women.”

“Yeah,” he said tightly. “Figures.”

Her face serious, Jo asked, “Keith, you’re not still sore at me, are you?”

“Are you still sleeping with Big Mac?”

“Oh, Christ! You’ll never figure it out, will you?”

“I’ve already figured you out, Jo.”

Her fists clenched in frustration, she said, “I don’t give a damn about Mac! Don’t you understand that?”

“Of course I understand that,” he said, icy calm, frigid with anger. “That’s what makes it so goddamned rotten.”

She started to reply, hesitated, let her hands drop to her sides. Without another word, Jo brushed past him and continued on her way toward the administration building.

Toward McDermott, Stoner told himself, as he stood alone in the middle of the dusty street and watched her walk away from him.

Chapter 22

Jo shivered in the darkness. As she unhooked her bra and slid her panties down her long legs, she asked McDermott, “Why do you keep it so cold in here?”

From the bed, his bullfrog’s voice croaked, “So that you’ll have to huddle close to me to stay warm.”

She was glad that he kept the lights off and the drapes pulled tightly across the trailer’s windows. He couldn’t see the expression on her face. The damned bunk’s not big enough for a fatass like him by himself, Jo grumbled silently, let alone the two of us.

Still, she padded over to the bunk, pulled the covers aside and squirmed onto the few inches of tough rubbery mattress beside Big Mac. This is ruining my back, Jo thought.

“And how’s my sweet young thing this evening?” McDermott asked, reaching for her breast.

The same line, the same approach, as predictable as sunrise. But McDermott’s own rising was beyond prediction. He needed lots of Jo’s help to raise an erection. And many times nothing she did could help him.

Jo worked on him calmly, dispassionately, a graduate student working on an experiment in order to get a good grade from the professor. She could feel the tensions easing out of McDermott’s body as she massaged and fondled him.

“You’re doing fine,” she cooed. “Big, strong daddy is going to fill me up, aren’t you?”

McDermott was moaning softly, lying on his back, arms at his sides. Bending over him, Jo whispered:

“That’s a good boy…You’re getting big and strong for me…”

Finally she straddled him, rocking back and forth until he came. When she stretched out beside him again, he was whimpering. Tears wet his face.

“What’s the matter?” Jo whispered, genuinely surprised. “Are you all right?”

“They want to take it away from me,” McDermott snuffled. “It’s my project, I’m in charge, but they want to go and turn it into some kind of space cadet circus.”

“Nobody’s going to take it away from you,” she soothed. “You’re the director of the entire project.”

“It’s that Stoner.” His voice was high and quavering, like a little boy’s. “He’s after me all the time. He wants to fly out there and meet the alien spacecraft.”

“Even if he does”—she stroked his chest—“you’ll still be head of the project. So what if he flies off into space…”

She felt his whole body shudder. “Go out and meet it? Touch it? Suppose it’s carrying disease germs? Suppose it’s some kind of slimy, horrible…thing?”

“No, no. It won’t be. Everything will turn out all right. You’ll see. It’ll be all right.”

“It could be evil…dangerous. It’s alien…not like us.”

“There, there. It’ll all work out. Nobody’s going to hurt you. Try to relax and get some sleep.”

It seemed like hours, but finally Big Mac was snoring peacefully, his white-haired chest rising and falling in calm rhythm. Jo slipped gratefully out of the bunk, glanced toward the shower stall. It’d wake him up, she knew. Pulling on her shorts and blouse, she decided to take a dip in the lagoon before returning to her own room at the hotel.

“But it’s a good idea,” Markov was saying to his wife. “A necessary idea!”

It was dark outside as they sat in the front room of their little bungalow. The Americans had given married couples each a tiny cement house of their own. Maria had spent their first two hours in it searching for hidden microphones.

They sat with two trays of precooked dinners—soggy American vegetables and thin slices of unidentifiable meat—resting on their laps. Markov’s was almost untouched.

“A good idea,” Maria mumbled, her mouth stuffed with a buttered soft white roll.

“Yes,” Markov replied.

His wife glared at him from her upholstered chair. “Technically, perhaps it is a good idea. But not politically.”

“Politically?”

Maria finished the roll of butter. As usual, she seemed both annoyed and disappointed with her husband.

“Don’t you understand why the Americans brought up this idea of meeting the alien spacecraft?”

“To capture it and bring it close to Earth for study,” said Markov.

“And who would make this thrilling capture?”

Markov shrugged. “Stoner is a former astronaut. I suppose he would want to be in on it…”

“Exactly! An American astronaut.”

“But we’re all working on this together, aren’t we?”

“Hah! There is together and together.”

Markov glanced down at his tray and decided that he couldn’t face another bite of the bland food. Maybe she’s right, he thought. Certainly we can’t trust the Americans to feed us.

Maria continued, “All through this project the Americans have tried every trick they know to keep the knowledge of this alien spacecraft to themselves.”

“So have we,” Markov protested weakly.

Maria ignored him. “Now the one astronaut they have on their team suggests that we go out into space and bring the alien ship into orbit around the Earth.”

“But it’s a good idea!” Markov insisted.

“And how will they do this thing?” she retorted. “With the American Space Shuttle, and American launching facilities, and American astronauts.”

“They will share the information with us.”

“How do we know that? How do we know they will share all the information with us that they obtain?”

“Zworkin feels the idea has merit.”

“Zworkin!” Maria almost spat. “That Jew! He’s probably in league with the capitalists.”

“Maria!”

“It’s true,” she insisted. “Our task is to make certain that if anyone reaches this spaceship it will be Soviet cosmonauts. We cannot allow the Americans to steal this alien spaceship for themselves. And we cannot allow the Soviet Union to be betrayed by naïve scientists and unconscious traitors.”

Feeling pitifully weak in the blast of his wife’s hot fervor, Markov said weakly, “I’ve already told Zworkin that I will serve on the committee that will examine Stoner’s suggestion.”

“H’mph. And have you befriended Stoner himself, as you were ordered to do?”

Ordered? Markov’s brows went up. Now she is giving me orders? To his wife, he replied, “I have met him twice; both times in groups with other people. We have said hello to each other, nothing more.”

“Nothing more,” she repeated sullenly.

“But Zworkin has accepted me for the committee, so I should see a good deal of Stoner in the near future.”

Maria’s scowl eased slightly. “See to it that any rocket adventures we enter into are done by Soviet cosmonauts.”

With a sad shake of his head, Markov got up from his chair and headed for the kitchen with his unfinished tray.

“Where are you going?” Maria called after him.

“Out for a walk. I’m not sleepy yet.” Even though there were twin beds in the bungalow’s one bedroom, the thought of sleeping in the same room with Maria was becoming unbearable to Markov.

“Don’t wake me up when you come in,” she growled.

Once outside, in the sighing night breeze and the friendly whisper of the palms, Markov could breathe again. She overpowers me, he knew. It’s a battle for survival between us, and she’s winning it.

He threaded his way through the little cluster of bungalows and made it to the beach, glowing white in the moonlight. He took off his shoes to stroll in the sand. It was still warm from the day’s sun. The water lapped gently a dozen meters away. Out in the night, along the invisible reef, he could hear the surf breathing like a restless sea god.

Markov stood alone on the sand and stared out at the moonwashed night. How long before the ocean wears away these islands? How long before Maria and I tear each other apart?

He laughed out loud. How dramatic you are! Tear each other apart! She’d snap you like a twig, but you couldn’t even muss her hair, no matter how hard you tried.

He thought again of those few moments in their apartment, when Maria had gloatingly told him how she had destroyed Sonya Vlasov’s life. Even then, Markov said to himself, even in full fury, you know better than to try to fight her.

Something made him look back up the beach and he saw a woman walking toward him. An apparition. Aphrodite, come out of the sea, tall, long-legged, with the slim waist and full bosom of a goddess. A white blouse, ghostly in the moonlight, was tied around her middle. Shorts clung lovingly to her hips.

Markov stared as she calmly approached him, smiled to him and said in English, “Good evening.”

His heart spun around. He was instantly, hopelessly, in love.

“A good evening to you, beautiful lady. I have been waiting for you all my life.”

She laughed. “You’re one of the Russians, aren’t you?”

“Does it show?”

“I’ve seen you with the other Russian scientists,” Jo said.

“And why have I not seen you? Have I been blind, or have you kept yourself invisible, goddess that you are?”

“Goddess? Wow!”

“Aphrodite, goddess of love and beauty. I am your humble servant, Kirill Vasilovsk Markov, ready to follow you across deserts and mountains.”

Jo laughed. “I’m afraid I’m not Aphrodite. My name is Jo Camerata, and I’m an American. But there is some Greek blood in my ancestry, come to think of it.”

“You see?” Markov said. “The goddess exists in you.”

Jo laughed.

“And what is such a lovely young lady doing in this romantic setting, all alone? Are there no handsome young men to escort you?”

With a shake of her head, she replied, “No. No young men.”

“That is sad.”

“Yes…” She smiled again. “But you’re here.”

“Ah, the moonlight must be playing tricks on your eyes, fair one. I am neither young nor handsome.”

“I can see perfectly well,” Jo said. “I came here for a swim. Would you like to go in with me?”

“Swimming? Now? At night?”

“Sure. The water’s warm.”

“Intriguing.”

“Wouldn’t you like to try it?”

“But I have no swimsuit.”

She laughed. “Neither do I. We can skinnydip. Nobody else is around.”

“My English…” Markov couldn’t believe she was saying what he thought she was saying. “You mean—in the nude?”

“Sure. Just leave your clothes here and wade in.”

She stripped quickly and ran for the water. Markov fumbled with his clothes, his eyes on the glowing curves of her naked body. Finally he stepped cautiously into the bath-warm water. It felt good, relaxing, inviting.

“Tell me,” he called to her as he waded in up to his chest, “were you going to go swimming all alone?”

“Yes, but it’s always safer to go with somebody else,” Jo answered. “Especially at night. The sharks come into the lagoon at night.”

“Sharks?” Suddenly the water felt cold and dangerous to Markov.

Ross Sea, Antarctica

Hideki Takamura prowled the plunging deck of the catcher boat, bundled into his hooded sweater and wind-breaker. It was late in the season to be searching for whales, and if a plane or ship from the International Commission saw them, Japan would be reprimanded and embarrassed before the entire world. At least the meddling fools from Greenpeace had sailed homeward, he knew. That was something to be thankful for.

The season’s catch had been poor, so even though the Commission had ordered all the whaling fleets home, they still plowed through the heavy Antarctic seas as the nights grew longer, hoping to find a few straggling whales to fill their half-empty holds.

The clouds overhead parted as if pulled away by the hands of a giant. Takamura looked up at the coldly glittering stars.

And his breath caught in his throat. The sky was shimmering with light: veils of eerie fluorescence streamed across the heavens, red, green, violet—the lights of the gods, dancing across the sky.

Stark fear clutched Takamura’s heart. All the long years of schooling and scientific training on which he prided himself vanished from his mind. This is an evil omen, he knew. An evil omen…

Chapter 23

The day was slowly dying.

Stoner had eaten dinner with Jeff Thompson at one of Kwajalein’s three government-owned restaurants. The food was cheap and about as appetizing as its price would indicate. It was still bright daylight outside when he finished, so he returned to his office and went over the latest batch of photographs from Big Eye.

Even in the orbital telescope’s best magnification the approaching spacecraft looked like nothing more than a featureless blob of light, a tiny smudge on the picture, a whitish thumbprint set against the sharp, unchanging patterns and endless blackness of eternity.

By the time he left his office the sun was throwing spectacular swaths of red and orange across the tropical sky. Stoner walked alone down the main street, past the cinder block government buildings, heading in the general direction of the Officers’ Club.

He wondered where Jo might be, what she was doing, and an image of her in bed with McDermott filled his mind. He tried to shut it away, to forget it, to think of something else instead. He quickened his pace toward the Officers’ Club; he knew he needed company, conversation, something to erase those pictures from his mind.

“Ah, Stoner!” Cavendish was standing at the doorway of the club with a lanky, flaxen-haired, sullen-faced young man.

“I want you to meet Hans Schmidt, of the Netherlands Radio Observatory at Dwingeloo.”

Stoner put his hand out automatically. Schmidt’s grip was lukewarm.

“Dwingeloo,” Stoner said, his memory tweaked. “I saw a report a few days ago that said Dwingeloo picked up the radio pulses from Jupiter last summer.”

“That was my work,” Schmidt said in British English. “But it was classified secret by NATO.”

The young man was slightly taller than Stoner, youthfully thin. But his face was still soft with baby fat. The forehead was high, the eyes a bit puffy, the lips set into a pout. He’ll be bald before he’s thirty, Stoner thought, but he’ll still look like a kid.

“Welcome to the club,” Stoner replied. “My work got stamped secret, too.”

“Quite,” said Cavendish, laying a hand on each man’s back and gently urging them into the Officers’ Club. “Schmidt here may actually have priority on discovering the radio pulses, you know. When did your group first pick them up?”

“It wasn’t my group,” Stoner said. “I was just hired on as a consultant. You want to talk to Jeff Thompson about that.”

They went to the crowded bar and ordered. Cavendish had a brandy, Stoner a scotch and water, Schmidt a Heineken’s. The club was noisy, smoky, the best and only bar on the island. After fifteen minutes of talk, Stoner agreed that Schmidt had probably recognized the strange nature of the radio pulses earlier than Thompson had.

“So you’ll get the recognition,” Cavendish said, “once all this comes out into the open.”

That seemed to make Schmidt even more morose. “By the time all this comes into the open I’ll be an old man.”

“Oh come now, you still have a ways to go, you know.”

Schmidt drained the last of his beer and looked as if he wanted to cry.

“They’ve pushed you around, haven’t they?” Stoner said.

He nodded slowly. “I was to be engaged…. Now who knows how long I’ll be here?”

“Me too. They’ve been shoving all of us around like a pack of animals. You know how I celebrated Christmas? They let me make a phone call to my kids. One call. Like a prison inmate.”

“Couldn’t they fly your girl out here?” Cavendish asked.

“They wouldn’t let her come. And she wouldn’t do it, anyway. I asked her, but she said no. I can’t blame her…to leave her home and family and go to the end of the Earth.” He shook his head sorrowfully.

“Damned bad show,” Cavendish murmured.

“First, they destroy my thesis with their secrecy laws,” Schmidt went on, staring into his glass, “and now they exile me to this island. If I had murdered someone I would be treated better than this. If I became a terrorist and captured a train or threatened to blow up an airliner they would treat me better than this.”

Stoner said grimly, “But you’re not a terrorist. You’re a scientist. They know they can kick us around and all we’ll do is beg for another chance to do our work.”

“There is one thing,” Cavendish said slowly.

“What?” Schmidt asked.

“A thousand years from now, when human history is written, your name will go down as the first man to make contact with an intelligent extraterrestrial race.”

Stoner put his drink to his lips, saying silently to himself, No. Schmidt may have discovered the radio pulses, but I am going to be the first man to make actual contact with that alien. Or I’ll die trying.

Schmidt’s little-boy pout deepened. “What makes you think there will be a human race to write its own history a thousand years from now? Or even a hundred years from now?”

“Well, of course…”

“Suppose,” Schmidt went on, “that this spacecraft is an invader, the first scout for an alien invasion fleet that will wipe us out? How will my name be written then?”

“That’s rather farfetched, don’t you think?”

Stoner, in the middle of another swallow of his scotch, sputtered laughter into the drink. “Here we are,” he said, blinking tears from his eyes, “sitting on a godforsaken atoll in the middle of the Pacific, waiting for an alien spacecraft to get close enough for us to study it in detail, and you’re talking about something being farfetched? This whole business is farfetched!”

“H’m. Quite. But still, I don’t believe that an intelligent species goes batting about the universe with rape and pillage on its mind, do you? That’s strictly funny-book stuff.”

“Who knows?” Stoner said. “Can’t plot a trend with only one data point.”

Cavendish smiled, a bit uneasily. “Datum, dear boy. Datum is the singular of the word.”

“I stand corrected.”

The old man put his empty glass on the bar. “Getting rather late for me. I believe I’ll toddle off.” He pulled a balled-up dollar bill from his pocket and left it on the bar. “Good night.”

And just that abruptly he left Stoner and Schmidt standing at the bar. Stoner felt awkward with the younger man, who seemed content to plunge into solitary gloom.

Cavendish has stuck me with baby-sitting this kid, Stoner realized suddenly. That dirty old man!

He scanned the club, seeking a friendly face. The big room was filled with smoke and men. Noisy, drinking, laughing men who waved cigarettes and cigars at each other, playing cards, telling stories and clustering around the few women who were present. Kwajalein’s normal complement of military and civilian technicians had been tripled by the influx of Project JOVE’s scientists and staff, but the ratio of men to women was still huge.

The local merchants vote in favor of the alien, Stoner thought. The bartender isn’t worried about being invaded. Not as long as the tips keep coming.

He spotted Markov sitting at a table across the smoky room, surrounded by a mixed crew of Americans, Europeans and Russians. They seemed to be enjoying themselves.

I ought to get to know Markov better, Stoner told himself.

Glancing back at Schmidt, who was staring morosely into his second glass of beer, Stoner said, “Come on, let’s join that gang over there.”

Wordlessly the Dutch astronomer followed him.

“…so she then informs me,” Markov was saying, his eyes bright and both hands toying with a tumbler of vodka, “that she wishes to go for a midnight swim.”

Stoner pulled an empty chair from the next table and joined the circle. Schmidt remained standing behind him.

With barely a blink of a hello, Markov went on, “Obviously she is an American, and quite good-looking. When I told her I had no swimsuit, she introduced me to a new American word: ‘skinnydipping.’ ”

It struck everyone as funny and they all laughed. Except Schmidt. Stoner wondered who the Russian was talking about.

“Naturally, when she explained what ‘skinnydipping’ means, I joined her with enthusiasm!”

They roared.

“Then, once we were in the water, she tells me that the lagoon is filled with sharks, especially at night.”

“That’s true,” said one of the Americans.

“Moray eels, too.”

“But, she added, we would be perfectly safe as long as we stayed in the shallow water. The only sharks we would bump into would be little ones.”

Looking up, Stoner saw that Schmidt hadn’t yet cracked a smile. Hopeless case, he thought.

“What did you do?”

Markov shrugged elaborately. “What could I do? Faced with the dilemma of meeting a shark or leaving her in the lagoon alone and unprotected, I did the correct thing.” He paused dramatically. “I ran up onto the beach as fast as I could and started putting my clothes on!”

Stoner laughed with the rest of them. But suddenly it struck him that the Russian might be talking about Jo.

“She called to me from the water, ‘Don’t be afraid! These little sharks don’t bother anyone!’ I called back, “You are wrong. They do bother someone. Me!”

One of the Russians said, in heavily accented English, “A man has much more to lose to a shark than a woman.”

“It was quite an experience,” Markov went on. “She came right out of the water behind me and started to berate me for my cowardice. Have you ever been castigated by an angry young woman who happens to be naked and dripping wet, under a tropical moon? Nerve-racking!”

He took a long pull on his vodka.

“So you went home full of sand and water,” someone said.

“I would have preferred to go to her quarters—to wash up, if nothing else,” Markov explained. “But she is living in the hotel with the rest of the single women, and it is impossible to get past those guards after midnight.”

“Too bad.”

Markov sighed. “I have my hopes. The Post Exchange sells shark repellant, I hear.”

“There are swimming pools, you know,” someone said. “Here at the Officers’ Club, at the hotel and another one at the BOQ.”

“Yes, I understand. But you see, it isn’t actually the swimming that interests me.”

The rest of them roared with laughter, but Stoner thought, Jesus Christ, I’ll bet it is Jo he’s talking about. Sounds like her kind of stunt. He realized he didn’t like the idea of the Russian making jokes about her, but at least Markov didn’t identify her by name. Probably he doesn’t even know her name.

The men swapped stories for another hour or so, then the group around the table started to break up. As he got up from his chair, Stoner saw that Schmidt had already disappeared. He frowned, wondering how long ago the youngster had walked off.

“Dr. Stoner,” Markov said to him.

“You tell a good story,” Stoner said.

Markov shrugged modestly and they started out toward the door.

“I never got the chance to tell you how much I appreciated your kind letter to me.”

“You wrote a good book.”

“Thank you,” Markov said, his voice so low that Stoner could barely hear it over the hubbub of the club. “But you must understand that your letter revealed to our government that you were working on the radio pulses from Jupiter.”

“I know. That’s why I wrote it. I figured, if you didn’t know about the pulses the letter wouldn’t mean anything to you. But if you did know about them, well…we should be working together on this, not in competition with each other.”

They reached the door and stepped through, into the quiet of the night. “I was afraid that you would be arrested by your security police, once they found out about the letter.”

“I was. Do you think I’d be here if they hadn’t forced me to come?”

In dead earnest Markov replied, “Of course you would be here. You would steal a submarine and sneak in here under cover of darkness if there were no other way to get in. This is the only place for a man like you, and don’t try to hide that obvious fact, especially from yourself.”

Stoner stopped in his tracks, under the streetlamp outside the club’s entrance, and stared at Markov. After a moment, he admitted, “You’re right. Dammit, you’re right.”

Markov broke into a boyish grin.

“But how did a linguist get dragged into this? Don’t tell me my letter got you into trouble?”

“No, not at all. If anything, it enhanced my stature among the guardians of the people’s safety.” He started walking slowly along the street, and Stoner followed alongside him. “No, I have been bitten by the same bug that has infected you.” Markov raised his eyes to the starry sky. “I want to know!”

Nodding reluctantly, Stoner said, “Yeah. If there’s only one Project JOVE, then this is the place where we have to be.”

“Of course. Knowledge is the important thing, the only thing that lasts. Discovery—ahh, that is the thrill. Better than women, I tell you.”

“Better than some women,” Stoner corrected.

Markov threw his head back and roared laughter. “Yes, yes! I agree! Better than some.”

Glancing at the luminous digits of his wristwatch, Stoner asked, “Want to come over to the radar center? They’re going to try to make contact with the bird tonight.”

“Make contact?”

“Bounce a radar beam off it,” Stoner explained.

“But it’s still farther away than Mars, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, but the radar guys think they might be able to get a signal bounced off it. They’re itching to try.”

“I will go with you,” Markov said, nodding eagerly. “I’ve never seen this done before.”

“Neither has anybody else,” Stoner said. “And we might not see it done tonight. The damned thing is a helluva long way off.”

The two men walked side by side down the empty street, through the warm, humid darkness, oblivious to the scent of flowers and salt spray on the air.

Academician Bulacheff sat uneasily in the stiff-backed chair. Borodinski’s desk was raised on a little dais, so that visitors had to look up at him. It was an old trick, but Borodinski carried it off well. He had greeted the academician brusquely, waved him to the chair in front of the desk and then bent his balding, neatly bearded head to the paperwork on his desk.

It’s true, Bulacheff said to himself. The General Secretary is dying and we’re going to have to put up with this young pup. I wonder if he’s deliberately trying to make himself look like Lenin?

As if he could read minds, Borodinski looked up at precisely that moment.

He smiled paternally. “I’m sorry to have kept you waiting, Academician Bulacheff, but the press of urgent business has been almost overwhelming these days.”

Bulacheff hesitated a moment, then asked, “The Comrade Secretary? He is well?”

“Oh yes, quite well.” Borodinski’s smile waned. “But extremely…busy. You must excuse him.”

“I had expected to see him personally. We have always discussed this matter between ourselves, face to face…”

“For security reasons, I know. But our friend has asked me to meet with you today.”

“I see.” Bulacheff wondered how far he could trust this younger man.

“The reports coming from Kwajalein indicate that it may be desirable to send a team of cosmonauts to meet the alien spacecraft,” Borodinski said. “Are preparations being made toward this end?”

He knows, Bulacheff realized. No sense trying to stall him off. “The appropriate departments of the Academy are keeping track of the spacecraft and preparing the necessary navigational plans for a rendezvous mission.”

“Good.”

“It is not within our jurisdiction, however, to force the Army to allocate the necessary rockets and cosmonauts.”

“I understand.” Borodinski nodded. “These steps are being taken, I assure you. What we need from you, for now, is continuously updated tracking information for an interception flight.”

“Interception?”

“If the spacecraft is hostile, or about to fall into unfriendly hands…”

“You would destroy it?”

Borodinski flicked both hands upward. “Poof! With an H-bomb. Didn’t our friend tell you of that possibility?”

“He mentioned it once, yes, but…”

“Then you understand that we need the necessary tracking data. Only your long-range radio telescopes have the power to provide such data, I’m told. The Army’s anti-missile radars haven’t the required range.”

“Of course.”

Borodinski smiled pleasantly and fingered his trim little beard.

“Comrade…” Bulacheff began, then hesitated.

“Yes?”

“There…have been rumors…of arrests, interrogations. Is the General Secretary safe and well?”

The younger man’s eyes narrowed and the slightly smug smile left his lips. “Comrade Academician, I assure you that the General Secretary is safe, and well, and most vitally interested in this alien visitor. As for rumors of…changes within the Kremlin—don’t let that bother you. It does not concern you, I promise.”

Still, Bulacheff felt an old familiar weight pressing against his heart.

Rising from behind his desk, Borodinski said, “All you have to worry about, my dear Academician, is the tracking data we require.”

“For making rendezvous with the spacecraft.”

“Or for intercepting it with a missile.” Borodinski pointed a forefinger toward the scientist. “We will either board that spacecraft or blow it out of the sky.”

Cavendish was having the nightmare again. The tropical weather seemed to leach all the energy out of his frail body, and he had been going to bed earlier and earlier each night since he’d arrived on Kwajalein. But his sleep was far from restful.

They were standing over him again with their needles and the lights. He was very small and he had been very wicked to resist them. They were giants and to resist them was not only foolish, but wicked. He could see the gold in their teeth when they smiled and he wanted to run, but his body was frozen and the needles were sinking into his flesh and he could feel the burning juices as they all bent closer over him…

He sat up in bed, shivering with cold sweat. His head throbbed. The muscles of his neck were so taut he could barely turn his head.

Alone in his single room in the Bachelor Officers Quarters, Cavendish pulled on his faded old robe, stuck his slippers on his bony feet and took a towel and a bar of soap from the rack by the room’s sink. He flap-flapped down the bare wooden hallway floor to the washroom.

It was empty at this hour of the night. He got into a shower stall and stood under the taps for several minutes. The water was only lukewarm, more frustrating than relaxing.

Back in his room, he stared at the rumpled, sweaty bed for long moments, then found himself pulling on an old shirt and a pair of slacks. He felt utterly weary; his eyes wanted to close. But mechanically he donned his only pair of sandals, buckled them across the instep and walked out of the BOQ like a sleepwalker, into the late night darkness.

He went directly to the bungalow where the Markovs lived, went up the cement steps and opened the front door without knocking.

Maria sat on the rattan sofa in the front room, an open suitcase beside her. Its innards were filled with knobs and dials. It hummed faintly, and a single red light glowered in it like an angry evil eye.

Maria’s face was an anxious mixture of awe, disbelief and fear.

“Dr. Cavendish?” she whispered, as if afraid of waking him.

“Yes,” he said. Somewhere deep inside him Cavendish wondered who this woman was and what she wanted of him. Only one lamp was lit in the room, over by her, next to the open suitcase filled with electronic equipment.

“Sit down,” Maria said.

Cavendish took the easy chair and crossed his ankles. He folded his hands in his lap and stared ahead blankly.

Maria licked her lips anxiously. She knew Kirill would be coming back soon; it had taken her hours to get the equipment to summon Cavendish—partly because she had been afraid to dial the power setting high enough, she realized now.

“You will remember nothing of this meeting tonight, will you?” she asked, her voice trembling slightly.

“Not a thing,” he said calmly.

“The reflexes are still there, even after all these years,” she marveled. “I was only a young girl when I first met you, Dr. Cavendish. You don’t remember me at all, do you? It was at a place called Berezovo.”

“The…hospital…”

“Yes, yes. You were a difficult patient. But you won’t be difficult now, will you? You won’t force me to…to do what they did…in the hospital.”

“I won’t be difficult.”

“You will be very co-operative, won’t you?”

“Co-operative.”

Maria sighed with relief. “Now then…about this American, Stoner.”

“My orders were to find out how much he knew and then, if possible, to eliminate him.”

“You did not follow those orders.”

“I sent out the necessary information. Eliminating him proved impossible. We were constantly guarded.”

“Is that the only reason?”

Cavendish licked his lips. “I felt the orders were foolish. Why eliminate him when we can use what he knows, what he discovers?”

“You did well, Dr. Cavendish.”

His hands unclenched, his eyes brimmed with tears. “I want to do well. I really want to. Honestly I do.”

Maria felt her stomach wrenching within her. She closed her eyes to blot out the sight of the weeping old man.

It was well past midnight but neither Stoner nor Markov had left the electronics building. Outside, on a clear sweep of denuded, treeless land, two giant antennas pointed up into the windswept night.

Stoner and Markov hunched over the back of the radar technician who sat at the main console. All three of their faces were reflected dimly in the faint green glow of the circular screen that dominated the console’s front panel. Other men and women had left their tasks and were crowding around them.

“It’s a blip, all right,” the technician muttered. “Damned weak, though.”

The screen sparkled and scintillated almost as if it were alive. Concentric circles of hairline-thin yellow made a sort of bull’s-eye against the screen’s sickly green background. High in the upper right quadrant of the outermost circle, a flickering orange dot glowed faintly.

“Can you center it?” Stoner asked.

The technician checked a clipboard hanging beside the screen. “Not yet. Still some satellite traffic in the way. You’ll get scatter off them and lose the bogey you want.”

“Is that it?” Markov whispered, staring fixedly at the screen.

“That’s it,” said Stoner.

The little group behind them seemed to sigh collectively. Markov tugged at his beard and saw his own reflection in the screen’s smooth glass: baggy-eyed, purse-lipped, nervous, awed, afraid.

“What do you have for a velocity vector?” Stoner asked the technician. To Markov, the American seemed calm, intensely calm, as if he was holding himself together for fear that if he let go for one single instant he would explode.

Wordlessly, the technician touched a set of buttons on the keyboard before him. Numbers and letter symbols sprang up on the screen next to the glittering orange blip.

“Where’s a computer terminal?” Stoner snapped. “I can’t tell if that’s within our prediction envelope…”

“There’s a terminal right over there, sir,” said one of the women technicians. She pointed to an empty desk with a computer screen and keyboard atop it.

Stoner slid into the chair and punched up the proper code. The screen flashed a long set of equations momentarily, then replaced it with a shorter list of alphanumerics. Stoner swiveled his chair to peer at the radar screen and its list.

“Zap!” he yelled. “Right on the money! That’s our bird, all right.”

Markov looked at the featureless blob of light on the radar screen and then back at Stoner’s satisfied grin. They were all smiling now, as if they had just witnessed a birth. All Markov saw was a featureless flicker of light and some numbers.

“What’s your frequency again?” Stoner asked the radar operator.

Markov let his attention wander as the two of them plunged into a discussion that was more numbers than any human language. He tried to get the significance straight in his mind. They had sent out a radar beam from the antennas outside this building, more than an hour ago. The beam had gone deep into space, reached the approaching spacecraft and been reflected back to the same antennas. That little gleam of light on the radar screen represented the alien spacecraft.

Later, when they stopped congratulating themselves and realized lamely that no one could find a bottle of champagne at this hour of the night, the triumphant little group broke up. Two of the technicians remained at their posts; the others headed homeward.

As they walked through the night, Markov asked Stoner, “What do we know now that we didn’t know before?”

The American shrugged. “Nothing. Not a damned thing. Except that it’s there, where we thought it would be.”

“Then why the excitement?”

“Because we’ve locked onto the bird,” Stoner said as they passed a row of darkened house trailers. “We’ve got a new way of examining it, like a new pair of eyes focused on it. Precisely calibrated eyes, too. Now we can get the other radars locked onto it—the big dishes at Roi-Namur, for instance. Goldstone and Haystack, back in the States. Even Arecibo. They’ll look at it in different frequencies—different wavelengths.”

“And what will that tell us?”

Stoner waved a hand in the night air. “Length, size…maybe the bird’s mass, if we’re clever enough. Put the radar measurements together with optical photos and maybe we can start to get some idea of what it’s made of—its material and shape.”

Markov nodded. “And when do we attempt to signal it?”

“I don’t know. That’s your end of the game. Big Mac will make that decision. But—in a way, we’ve already signaled it.”

“The radar beam?”

Nodding, Stoner said, “If there’s any kind of intelligence aboard that spacecraft—either a live crew or a smart computer—they’ll have sensors aboard that will tell them we’ve bounced a radar beam off them. They’ll know we’ve spotted them.”

Markov looked up toward the stars.

“If they don’t want to make contact with us,” Stoner went on, “they’ll start to maneuver away from us.”

Or if they are hostile, Markov thought, they will take some other form of action.

Chapter 24

The Lincoln sped through the dark Nevada night, arrowing along I-15, across the flat salt desert. On every horizon craggy mountains loomed pale and silent in the cold silver light of the crescent Moon.

“It’s gonna peak,” Charles Grodon was saying. “We can’t keep kidding the people along much longer.”

Willie Wilson sat slumped, eyes closed, chin on chest, in the velour rear seat of the Lincoln. Beside him sat his brother and manager, Bobby. Grodon was on the jump seat, facing them.

“Come on, Charlie,” whispered Bobby. “He’s wiped out.”

Bobby was three years younger than his brother, several inches shorter, twenty pounds heavier. Where Willie was blond and intense, Bobby was a pleasant-faced, freckled redhead. They joked about being twins.

“We’re all tired,” Grodon answered. “Battin’ around the country, working our butts off. I just don’t wanta see it all go down the drain.”

Grodon was wire-thin, sharp-featured, with nervous hands that were never still. He drummed his fingers on the razor-sharp creases of his pinstriped trousers. He toyed with the buttons of his vest. He rubbed at his nose.

“We got the biggest crowd Vegas ever seen,” Bobby said, keeping his voice low to avoid disturbing his brother. “National TV coverage on all three network news shows. Time magazine sniffing around. What more do you want?”

“We gotta give them something more than ‘Watch the Skies,’” Grodon said. “Willie’s got to take the next step, tell them something they haven’t heard before. Otherwise they’re gonna get tired of it and stay away.”

“We’re booked solid in Washington and Anaheim,” Bobby pointed out.

“Lemme tell you something,” Grodon said, jabbing a finger toward Bobby. “First big national promo campaign I worked on was for Mark Spitz…”

“Oh, the swimmer?”

“Yeah. We made Mark Spitz a household name. Everybody knew who he was, how he won seven gold medals in the Olympics. He was on every TV show there was. He was on posters. Wheaties boxes. Milk cartons. You name it. And six months later nobody knew who the fuck he was.”

Bobby’s round face pulled into a frown.

“Because,” Grodon explained, “the big schmuck had nothing to offer. He was a terrific swimmer, so what? He couldn’t sing. He couldn’t act. He couldn’t even read a joke off the cue cards. All he could do was take off his clothes, jump in the fuckin’ water and swim like a dolphin.”

“I don’t see…”

Grodon leaned forward on the jump seat until he was nearly touching noses with Bobby. “The thing is this—it’s easy to get attention. We’ve done that. Willie’s got everybody watching him, waiting for his Big Event. ‘Watch the Skies,’ he’s telling ’em. So they’re watching. But they ain’t seeing anything. Nothing’s happening.”

“It will.”

“Yeah?”

“If Willie says it will, it will.”

Grodon made a sour face. “Come on, Bobby. This is me, Charlie the Jew. Remember? Willie might believe all this crap he’s spouting but we can’t go off the deep end with him, for Chrissakes. Somebody’s gotta keep his head screwed on straight.”

“It’ll happen,” Bobby repeated stubbornly. “If Willie says it’s going to happen, it’ll happen.”

“When?”

“When it happens.”

“It better be soon. Damn’ soon. Because if something spectacular doesn’t happen soon, all those big crowds and those media people are gonna disappear…like that.” He snapped his fingers.

“It’s going to happen,” Willie said.

Both men turned toward him.

“It’s going to happen,” Willie repeated. “I know it will, just as sure as I know my heart’s beating. I don’t know what it’s going to be, or when it’ll come…”

“It better be soon,” Grodon muttered.

“Don’t worry so-much, Charlie. It’ll happen soon enough. Whenever the Lord decides it to be, that’ll be soon enough.”

“The Lord don’t have to worry about gate receipts.”

Willie laughed and called to the driver, “Hey, Nick, pull over, will ya? I gotta take a leak.”

The Lincoln slowed smoothly and pulled over onto the shoulder of the broad, empty highway.

Willie ducked out the rear door, shivering in the sudden desert chill. The nearest cover was a straggling bush a dozen yards from the car, but the whole moonlit plateau was empty this late at night. Nothing but the moaning, cutting wind and the distant glittering stars.

Willie unzipped his fly and urinated onto the desert ground. He imagined his piss soaking into the porous sand so quickly that it didn’t even leave a momentary puddle.

As he zipped up again and rebuttoned his jacket he glanced up at the sky.

“Jesus Christ Almighty,” he whispered, goggling. Then he shouted it. “Jesus Christ Almighty! Look! Look!”

Bobby bounced out of the car in an instant while his brother danced and yelled and pointed upward. Grodon climbed out after him. Then the driver. They all stared up.

Eerie green and pink flickers of light were playing across the sky, glowing fingers of radiance that danced and shimmered among the stars.

“Wh…what is it?” the driver asked, his voice hollow.

“It’s coming!” Willie howled. “I told you it’s coming and it’s coming!”

Bobby stood open-mouthed, staring at the display.

“It’s just the Northern Lights,” Grodon said. “It happens sometimes this far south. Must be sunspots or something causing ’em.”

“It’s a sign,” Willie insisted. “It’s a sign!”

Grodon shook his head. “Too bad you can’t arrange to have ’em on during the rally in Washington.”

Willie laughed. “Who knows? The Lord works in mysterious ways.”

Bobby stood rooted to the ground beside the car, slack-jawed, gaping, awed by what he saw and by his brother’s ability to predict that it would happen.

Jo woke early. The Kwajalein sun streamed into her room, even though she had tacked a blanket over the window. Bright sunlight etched the edges of the window and made the thin blanket glow like molten metal.

She had insisted on having her own room at the hotel, with the other single women in the group. McDermott had groused at first, but as long as she spent part of the night with him, he seemed satisfied. He didn’t want sex, Jo quickly realized, as much as a sense of ownership.

She rose, showered, dressed quickly while mentally debating whether she wanted to take the free breakfast at the dingy government mess hall or buy something slightly better at one of the island’s three restaurants. With a shrug, she decided to skip breakfast altogether.

I can make tea at the office, she told herself as she finished combing her hair. She put on her lipstick, nodded to herself in the dresser’s time-fogged mirror and went to the window to take down the useless blanket.

She saw Stoner striding along the street, heading for the mess hall, his face set in its usual impersonal scowl. Always in his own world, Jo thought, with no time for anyone else.

With a shake of her head, she turned away from the window, found her purse and headed for the computer complex.

The computer building was constructed around a massive IBM facility. The big, boxy computer consoles—each of them larger than a full-sized refrigerator—stood in long rows inside a central well that rose three stories high. Offices surrounded this well, which the workers called the Pit. Balconies ran along its four sides.

Jo had wangled a private office on the second floor, overlooking the balcony and the Pit. It was little more than a cubbyhole; the walls were bare and painted a ghastly institutional green. The desk was a strictly functional metal affair, dented and dulled from long use. The swivel chair squeaked and tipped over if you leaned too far back on it, according to the warning of the sailor who delivered the furniture to the room. The file cabinets rattled. But the computer terminal atop the desk was sparkling new and worked perfectly. For Jo, that was enough.

Her electric teakettle was just starting to whistle when Markov appeared at the open doorway and tapped on its wooden frame.

She turned, kettle in one hand. “Oh! Hi!”

He blinked at her. “My swimming instructor. So this is where you hide during the daytime.”

“I’m not hiding, I’m working,” Jo said. Motioning him into the office with her free hand, she asked, “Do you want some tea?”

Markov smiled and nodded as he took one of the two metal-and-plastic chairs that stood against the bare office wall.

Jo took a plastic cup and an extra tea bag from the bottom file cabinet drawer and poured tea for Markov. She set the cup amidst the computer sheets and typing paper littering her desk.

“I don’t have any milk or sugar,” she apologized.

“This will be fine,” said Markov.

She sat on the other chair, beside him, close enough for him to smell the fragrance of her skin, the shampoo she had used on her hair.

Clearing his throat, Markov announced, “I am here on official business.”

“Not for another swimming lesson?” Jo teased.

He broke into a grin. “Perhaps later.”

“Okay.”

He seemed flustered, like a young boy going out on his first date. “Yes. The, ah…the radio astronomers are going to begin beaming messages to the spacecraft this morning, as soon as it rises above the horizon.”

“I know,” Jo said.

“Several different kinds of messages will be sent, on a variety of frequencies.”

“Will they try laser beams, too?”

Markov said, “Stoner has requested a very powerful laser system from an observatory in Hawaii. It will be sent here within a week or two.”

So he’s getting his way on the laser, Jo thought. I figured he would.

“They have also decided,” Markov went on, “to follow my suggestion of transmitting the Jupiter pulses we recorded back at the spacecraft.”

“That’s a great idea,” Jo said.

“Really?” He beamed.

“Of course. A really terrific idea.”

He reached for the tea, took one scalding sip, then said, “Well, I’m afraid that we’re going to need a good deal of computer time to translate the tapes we have back into signals that the radio telescopes can transmit. They sent me to find someone in the computer services group who could help us with the problem.”

“These are audio tapes?” Jo asked. “Didn’t Dr. Thompson bring the original computer analyses of the tapes when we moved here?”

“Yes, I have spoken with Thompson about this. He says he has both.”

With a slight toss of her head, Jo said, “Then it’s no problem. We just need a little time to check out the computer tapes and make sure they’re compatible with the machine language we’re using here. Filling in the requisition forms will take more time than doing the job itself.”

Markov gave a relieved sigh. “How soon…?”

“How quickly do you need it done? Everything I’m working on here right now is pretty routine. I could get to work on this today and have it for you tomorrow.”

“Wonderful!”

She grinned at him. “After all, we’re old swimming partners, aren’t we?”

His face reddened. “I…you must accept my apologies for that evening. We Russians are not noted for our swimming abilities, you know.”

“No need to apologize,” Jo said.

He was certain that she could hear his heart thumping in his chest. “Jo…dearest lady, I would fight dragons for you.”

“On land.”

“Uh, yes…preferably on land.”

“You’re very sweet, Dr. Markov,” she said.

“Kirill.”

“Kirill. If I run into any dragons, I’ll let you know.”

He took her hand in both of his and kissed it. “I love you madly, dear lady.”

“Oh no,” Jo said, her face turning grave. “You shouldn’t think that.”

He gave a helpless shrug. “It’s much too late for such advice. I love you. Totally.”

Very seriously, Jo said to him, “If we had met a year ago…or even six months ago…”

“I know, I know,” he said, gazing soulfully into her eyes. “Professor McDermott has his claim on you. But surely you can’t be serious about him.”

“I’m not.” Jo’s voice was so low that he could barely hear her.

“Then you can be serious about me!” Markov said, trying to make her smile.

She didn’t answer. Her whole body seemed to droop.

Taking her chin gently in one hand, Markov raised her face so that he could look into those marvelous eyes once again.

“There is someone else,” he realized.

Still she remained silent.

“Someone who does not return your love,” the Russian went on. “Or…perhaps he does not even know you love him?”

For some unfathomable reason, Jo knew she could trust this gentle, boyish man. She nodded slowly.

Markov sighed wistfully. “He is a fortunate man, whoever he is,” he said softly. “And a fool.”

Reynaud was trudging along the beach, his bare feet sloshing in the gently lapping waves, his black trousers rolled up to expose his chubby knees, his shirt clinging wetly to his back.

He blinked against the afternoon sunlight. A body lay sprawled on the sand up ahead, half in the water.

Reynaud ran, puffing, to the body. It was Hans Schmidt.

“Hello,” said the young Dutch astronomer, squinting up at Reynaud. “What are you running for?”

With a final gasp of exhaustion, Reynaud sank to his knees beside the lad. “I thought you were unconscious, or dead, laying here like this.”

Schmidt was still stretched out flat, his blond head on the sand, his shirt open and stirring slightly in the breeze, his trousers and sandaled feet in the water.

“I’m not dead,” he said, grinning crookedly. “I’m not even unconscious.”

“Then why…?” Reynaud made a gesture.

“Why not? What else is there for me to do?” Schmidt raised the hand he had been holding at his side. There was a brownish cigarette smoldering between his fingers.

“Isn’t there any work for you to do? You’re an astronomer, after all.”

Schmidt took a long drag on the cigarette. I wasn’t sent here to work. I’m in exile. This is a prison. I’ve been sent here for knowing too much.”

“But surely…”

Offering the cigarette to Reynaud, the young man went on, “But it’s not a bad prison, as prisons go. The scenery is lovely. And they have some very good grass. Here, try it. The sailors sell it cheap; they fly it in from the Philippines.”

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

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

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

Schmidt collapsed back on the sand with laughter.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Not for me,” said Schmidt.

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

“You’re bored too?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What do you mean?”

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

“No, I don’t think…”

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

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

Chapter 25

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

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

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

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

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

“Anything?” he whispered.

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

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

“Sad,” snapped Stoner.

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

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

“They said…not good.”

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

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

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

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

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

Ah, springtime in Manhattan, thought Dr. Chartris.

His phone rang.

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

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

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

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

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

“Almost breaking even.”

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

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

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

“You too?”

“Whattaya mean, me too?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You seen it in New York?”

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

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

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

“Unusual? It’s damned scary!”

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

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

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

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

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

One of them was Stoner.

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

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

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

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

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

No one seemed to know.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What frequency is it?”

“Infrared…one-point-six microns.”

“Then it’s not a CO₂ laser.”

“No. Neodymium.”

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

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

“Which costs time and money,” McDermott added.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What the hell is that?” McDermott grumbled.

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

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

“That’s right.”

“Like a gas cloud,” McDermott said.

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

“How large is the cloud?”

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

“And the thing inside it?”

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

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

“No tail,” answered Thompson.

“How do the Big Eye pictures look?”

Thompson turned to Stoner.

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

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

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

“Not much structure is visible…”

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

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

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

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

“What is the cloud?” Zworkin asked.

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

“A fuzzy, pulsating mirror,” Cavendish mused.

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

“It is an enigma,” Zworkin said.

“It’s a comet,” insisted McDermott.

“Too small…”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“If it doesn’t change course again.”

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

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

“Coincidence,” McDermott said easily. “The Jovian radio signals were a natural phenomenon, and when you looked in that direction with Big Eye you discovered this bitty hunk of a comet and got all flustered about extraterrestrial spacecraft.”

Stoner slumped back in his seat and glared at the old man.

McDermott looked around the table, daring anyone to challenge his conclusions.

“All right, then,” he said. “I’ll tell you what we’ll do. It seems to me that it’s too early to report to Washington that this object is natural in origin. We just might be wrong about that, and Project JOVE would be stopped in its tracks.”

Markov tapped his fingertips on the tabletop. “If there is even the slightest chance that this object is indeed a visitor from another civilization, we would be criminally negligent to abandon this project. Even if the chance is microscopically small, why disband, when in another few weeks, another few months at most, we will definitely know, one way or the other? Why not continue to study the object with every means at our disposal, on the chance that it is an intelligent visitor, and that it will respond to our signals? If we abandon this work now, the thing may pass us by and we will lose our one chance to make contact with an intelligent extraterrestrial civilization. That would be criminal!”

McDermott picked up his pipe, toyed with it. “I’m willing to give it another few weeks. If it’s intelligent, if it’s alive, it’ll respond to our signals in some way. But if it isn’t, there’s no sense indulging in wishful thinking.” He focused his gaze directly on Stoner. “Or planning.”

So that’s what he’s after, Stoner realized, his mouth compressing into a hard thin line, his insides turning to ice. The old bastard wants to shoot down the rendezous mission.

Looking around the table at the others’ faces, alternately glum or reluctantly nodding agreement, Stoner saw that McDermott had accomplished his goal. They’ll let him get away with it. Rather than have him recommend shutting down the whole project, they’ll go along with dropping the space flight mission.

Too angry to trust himself to answer Big Mac, Stoner sat in smoldering silence as the meeting adjourned.

Cavendish walked past him, patted him on the shoulder and murmured, “Too bad, old man.”

“Why didn’t you say something?” Stoner demanded, getting to his feet.

Cavendish shook his head. “Your McDermott is determined to stop the rendezvous mission.”

“It would have helped if you’d spoken up.”

“Quite…” Cavendish seemed confused for a moment, disoriented. “I…really, I haven’t been feeling too well lately. I’m sorry…”

Stoner saw that his face was gaunt, eyes hollow.

“Are you sick?” he asked.

Cavendish half smiled. “I really don’t know.”

“You ought to see a doctor.”

“Yes,” he said vaguely. “Quite.” And he left Stoner standing there as he wandered out of the conference room.

Markov was by the doorway, a frown on his long face. “Professor McDermott is wrong,” he said as Stoner came up to him. “We must be prepared to send a cosmonaut to inspect this spacecraft. It is not a natural object. I feel this in my bones.”

“Feelings don’t count in this business,” Stoner said. “Evidence does.”

“But why is McDermott so stubborn about this?”

“Because he knows if there’s a manned space mission, I’ll be the logical choice as the man to go. And he hates my guts.”

“That is no reason.”

“It is for him,” Stoner said.

“We must not let him get away with that. We must be daring. Revolutionary!”

Stoner leaned against the doorjamb, feeling suddenly tired, worn down. “What do you mean?” he asked.

Markov said, “We must bypass McDermott and start our own space program.”

With a laugh, Stoner asked, “And how do we do that?”

“I’m not sure,” Markov answered honestly. “But we can begin with the two of us, and recruit others. We will create a revolutionary underground movement.”

He was serious, behind his bantering tone, Stoner could see. “We’ll need somebody from computing to keep us up to date on the spacecraft’s track,” he said.

Markov smiled. “I have just the person. An American, Jo Camerata.”

“Jo?” Stoner looked sharply at the Russian. “No, she wouldn’t work with me.”

“Ah, but she would with me,” Markov said.

A sudden rush of anger surged through Stoner. Surprised at his own reaction, he fought it down.

Finally he managed to say, “Okay. You work with her.”

Markov studied the American’s face intently. “So you are the one.”

“One what?” Stoner asked tightly.

“You care for her.”

“No.” He shook his head.

“Then why do you look as if someone has just stabbed a knife into your liver?”

“Look, Markov…”

“Kirill.”

“Okay, Kirill—Jo and I had something going months ago. But it’s all over now. Dead.”

“And yet you have the power to hurt each other deeply.”

“Each other? She’s feeling hurt?”

Markov nodded gravely.

“Because of me?”

“Apparently so.”

Stoner tried to assess this new piece of data, but it didn’t seem to fit inside his head. “I don’t understand it,” he muttered.

“Neither do I,” said Markov, with a heavy sigh. “I am madly in love with her, you know, but I can see that it will do me no good. I think perhaps you are madly in love with her too, but you haven’t admitted it to yourself.”

Stoner said nothing. His brain seemed to be short-circuited: no output.

“Well”—Markov made a rueful smile—“I will ask her to join our revolutionary underground. At least it gives me a legitimate reason to speak with her.”

He left Stoner standing in the doorway, puzzled, doubtful, wondering.

Chapter 26

Jo was going down the stairs from her office to the main floor of the computer building when she saw Dr. Cavendish standing listlessly at the bottom of the stairwell.

With a shock, she realized that he looked older than he had when they had first arrived at the island, only a few weeks earlier. His body was gaunt, the clothes hung on his frame limply. His face was deeply etched with sleeplessness, his eyes were dark and sunken.

“Dr. Cavendish, are you all right?” she asked him.

He blinked and peered at her. “Ah, yes…Miss…” His voice trailed off.

“Camerata. Jo Camerata. I’m with the computing section here.”

“Oh, yes, of course,” Cavendish said. “How stupid of me not to recognize you.”

“Is there something I can do for you?”

He shook his head slightly. “I’ve just come out from the weekly meeting with Professor McDermott, and I was gathering my strength before going out into the hot sun again.”

“It is more comfortable in here,” Jo agreed.

“It’s not true about mad dogs and Englishmen, you know. I hate the heat. I think it’s affecting my health, actually.”

“Isn’t your office air-conditioned?”

“Oh yes. They’ve wedged me into a splendid little nook over in the electronics building. Brand-new air conditioner sitting in the window, puts frost on my tea when I turn it all the way up. But it’s the getting there that’s bothersome. I’ll have to walk half a mile in that sun…”

Thinking swiftly, Jo said, “Why don’t you work in my office for the next hour or so, until the sun goes down a bit and the afternoon breeze cools things off outside?”

“In your office? Oh, I couldn’t. All my papers and things…”

Jo took him by the arm and started walking slowly up the steps with him. “The data you’re working on is in the central computer, isn’t it? You can use my terminal and work just as easily here as at your own desk.”

“I never thought of that.”

She smiled at him. “You’re accustomed to working with paper. My generation is accustomed to working with electronics. Anything you need can be called up on the computer terminal’s readout screen.”

“Yes, but I’ll be dispossessing you of your own office.”

“I can work anywhere,” Jo said as they climbed the stairs. “Don’t worry about it. You’ll be a lot more comfortable here.”

“It’s awfully good of you,” Cavendish said.

They reached her office. Jo sat the old man down at her desk and showed him how to summon up his own work on the computer terminal.

“Marvelous,” Cavendish said, smiling.

“I even have a teakettle here, if you don’t mind drinking American tea.”

His smile lost a notch. “From tea bags?”

Jo nodded. “If you need anything, I’ll be down on the main computer floor, in the Pit.”

“The Pit?”

“That’s what the programmers call the central well of the building: the Pit.”

Cavendish’s shaggy brows rose. “Is there a Pendulum also?”

“A pendulum? Like on a clock?”

“Edgar Allan Poe’s story, ‘The Pit and the Pendulum.’”

With a shake of her head, Jo admitted, “I don’t think…oh, wait, wasn’t there a Vincent Price movie by that name?”

American education, Cavendish thought sadly.

After a few more words, Jo left him and headed back downstairs, feeling like a good daughter. Cavendish played delightedly with the computer for a few minutes, but then the headache came back with blinding force and he nearly collapsed on the desk.

It was nearly midnight in Washington. The offices in the West Wing of the White House were still lit. The national monuments were aglow, even though the downtown streets were empty. Don’t go out at night, tourists were told, and they stayed in their hotels until the sunrise drove the pimps and muggers off the streets.

NASA’s sleek, modern headquarters building was almost entirely dark. Only a few office lights still burned. One of them was the office of the Deputy Director for Manned Space Flight, Dr. Kenneth Burghar.

Jerry White pushed that door open without knocking and grinned down at his boss, who was sitting at his desk, awash in paperwork.

“Christ, I thought I was the only kook in this outfit who burned the midnight oil,” White said cheerfully.

“Budget cuts,” Burghar muttered. “OMB wants to slice another twenty million from the budget.”

White’s grin turned sour. “Here, take my left arm. I need the right one to sign my unemployment checks.”

“It isn’t funny, Jer.”

“I wish to Christ it was,” White said fervently.

Burghar pushed his chair away from the desk slightly, leaned back and rubbed his eyes. His tie was gone, his shirt sleeves rolled up. The remains of a slice of pizza decorated one corner of the desk, next to a half-empty paper cup of black coffee.

“What are you doing here at this hour?” he asked White.

“Same as you,” White replied, plopping down on the plastic couch along the side wall of the office, “trying to do the work of the guys who’ve already been laid off.”

“Sometimes I wonder if it’s worth it. If they don’t give a shit over at Budget and on the Hill, why the hell do we knock ourselves out?”

“Because we’re dedicated, committed men.”

“We ought to be committed—to a funny farm.”

White shrugged. “Maybe.”

“You didn’t come in here to discuss fiscal policy, did you?”

“No, I didn’t.” White pulled a one-page memorandum from his jacket pocket and handed it over to his boss.

“What’s this?”

“From the Office of Science and Technology Policy: Sally Ellington and those West Wing geniuses must be puffing pot again.”

Burghar scanned the memorandum. “A manned mission that goes four times farther than the Moon’s orbit? What the hell is this all about?”

“Search me. The White House wants a quickie study on the problem and a report, right away.”

Burghar huffed. “Thank god they don’t want hardware. It’d take ten years.”

“Ken, I don’t even have the people to do a paper study! Where’m I going to find the manpower to…?”

“Person power,” Burghar corrected wearily. “Affirmative action, remember? And when the memorandum comes from the White House, you find the persons.”

“But what’s it for? All they say is a manned rendezvous mission with an unspecified target.”

Burghar shrugged. “They’re being secretive. Probably it’s for some military operation.”

“It’s just another goddamned idiot study that’ll go into their files and gather dust. Why the hell should we do it?”

“What can I say?”

White leaned closer to his boss. “Ken…there’s one thing. I’ve been hearing rumbles about some kind of alien spacecraft that’s been spotted in deep space. Could this be it?”

Burghar ran a hand through his scant hair. “Go ask OSTP. They won’t tell me anything, but maybe they’ll like you because your tennis game is better.”

“Sure. And Sally Ellington’s hot for my body.” White didn’t grin. “Seriously, Ken, what kind of a half-ass study can I get done without the manpower? And what’s the point of it? We don’t have the hardware to send a manned mission four times farther than the Moon!”

“We sure as hell don’t. So do the usual kind of half-ass study and give them the report they want, when they want it. Don’t get flustered about it.”

“It’s not an alien spacecraft, huh?”

“Oh, crap,” Burghar moaned. “Next thing you’ll be seeing flying saucers out the window.”

“Okay, okay…I’ll put Sally baby’s request into the old paper mill, with all deliberate speed.”

“Good. Do that. And learn to say personnel, not manpower. Save me a lecture, will ya?”

Cavendish picked listlessly at his dinner, finally gave it up. The headaches came in waves, unpredictably, and nothing seemed to help them. He had staggered from Jo’s office to the medical center and spent nearly two hours being tested and examined by a young Navy medic.

“Migraines are often caused by emotional stress,” the earnest young man had said with the look of a funeral director on his tanned face. “Perhaps you’re working too hard.”

Cavendish accepted his prescription, wadded it into a tight little ball and threw it in the first trash receptacle he found outside the medical building.

Useless, he knew.

Now he stood on the front steps of the island’s best restaurant (the scientists had rated it at only minus one star) and decided to take a walk on the beach. His headache was gone, for the moment, but the memory of it had triggered an old fear in him that coursed through every nerve of his body.

The sun was touching the horizon, a fat ball of molten red. The sky was glowing copper, with a few long streamers of gold and purple clouds hanging in the west.

Cavendish felt bone-tired. His whole body ached. His eyes burned from lack of sleep. Yet something made him walk along the beach that circled the island. He walked slowly, like a man searching for a specific spot even though he doesn’t know where that spot might be. The sun sank out of sight and the shadows of evening covered the world.

All the way past the docks he walked, like a sentry, like an automaton, and down around the ocean side of the island, where the reef came close and the surf boomed out of the twilight.

Someone was sitting under the trees that fringed the beach. Waiting for him.

“Good evening,” said Maria Markova.

“Yes,” Cavendish answered.

Maria’s suitcase of electronic gear was at her feet, opened, its tiny light gleaming red in the shadows.

“Report.”

Without hesitation, Cavendish began, “The meeting was attended by Professor McDermott, Academician Zworkin, Dr. Thompson…”

Nearly an hour later, they were both sitting on the sand. Maria rested her back against a tree; Cavendish sat cross-legged, straight-backed. It was too dark to see the pain in his eyes.

“…and he suggested that I see a psychologist,” the Englishman finished.

Maria sat in silence for a while, thinking. “Anything else?” she asked.

“No…except for Schmidt.”

“Schmidt? The Dutchman?”

“Yes. There are rumors circulating around the island that he is becoming a drug addict. Certainly he has been useless as far as real work is concerned.”

“Tell me about Schmidt; everything you know about him.”

Cavendish did.

“This young man could be useful,” Maria said when he had finished. “Befriend him. Play on his animosity toward the Americans. Be certain to make him believe that it is Stoner who is stealing the glory from him.”

“Stoner?”

Nodding in the darkness, Maria said, “Stoner. He is the one who must be stopped. And Schmidt may be the way to stop him.”

“I…don’t understand,” Cavendish said.

“It is not necessary for you to understand. Only to obey.”

“Yes.”

“Very well,” Maria said. “You have done well. You may go now.”

“Yes,” Cavendish dutifully answered. He got slowly to his feet, and as he stepped out from under the shadows of the trees, into the pale moonlight, Maria could see for the first time the anguish that twisted the old man’s face into a hideous death’s mask.

Her breath caught. Cursing herself for a weakling, she dismissed Cavendish almost angrily. Painfully, stiffly, he walked away without another word.

Maria’s hands were shaking as she turned off her machine and snapped shut the lid of its suitcase. It felt heavier than ever as she carried it back to her bungalow.

Camp David

The rustic little briefing room was jammed with newsmen. Even though no TV cameras were allowed, photographers clicked and whirred away as the press secretary strode up to the podium.

“Okay,” he said, adjusting the microphone with one hand. “Here’s today’s statement:

“The President had breakfast with the Reverend Willie Wilson, the Urban Evangelist, this morning. Reverend Wilson’s evangelical mission is sponsoring an outdoor rally at RFK Stadium next Tuesday evening, and Reverend Wilson invited the President to attend. The President reluctantly declined, due to the press of other business….”

“Like the way the primaries are going,” a reporter sotto voce’d loudly enough for the whole room to titter.

The press secretary frowned, then returned to his statement: “The President congratulated Reverend Wilson on his fine work for inner city people. Reverend Wilson’s now famous ‘Watch the Skies’ message was not—repeat, not—discussed.”

The press secretary looked up at the reporters and photographers.

“That’s it?”

“That’s it. This isn’t a press conference; I’m not going to answer any questions. Copies of the statement will be available in about ten minutes.”

Chapter 27

Stoner and Markov were eating together in the mess hall when Schmidt sauntered in.

“A sad case,” Markov muttered, spooning soup past his beard.

“What do you mean?” Stoner asked.

“Haven’t you heard? Schmidt spends his days puffing on narcotics instead of working.”

Stoner stared at the young astronomer, who was getting into line in front of the steam counter.

“Narcotics? You mean pot?”

“Marijuana, other things. I understand there is quite a market here for tranquilizers, amphetamines.” Markov shook his head in stern disapproval.

“So that’s why he’s been no damned use to anybody since he got here,” Stoner said, his mouth tightening. “Maybe we should have him busted.”

“Busted?”

“Thrown in jail. What he’s doing is illegal.”

“It is?” Markov looked surprised. “I thought the drug culture was an integral part of the decadent capitalist society.”

“It may be,” Stoner replied, his eyes still on Schmidt, “but that doesn’t mean it’s legal.”

“The hypocrisies of capitalism.”

Stoner looked at the Russian. He was grinning.

Turning back to Schmidt, he saw that the young astronomer had filled his tray, walked as far as the cash register, spoke a few flustered words to the native Marshallese woman working as cashier, then—red-faced—left the tray where it was and walked quickly out of the mess hall.

“What’s he doing?” Stoner wondered.

Markov shrugged. “He’s probably spent all his money on drugs and forgot that he didn’t have anything in his pockets to pay for his dinner.”

Edouard Reynaud was sitting at the writing desk in his trailer, trying to compose a dignified letter to Cardinal Benedetto on the latest progress of Project JOVE.

He let the pen drop from his fingers, then rubbed his eyes. The words kept blurring. His head still buzzed from whatever he had taken that afternoon with Schmidt. Besides, he hated writing. Equations are so elegant and direct, he thought. Words are slippery and full of pitfalls.

Looking up, he saw that it was fully night outside. The little desk lamp was the only illumination in his trailer.

“I’ll miss dinner,” he mumbled to himself. The food on this miserable island made it easier to avoid the sin of gluttony.

A knocking rattled the trailer. Reynaud got up and went to the flimsy metal door. Opening it, he saw Hans Schmidt standing on the step, droopy-eyed, worried.

“I don’t have any more money,” Schmidt said.

Reynaud blinked with surprise. “What?”

Schmidt seemed to be weaving slightly, even though his feet didn’t move. “Money. They took all my money. I can’t buy a meal.”

Remembering the mosquitoes that could keep a man awake all night, Reynaud stepped outside and shut the trailer door firmly. “You mean you’ve spent all your money, and now you have nothing left for food?”

Schmidt insisted stubbornly, “They took it all. They didn’t leave me any for myself.”

“Come and have dinner with me,” Reynaud said, reaching for the young man’s arm. “You’ve had enough of a high for one day. You must sober up before you hurt yourself.”

Schmidt laughed. “Come over to my place. I have some good grass.”

“No, no.” Reynaud tugged at his arm. “Come and get some food into you.”

“I thought you were my friend.”

Looking up at that angelic face with its golden frame of hair, Reynaud took his hand away from Schmidt and said carefully, “I am your friend. More of a friend than those who are selling you these drugs.”

Schmidt backed away, stumbling slightly on the sandy ground. “You’re just like all the rest of them! Go away! Get away from me! Leave me alone. I know who my real friends are.”

Reynaud stood in front of his trailer as Schmidt lurched off into the night. It would be so easy to go with him, to use the drugs to seduce him. But with a resolute shake of his head the cosmologist turned in the opposite direction, toward his dinner.

I can’t help him, Reynaud told himself. I can only make things worse for him.

Jo Camerata sat glumly at the bar in the Officers’ Club, an unfinished daiquiri in front of her. It was early in the evening, the club was quiet and almost empty. McDermott was probably wondering where she was, but she just didn’t have the heart to spend another evening with the old man.

She slipped off the barstool and headed for the ladies’ room. The trio of Navy officers at the end of the bar smiled and called to her. She smiled back but kept on going.

Once inside the ladies’ room the smile vanished from her face. Jo sat in front of the cosmetics mirror and took a long look at herself. You’d better start spending more time sleeping, girl, or you’ll look like forty before you’re twenty-five.

When she came out and surveyed the club again she was suddenly filled with boredom. The same guys making the same jokes, she thought, and thinking with their balls. She went to the door and stepped out onto the dimly lit street, heading for the hotel where the single women were quartered.

“Mind if I walk you home?”

She turned and saw, in the dimness of a distant streetlamp, that it was Jeff Thompson.

“Oh, hello, Dr. Thompson.”

“Calling it a night so soon?” Thompson asked, falling in beside her.

“I’m tired,” Jo said.

“Yeah. Me too.”

“Have you been working all this time?”

“I dropped over to the comm center, to see if our visitor has decided to say anything to us yet.”

“Nothing?”

“Not a peep.”

“Maybe it’s trying to decipher our messages, just like we tried to decipher the radio pulses from Jupiter.”

Thompson shook his head. “I just wish it was all over and done with. I’d sure like to be back home.”

“Your wife will be coming out here soon, won’t she?”

Thompson shrugged. “Now the kids are complaining that they don’t want to miss the summer with their friends. It’s hard to uproot a family.”

Jo said nothing. They walked along the empty street side by side for several paces in silence.

Then Thompson asked, “How’s Big Mac?”

She almost laughed. “He’s old.”

He reached out and took her hand. “Jo, I never thought that…”

But she wouldn’t let him finish. “You know, Dr. Thompson, you’re the kind that would hate himself the next morning.”

“You think so?”

“Yes.” She stepped closer and kissed him, swiftly, on the cheek. “That’s the way you are, and it’s a shame. You would have been so much better for me.”

Then she turned and walked quickly down the street, toward the hotel, leaving Thompson standing there alone, smiling foolishly, wondering whether he ought to be proud of his self-control or mortified at his lack of courage.

He jammed his hands into the pockets of his slacks and walked slowly toward the BOQ, determined to call his wife despite the hour and the cost.

Markov and Stoner left the mess hall together, and saw Jo striding alone down the street.

“Ah, our fellow revolutionary,” Markov said. He hurried down the stairs and called out to her, “Jo! Miss Camerata!”

She turned and saw the two of them loping up toward her like a pair of eager teen-agers.

“Hi,” Jo said to them both.

Stoner felt suddenly awkward with Markov beside him. “Hello…”

But the Russian took her hand, kissed it and said, “And a good evening to you, my lovely lady. Your beauty outshines the stars.”

Jo giggled. Stoner felt his face go slightly red.

Tucking her arm under his own, Markov said, “Tonight we must make a request of your knowledge, your skill, your bravery.”

Keeping her voice light, Jo asked, “What are you talking about?”

“We need you to do some bootleg work for us,” Stoner said.

“What do you mean?”

As they strolled slowly down the street, Stoner began explaining his plans to her. Jo looked back and forth from him to Markov and back to Stoner again.

“Sure,” she said, “the computer stores all the tracking data from the radars. I could start a rendezvous program easily enough. But I thought that McDermott had put…”

“That thing isn’t a comet,” Stoner blurted. “It’s not a natural object at all. It’s an artifact.”

“Professor McDermott is being too narrow-minded,” Markov added. “We must prevent him from ruining the entire purpose of this project.”

“He’s afraid of it,” Jo said. “Mac wants it to be a natural object because he’s scared of what it might really be.”

Stoner shook his head. “He doesn’t have that much imagination.”

“Now, listen,” Jo insisted, “I know what goes on in his head…”

“I’ll bet you do.”

Before she could reply, Markov stepped between them. “Jo, dearest lady, I said that we needed your courage as well as your skill. And we do. This tracking data must be prepared without Professor McDermott knowing of it.”

“It’s important,” Stoner said, dropping his argument with her. “Vital.”

Jo said nothing.

“Will you help us?” Stoner asked.

“So you can fly up to this thing and meet it,” she said.

He nodded. “That’s right. You want to be an astronaut someday? Help us make contact with this bird and they’ll be hiring astronauts by the thousands.”

“Sure,” Jo said. “It’ll be a great opportunity for me. If Mac doesn’t toss us all in the slammer first.”

Stoner raised his hands in a gesture that said, It’s all up to you.

“Why a manned rendezvous mission?” Jo asked. “Why not an automated probe, like the kind that landed on Mars and Venus?”

Stoner answered quickly, “Because it takes years to build such probes. And they’re dumb. They’re just preprogrammed machines that do exactly what they’ve been programmed to do and not one damned thing more. How do you design a machine to examine something we’ve never seen before? That we know almost nothing about?”

“The object would be gone from the solar system before the committee discussions were finished,” Markov pointed out.

“But we do have manned spacecraft,” Stoner went on urgently. “NASA has its Space Shuttle. The Russians have their Soyuzes. I think there’s even a launch facility out on Johnston Island, not that far from here.”

“We also have our Salyut space station in orbit continuously with two cosmonauts aboard it. They can be sent to…”

“No,” Stoner snapped. “I’m the man who goes.”

Markov replied, “I realize that you would like to be the one to go, but…”

“No buts. We need somebody who knows what to look for. You can’t program a cosmonaut with everything he needs to know. You can’t turn a rocket jock into an astrophysicist, not in a couple of months. I’m the logical man for this mission. If you send anybody else, it’d be just as stupid as sending an automated probe with its limited programming.”

Tugging at his beard, Markov said, “Your logic is unassailable. Certainly you have all the knowledge of what we are doing here. Perhaps we can get you boosted up in a Soviet rocket, with one of our cosmonauts as your companion.”

Stoner nodded. “That would be fine by me.”

Jo said, “But if you go…it’s going to be a kind of hurry-up, makeshift mission, isn’t it?”

“That’s right,” Stoner said. “If Big Mac had planned on a manned rendezvous mission from the beginning, things would be a lot easier for us.”

She shook her head. “It sounds awfully chancy.”

They were passing under a streetlight, and Stoner could see real concern on her face.

He smiled at her. “Don’t worry. Driving a car in Boston is a lot more dangerous.”

Jo nodded, but she didn’t look convinced.

“You don’t believe me?”

Jo thought a moment as the three of them walked down the dimly lit street, past house trailers and the dull, graceless cement block office buildings.

“Does it really matter what I think? You’ve made up your mind that you’re going off into space to greet our visitor.”

“I’ve got to go,” Stoner said. “I’ve got to.”

Markov broke in, “We will need someone else to help us with our little revolution.”

“Someone else?” asked Stoner.

“Yes. Someone with enough stature to override Professor McDermott’s objections once he finds out what we are doing.”

Jo suggested, “What about your head man, Zworkin?”

“Not him,” Markov said. “He is too old and cautious to outshout McDermott. I was thinking of the cosmologist, Reynaud.”

“The monk?”

“Yes. He has a direct line to the Vatican, which can be politically very useful.”

“The Vatican? What political clout does the Vatican have?”

Markov laughed softly. “Our lamented Josef Stalin once asked the same question—and found the answer, much to his chagrin.”

“Reynaud looks like a cream puff to me,” Stoner said. “He won’t have the guts to fight Big Mac. What about Cavendish?”

“He’s sick,” Jo said.

“But he’s with NATO, and he’s pretty well connected higher up, as well, from what I’ve heard.”

“I don’t think he would be the man for us,” Markov said slowly.

“And he’s sick,” Jo repeated. “He’s really in trouble, physically.”

“I could still talk to him,” Stoner said.

Markov objected, “But you must not approach him, Keith. You are too well known to be opposed to your Big Mac.”

“Then how…?”

“I’ll talk to him,” Jo said. “But I don’t think it’ll do any good.”

“And I will approach Reynaud,” Markov said.

They were strolling past the bungalows now. Far down the street, Stoner could see another couple walking slowly toward the beach.

“Ah, there’s a light in my window,” Markov said. “My darling wife must be waiting up for me.”

They walked him to his bungalow.

“Would you care to come in for a nightcap?” Markov asked.

Jo glanced at Stoner, who shook his head. She declined also.

“Very well, then.” Suddenly Markov gripped Stoner’s right hand in both of his. Looking straight into the American’s eyes, Markov said, “There are enormous forces working against us.”

“I know,” Stoner said.

“More than you realize,” the Russian insisted.

Stoner nodded slowly. “It doesn’t matter.”

“Yes. We will fight the good fight. Together. Against them all!”

“Damned right.”

“Keith…I am proud to be your friend.”

“And I’m proud to be yours, Kirill. We’ll beat the bastards, you’ll see.”

“Yes. Of course.” Markov turned to Jo, took her hand, put it to his lips. “And you, dear lady. Any man would gladly face the firing squad for you.”

“You’re very sweet,” Jo said, grinning, “but much too dramatic.”

“Ah yes, I know. It’s our national curse. We Russians are an emotional people. We feel things deeply.” He seemed slightly flustered, embarrassed. With a forced little laugh, Markov said, “Well, good night. Perhaps tomorrow our visitor will answer our signals and we won’t need to start a revolution, after all.”

“Good night,” Stoner said.

Markov trotted up the cement steps and entered his house. Stoner walked slowly with Jo back toward the hotel.

“He’s a funny guy,” Stoner said. “I like him.”

“I do too.”

“Do you really think Reynaud would be any help to us?”

“More than Cavendish,” she answered. “That poor guy ought to be in the hospital.”

“But you’ll talk to him about helping us, won’t you? It’s important.”

“More important than his health?”

He looked down at her, walking along beside him. “Of course it’s more important than his health! It’s more important than anything else…”

“For you, Keith,” Jo said. “It’s important to you. This is your dream, your obsession.”

For a moment he didn’t reply. Then, softly, “No, you’re wrong, Jo. It’s my life.”

Chapter 28

The Officers’ Club bar was quiet, cool, shadowy. It was not yet six o’clock, but the place was slowly filling up with the after-work, before-dinner crowd. Stoner sat glumly in a corner booth, his back to the wall.

Markov sauntered in, his head pivoting as he blinked and waited for his eyes to adjust after the burning glare of the street outside. He spotted Stoner at last and came over to the booth.

“Better get yourself a drink first,” Stoner told him. “There’s no table service until after six.”

Markov went to the bar, quickly negotiated a vodka-tonic and hurried back to the booth.

“How was your meeting with Professor McDermott?” he asked as he slid in across the table from Stoner.

Stoner pointed to the two empty beer glasses in front of him and the nearly empty condition of the third.

“That bad?” Markov asked.

“Kirill, we’re in the hands of fanatics,” Stoner said. “Big Mac is a paranoid and Tuttle is a religious nut.”

Markov took a sip of his drink. “Tell me about it.”

Stoner began to explain.

Maria Markova sat in the cushioned chair in the front room of her bungalow. On her lap was a letter from Moscow, just in on the weekly flight from the U.S.S.R. She held an oblong black object in her hands, about the size and shape of a pocket calculator.

The letter was handwritten in a neat, tight Russian script and signed, “Affectionately, Cousin Anna.” Cousin Anna was nonexistent. The pocket calculator was a cryptographic computer, and Maria was using it to decode her latest orders from Moscow.

The message was brutally simple: Prevent the Americans from mounting a rendezvous flight to meet the visitor. Use all necessary means available.

Maria cleared the computer’s little glowering red readout symbols and got heavily to her feet. She burned the letter in the kitchen sink, then went into the bedroom and put the computer back into its fitting inside the electronics suitcase.

Use all necessary means available.

That meant Cavendish. He was her only tool, her only weapon. She sat on the bed next to the suitcase. The mattress sagged and squeaked under her.

Cavendish. She closed her eyes, but still saw the look of agony on the old man’s wretched face. And that was merely when she had been asking him for information. Now she had to use him somehow, and if he resisted, she would have to punish him.

Maria shuddered.

Behavioral psychology began with Pavlov’s work on dogs, Maria had learned. Western psychologists developed this into the principle of positive reinforcement: reward the subject when he does the correct thing, and withhold the reward when he fails to do the correct thing. It was a weakling’s approach to the problem, requiring enormous amounts of time and patience, for little return.

Maria’s superiors had long ago discovered that the reverse principle works better, more surely. Punish the subject for failure, and only when he obeys you absolutely do you withhold the punishment. It was the same principle that Pavlov had discovered, actually. But by manipulating the punishment instead of the reward, you got better results, more quickly. The long-term effect on the subject was deleterious, of course, but that could not be helped.

Maria fingered the control knobs on her suitcase of electronic gear. The microelectrodes had been implanted in Cavendish’s brain many years earlier, but they still worked, and they were so small that they had escaped detection all these years.

Western psychologists would have put the electrodes into the brain’s pleasure center, to reward Cavendish for good behavior with a jolt of pure electronic rapture. The surgeons in Moscow, however, knew better. Maria could cause a variety of effects in Cavendish’s brain, ranging from sleeplessness to agony.

If he refuses to help me, she thought, with mounting apprehension, I’ll have to torture him.

Markov gulped down his second vodka-tonic and put the glass precisely on the ring it had left on the Formica table when he’d picked it up.

“As a revolutionary,” he told Stoner, “I would say that we have hit a stone wall.”

“That’s your considered opinion, is it?”

Sighing unhappily, “Yes.”

Stoner slid out of the booth, walked unsteadily to the bar and got two more beers and two vodka-tonics.

“You are anticipating a long siege,” Markov said as Stoner put the glasses on their table.

“A true revolutionary must be prepared for long sieges,” Stoner answered gravely. “And for stone walls.”

“We have enough of those,” said Markov.

“In a good cause there are no failures, only delays.”

Markov raised his glass. “To the revolution.”

“We will gain the inevitable triumph,” Stoner quoted Roosevelt, “so help us God.”

“Do you have any plans for dinner?” Markov asked once the glass left his lips.

Stoner slowly shook his head.

“Do you foresee eating a meal sometime this evening?”

“I guess so. No hurry.”

“Of course.”

“Were you successful in rousing our good friar, Brother Reynaud?” Stoner asked.

“If I had good news about that, would I be drinking here with you in this lugubrious mood?”

“Lugubrious? You are a linguist, aren’t you?”

“At times,” Markov said.

“Lugubrious.” Stoner turned the word over in his mind. “Now is the winter of our discontent…”

Markov raised his glass halfheartedly. “Our revolution is not going well, I’m afraid.”

“Well, the American Revolution didn’t start off too smartly, either, friend. We’re in our Valley Forge period, right now.”

Markov’s face brightened a bit. “That’s right. You were a revolutionary nation, too.”

“Were? We are a revolutionary nation,” said Stoner. “We invented the telephone, didn’t we? Wasn’t that a revolution? And the airplane, the computer, the Mickey Mouse wristwatch—that was a real revolution, my friend.”

“I thought we invented the telephone,” Markov said, scratching at his beard. “I’m sure I read that in Pravda once.”

“Okay, you can have the telephone. But we invented TV dinners.”

“A true revolution.”

“And bubble gum.”

They drank to bubble gum.

Jo pushed her castered chair away from the computer console and glanced up at the big clock on the wall of the Pit. It was slightly past six.

“I’ve had it,” she told the programmer sitting next to her. “Nine hours with no break except for a lousy sandwich.”

“And nothing to show for it but chipped nails,” the programmer said.

She grinned at her. It’s in a good cause, she said to herself. All the extra calculations of the spacecraft’s projected track, they’re more work but they’re necessary for the rendezvous mission. If it comes off.

To the programmer, she said, “Listen, if they’re not paying you overtime you shouldn’t work overtime. Working through lunch hour was enough.”

“I just do what I’m told,” she said, getting up from her chair and heading for the ladies’ room.

A few minutes later Jo went out into the hot sunshine. She decided to stop off at the Officers’ Club before facing dinner.

As soon as her eyes adjusted to the club’s dimness she saw Stoner and Markov over in the corner booth. Actually, she heard them before she saw them.

“To the glorious October Revolution and all the revolutionary peoples of the world!” Markov was shouting. “I toast you all, wherever you are!”

Stoner looked up as Jo walked over to their booth. She asked, “Is this a private celebration, or can anybody join?”

Markov answered instantly, “Come! Sit down! Join our funeral.”

“Funeral?” Jo slid into the booth beside the Russian.

Stoner lifted his glass an inch from the tabletop and saluted her with it.

“We are celebrating the Fourth of July a few months early.” His words were slightly slurred. “I think.”

“But why call it a funeral?”

“Russian melancholy.”

“Then there is the glorious November Revolution,” Markov said, blithely ignoring their words. “Ah, my friends, that was the turning point. When the immortal Lenin appeared at the train station in Petrograd, the world changed.”

An unhappy-looking Marshallese waitress, solid and square as a sack of cement, came to their table. “More drinks?” she asked.

Jo ordered a piña colada. Markov had gone to straight vodka on ice. Stoner stayed with beer.

When the drinks came, Stoner said, “I think we ought to toast the United States Marine Corps: the brave men who wrested this island from its fanatical Japanese defenders in nineteen forty-something.”

Looking from one of them to the other, Jo asked, “What’s going on here?”

“You really want to know?” Stoner replied.

“Yes!”

“Don’t ask.”

For an instant, Jo looked as if she was going to be angry. But then she laughed, shook her head and picked up her frosted goblet. “Okay,” she said. “If that’s the way you want to play it. But at least tell me what we’re drinking to.”

“To revolution!” Markov shouted.

“The Copernican Revolution,” said Stoner.

“The Revolution of Nineteen-Five,” Markov countered.

“Whatever.”

They drank.

“What we need,” Markov said, slapping his emptied glass down, “is an orchestra. We should be playing Tchaikovsky’s ‘Eighteen-twelve Overture.’ ”

“Not revolutionary enough,” Stoner argued. “How about ‘Stars and Stripes Forever’?”

“Counterrevolutionary!”

“It is not!”

“What about ‘Me and Bobby McGee’?” Jo suggested.

They both stared at her blankly.

“Janis Joplin,” she explained. “She was a revolutionary singer in the…oh, forget it!”

Stoner hunched over the table and the other two leaned toward him. “There’s got to be some way,” he said quietly, “of getting Big Mac to agree to a rendezvous mission. We’ve got to find a way.”

“True revolutionaries are not discouraged by the stubborn opposition of reactionary elements,” Markov said with perfect diction. Then he burped.

“We’ve got to find a way,” Stoner repeated.

“Or make one,” said Jo.

“Perhaps when they shine the laser on the alien,” Markov mused, “that will tickle him to react.”

“Him,” Jo said. “You still think of the alien as a male.”

“It,” Stoner compromised. “What did you mean, ‘Make one’?”

“Huh?”

“I said we’ve got to find a way to get Big Mac off his ass, and you said, ‘Or make one.’ What d’you have in mind?”

Jo blinked at him. “Nothing. I was just…talking.”

But Stoner’s mind was churning through the alcoholic haze. “Suppose…Kirill, listen…suppose we started to get a response from one of the radio telescopes. Nothing definite…just a few clicks and scratches…”

Markov looked at him blearily. “You are suggesting that we fake such a response?”

Stoner waved one hand slowly in the air. “Let’s say we…improve on the return signal a little. Just a teeny little bit.”

“Very dangerous,” Markov said, shaking his head. “Very unscientific.”

“Yeah. I suppose.”

“But would it work?” the Russian went on. “Could you fool your Big Hamburger?”

“If we had somebody at the radio telescope who knew how to do the trick,” Stoner said.

“And,” Markov added with an upraised finger, “if he knew how to keep his mouth shut.”

A slow smile spread across Jo’s face. “What about Dr. Thompson? I think maybe I could get on his good side.”

Maria Markova was sitting on her bed, drumming her stubby fingers on the lid of the suitcase. Kirill will be out for hours, she knew. As long as there is a bar open or a pretty girl to chase, he will be busy.

That gave her the better part of the night to interrogate Cavendish. She had to find some way to use the Englishman to stop the Americans, to prevent Stoner from going through with his plan to rendezvous with the alien spacecraft.

Stoner, she thought. It all focuses on him. If I can put him out of the way, I will have accomplished my assignment.

Jaw clenched, she unsnapped the locks on the suitcase and opened its lid. The unit was powered by its own tiny radioisotope source, and the baleful red light that showed it was working glared back at her.

Maria reached for the transmitter knob and turned it to beam out a hotter, more painful signal. But the face she visualized as she sent the agony on its way was not Cavendish’s. It was her husband’s.

Chapter 29

Reynaud sat on the edge of Schmidt’s bed, tense as a crackle of electricity, staring at the young astronomer.

For more than an hour now, Schmidt had been sitting on the floor in a corner of his room in the BOQ, arms hanging slackly from his shoulders, hands limp on the bare wooden flooring, eyes glazed and staring at nothing.

He looked dead, except for the rapid, panting rise and fall of his chest and the puffing, almost wheezing breath from his open mouth.

Reynaud had tried to talk to the youngster, tried cold water, even slapped his face. Schmidt just sat there and stared, glassy-eyed.

If I call for medical help they’ll lock him up, Reynaud thought. God knows where he’s gotten the drugs. What if he doesn’t pull out of this? What if he dies?

For the hundredth time, Reynaud got up and went as far as the door. Perhaps there is a doctor who would treat him without letting the authorities know, he told himself.

But his hand refused to turn the doorknob.

As he turned back toward the astronomer, Schmidt’s hands slowly clenched into white-knuckled fists.

“I can see it,” he said, his voice hoarse from the dryness of his throat.

Thank God, Reynaud thought. He’s coming out of it.

“It’s coming,” Schmidt croaked. “Oh, Jesus God, it’s coming right at me! It’s coming!”

He scrambled to his feet. Reynaud went toward him, feeling small and helpless next to the youngster.

“It’s coming at me!” Schmidt screamed. “The colors…” He flung an arm across his eyes. “The pain!”

“No, no, you’ll be all right,” Reynaud said, reaching for the younger man’s other hand.

But Schmidt flung him backward with a wild sweep of his arm. Reynaud hit the bed with the back of his legs and tumbled across it, landing with a painful thump on the floor on the other side.

“I can’t stand it!” Schmidt screamed.

He lifted the entire bed completely off the floor, raising it over his head. Reynaud knew he was going to die. He couldn’t move. For a terrifying instant Schmidt loomed over him like an Aztec priest ready to rip the heart out of his chest.

Then the young man, face twisted into an agonized mask of primeval fury, swung around and threw the bed as easily as a child throws a stick. The metal frame crashed against the wall, splintering the dresser and chair, smashing the plasterboard like a bomb.

Schmidt raced for the door, flung it open and disappeared down the hallway, leaving Reynaud on the floor, white-faced with pain and shock, one arm twisted under his body grotesquely.

“It will never work,” Markov was saying.

“Sure it will,” Stoner insisted.

They were still at their booth in the Officers’ Club, drinking coffee now. Stoner’s head thundered. Markov looked bleary, gloomy, exhausted.

Jo had gone to the cafeteria before it had closed and brought them back soggy sandwiches. Now, sitting beside Stoner, she said:

“I think it could work. Dr. Thompson would help us, I’m sure.”

Markov shook his head, just once; the obvious pain made him stop and close his eyes.

“You’re worried that too many people have to be in on it,” Stoner said.

“Yes,” Markov agreed, eyes still closed. “A faked message from our visitor would require the three of us, Thompson and at least two or three of the radio telescope technicians. Besides, don’t you think that men such as Zworkin and Cavendish are clever enough to recognize a faked message after a bit of study?”

“That’s where you come in, old friend,” said Stoner. “Your job is to create a message that’ll keep them puzzled long enough for us to get the rendezvous mission going.”

Markov opened his eyes and smiled sadly at them. “I see. It all depends on me.”

“A lot of it does.”

“Will you try?” Jo asked him.

The Russian pursed his lips, then smiled at her. “For you, beautiful one, I would dare anything. Why not? It will be a challenge. And if we are truly revolutionaries, we must take some risks, mustn’t we?”

Despite his own headache, Stoner saw that Markov was humoring them both. The Russian had no faith in the desperate scheme. But he raised his coffee cup to Markov.

“To our revolution,” Stoner toasted.

Markov clicked his cup against Stoner’s. Jo added hers, saying, “To us.”

Through a red wash of agony, Cavendish saw them bring Reynaud into the infirmary: two husky young sailors carried the stretcher with the fat little priest resting on it like a small beached whale in a black suit. Cavendish’s own pain made his vision blur; he couldn’t tell if Reynaud was conscious or not.

“What…happened to him?” Cavendish’s voice was weak, hollow.

The efficient middle-aged nurse who had been watching over him clucked her tongue. “Never you mind him. You just lay back there and rest.”

Cavendish felt too weak to do anything else. But the pain was getting worse, not better. It had been a mistake to come to the hospital when the pain had started. Now he was trapped in here, and the waves of torture were racking his whole body, despite the analgesics the doctors had pumped into him.

He knew where he had to be, what he had to do. He was being disobedient, and they were punishing him for it. As they should. He had been a fool to disobey. But now this American nurse was hovering over his narrow infirmary bed and he was too weak to fight his way past her.

If she would just go away for a minute or two, Cavendish thought. Just long enough to let me slip away.

The young doctor who had given him the injection stepped into the little curtained alcove.

“How’s he doing?” he asked the nurse.

“Restless.”

Turning to Cavendish, the doctor put on a professional smile. “Still feeling some discomfort?”

Discomfort? Cavendish thought. Why can’t they say the word pain?

“I’m…I feel somewhat better,” he lied, knowing that the doctor expected such an answer.

“Good. You just try to relax. Migraines don’t last forever.”

“The…man they just brought in,” Cavendish managed to gasp out. “Was that…Dr. Reynaud?”

The doctor nodded. “Yes. Fell down and broke his arm.”

“It’s busy tonight,” the nurse said. “Some nights you just sit here, bored to death. But tonight’s busy.”

“And it’s not even payday,” the doctor said.

Cavendish let his head sink back onto the pillow and ground his teeth together to keep from crying out with the pain. The doctor left, but the nurse went no further than the end of the curtains framing Cavendish’s bed.

A terrific clatter and roar of shouting voices suddenly erupted from somewhere beyond the curtains.

“For Chrissake, hold him down!”

“Gimme a hand!”

“Orderly! Nurse! Come on, quick…”

And over it all, the screaming, screeching voice of a…what? Cavendish couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman. Or a beast.

The nurse disappeared. Cavendish could make out the sounds of struggle, fighting. Bodies flailing and thumping against walls and floor. A pair of burly orderlies raced past his curtained bed. Then the same doctor who had treated him.

“Hold him, hold him!”

Every muscle in his body fluttering from the effort, Cavendish slowly, excruciatingly, pulled himself up to a sitting position. They hadn’t taken his clothes off, just his shoes. Getting to his feet nearly made him faint. Reaching down to pick up his shoes was an agony of effort.

And through it all, the melee out in the hallway continued.

In his stocking feet, Cavendish stepped to the edge of the curtains and peered out into the hall. A tangle of bodies thrashed on the floor by the hospital’s main entrance, orderlies and nurses struggling to hold down a single young blond man who battled them all with rabid, insane ferocity.

One doctor, armed with a hypodermic, was trying to plant his knees on the young man’s chest. Another—the doctor who had treated Cavendish—was attempting to stick a needle into one of his thrashing legs.

Good Lord, Cavendish thought with a shock of sudden recognition, that must be young Schmidt! But it was hard to tell; the man’s face was contorted into that of a wild animal.

Cavendish gaped, almost forgetting his own pain, for several moments. Then he slipped away down the hall, heading for the hospital’s rear entrance, carrying his shoes in one hand like a husband sneaking home to his angry wife after staying away too long.

Jo was holding his arm as Stoner came out of the Officers’ Club. Markov stood on his other side, beneath the naked light bulbs that illuminated the club’s sign. Thousands of insects buzzed and hovered around the lights, trying in their mindless, instinctual way to understand its mystery.

The lights went out abruptly.

“I had no idea it was so late,” Stoner said. “We closed the joint.”

“It’s midnight,” Jo said. “They close at midnight.”

Stoner took a deep breath of sea air. It was cool and seemed to cut through the fog in his head.

“Well, my fellow revolutionaries,” he heard himself say, “what do you think our chances are?”

“We can do it,” Jo answered immediately.

Markov’s reply was slower, “I will need a few days to create a suitably confusing set of signals.”

“But what chances of success do we have?”

The Russian tugged at his beard. “Practically zero,” he admitted. Then, with a boyish grin, “But the difference between zero and practically zero is the margin of all successful revolutions.”

“We’re all crazy, you know,” Stoner said.

“Not crazy. Drunk, certainly. But not crazy.”

“We can do it,” Jo repeated, grasping Stoner’s arm more tightly. “Big Mac isn’t that smart; he’ll fall for it. He’ll probably have a heart attack but he’ll fall for it.”

“That’s a fringe benefit I hadn’t thought about,” Stoner said grimly.

“I’ll talk to Dr. Thompson about it first thing tomorrow morning,” Jo said.

“Thompson,” Stoner echoed.

Nodding, she said, “He’s the key to this whole plan. We’ve got to get him to go along with us.”

“He won’t do it,” Stoner said.

Jo answered, “I think I can talk him into it.”

He looked at her for a long moment, then walked down the three wooden steps from the club’s doorway to the coral-cement paving of the sidewalk.

“Skip it,” he said.

“What?”

Turning back to face Jo and Markov, Stoner said, “Forget the whole idea. I’m not going through with it.”

Markov’s face fell. “But it was your idea!”

“I know. But it’s no good. Forget about it,” he said.

Stepping down to his side, Jo said, “Keith, if you’re worried about Jeff and me…”

“I’m not worried about anything,” he snapped. “But I’m not going to fake data. That’s a scheme that only a drunk would even think of.”

And, abruptly, he turned and walked off toward the BOQ. Jo stood at the base of the steps and watched him disappear up the shadowy street.

Markov went to her. “I never believed he would go through with it,” he said gently. “It was merely wild talk, to get over his disappointment about Professor McDermott’s intransigence.”

But Jo said, “No. That’s not the real reason. He won’t tell us his real reason. He won’t even admit it to himself.”

Markov put a hand lightly on her shoulder. “Dear child, I know how you must feel.”

“How could you?”

“I know what a broken heart feels like.”

Jo shook her head. “And I thought mine was shatterproof.”

“None of them are,” Markov said. “The best you can hope for is some quick-setting cement to put the pieces back together again.”

With a rueful grin, Jo said, “Quick-setting cement? And here I thought you were a romantic.”

Markov put his arm around her shoulders and started walking her along the street. “Come, I will escort you to the hotel.”

Jo let him lead her. She only turned once to look down the street in the direction Stoner had taken.

In the darkness of her bedroom, the baleful red light of the electronics unit stared at Maria like a devil’s unwinking evil eye.

He’s an old man, she told herself. I can’t keep it on maximum power for long; he’ll collapse and die on me.

She was about to turn the power dial down when she heard a strange shuffling, dragging sound outside the window. Looking out toward the street, she saw Cavendish moving like a zombie, up the porch steps, to her front door.

Maria glanced at her wristwatch. The luminous dial was fuzzy, the hands indistinct. With an impatient huff, she leaned across the bed and turned the power dial down to minimum. The eyes are getting worse, she thought as she got to her feet. I will need stronger lenses soon.

Smoothing her dress, she went into the living room and unlocked the front door to admit Cavendish. He was standing there obediently, like a dog or a stolid cow, waiting to be allowed to enter.

Maria kept the lights off. She didn’t want to see the Englishman’s face. He went to a chair, collapsed into it with a soul-wrenching sigh.

“Your shoes,” Maria saw in the dim light from the street. “Why are you holding your shoes?”

“I was in the infirmary,” he answered.

“Why there?”

Slowly, Cavendish began to tell her what had happened to him, how he had tried to outwit his just punishment by going to the American hospital.

“How did you get away?” Maria asked.

He told her about the hubbub with Schmidt.

“Everyone knows he’s been popping drugs,” Cavendish said in his flat, machinelike tone, “but apparently he’s taken a serious overdose of something very powerful. He was like a madman. A berserker.”

A berserker. The phrase caught in Maria’s mind. A berserker. Certain narcotics can turn an ordinary young astronomer into a mindless fighting machine.

In the darkness, she smiled. Now I know how to stop Stoner, she thought. And it won’t even hurt Cavendish. For some strange reason, she felt relieved by that thought.

Chapter 30

The rally began at eight, but the powerful lights of RFK Stadium were already blazing when the first eager people arrived to begin filling up the huge oval.

Willie Wilson wiped a bead of nervous perspiration from his upper lip as he saw the seats filling up under the still-bright early evening sky of Washington.

“I told you it’d be a sellout,” his brother Bobby said, smiling. “We’ll be turning ’em away at the gates in another half hour.”

By the time the warm-up bands and singers and guest stars had prepared the huge, sellout throng, it was fully night, even though no one could see the sky through the overpowering glare of the stadium lights.

Willie’s entrance was carefully, dramatically staged. All the stadium lights were to go out except for the single spot that would pick him up as he stepped out of the entrance ramp and onto the turf. Then the spot would follow him as he walked—magnificently alone—the length of the runway and up the steps to the platform where the microphone stood waiting for him.

No matter how many audiences he spoke to, no matter how many times he delivered his message to the people, Willie still felt that sick, fluttery queasiness in his gut the last few seconds before he went out.

Behind him, he could hear Bobby crowing to Charlie Grodon, “I told you it’d be a sellout crowd, didn’t I?”

“This time,” Charlie agreed reluctantly. “But what about Anaheim? From what I hear the tickets ain’t moving so fast out there.”

Willie shut their voices out of his mind. They were not important. Nothing was important except convincing that crowd out there that his message was worth listening to.

He stood poised tensely as a young bronco about to be let out of its chute as the ex-singer turned proselytizer raised her voice in praise of him. Willie felt the clammy sweat oozing from his pores as she shouted into the microphone:

“…THE MAN YOU’VE ALL BEEN WAITING TO SEE,” the loudspeakers bellowed, “WITH THE MESSAGE YOU’VE ALL BEEN WAITING TO HEAR—THE URBAN EVANGELIST HIMSELF, WILLIE WILSON!”

The combined bands struck up a fanfare, the lights faded and died, and the crowd roared.

Then choked into silence.

In the lone spotlight, Willie halted in the middle of a loping, athletic stride.

Silence. As if the whole stadium had disappeared. As if he’d been whisked away into the darkness of interplanetary space.

Confused, bewildered, scared, Willie halted with the spotlight still dazzling his eyes. He could see nothing in the overpowering glare of that single light.

But he heard gasps. Voices. Groans.

“Look!”

“My God, what can it be?”

“Up there, look at the sky! Look at the sky!”

Willie tried to shade his eyes but it did no good. There were screams now, strangled cries of…what? Fear? Awe? Terror?

He took a couple of fast strides forward and the spotlight stayed where it was. Even the light’s operator had frozen.

Willie looked up and saw it. Flickering in the sky. The message.

The stadium was coming alive with sounds now. People were cursing, hollering, moving, jamming toward the exits, pulsing with the animal fear of a mindless mob.

Willie raced for the platform. Even in the darkness his steps were unfaltering. He banged his shin on the first stair, gritted his teeth and made his way to the top of the platform.

The mob was a living, breathing, mindless organism out there in the darkness. He could hear whimpers and screams and the bellowing of animal rage.

His hands clutched the slim rod of the microphone.

“LISTEN TO ME,” he shouted, and his voice was amplified a millionfold throughout the vast stadium.

“LISTEN TO ME! HEAR MY VOICE! THE WORD OF GOD IS HERE AMONG US. FALL TO YOUR KNEES!”

The clamor in the flickering darkness faltered, took in a collective breath. Willie thundered:

“FALL TO YOUR KNEES! HEED THE WORD OF GOD. THIS IS THE SIGN THAT WE HAVE ALL BEEN WAITING FOR. DO NOT BE AFRAID. THERE IS NOTHING TO FEAR.”

He hesitated, face raised to the lights in the sky. They pulsed and flickered like a living presence. The spotlight suddenly jerked into motion, caught him in its radiant circle.

“I TOLD YOU TO WATCH THE SKY. NOW LOOK AT IT! SEE THE HANDIWORK OF THE LORD GOD ALMIGHTY! THIS IS NOT A TIME FOR FEAR. IT’S A MOMENT OF TRIUMPH! TO YOUR KNEES AND PRAY. GIVE THANKS. GOD IS SPEAKING TO US IN A VOICE OF FIRE, BUT IT’S A LOVING VOICE. IT’S THE VOICE OF LIFE ETERNAL. WITNESS THE BEAUTY OF IT, THE KINGDOM AND POWER AND GLORY OF OUR LORD AND SAVIOR JESUS CHRIST, OF GOD THE FATHER AND THE SON AND THE HOLY SPIRIT, FOR EVER AND EVER…”

The newspapers next morning said that Willie spoke for three straight hours, never faltering once nor leaving that lone circle of light. His voice alone averted a panic that might have crushed thousands in a terrified stampede for the stadium exits.

Jo said good night to Markov at the hotel’s entrance, and even stepped into the foyer, where the sleepy guard sat with his chin on his chest.

With an unhappy shake of her head, she pushed the door open again and stepped back outside. Markov was already well down the street; no sense calling to him. Jo walked across the street, slipped between cement block buildings and headed for the beach.

She wasn’t surprised when she saw Stoner there, walking stolidly alone down the silvery-white sand. He looked up as she approached, and he didn’t seem surprised either.

“Hello, Keith.”

He almost smiled at her. “Well, you said we were two of a kind. Here we are.”

She fell into step alongside him and they walked on the warm sand, beneath the tall, stately palms that rustled softly in the breeze. Jo stopped for a moment to take off her shoes. Stoner sniffed at the warm sea breeze, heavy with the scent of flowers. The surf murmured off in the darkness, endlessly.

Walking alongside him again, Jo asked, “What’s your real reason for backing away from our little scheme?”

“I told you,” he answered in the darkness. “I won’t be party to falsifying data. It sounded good when I was drunk, but now I’m sober.”

“That’s the reason?”

“Yes.”

“The only reason?”

He stopped and turned toward her. “What do you want me to say: that I don’t want to do it because I don’t want you cuddling up to Thompson?”

“Yes, Keith, that’s exactly what I want you to say.”

“It would make a difference to you?”

“I love you, Keith.”

For a moment, he said nothing. Then, “Does McDermott know?”

“Of course he knows. Why do you think he made me go with him? To take me away from you. Makes him feel macho.”

“And why did you go with him?”

“To make sure that you’d be allowed to come here with us, and not be sent to prison.”

“They wouldn’t send me to prison,” he said. But his voice was lower, softer.

“McDermott said they would.”

“And that’s why you’ve been sleeping with him.”

“Yes. And to get what I want out of him, too,” she answered.

His shoulders slumped. “Jesus Christ, Jo. You’re right, we are two of a kind.”

“I’ve known it all along. And now all you really want is to go flying off into space again, isn’t it?”

He shrugged and resumed walking along the beach.

“Everything you’ve done,” Jo said, “all the mountains you’ve moved…it’s really only for the chance to fly out and meet this alien spacecraft.”

“So I’m a single-minded fanatic,” he muttered.

“You’re a human being, Keith. You scare me sometimes, but you’re human. If only you’d act like one more often…”

“I scare you?”

“This single-mindedness of yours. This drive to fly away from everything, away from everyone…”

He put his arms around her. “I don’t want to fly away from you, Jo. I really don’t.”

She let him pull her close and leaned against his strong, sure body and felt all the anger, all the doubts, all the fears wash away like dead fallen leaves swept off in a cleansing torrent.

He tilted her chin up and kissed her, lightly, and she clung to him, eyes closed.

Their lips parted. “You’re so beautiful, Jo. So impossibly beautiful…”

But as she opened her eyes and looked up at him she saw the sky. “Keith…what is it?”

He turned his gaze upward and she felt him tense for an instant. He let go of her and spun around, head flung back, staring, mouth agape, arms spread outward to balance him as he turned again and again and again, gazing raptly at the bright flickering sky.

“What is it, Keith?” Jo repeated, staring herself at the glowing curtains of light that streamed across the heavens from horizon to horizon.

He laughed. “What is it? Take a look! It’s our revolution! It’s the biggest cosmic joke of them all! Look at it! Just look at it!”

The whole sky was alight with blazing veils of color, shimmering reds and greens and palest yellows, curtains of light that shifted magically across the heavens, dimming the stars, scattering their reflections in the calm waters of the lagoon.

Jo felt the breath suck out of her. It was awesome, frightening, overpoweringly beautiful.

“The Northern Lights!” Stoner was laughing, spinning around like a little boy on the sand, drinking in the wonder of it. “Or maybe the Southern Lights. Who cares? If they’re shining here, this close to the equator, they must be shining everywhere. All over the planet! Got to be. Look at them! Aren’t they magnificent?”

She ran to him. “The Northern Lights? But why…?”

Sliding an arm around her, “It’s our visitor, Jo. Don’t you see? He rattled the magnetosphere of Jupiter and now he’s doing the same thing to Earth’s magnetic field. It’s his answer, his signal to us! Magnificent!”

The planet turns. The line dividing night from day races across seas and continents. And as darkness touched the abodes of humanity:

Along the broad avenues and narrow alleyways of Peking, millions of startled citizens stare up at the sky, watching the fire dragons dance across the heavens. With single mind, they rush toward the Forbidden City, thronging in the ancient square, seeking an answer, an explanation, word from their leaders that will expel the dragons and ease the fears that clutch their hearts.

In Tehran the muezzins climb hurriedly to their minaret balconies to proclaim the glory of Allah, the All-Wise, the All-Compassionate. Men fall to their faces in prayer, casting fearful glances up at the fire-lit sky. Women huddle together and weep. The end of the world is very near, they know.

In Warsaw and Cape Town, in Dublin and Dakar, in Buenos Aires and Nova Scotia, the sky blazes and the people gape and cry out and pray to their gods or their scientists for some saving word, some hope, something to take away the fear that turns blood to ice.

And the lights in the sky dance, everywhere, all across the nighttime of Earth.