Voyagers

Chapter 31

Since his arrival on Kwajalein, Stoner had worked at a desk in an open office area on the top floor of one of the oldest buildings on the island.

Seventeen men and women whose jobs were deemed not important enough to rate private offices shared this area, which they affectionately called the Swamp. Their desks were jammed together like an old-fashioned newspaper city room. It was almost as noisy as a newspaper office, too. No matter how carefully one tried to avoid irking one’s neighbors, phones rang, computer terminals clacked, voices echoed off the low corrugated ceiling and the bare cement block walls. And when the sun pounded on the low metal roof, not all the air conditioning on the island could make the Swamp bearable.

Rain was hammering on the roof as Stoner stood in front of his desk, watching the President’s televised speech on the viewscreen that normally served the computer. A tropical squall yowled outside their windows, but no one in the Swamp paid any attention to it.

Everyone in the room watched in dead silence as the President spoke. Slowly, carefully, the President told the people about the spacecraft, patiently explaining that it presented no threat to anyone on Earth. No threat. He kept repeating that. It was an opportunity, a marvelous, unexpected revelation that the human race is not alone in the universe. It is not a threat to us.

But the President looked frightened. And very, very weary.

Stoner listened, watched, waited. He sensed every nerve in his body stretching taut, every muscle aching with strain as he literally tried to pull the words he wanted to hear from the President’s televised image.

And then the words came: “This morning I issued a directive for a joint American-Soviet space mission, to fly out toward this extraterrestrial spacecraft and examine it firsthand. We will go out to meet this alien visitor.”

The breath sighed out of Stoner. His knees trembled. We’re going to do it, he told himself, still too tense to smile or say anything. We’re going to do it. I’m going to do it.

He barely heard the President go on to announce:

“I have therefore decided to devote my entire personal effort to achieving the international co-operation and understanding necessary to allow us to make effective contact with the alien spacecraft and to garner maximum benefit from that contact. Since this will be such a heavy responsibility upon me personally, and upon my aides and advisers, I have decided—reluctantly—not to seek re-election to the presidency.”

Somebody in the steaming hot room yelped. Stoner barely paid attention.

“I will not accept my party’s nomination for re-election, and I will not campaign for any candidate this year. My full energies must—and will—be devoted to leading the international effort to learn as much as we can from this alien visitor.”

A few ragged cheers came from the others watching the screen.

“Maybe now we’ll get some decent food,” one of the men wisecracked.

“Or get my window fixed,” said a woman, regarding the leak that trickled down the wall from the windowsill.

The tension snapped. Even Stoner grinned as he sat back at his desk and resumed his interrupted task: scanning the spectral analyses of the approaching spacecraft.

The rain ended almost as abruptly as it had begun. The afternoon brightened and the Swamp heated up to its usual mugginess. People began drifting away from their desks, finding reasons for going across to the computer building, or the radio telescope installations, or anywhere that might be cooler and drier.

“I worked through lunch,” said one technician as he passed Stoner’s desk. “I’m entitled to leave a little early.”

Stoner barely glanced up at him. The man started down the stairs with two buddies trailing close behind him. He had made the excuse within Stoner’s earshot, as if he now regarded Stoner as the man who made decisions.

As they disappeared down the echoing metal steps, Jo Camerata came in. She looked around for a moment, then went to Stoner’s desk and perched on the edge of it, her long bare legs crossed, hair pulled back and pinned up off her neck.

“How can you work in this heat?” she asked. “It’s unbearable.”

“I didn’t notice,” Stoner said.

“Didn’t notice? You’re sweating like a horse. Your shirt is soaked.”

He glanced down and picked at his shirt front, plastered against his chest.

“Must be my Zen training. Mind over matter.”

Jo tapped her own shirt front. “Well, this matter is going out to the beach for a dip before dinner. Want to come with me?”

He smiled at her. “I’ve got work to do, Jo.”

“It can wait. Come on, you can come to work early tomorrow. That’s what I do. I get in before seven.”

Stoner gave her a skeptical glance.

“Well…” Jo broke into a grin. “Would you believe, before eight?”

“Sometimes.”

She leaned toward him. “I can’t tempt you? I know some very nice empty beaches, where nobody goes.”

“Jo, we’ve only got a few weeks to get everything ready.”

“You work too hard. At the wrong things.”

He could smell the fragrance of her scent. Leaning back in his chair, away from her, he offered, “Look—I really have an awful lot to do here. Can I meet you for dinner? Around seven?”

“I have to go swimming alone?” Jo made a pout.

“It’s a rough life,” Stoner said.

“You’re a difficult man, Keith Stoner,” Jo said, getting to her feet.

Looking up at her, he replied seriously, “I’m not trying to be difficult, Jo. Honestly.”

“Oh, I know! I just wish that you’d put your own needs a little higher up on your list of priorities.”

He didn’t answer. She glanced around, saw that the Swamp was practically empty, leaned down swiftly and kissed him on the lips. Before Stoner could react she was on her way to the stairs, grinning.

He grinned back at her. Then he swung right back to his work. His smile disappeared as he returned to the spectral analyses, almost alone in the steamy room.

Outside in the sun-dazzled street, at least there was a sea breeze to moderate the drenching heat. Jo took a deep breath and, instead of heading for the beach, started walking back toward the computer building.

Halfway there she met Markov, coming up the street in the opposite direction.

“Ah, my heartbroken friend. How are you this afternoon?”

Despite herself, Jo laughed. “Still heartbroken. And you?”

“The same.”

She stood in the hot sunlight, gazed at the squat, windowless computer building, then turned her attention to the Russian. He was smiling at her, boyishly polite and expectant.

Just because Keith’s a fanatic about this is no reason for me to be, too, Jo thought. I’ve got my own life to lead.

“Can you paddle a canoe?” Jo asked Markov.

He blinked. “I beg your pardon. Sometimes my grasp of your euphemisms…”

“A dugout canoe,” Jo said. “There’s lots of them on the beach, up past the airstrip. We could paddle out across the lagoon and find a nice private island, all to ourselves.”

Markov’s face lit up. “And no sharks?”

“No sharks.”

“Show me where these canoes are,” Markov said, offering his arm. “I will power you through the water like a dolphin!”

The Swamp was empty, except for Stoner, when Jeff Thompson and Lieutenant Commander Tuttle came in. Tuttle looked around, a puzzled frown on his snub-nosed, sunburned face.

“Why isn’t the air conditioning on?” he asked.

“It is,” Stoner said.

Tuttle was in his khakis, but the short-sleeved shirt was already darkening with perspiration.

“We’ve got to get you out of here,” the lieutenant commander said. “How can you work in this soup?”

“Dedication.”

“Now you know why he can drink so much beer without getting fat,” Thompson said, yanking his shirt out from the waistband of his shorts.

Stoner turned off this computer screen and leaned back in his creaking chair. His back felt wet.

“What brings you up here?” he asked Tuttle.

Thompson answered, “You saw the President’s speech?”

“Stood at attention all the way through it.”

Tuttle pulled a wheeled chair from the next desk and sat down. He’s so little, Stoner thought. I always thought Jeff was small, but Tuttle looks like a kid beside Jeff.

“Professor McDermott received orders from Washington just before the speech was broadcast,” Tuttle said.

“About the rendezvous mission?” Stoner asked.

“Right. Our people in Washington are talking with the Russian embassy. I expect Professor Zworkin will be getting orders from Moscow before the day’s over.”

“So it’s going to happen.”

Thompson nodded gravely. “You’re going out to meet our visitor. In a Russian ship, it looks like.”

“Big Mac must be overjoyed,” Stoner muttered.

“Professor McDermott…” Tuttle glanced at Thompson, then continued, “Professor McDermott is in a sort of state of shock. I don’t think we can depend on him to make any effective decisions for the time being.”

“He’s sick?”

Thompson said, “He needs a rest.”

“Dr. Thompson is taking over McDermott’s administrative duties. He and Professor Zworkin will be coequals on Project JOVE for the time being.”

“I see. Good luck, Jeff.”

“And you,” Tuttle went on, “will take over the planning for the rendezvous mission.”

Stoner nodded.

“We’ll have to move you out of here, into a better office…”

“How about Big Mac’s office?” Stoner suggested, straight-faced.

Tuttle’s jaw dropped open.

“He’s kidding,” Thompson said quickly. “He can take the office next to mine. We’ll find someplace else for the people in it.”

“Okay,” said Tuttle.

Stoner said, “I want Professor Markov to work with me.”

“Markov?”

“He’s the linguist,” Thompson said.

“That’s right,” said Stoner. “He’s got a more open mind about alien thought processes than the others around here. And he can help me get along with the Russians I’ll have to work with.”

“Alien thought processes?” Tuttle repeated.

“Language, psychology, call it whatever you want. But the fact is that we’ll be going out to meet something, or somebody, that has no point in common with any language or race or culture on Earth.”

“You don’t think that thing has people on it, do you?” Tuttle’s eyes were widening.

“I doubt it,” Stoner admitted. “If it’s come all the way from another star, another solar system, it would have to be gigantic to hold a crew. Even one man would need all sorts of supplies, fuels, life support equipment…”

“How could they keep a crew alive for thousands of years?” Thompson asked.

“Freeze ’em,” said Stoner. “Then thaw them out and revive them automatically when they come close to their destination.”

“Their destination?” Tuttle asked in a hollow tiny voice. “You think they’re coming here deliberately?”

Stoner shook his head. “No. I don’t see how they could have picked out our planet over interstellar distances, any more than we could find theirs.”

“But they’re here. They found us.”

“True enough.”

“They could have aimed for a star like their own,” Thompson suggested. “A nice, stable, G-type yellow star.”

“If they themselves came from a G-type star.”

“Chances are that they did.”

“Maybe. But look at how that spacecraft behaved when it entered our solar system,” Stoner pointed out. “First, it headed for the biggest planet in the system, the one with the strongest magnetic field wrapped around it.”

“Hey, that’s right!”

“And after swinging around it for a while, they took off for the inner planet with the strongest magnetic field.”

“Earth,” whispered Tuttle.

“So that’s what they’re looking for,” Thompson said. “They must come from a world that’s got a good-sized magnetosphere, and they figure that only worlds shielded by strong magnetic fields can support life on them.”

“Could be,” said Stoner. “Sounds logical.”

“But is it a manned ship or is it automated?” Tuttle demanded. “Does it have a crew aboard or not?”

“My guess is that it’s not manned,” Stoner said. “Why send a crew on a one-way mission into the unknown? It’s obvious they’re just sniffing around, looking for signs of life.”

“We’ve been broadcasting radio and television out into space for more than seventy-five years,” Thompson said. “They could have picked up our broadcasts from dozens of light-years away.”

Stoner chuckled. “Somehow I don’t see an interstellar mission being sent out on the strength of ‘I Love Lucy.’”

“You never know.” Thompson grinned back. “Maybe there’s an interstellar FCC that wants us to stop polluting the ether.”

“Now, that makes sense,” Stoner agreed.

“But if they do have a crew aboard,” Thompson mused, growing more serious, “think of the technology they must have to keep people alive and functioning over interstellar times and distances.”

“It can’t be!” Tuttle blurted. “It’s got to be unmanned. It’s got to be!”

“Is it very painful?” Cavendish asked.

Hans Schmidt’s eyes looked heavy, sleepy, rather than pained. He turned his head slightly on the pillow and gazed out the hospital window.

“Can you hear me? Am I bothering you? I’ll go away if you like,” said Cavendish.

“No, it’s all right,” Schmidt said. “I…it’s just that I don’t know what to say.”

Schmidt could not understand the suffering that had turned Cavendish’s face into a bone-tight mask of tension. To the young astronomer, the Englishman was merely an old man with red, sleepless eyes and a nervous tic in his cheek.

“You’ve had a bad time of it,” Cavendish said, his voice strained, harsh.

“It’s my own fault,” said Schmidt.

“Hardly,” Cavendish made himself say. “Someone sold you the drugs. An American, I’ll wager.”

“Several Americans.”

“You see?”

Schmidt’s eyes closed. Drowsily, he said, “You’re the only one who’s come to visit me, other than Dr. Reynaud. He’s just down the hall. I broke his arm, you know.”

“It’s a minor fracture, actually,” Cavendish said, “and Reynaud’s told everyone that he did it himself, falling over your bed.”

Schmidt shook his head slowly. “I demolished the room. They told me about it. I have no memory of it.”

“It’s not your fault,” Cavendish insisted. “You mustn’t blame yourself.”

“Who then?”

Cavendish started to reply, but the words wouldn’t come out. He got up from the little wooden chair on which he was perched, walked stiffly, painfully, to the window and looked out. Perspiration beaded his brow.

They’re making you do this, a part of his mind shouted silently at him. They’re forcing you to do it. But you can fight against them. You don’t have to obey.

His breath caught. He gasped with pain.

“I can’t,” he muttered.

“What did you say?” Schmidt asked from his bed.

Turning back to face the astronomer, Cavendish could feel his legs shaking beneath him, his stomach wrenching with the pain.

“It…it’s not your fault,” he repeated, and the pain eased a little. “The Americans…they forced you to come here, pulled you away from your home, your studies…”

“My girl, too.”

“Yes. You see?” It was easier if he just kept talking; the pain faded while he spoke to Schmidt. “You can’t blame yourself for what happened. It’s the bloody Yanks who’ve called the tune all along.”

Schmidt agreed with a nod, “I could have been home and happy. I never touched anything stronger than pot in my whole life until I came here.”

Woodenly, like a marionette jerked along by invisible strings, Cavendish stepped back to the chair beside Schmidt’s bed. Instead of sitting in it, he leaned both bony hands on the chair’s back.

A wave of pain washed over him and his knees nearly gave way.

“Stoner!” he blurted.

“What?”

Looking toward the young astronomer through pain-reddened eyes, Cavendish said, “It’s Stoner who’s at the bottom of all this.”

“Stoner? The American?”

“Yes…” Taking a deep, shuddering breath, Cavendish went on, “We’d all be home now if it weren’t for him. McDermott wanted to finish the project and send us all home, but Stoner insisted on pressing on.”

“He wants to get all the credit, doesn’t he?” Schmidt said, the old sullen pout returning to his lips.

“Yes.” It was more of a whimper than a word.

Schmidt finally noticed the old man’s pain. “What’s wrong? Are you ill?”

“Headaches,” Cavendish grated out. “I…get headaches.”

“Shall I call a doctor?”

“No. No, I’ll be all right.” Cavendish fished in the pockets of his trousers and pulled out a small plastic bottle. “They gave me pain-killers. Quite good, actually.”

Schmidt had propped himself up in the bed on one elbow. “They won’t let me have anything for the pain,” he said. “Nothing stronger than aspirin.”

Holding the bottle in front of the youngster, Cavendish repeated, “These are quite good. Non-narcotic. Non-habit-forming.”

“Really?”

“Yes,” the old man lied.

“It gets worse at night,” Schmidt said. “The pain.”

Straightening up, Cavendish said, “Perhaps it would be all right if I let you have a few of these…”

Schmidt nodded as Cavendish unscrewed the cap and shook out four pills into his trembling palm.

“You’re sure you can spare them?” Schmidt asked.

“I…can get more…”

Schmidt accepted the ovate yellow capsules, held them in his hand and looked down at them.

Cavendish’s whole body was on fire. “Try one,” he croaked. “It…will keep the pain…away.”

Schmidt hesitated only a moment, then took the cup of water next to his bed in one hand and popped a capsule into his mouth with the other. He drank and swallowed.

Within a few moments he was leaning back on the bed, glassy-eyed.

Cavendish, twitching as if electric currents were being applied to his nerve centers, came over to the bed and whispered into Schmidt’s ear:

“It’s all Stoner’s fault. If you can get up from this bed and find Stoner, you can go home again and be happy. Stoner wants to hurt you. Stoner wants to kill you. You’ve got to stop him before he kills you.”

Cavendish’s eyes widened at the words pouring from his lips. It was as if someone else were speaking, using Cavendish’s mouth as a transmitter, a machine totally disconnected from his own control.

Terrified at what was happening, he jerked away from the bed. A glance out the window told him that it was still late afternoon outside. Cavendish shambled out of Schmidt’s room, heading away from the hospital as fast as he could. He never noticed that out in the peaceful lagoon an outrigger canoe with two people in it abruptly capsized.

Chapter 32

They were already soaked from the first time the outrigger had overturned. Markov paddled furiously, battering the water with uneven, choppy strokes, while Jo sat up in the bow and tried not to laugh.

“Watch out now,” she warned, “we’re getting into another channel between islands…”

Before she could finish the sentence the current caught the canoe and it started to tilt over. Markov watched helplessly as the outrigger pontoon swung up over his head and the two of them were dumped again into the bath-warm water.

He stood waist-deep in the water and felt his pockets. If anything’s lost, it’s lost forever, he knew. Then he remembered his wristwatch. It was dripping water and the crystal was fogged over, but the sweep-second hand still seemed to be moving.

“Come on, help me right it,” Jo called.

With a heavy sigh, Markov grabbed the pontoon struts and pushed the canoe right side up again. It was full of water. Laughing, Jo motioned for him to tilt the canoe enough to let most of the water out.

“I thought,” Markov said, grunting with the effort, “that these boats could not turn over. Isn’t that what the outrigger is for?”

Jo just laughed. He helped to push her back into the canoe, making certain to get a good handful of her backside in the process. Firm yet tender, he appraised.

Still grinning at him, Jo stuck out a hand. “Come on, climb back in.”

Markov surveyed the distance to the empty beach nearest them. “No thank you, I’ll walk. It’s safer.”

“Walk?”

“Wade. In fact, I will propel you to a safe harbor.”

“I thought you were afraid of sharks.”

He looked down into the perfectly clear water. “If I see a shark coming, I’m sure I can outrun him to the beach.”

He got behind the canoe and started pushing it through the water like an oversized child’s toy.

Jo clutched the gunwales and beamed at him. “My hero! Just like Humphrey Bogart in ‘The African Queen.’”

“Who?” Markov asked, sloshing through the thigh-deep water.

She gaped at him. “You never heard of Humphrey Bogart?”

“Wasn’t he Vice-president of the United States?”

As he nudged the outrigger up onto the beach, the sky darkened and unloaded another shower. Jo hopped out of the boat and helped him push it safely up on the sand. Then they ran for the cover of the trees up the beach and collapsed on the sand, wet, laughing, breathless.

“I don’t believe that I was meant for the outdoor life,” Markov observed.

“Whatever makes you say that?” Jo countered.

“I am a civilized man. That means I belong in a city, not out in this wilderness.”

“Moscow?”

He nodded. “Yes. Moscow would look very good to me right now. Providing you were there to share it with me, of course, dear one.”

“What’s it like?” Jo asked. “I’ve never been there.”

“It is a city,” Markov answered, shrugging. “Not as beautiful as Paris, nor as large as London. Not as crowded as Tokyo. The sun shines there for two whole minutes each year. Everyone rushes outdoors to witness the phenomenon. Then it gets cloudy again and it snows for the rest of the year.”

She laughed. “You love it, don’t you?”

Watching the rain gusting across the lagoon, Markov answered, “I suppose I do. I was born there. I imagine I will die there. My father died fifty kilometers to the west of Moscow, helping to hold off the Nazi invaders in nineteen forty-one. His father died in the civil war that followed the Revolution.”

Jo bent over slightly and touched his cheek with her outstretched hand. “But you’ll live a long and peaceful life, won’t you?”

He actually blushed. “I have every intention of doing so,” he said, trying to recover his composure.

They waited as the shower drifted across the island and headed off to the west. The sun came out from behind the scudding clouds, hot and bright. In minutes the beach was dry again.

Markov squinted at the sky. “Our clothes would dry faster if we spread them on the sand.”

Nodding, Jo teased, “Then we could go skinnydipping again.”

“I think I’ve been in the water enough for one afternoon,” Markov said.

Jo thought it over for a few moments. “Maybe we’d just better let the sun dry us off, without stripping.”

With a nod, Markov answered, “The better part of valor.”

Jo smiled at him, then said, “I just hope we can get back to Kwaj before it gets dark.”

It was midnight in Washington.

Despite the tension he felt, Willie Wilson smiled easily and leaned back on the couch. The hotel suite was well furnished; the management had given him its very best, top floor and top prices.

“You’re not from the insurance company?” Willie asked, spreading his arms across the back of the couch.

The young man sitting on the chair facing him smiled. “No, sir, I’m not. I’m with the Department of Justice.”

“Justice?” Willie glanced at his brother, who stood uneasily by the empty, unused bar, an almost scared look on his ruddy face.

“Yes, sir,” said the young man. He was neatly dressed in a conservative gray suit and quiet maroon tie. He looks like a lawyer, Willie thought.

“What do you want with me?” Willie asked him.

“We want to prevent a tragedy from happening,” the young man said.

“We?”

“The Department. The Attorney General. The White House.”

Willie gave a low whistle. “Heavy stuff.”

The young man nodded.

“What tragedy are you worrying about?” Willie asked.

“The panic you’ve been spreading.”

“Panic? I don’t deal in panic. I’m just a simple minister spreading the Word of the Lord.”

“Sir, you are frightening people. What happened at RFK Stadium could have been a colossal tragedy. It was only avoided by the narrowest of margins.”

“By his quick thinking!” Bobby snapped, jabbing a finger toward his brother.

“It was the Lord’s doing, not mine,” Willie said softly, still smiling.

“Reverend Wilson, you are frightening people. It was bad enough when you were just telling them to watch the skies. But now—with these lights in the sky every night…”

“That’s the message we’ve been waiting for,” Willie said.

“People are scared! They think the end of the world is coming.”

“I never said that.”

“But that’s what people believe you’re saying,” the young man said earnestly. “All over the country.”

“I’m just a simple minister of the Lord…”

“You’ve become a powerful national figure, Reverend Wilson. And you’ve got to show some responsibility for that power.”

“What do you mean, responsibility?” Bobby asked.

“You’ve got to cool it.”

“What?”

“You’ve got to stop scaring people. You’ve got to tell them that the lights in the sky have nothing to do with God or the end of the world.”

“I can’t do that,” Willie said flatly.

“You’ll have to.”

“Or else what?” Bobby asked.

The young man turned slightly in his chair to face Bobby. “Or else the federal government will get very tough with you.”

Willie’s smile never faded. He said, “I’ve met with the President, you know.”

“Yes, sir, I know. He sent me here, Reverend. He asked me to remind you of the tremendous responsibility you hold in your hands.”

“The President did?”

“That’s right, sir. He could have sent someone from IRS. Or from FCC.”

Willie’s smile became a shade tighter, just a little forced.

“In other words,” Bobby grumbled, “we play ball or the government shuts us off from television and goes through our books with a hundred auditors.”

“What do you mean, play ball?”

“Where is your next big rally, Reverend Wilson?”

“Anaheim.”

The young man nodded. “Yes. We’ve already been in contact with the stadium management there.”

“What right do you have…?”

“It’s very simple, Reverend. A panic at one of your rallies could kill hundreds of people. Maybe thousands. None of us wants that to happen. Right?”

Willie nodded slowly.

The young man took a deep breath. “Then what you have to tell your followers is that the lights in the sky are completely natural, that they’re caused by the spacecraft that’s approaching us, and that there is no supernatural meaning behind the lights whatsoever. You must disassociate the lights in the sky from the voice of God.”

“But that’s not possible,” Willie said.

“Yes, it is. You’ll have to say it.”

Willie glanced up at his brother, then looked back at the man from the Justice Department. “You’re interfering with the Lord’s work.”

“You work for the Lord, sir. I work for the Attorney General.” He hesitated, then added, “And we all work for the IRS.”

It was sunset before Stoner emerged from his office building. He stood at the entrance for a moment and looked out through the fringe of palms across the street toward the flaming sky. Then he turned and headed for the Post Exchange.

An hour later, showered, dressed in clean slacks and pullover shirt, he walked from the BOQ to the hotel, only to find that Jo wasn’t there. With a shrug, he went to the computer building, then to the Officers’ Club. She wasn’t in either place.

Where the hell could she be? he wondered. The clock behind the club bar showed it was well past seven. She said she was going for a swim; if anything had happened to her the whole island would be buzzing with it.

He made his way past the hardy group of regulars who lined the bar and sat wearily in the same corner booth he and Markov had used before.

She couldn’t have forgotten, he knew. She just decided not to show up. Cold anger seeped through him. She’s probably with McDermott.

No matter where Cavendish walked, no matter how far he decided to go or which direction he decided to go in, his feet kept returning him to the hospital.

It was dusk now, and as he leaned against the bole of a palm across the tennis courts from the hospital’s blocky shape, he could see lights going on in the windows.

I’ve got no will of my own, he whimpered deep within himself. They’re controlling me, making me walk and talk like some bloody animated doll.

He sagged against the tree. The pain wasn’t so bad at the moment, but nothing could make it go away altogether. Only obedience to their commands alleviated the agony.

“Damned clever of them,” he muttered to himself. “If they devoted as much effort to bettering their blasted economy as they do to controlling people’s minds, they wouldn’t need their blasted KGB.”

The pain wasn’t so bad now. Maybe I could get some food down, he thought. Or sleep! He leaned his head back and closed his eyes. Sleep. What a luxury that would be.

Cavendish never saw Schmidt raise his window, lean out over its edge and drop the two floors to the sandy soil at the base of the hospital wall. The young man was fully dressed, his eyes glittered wildly, and in his buttoned shirt pocket were only two of the capsules that Cavendish had given him a few hours earlier.

Markov felt like a sailor returning home from a shipwreck. He was stiff-kneed with muscle strain, sticky with salt and sand, and sunburned painfully on his face and high forehead.

Every muscle ached. He had rowed the damnable outrigger canoe for hours while Jo sat grinning at him. If it hadn’t been for the brightness of the aurorae and the lights from the buildings on Kwajalein, Markov knew they would have drifted out to sea in the nighttime darkness and perished in the watery wilderness.

Now he clumped up the front stairs of his own little bungalow, crossed the uneven cement porch and pushed through the front door. It was not yet nine o’clock but it felt like four in the morning to Markov. Maria will be surprised to see me home so early, he thought.

She was not in the front room. He shrugged, and the movement under his shirt made him realize that his neck and shoulders were also sunburned.

With a sigh that looked forward to nothing more than collapsing face down on his bed, he opened the bedroom door.

Maria gaped at him, startled, shocked. The suitcase on her bed beside her was filled with strange electronic controls. A tiny glowing screen was flickering with a jagged trace of light, like an EKG.

But it was the expression on her face that stunned Markov. Guilt, anger, fear were all there. Her mouth was open but no sound issued from it. Her eyes stared at him and he could see all the way into her soul through them. She looked the way Lucifer must have looked when he realized that God had opened the pits of hell for him.

“What are you doing?” Markov bellowed. “What is this?”

All pain forgotten, he advanced on his wife. She got up from the bed, backed away from him, confusion and shame written across her face.

Markov looked from his wife to the suitcase of electronic gear. He grabbed the suitcase and raised it over his head.

“Don’t!” Maria screamed, and leaped at him.

He hurled the suitcase against the nearest wall. It split in two under the impact of the cement.

“You don’t know what you’re doing!” Maria screeched, clawing at him.

He pushed her away and she bounced onto the bed. Markov stepped over to the electronic equipment. One baleful red light was still on. In a cold fury he smashed his sandaled foot against it. Glass shattered and plastic buckled. Again and again he stomped the suitcase until nothing was left but unrecognizable shards of glass and circuit boards.

Maria was round-eyed. “You…you’ve destroyed a vital piece of state property.”

“Be silent, woman,” he growled, “and be grateful that I don’t do the same to you. I don’t know what that equipment was for, but it was for no good, I can see that much.”

Staring at the smashed equipment, Maria broke into sobs. “They’ll kill us both, Kirill. They’ll kill us both.”

“Then let them!” Markov snapped. “Perhaps we’d be better off dead.”

Chapter 33

Stoner sat alone in the corner booth, feet up on the opposite bench, a half-empty bottle of champagne sitting in a plastic bucket on the table.

Some big night, he said to himself. You sure are having a wild time, old buddy.

The club was filling up with the after-dinner crowd. Somebody had put blaring disco music on the stereo, and people had to shout to hear themselves over it. A few people came over to Stoner’s table from time to time, but he quickly and firmly shooed them away.

Maybe I ought to go over to McDermott’s trailer and see if she’s really there, Stoner thought. But what if she is? Then what do you do? Drag her off by the hair of her head?

He yanked the bottle from its icy water and poured his plastic glass full. The champagne looked pretty flat. California stuff, he guessed, peering at the label. Christ, not even that: New York State. He dunked the bottle back into its bucket so hard that some of the ice water splashed on him. Blinking, Stoner swung his feet to the floor.

Hell, I can’t even get drunk when I want to.

The front door of the club banged open so hard that the crash made everyone jump. Stoner saw Schmidt standing framed in the doorway, shoulders hunched and head lowered as if he were going to ram a wall.

For a moment all conversations stopped. The disco music blared inanely on, and Schmidt’s heavy, open-mouthed breathing seemed to match the music’s thumping beat.

Stoner turned back to his champagne. The club filled with talk again. People moved, laughed, drank. But Schmidt, burning eyes fixed on Stoner, pushed his way past the crowd at the bar, heading for the corner booth.

“It’s all your fault,” he said to Stoner.

Stoner looked up at him.

“You can sit there and drink champagne,” Schmidt said, his words only slightly slurred, “and keep us here in this godforsaken hole.”

“What are you talking about?” Stoner asked.

“Sure, you drink champagne and wait for the Nobel Prize while the rest of us rot away!” the young astronomer said, his voice rising.

“Sit down,” Stoner said, “and stop making a fool of yourself.”

“I’ll show you who’s a fool!” Schmidt shouted.

He grabbed Stoner by the shirt and yanked him out of the booth as easily as a child lifts a toy. Stoner felt his shin scrape against the table’s edge and then he was completely off his feet and thrown to the floor.

Everything in the club stopped. Even the music.

“Champagne!” Schmidt screamed, slapping the bottle and its plastic bucket off the table.

“What the hell’s wrong with you?” Stoner bawled, scrambling back to his feet. No one in the club moved, they all stood frozen, wide-eyed, watching the two of them.

Turning on him, Schmidt roared, “It’s all your fault!” and leaped at Stoner, grabbing him by the throat. His thumbs were like steel against Stoner’s windpipe. Stoner gagged, couldn’t breathe.

Instinctively, Stoner locked his hands together and swung both arms hard inside Schmidt’s wrists, ripping the younger man’s hands away from his throat.

“You’re crazy,” he croaked raggedly.

But Schmidt, his eyes afire, screamed back, “You want to steal everything from me.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Stoner saw the club door swing open again and Jo stepped in, hair still glistening wet. Her mouth dropped open as she saw the two men confronting each other.

Schmidt swung at Stoner and he saw the punch coming but he was too surprised and slow to avoid it. The Dutchman’s heavy fist caught him on the cheek and spun him around. He crashed into the booth’s table and sprawled over it. Schmidt was on him before Stoner could turn over, both knees on his back, pounding his head and shoulders with bunched fists.

“Your fault! Your fault!” Schmidt screamed with each blow.

Stoner felt himself starting to black out and knew that Schmidt would go on pounding him to death while all the rest of them watched. By the time they got past their shock it would be too late to help. With raw animal instinct he jammed one foot against the back of the bench and pushed the two of them off the table. They fell heavily to the floor and he broke free of Schmidt’s insane grip.

For an instant the two men crawled away from each other. Stoner saw the younger man’s eyes. He’s crazy! Schmidt’s hair was matted over his face, eyes dilated, mouth hanging open, gasping for breath, snarling at him. Stoner could taste blood in his own mouth and every muscle of his body throbbed with pain.

He’ll kill me! Stoner’s mind shrieked at him. He’ll kill me if I let him.

Schmidt scrambled to his feet as Stoner did. Stoner backed away a short step, and felt the heel of his shoe touch the champagne bottle. The floor was wet where he stood.

Focus, Stoner heard his old instructor hiss at him. Focus your strength and speed.

Snarling, Schmidt rushed. Stoner sidestepped, kicked at his kneecap and sent him sprawling across the slippery mess on the floor.

Schmidt got up immediately, as if he couldn’t feel the pain, as if there were no pain. His face had somehow been gashed along one cheek and blood dripped down his neck, into his collar. White showed all around his eyes and his lips were pulled back to bare his teeth.

Again Schmidt leaped. Stoner tried to avoid him again, but the younger man’s outflung arm caught him neck high and they both went slamming against the club wall. Stoner pushed Schmidt away and tried to get to his feet. Schmidt grabbed the empty champagne bottle and hefted it like a club.

Backing away, knees bent, hands out defensively, Stoner heard his instructor’s voice again: The martial arts are not a game! You are not trying to score points, you are trying to save your life!

Schmidt advanced toward him, brandishing the bottle. A low growl came from his throat. Stoner watched the young man’s feet as he came closer, forcing himself to concentrate on what he must do, calming his breathing rate, putting his body in balance.

Nobody’s going to lift a finger to help, he saw with a strangely detached part of his mind. They either figure this is a private grudge or they’re scared of getting hurt.

Schmidt swung the bottle in a wild overhand sweep. Stoner ducked under it and leaned all his weight into a punch to Schmidt’s diaphragm. Then he grabbed him and spun him into the wall.

Schmidt turned and swung again wildly but Stoner blocked it with a forearm and kicked him through the partition between booths. The wood splintered and screeched as the young astronomer’s body shattered it.

Stoner stood over Schmidt’s prostrate body and let the breath sigh out of him. He saw Jo still standing at the doorway and now Reynaud was beside her, insanely dressed in gray Navy pajamas, with his arm in a light sling. The others in the club were edging toward him now, timidly approaching.

But Schmidt started climbing slowly to his feet, the bottle still firmly in his hand, a grisly smile on his bleeding face. Everyone froze into stillness.

Jesus Christ! Stoner gaped. He’s like Frankenstein’s monster. Nothing stops him.

Schmidt giggled like a schoolboy pulling the wings off a fly and came at Stoner again.

Stoner buried the fear and pain he felt and did what had to be done. Block, kick, punch to the side of the head. Schmidt sagged to his knees. Stoner grasped the wrist of his right hand, yanked the arm out full length and kicked Schmidt’s ribs. The bottle fell from his hand. Ribs cracked audibly. Stoner chopped a vicious knife-edge blow to Schmidt’s neck and he went down on his face.

The crowd surged in closer.

“Don’t get near him!” Stoner panted. “He’s crazy.”

And Schmidt slowly climbed back to his feet. The crowd gasped and backed away. His ribs must be broken from that kick, Stoner knew. What in hell is going to stop him?

His face set in a hideous death’s-head rictus, Schmidt charged again at Stoner, who met him with a front kick to the abdomen and a hammer blow to the shoulder. Schmidt’s collarbone cracked.

Break him down, Stoner told himself. Go for the bones. Chop him down like a fucking tree.

It seemed like an eternity. Stoner worked automatically blank-minded, remorselessly, until Schmidt lay inert on the wooden floor, as still as death.

Reynaud pushed his way through the onlookers with his one good arm, Jo trailing behind him.

“You’ve killed him!” Reynaud cried, sinking to his knees beside Schmidt’s prostrate form.

“I don’t…think so,” Stoner panted. “Hope not. I couldn’t…he went…berserk…”

Jo was staring at him. “You’re hurt.”

“I’m okay,” he said. “Get an ambulance…for the kid. I had to hit him…pretty hard.”

“But you…”

The adrenaline was wearing away and every muscle in Stoner’s body was starting to scream.

“Just get me back to my room,” he mumbled, heading for the door. “I just want to lie down.”

But there were four uniformed shore patrolmen at the door. Stoner collapsed into their arms.

Cavendish woke up slowly, blinking and struggling to clear the fog of sleep from his brain. He shivered with cold. For long moments he had no recollection of why he was sitting slumped against the bole of a big palm tree, legs folded painfully under him, across the tennis courts from the island’s hospital.

Gradually he remembered. He remembered Schmidt and the wild untrue words he had poured into the young man’s ear. Shame burned through him. They’re controlling me, he told himself. They’ve stolen my soul.

He looked out across the tennis courts. It was dark and no one was in sight. Leaning against the tree, he pulled himself up to his feet.

His legs were afire with pins and needles, but his head felt clear. The pain is gone! His hands flew to his face, his scalp, as if they had a will of their own, probing, searching, trying to find from touch if he were deluding himself and the pain was really lurking in there somewhere, hiding, waiting to come back in even more terrifying force.

“It’s gone,” Cavendish whispered shakily to the night shadows. “Truly gone…as completely as if someone had turned off a switch.”

A switch. “Quite,” he said to himself. “A switch that they can turn on again just as easily, whenever they decide they want more from me.”

He pulled his trembling hands away from his head. Despite their tremor, inwardly he felt quite calm. His mind was his own again—at least for a little while.

And with a clarity that comes only when all distracting thoughts have been burned away, Cavendish at last realized what he had to do.

The only person who makes slavery possible, he had once read somewhere, is the slave himself.

And with that brilliant, blazing clarity of vision that had suddenly been granted him, Cavendish saw how he could end his own slavery.

“I know what you want,” he muttered through clenched teeth, “but you can’t make me do it. I’m a man, not one of your bloody trained dogs.”

Very deliberately, he turned his back to the hospital and threaded his way past the trees, through the buildings, across the main street and through the clustered buildings on the other side. The ocean side. It took only a few minutes to span the width of the island and stand on the ocean beach.

The surf boomed closer here. The sea stretched out under gleaming skies. Beyond the scudding clouds the aurorae flickered and laughed at him.

I know what you are, and what’s causing you, Cavendish said silently to the dancing lights. That’s enough. I won’t get to meet you in person, but that’s all right. I’ve had enough for one lifetime.

The ocean surged at his feet, alive, breathing.

Cavendish smiled sadly into the dark waters. “Sophocles long ago heard it,” he quoted. “And it brought into his mind the turbid ebb and flow of human misery.”

There were strong currents in that remorseless ocean, currents that would sweep a man away from land, currents that harbored the planet’s most efficient carnivores.

Cavendish stood at the water’s edge for only a moment. No thought of his past life paraded through his mind. He thought only of the future, a bleak, grim future of pain and slavery to unknown, unknowable masters.

With a crooked smile he muttered, “But while I have the strength, I can end all that.”

He waded into the sea, into the warm engulfing amniotic fluid that would erase his pain forever. Straight into the waves he walked, up to his knees, up to his hips, his shoulders, oblivious to what waited out there hungrily, oblivious to the lights in the sky that made the night brilliant with eerie glowing fire. Sure enough, the current seized him and soon he disappeared from the land.

Air/Sea Unit 504

Even through his acoustically insulated helmet, the pilot was getting a headache from the helicopter’s rattling, roaring engine. Below him was nothing but empty gray ocean. At his side, the crewman scanned the choppy sea with binoculars.

“How th’ fuck they expect us to find a guy in th’ fuckin’ water without a fuckin’ dye marker?” the pilot hollered over the chopper’s cacophony.

The crewman put the binoculars in his lap and rubbed his bloodshot eyes. “Orders,” he yelled back.

“Fuck! The dumb sonofabitch went out swimmin’ at night and got pulled under. He’s fuckin’ shark food by now.”

“I know that,” the crewman hollered, “and you know that, and even the commander knows that. But the regs say we gotta put out a search.”

“Fuckin’ regulations. Waste of fuckin’ time.”

But when the precise second came for his radio check-in, the pilot’s harsh voice changed to a smoothly professional, “J-five-oh-four to Kwajalein control. Position six-niner-alpha. No joy.”

He clicked off the radio and resumed, “Another three fuckin’ hours we gotta spend fuckin’ around up here! Fuckin’ dumb Englishman.”

Chapter 34

Stoner sat stiffly in the uncomfortable wooden chair in Tuttle’s small office. Every part of his body ached horribly. His head buzzed from the hours of questioning. And the rattling drone of the air conditioner in the lieutenant commander’s one window was giving Stoner a headache.

Two other officers sat facing Stoner, while Tuttle leaned back in his swivel chair, behind his metal desk. The other two were from Base Security: a young black lieutenant junior grade and a grizzled, ruddy-faced guy who looked much too old to be merely a full lieutenant.

“But why did he attack you?” the j.g. asked for the hundredth time.

Stoner started to shake his head, but the pain made him wince instead. “I told you before,” he replied, “I don’t know.”

“He said something about it being your fault,” the older officer chimed in. “What was he talking about?”

Around the same bush again, Stoner thought, giving them the same answers he had given dozens of times already: I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know.

But in his mind he saw again Schmidt’s crazed face, felt the insane inhuman strength of the man, the total mindlessness of his attack. And Stoner realized, It wasn’t an accident. It couldn’t have been just blind chance. He was out to get me. He wanted to kill me.

“Where could he have gotten the drugs?” asked the lieutenant.

His black junior said, “We got the report on what he was on: PCP. Angel dust. Enough to stoke a regiment.”

“Where could he have gotten that?” Tuttle asked, his round face a picture of concern.

Stoner laughed. “You guys aren’t serious, are you? This island’s a floating junk paradise. Take a walk down the street any night, there’s enough pot in the air to fly you home.”

“Angel dust is a lot more serious than marijuana,” the older lieutenant said sternly.

“There’s a lot of pill popping going on around here,” Stoner said. “You guys must be aware of that.”

“But not angel dust,” the black lieutenant said.

Stoner shrugged and lapsed into silence.

“What reason would Schmidt have for attacking you?” Tuttle asked.

“None that I know of,” said Stoner.

“You’d never argued over anything before?”

“We’d hardly ever talked to each other before,” Stoner said.

Their questions continued and Stoner continued to fend them off with ignorance, but inwardly he began to realize: Schmidt came after me for a reason, and not just because he was bombed out of his skull. He wanted me. He wanted to put me out of the way. Why? Because somebody told him that’s the surest way to end this project and get everybody sent home again.

Tuttle called in an aide and had sandwiches brought in. The questioning continued as they ate.

Finally Stoner stood up. “Look…we’ve been over the same ground now dozens of times. I’ve told you everything I know—which isn’t much, I admit. But I’ve got work to do and I don’t see any point in going on with these questions.”

Tuttle said, “This is a serious matter, you know.”

Feeling every muscle in his body groaning, Stoner answered, “I know. I’m the guy that got jumped on. But if you people put some effort into finding out where Schmidt got the drugs, you might get somewhere. I’ve told you everything I know.”

He turned and went to the door. No one stopped him, so he left the office, went outside into the painfully bright sunlight and walked toward the building that housed the Swamp.

Then he remembered that his office had been moved to the computer building. Head still buzzing, his insides churning, Stoner went to his new office.

He was sliding cardboard boxes full of photographs into the empty bookshelves of the new office when Markov rapped once on the open door and came into the room, grinning, hands behind his back.

“You are coming up in the world, Comrade Stoner. Congratulations.”

Wiping sweat from his forehead, Stoner said, “Thanks. It is more luxurious than the Swamp.”

“Do you think this new office is a reward for your intellectual abilities,” Markov asked, “or for your prowess as a fighter?”

Stoner’s insides went cold. “That’s not funny, Kirill. I might have killed that kid.”

“Yes, I know.” Markov’s own face was somber. “But I am glad that it’s him in the hospital today, and not you.”

“How is he? Have you heard…?”

“He’ll be all right. He is young and healthy. His bones will knit quickly.”

Stoner dropped down into his desk chair. “They woke me up at eight this morning and brought me down to Tuttle’s office. I’ve been answering questions all goddamned day.”

Markov remained standing, hands still behind his back, nodding sympathetically.

“What’re you hiding behind your back?” Stoner finally asked.

“Oh.” Markov suddenly looked almost embarrassed. “It’s nothing. A gift of sorts. For your new office.”

“A gift?”

“A symbol, really. Emblematic of the problem that has brought us together and led to our friendship. A symbol that is truly representative of where we are and what we are faced with.”

“What are you talking about?” Stoner asked, intrigued despite himself.

Markov was warming up, more like his cheerful self. “I had thought of bringing you champagne and caviar, to celebrate your new office. But what good are they? Merely food for the belly. I bring you a lasting gift for the mind. Besides, I couldn’t afford to buy champagne and caviar.”

Stoner sat up straighter and placed both his hands on the polished surface of his broad, empty desk. “Okay, I’m bracing myself for this terrific symbol.”

With a flourish, Markov produced from behind his back a large, brown, shaggy coconut.

Stoner stared, then laughed.

“No, no, no!” Markov said, his face almost serious. “It is truly a symbol, as I said. It is symbolic of this island, isn’t it? And if you try to open it, you’ll find that—and this is an American idiom, I believe—it is a tough nut to crack!”

Stoner raised his hands in mock surrender. “You’re right, friend. When you’re right, you’re right.”

“A tautology,” Markov replied. “Another thing about this symbol: it is a world traveler. The coconut can float across the entire Pacific Ocean, I am told, and germinate on shores far from its place of origin.”

“Like our visitor,” Stoner realized, his grin dissolving.

“Exactly.”

“You’re a deep thinker,” Stoner said. He took the coconut from Markov’s hands and placed it on his bare desktop, next to the telephone. “I’ll keep it here, to remind me of what we’re up against.”

“Good. One more symbolism: Once you have cracked open a coconut, it contains milk and meat to sustain life.”

“But the trick is to crack it open.”

“Not easy.”

“Unless you have the proper tools…and the skill.”

Markov nodded.

“Thanks, Kirill,” Stoner said. “You’ve cheered me up. It’s been a pretty somber day.”

“Yes. They still haven’t found Cavendish, you know.”

“Cavendish?” Stoner tensed.

Blinking, Markov asked, “You haven’t heard?”

“Heard what?”

“Dr. Cavendish has disappeared. They presume he has drowned. There is no trace of him on the island, and the Navy has sent out search patrols…”

Stoner sagged back in his chair. As if to reinforce Markov’s revelation, a helicopter thundered by; the building vibrated to the roar of its engines.

“Cavendish,” Stoner repeated. “My god…”

Markov tugged at his beard. “Are you all right? Your face has gone white.”

Looking up at the Russian, Stoner said, “Cavendish was an agent…a spy…”

“No,” Markov said.

“He told me himself. A double agent. He worked for your side, the KGB—but he really was working for British Intelligence.”

Markov’s mouth dropped open in a silent gasp of amazement.

“He told me himself,” Stoner repeated. “Both sides were leaning on him.”

“And now he’s disappeared,” Markov whispered. “Dead, no doubt.”

Stoner mused aloud, “Schmidt tries to kill me last night, and Cavendish disappears. The same night.” He looked up at Markov. “Kirill, what does it add up to?”

The Russian just stared back at him, wordlessly.

“Do you think your people are out to prevent me from making the rendezvous flight?”

“I…” Markov hesitated. “I think perhaps that might be true,” he said, his voice barely audible.

“Jesus Christ.”

Markov shook himself, like a man trying to throw off a bad dream. “Let me check into it. Let me see what I can learn.” He got to his feet.

But Stoner put out a restraining hand. “Maybe you ought to stay out of it, Kirill. You could get yourself into real trouble if you put yourself in the middle of this.”

“I am already in the middle of this,” Markov said with iron in his voice. “They have tried to kill my friend.”

“And they’ve already killed Cavendish.”

“Perhaps so.”

Stoner stood up and came around the desk. “Stay out of it, Kirill. Don’t get yourself in trouble.”

Markov laughed. “We are all in trouble, my friend. Every last one of us.”

Into the hot afternoon sunshine Markov strode, unblinking, unseeing. Down the main street, his back to the radio telescope antennas, past squat blockhouse office buildings, past the BOQ, the hotel, the trailer park. He turned into the area where the bungalows stood and marched straight to his own house.

“Maria Kirtchatovska!” he bellowed as he slammed the front door shut behind him.

She came out of the kitchen, a sizzling saucepan in one hand. “What are you doing home?”

“Put that down and come here,” Markov said, pointing to the sofa.

She scowled at him, but went back into the kitchen and reappeared a moment later, wiping her hands on a towel.

“I was making dinner for us,” she said.

“Sit down.”

“I haven’t told anyone about your temper tantrum last night…”

“Dr. Cavendish is dead,” Markov snapped, feeling fury racing along his veins. “Drowned, most likely.”

She sat heavily on the sofa. “Drowned?”

Still standing, Markov added, “And young Schmidt went berserk with a drug overdose last night and tried to kill Stoner. Do you see any connection between these two events?”

Maria looked away from him without answering.

Looming over her, Markov said, “That…machine you were using last night. It had something to do with Cavendish, didn’t it? Or was it Schmidt?”

“Kir, we agreed long ago that there are certain parts of my work that we would never discuss.”

He was tempted to raise his hand and slap her. “That agreement is finished. I should have ended it when you ruined that young student’s life. Now you’ve murdered Cavendish, haven’t you?”

“No!”

“Don’t lie to me, Maria Kirtchatovska! The man was a KGB informant and now he is dead. You killed him, with that infernal machine.”

She shook her head stubbornly. “The device was a communications system, a sort of radio…”

“Nonsense! You communicate with Moscow by those silly letters you send each week in the supply plane. I know that much. Somehow your machine killed Cavendish.”

“It couldn’t have…”

“I saw the look on your face when I caught you at it! You weren’t communicating anything except pain and death! Don’t try to deny it.”

“Kirill, I…” Maria ran a hand through her short-cropped hair, suddenly agitated, tearful. “What could I do? I have to follow my orders. What else could I do?”

“Murder. Torture. You’ve been involved in it all along, haven’t you? All these years.”

She was crying, tears leaking down her broad cheeks. “No. Not until now. And I didn’t want to. I had to. It was the only way to survive…”

“And all these years I closed my eyes to it. I knew that all the whispered stories were true, but I kept telling myself, ‘Not my Maria. She wouldn’t do such things. She’s only in the cryptographic section. She’s not involved in arrests and interrogations and assassinations…’”

“I’m not!” she wailed. “Not until this…this…thing came upon us.”

“You never had anyone arrested? You were never involved in interrogations? Murders?”

“No! Not directly.”

He threw up his hands and paced across the room. “Pah! Not directly. Your hands are clean—almost. Disgusting. Disgusting! To think that I’ve lived with you all these years and kept my eyes closed.”

Her chin went up. “I’ve kept my eyes closed to your adventures. If you…”

“My adventures!” He wheeled around to face her. “I was making love, woman! I was seeking beauty and kindness and joy! I wasn’t giving electric shock treatments to some poor wretch in the basement of a prison hospital.”

“I never…” Maria’s voice faded away into sobs.

“It’s over,” Markov said sternly. “Do you hear me? It’s ended. Finished. I won’t share my life with a torturer and murderess.”

“What do you mean?”

“Either you leave the KGB or you leave me. Take your choice.”

Her eyes went wide. “I can’t resign! They don’t allow it.”

“Retire, resign, transfer to another job. Otherwise I’ll never live with you again. Never! I couldn’t!”

“But, Kir, if you try to leave me there’ll be questions, an investigation…”

“Tell them you’ve thrown me out because of my escapades. They’ll believe that.”

“I don’t want to leave you,” she said. “I don’t want you to leave me.”

“Then you must quit your job.”

“I can’t…”

He went to the sofa and sat beside her. She had stopped crying, but the tears had left fat streaks down her face.

“Is it true that you didn’t want to do what you did? That they forced you into it?”

“They ordered me and I obeyed,” she said. “I had no choice.”

“They ordered you to do what? To kill Stoner?”

She gave a little gasp of surprise. “Not…they want to prevent Stoner from flying the rendezvous mission. They want him stopped—any way possible.”

“But our government is co-operating with the Americans on this!” Markov said. “Zworkin, Academician Bulacheff, the General Secretary himself…”

Maria shook her head stubbornly. “I only know what my orders are. They want Stoner stopped.”

Markov sighed. “Maria…how can I live with someone who…who follows such orders? It’s impossible!”

“It’s as much your fault as mine,” she said. “I never wanted to get involved in all this.”

Markov shook his head in misery. “What are we to do, Maria? What are we to do?”

Chapter 35

Jo sat staring at her computer terminal’s readout screen. The numbers and letters glowing at her were meaningless; her mind couldn’t concentrate on them. She got up from her desk and walked out onto the balcony outside her office. Down in the Pit the computer hummed and winked its lights in intricate patterns, too fast for any human to understand.

With a shake of her head, she stepped back into her office, grabbed her worn leather shoulder bag from the desk and headed downstairs.

She stopped in the rest room first, pushed a comb through her thick hair and checked her face. Then she marched straight to Stoner’s office.

The door was open. He was on the phone, his back to her. She waited just inside the doorway.

“Sure,” Stoner was saying. “I can take all the physical checkups they want right here at the base hospital. If NASA wants their own people to run the tests then NASA can fly them out here. Right? Good. Okay. Thanks again. See you.”

He turned his chair around to hang up the phone and saw Jo standing there.

A flicker of uncertainty crossed his face. “Hello, Jo.”

“Hi.” She stepped further into the office. It was still bare, new-looking. Voices echoed slightly off the freshly painted walls. Half the bookshelves were empty, the rest held stacks of photographs and a few thick looseleaf notebooks. Three unopened cardboard boxes rested on the carpeted floor beside the steel file cabinets. The desk was steel also, but its top was painted to look like walnut. It also was bare, except for the telephone and an incongruous coconut.

“Have a seat,” Stoner said, without getting up from his chair.

Jo took the nearest chair, chrome and plastic, cold and uncomfortable.

“You’re all right?” she asked.

He nodded slowly. “Bruised and aching, but okay. I checked the hospital a half hour ago; Schmidt’s in stable condition. No lung punctures, just some broken bones. He’ll mend.”

Clenching her hands on her lap, “I feel terrible about it.”

He said nothing.

“I mean…if I hadn’t been late for our dinner date,” Jo explained, “you wouldn’t have been at the club and Schmidt wouldn’t have found you.”

His face took on that grim, almost angry look that shut everyone else out. “He’d have found me, no matter where I was. It’s a small island, and he was looking specifically for me.”

“But why? What made him?”

“Where were you?” Stoner asked.

Jo’s heart quickened within her. He cares! It matters to him!

“I was stuck halfway across the lagoon,” she said, the beginnings of a smile curving her lips. “Markov and I took a canoe trip.”

“Kirill?”

Nodding, “We borrowed an outrigger and neither one of us could keep it from tipping over. You should have seen us! Soaked.”

“Kirill’s in love with you,” Stoner said, without hostility.

“Like Cyrano was in love with Roxane,” she replied. “I’m perfectly safe with him.”

“Unless you both get eaten by sharks.”

“We made it back okay.” She felt her smile fade into an apologetic look. “But I was late. By the time I got to the club…”

“It’s not your fault,” Stoner said quickly. “You mustn’t think that. Somebody pumped Schmidt to the gills with angel dust and sent him out to get me.”

“Who would do that?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know. Maybe the Russians.”

“The Russians? Do our Navy people…?”

“I haven’t told them a word, and I don’t want you to, either.” Stoner leaned across his desk, eyes fastened on hers. “If they start cloak-and-daggering each other, you can kiss this rendezvous mission good-by.”

“But if somebody tried to kill you…” Jo’s voice trailed off.

With a shrug, he answered, “I think they just wanted to knock me around so I wouldn’t be ready for the trip to Russia and the flight. Somebody doesn’t want an American to make the rendezvous mission.”

“The Russians,” she murmured.

“Not the Russian scientists,” Stoner pointed out. “Probably not the Russian Government, either. I think it’s just an element within their government. The hardliners. The KGB, most likely.”

Jo sagged back in the chair, her insides going hollow. “Then you’re in real danger.”

“Maybe. Kirill’s checking it out for me.”

“You’ve got to tell the Navy!” she urged. “Tuttle and the others, they’ve got to know about it so they can protect you.”

“No,” he said firmly. “They’ll fuck up the rendezvous mission once they start clomping around.”

“Better that than getting you killed.”

“Jo, I told you once that this is my life. I meant that, quite literally. Let me handle this my way.”

“And get killed.”

“I’ll take that risk,” he said.

“Keith…” But what can I say? she asked herself silently. That desk is between us. His work, his obsession. It’s more important to him than life itself. More important to him than I am.

“Besides,” he was saying, trying to make it sound less grim, “it was probably Cavendish’s doing. I don’t think his disappearance on the same night was a coincidence.”

She nodded slowly. “There are a lot of rumors going around about Dr. Cavendish.”

Stoner nodded back. “Yeah, I guess there are.”

“Was he really an agent for the Russians?”

“Back in New England he told me he was a double agent. I’m not sure that he knew which side he was really working for, now.”

“He was awfully sick.”

“Maybe. Maybe he was faking that.”

“Do you think any of the other scientists are working as intelligence agents for their governments?” Jo asked.

Stoner’s brows rose. “I don’t know. I never thought about it. Some would, I suppose.”

“Professor McDermott would,” she said, very deliberately.

Stoner gave a bitter bark of a laugh. “Big Mac? Some spy he’d make, with that mouth of his.”

“He’s sneakier than you think,” Jo said.

He gave her a long, searching look. “Yeah, I’ll bet he is.”

“His health isn’t very good,” Jo went on. “Ever since the aurorae started, he’s been a wreck.”

“So I’ve heard. I haven’t seen him for more than a week.”

“Neither have I,” she said pointedly.

He hesitated, then said evenly, “That’s good.”

For long moments neither of them said anything. Jo waited for Stoner to speak, to come out from behind his desk and reach toward her, touch her, do something to show that he cared for her. Instead, he merely sat there, looking uncertain, uncomfortable.

“I heard,” she broke the silence at last, “that you’re in charge of picking the personnel to go to Russia with you.”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“I want to go. I’ve checked the personnel requirements, and you can carry me as a computer analyst. There’s an opening.”

He drummed his fingers on the bare desktop for a moment. “Jo…if there’s any danger in this trip for me, it might catch any other Americans traveling with me.”

Her chin went up a notch. “Do you think you’re the only one around here who can be a hero?”

He almost grinned. “I’m no hero, Jo. I’m a madman. I know that.”

She couldn’t help smiling at him. “Keith, I told you a long time ago that we’re two of a kind. I want to go, just as much as you do.”

“You really do?”

“Like you said—it’ll look good on my résumé.”

“Yeah,” he replied. It was nearly a sigh. “Okay, I’ll put you down for our computer analyst. Better get over to the hospital for the physical checkup.”

She got to her feet. “Thanks, Keith.”

“You’re crazy, you know.”

“I know,” she said. “Just like you.”

He stood up too, but wouldn’t come out from behind his desk. Jo went to the door and left his office, with him standing there watching her go.

“Jesus Christ, willya look at that!”

The TV newsman frowned at the helicopter pilot. “Keep a decent mouth,” he said, more into his lip microphone than across the whining roar of the turbine engine.

“We won’t be on the air for another twelve minutes,” the pilot shot back, still staring down at the mammoth throngs streaming into Anaheim Stadium. As far as the eye could see, along the freeways stretching back toward Los Angeles and out beyond Disneyland, solid masses of cars inched along bumper to bumper.

“Where’d they get all the gas?” the pilot wondered.

The TV reporter lifted his tinted eyeglasses and rubbed at the bridge of his nose. “Look,” he said to the pilot, “keep a decent mouth anyway, will ya? All we need is for a wrong word to sneak out on the air and we’ll have all of them screaming for our scalps.” He pointed downward, toward the cars.

The pilot shook his helmeted head. “I never seen a crowd like that. Where they gonna put them all?”

The reporter heard it as an awed whisper in his headset earphones. Turning in his seat, safety harness cutting into his fleshy shoulder, he looked across the early evening sky for the camera copter. It was skittering along the Orange Freeway, taping the credible traffic for the eleven o’clock news.

The reporter reached forward to click the radio dial to the frequency that connected him with the camera ship.

“Harry, this is Jack. Can you hear me?”

“Yeah, Jack.”

“How’s the equipment?”

“Everything’s A-okay here. Fine.”

“Good. Now remember, in the middle of Wilson’s spiel they’re gonna douse all the lights so everybody can see the aurora. That’s the shot I want—the stadium lit by the Lights from the Sky.”

“I know. I’ll get it.”

“You sure?”

“I got the low light level snooperscope. Don’t worry about a thing. It’ll come out terrific.”

“It better,” the reporter said.

The stadium literally pulsed with the immense crowd. It was like a vast supernatural beast, breathing and murmuring in the gathering twilight. Row upon row, tier upon tier, the crowd filled every seat, jammed the cement stairways so that vendors couldn’t get through to hawk their wares, stood shoulder to shoulder on the ramps behind the seats and down on the field surrounding the speaker’s platform.

Off at one end of the huge oval, the mammoth scoreboard used for baseball games proclaimed in fluorescent lights, HOME OF THE ANGELS. A gigantic letter A, its apex circled by a glowing halo, stood out against the darkening sky.

Outside the stadium, still more thousands milled around the parking areas. Portable TV sets flickered on the tailgates of station wagons. Families picnicked amid the carbon monoxide fumes.

The night deepened and the activities began. The many-throated crowd roared and laughed and sang as it was prompted to by evangelists, guitar players, rock groups and politicians who followed each other up onto the makeshift wooden platform at the center of the field.

A former astronaut who had become deeply involved in studies of extrasensory and paranormal experiences came to the microphone and proclaimed, “This alien ambassador is bringing us our chance to join the brotherhood of the galaxies.”

The crowd sighed with awe.

An evangelist, red-faced in the spotlight, exhorted the crowd, “This message from the Lord is a warning that we must mend our ways, atone for our sins and surrender our willful hearts to Christ Jesus, our God and our Savior.”

Thousands fell to their knees, shouting praises and screaming for forgiveness.

“Let those who have scoffed at us,” bellowed a noted UFOlogist, “come forward and admit that they were wrong! We are not alone, and we never have been!”

The crowd roared its approval.

Finally, after more hymns and clapping in time to a Gospel choir, after a deafening medley from an over-amplified rock group, after full darkness had shrouded the brilliantly lit stadium, the loudspeakers solemnly proclaimed:

“Ladies and gentlemen, the man whose voice cried out in the wilderness, the harbinger of the Great Days to Come, the Urban Evangelist himself—WILLIE WILSON!”

Like a huge animal with a hundred thousand voices the crowd surged to its feet and bellowed as Willie Wilson, slim and lithe in a sky-blue denim suit, loped down the cleared path through the crowd on the field and up the wooden steps to the microphone.

I can’t do it, he said to himself as he reached for the microphone. Feeling the power of the crowd around him, the fervent anticipation that electrified the air, he shook his head and told himself, I can’t disappoint them. I can’t let the government interfere with the Word of the Lord.

He raised both arms and turned slowly in the circle of light, soaking in the crowd’s roaring approval. The bellow shook the ground.

High overhead, unnoticed in the glare of the stadium lights, the two TV helicopters circled endlessly, photographing the dramatic moment while the news reporter spoke his impromptu commentary into his microphone.

“Thank you all and God bless you, each and every single one of you,” Willie shouted into the microphone, pulling it off its slender stand so that he could turn full circle and be seen by every part of the throng.

The crowd quieted, resumed its seats. Those on the field surrounding the platform remained standing, though.

“My message is a simple one,” Willie began. “God loves you. Each and every single individual one of you. God knows each of you personally, individually, knows what’s in your heart and in your mind. And He loves you. Each one of you. Despite your shortcomings. Despite your failures. The Lord God Jesus Christ loves you”—Willie pointed into the crowd—“and you, and you, and each and every one of you.”

They murmured and sighed. A few scattered “Amens” rippled through the night.

“And because God loves us,” Willie continued, “He has put a sign in the sky, to remind us of who He is and who we are…a sign that is at the same time a warning and a herald…a sign that is unmistakable.” He paused dramatically, and a part of his mind told him that the IRS would be on his back within twenty-four hours.

“Look to the sky!” Willie proclaimed. “And see the glory of the Lord!”

Every light in the stadium winked off on cue and the crowd gazed up into the sky. Not a sound from them. Moments ticked by in eerie silence as the huge throng stared into the darkness and the shimmering glow of the aurora slowly became visible to them.

They moaned. They gasped. They sobbed. Willie himself, watching the display from the platform, could feel the hairs on the back of his neck standing on end.

Don’t drag it out too long, he reminded himself. Catch them right at the peak…

In that unnatural silence Willie heard a strange whining drone, the whicker-whicker-whicker of helicopter rotors. Turning toward the sound, he saw the blinking running lights of a low-flying chopper as it made a pass over the stadium.

“It’s them!” somebody screamed.

“They’re here!”

“They’ve come! They’ve come!”

The vast animal of the crowd surged and panicked. Before Willie understood what was happening, a human wave broke across the stadium. People shrieked and screamed and ran.

“No, wait!” Willie shouted into the microphone. “It’s nothing to be afraid of…”

But the animal was mindless with terror. People were being trampled at the jammed exits. Others jumped from ledges to get away. The wave of terrified beasts broke across the wooden platform, swarmed over it; the platform swayed, sagged, groaned and collapsed into a sea of screaming, trampling, bloody panic.

And beneath it all, among the splintered planks and thundering, stampeding feet, Willie Wilson lay inert as maddened people tripped over his prostrate form and went down on top of him.

Chapter 36

Markov sat in moody silence on the darkened porch of the bungalow. A mosquito whined near his ear but he paid no attention to it.

Go ahead and drink my blood, he said silently. You won’t be the only one.

The front door creaked slightly as Maria opened it. She came out and sat on the other end of the wicker couch, as far from Markov as she could get.

“Well?” he asked.

For several seconds she made no reply. Then she said flatly, “I have sent my report to Moscow. I told them that Cavendish committed suicide and I then destroyed the apparatus to avoid any possibility that the Americans might discover it.”

“Did you tell them that you wish to retire from the service?”

“Certainly not!”

“Did you ask for a transfer to a branch that doesn’t get involved in these hideous things?”

“Kir,” she said, “I’ve told you a thousand times, our branch normally does not deal with undercover agents and interrogations. It’s only this…this alien thing that’s forced us into this situation.”

“I want you out of the KGB, Maria Kirtchatovska,” Markov said. “I want you to be the wife of a university professor and nothing more.”

She turned toward him and in the dim light from the window he could see the stubborn expression on her face. “You’d enjoy that, wouldn’t you? I sit home and collect a retirement pension while you spend each night with a different college girl. A wonderful life! For you.”

“Do you believe that torturing people and killing them is such a good way to live?”

“I never did anything like that!”

He slapped his hands against his thighs and got to his feet. “Maria, you are lying. Lying to me, and even lying to yourself. If you can live with what you’ve been doing, so be it. But I can’t live with it. I cannot live with it!”

“You’ve been living with it for nearly twenty years,” she countered.

Looking down at her, he said, “Yes, I’ve been keeping my eyes closed for twenty years. Now they are open.”

“What do you want of me?” Maria asked. Her voice was different, no longer hard and stubborn, almost openly pleading.

“I told you what I want.”

“I can’t retire,” she said. “They’d never allow it. Don’t you realize what’s happening these days? With the General Secretary ailing and the Presidium going through earthquakes?”

“The only other thing I can do is divorce you,” Markov said.

“Divorce? After all these years?”

“I can’t live with what you’re doing,” he said. “I know you’re trying to prevent Stoner from getting to fly on the rendezvous mission. The man is my friend, Maria. If you harm him, you put yourself against me.”

She sighed heavily. “Kir, you’re going to end up teaching school in some prison town in the Gulag.”

Markov nodded in the darkness. Glancing out at the shimmering sky, he said slowly, so softly that he could barely hear it himself, “There is one other possibility.”

“What other possibility?”

“I could stay with the Americans…ask for asylum.”

He heard her gasp with shock. “Defect? Leave Russia forever? Turn your back on your own people, your own nation?”

“I don’t want to do that, but…”

“They’d kill you, Kirill Vasilovsk.” Maria’s voice was metal-hard, as matter-of-fact as an automatic pistol. “I’d kill you myself before I’d let you do that to us.”

When Stoner looked up from the work on his desk he saw that out beyond his window it was night. Even through the panes, though, the shimmering, beckoning lights made the sky dance.

He glanced at his wristwatch, then on impulse reached for the phone. It took a few minutes to track her down through the island’s central switchboard, but finally he heard Jo’s voice:

“Hello?”

“It’s Keith Stoner, Jo.”

“Oh. Hello, Keith.”

Suddenly he felt schoolboy awkward. “Um…have you had your dinner yet?”

“An hour ago.”

“Oh.”

“Are you still at your office?”

“Yeah. There’s a lot to do…”

“And you haven’t had anything to eat since lunch?”

“No.”

She said, “Well, you’d better get down to Pete’s place. He’s the only one who stays open after nine. I’ll meet you there.”

“But you said you’ve already eaten.”

She hesitated only a second. “I’ll have some dessert with you. Okay?”

“Sure. Fine.”

An hour later, as they left the seedy restaurant, Jo said:

“Remind me to stick to Jell-O next time.”

“The cake was no good?” he asked.

“It must have been left here by the Japs after World War Two, it was so stale.”

He laughed.

Automatically they walked across the empty street, between buildings, heading for the beach. They walked side by side, not touching, but close enough for Stoner to feel the warmth of her. Jo was wearing a dress, a light sleeveless flowered frock that caught the warm, scented sea breeze.

“Keith…answer a question for me?”

“If I can,” he said.

“Why is this rendezvous mission so important to you? I mean, why do you have to make the flight?”

He looked down at her. “Christ, Jo, you ought to understand that. You’d feel the same way, wouldn’t you?”

“I do feel the same way,” she said earnestly. “But I don’t understand why. What’s driving us? Why do you have to go? Why do I want to go?”

He thought about it as they stepped clear of the buildings and out under the trees that fringed the beach. The sand lay white and warm, the surf murmured distantly to them.

Finally, Stoner answered, “It’s my career, Jo. The path I’ve chosen. The work I do.”

“No,” she said. “There’s more to it than that. It’s not a job, it’s…it’s a drive. A fierceness to get into space and leave everything else behind.”

“I’ve got nothing to keep me here,” he said. Then, before she could reply, he added, “Except you.”

Jo put a hand on his arm. “But even…no, Keith, that’s not true. You still want to go out there and meet this alien visitor, no matter what, don’t you?”

“Of course.”

“Why? Why does it have to be you, personally?”

“Because I want to know,” he said with quiet ferocity. “That’s what every scientist wants—to know, to discover, to be the first to uncover a new piece of knowledge, a new chunk of territory.”

“But you could learn that even if somebody else goes on the mission,” she said.

“Not the same! I want to touch it with my own hands, see it with my own eyes. Like a caveman, Jo. Like Doubting Thomas from the Bible. I’ve got to see it for myself. That’s the bang of it. The drive.”

She stared up at his face as they walked along the beach. The sky was lit by the aurora, gleaming, dancing, calling.

“Think about all the people you know,” Stoner said to her. “How many of them realize that the atoms of their bodies were created inside distant stars? We’re all stardust, every one of us. Every atom of your body, Jo, was built up inside a star, eons ago. We’re part of the universe, kid. It’s inescapable.”

She laughed softly. “There’s a poet inside you, somewhere.”

“Maybe,” he admitted. “But there’s a practical side to all this, too. Down here, I’m just another astrophysicist. An overtrained specialist in a field that’s filled with men and women who’re better trained, younger and brighter than I am. I’m only a mediocre scientist, at best.”

“Now you’re being modest.”

“I know my limitations. I’ll never get close to a Nobel Prize or a fat fellowship. I’ll plug along and teach at some second-rate university in total obscurity.”

“Unless…”

“Unless the space program opens up again.” He jabbed a thumb skyward. “I’m good up there. I can lead a team of engineers and scientists. I know both ends of the job and I’m not afraid of living inside a pressure suit at zero gravity.”

“I don’t think I’d be afraid, either.”

Grinning, “No, I don’t think you would, Jo. It’s our milieu, or ecological niche. That’s where my career lies, and maybe yours, too. That’s where we can make the best contributions to the human race’s storehouse of knowledge.”

“And that’s where the alien is.”

“Yes. Like a godsend. We can’t let him pass us by without making contact with him.”

“Or her,” Jo kidded.

“It,” he said.

Jo laughed and suddenly kicked off her sandals. “Come on, take those shoes off, Keith Stoner. Break down and have fun for once in your life.”

He frowned at her. “I have fun…”

“You call chopping boards with your hands fun?” And she dashed away from him, down along the beach, bare feet splashing in the lapping waves.

Stoner watched her for a few moments, then bent down and yanked off his shoes and socks, nearly tumbling onto the sand as he hopped on one foot to finish the job. Then he raced after her, under the glowing sky.

He splashed along the waters of the lagoon, laughing as he caught up with her. Grabbing her by the wrist, Stoner hauled her along at his pace until she shrieked with breathless laughter and they both collapsed onto the shining sand.

“Keith, you’re not fair,” she panted. “Your legs…are so much longer…”

“Oh, jeez, you make me feel like a kid again, Jo. You make me forget everything else and want to play.”

He raised himself up on one elbow and lifted her head toward him. Jo wound her arms around his neck and felt his hands caressing her, warm, strong hands against her bare skin. She could hear the pulsing beat of the distant surf against the reef, but it was quickly lost in the thunder of her own heart. Eagerly they pulled their clothes off and she pressed her naked body against his, wanting him, wanting all of him inside her. She clutched his hair and stifled the scream of ecstasy inside her by pressing her lips against his.

Then they lay side by side, spent, watching the shimmering curtains of pastel lights that flickered across the sky while the warm, tideless waves of the calm lagoon lapped at their feet.

Jo turned her head on the sand and saw Keith staring a million miles off into that sky.

He forgot everything else for such a little while, she thought sadly. Such a little while.

The Kremlin

“And why is the General Secretary not present?” asked the Minister of Industrial Production.

Borodinski, seated at the head of the long, polished table, replied, “He is indisposed. He asked me to preside over this meeting in his place.”

They glanced at each other uneasily. Of the sixteen places around the table, five were conspicuously empty. Their usual occupants would never see the inside of the Kremlin again.

Borodinski introduced Academician Bulacheff, sitting at the very foot of the table, and opened the discussion on the topic of the alien spacecraft.

“Then we are going through with this scheme of sending cosmonauts to greet the alien?” asked the Foreign Minister.

“It is the General Secretary’s plan,” Borodinski said.

“But with an American astronaut aboard our Soyuz?” grumbled the Minister of Internal Security. He sat close to the head of the table, but the chairs on either side of him were empty.

“Yes,” said Borodinski.

“He’ll be able to spy on our launch facilities, our rocket boosters—everything!”

“He is no spy,” said Bulacheff, his voice surprisingly strong. “He is a scientist, not a hoodlum.”

Dead silence fell over the conference room. Borodinski barely suppressed a laugh. The academician is too new to these meetings to show the proper respect for our chief pesticide, he thought. Then he reflected, Or he is old enough so that he doesn’t care about running the risks, perhaps? This alien visitor must be very important to him.

The Security Minister glared at Bulacheff, then leaned back in his chair and slowly put a long, filtered cigarette to his lips.

“We will fly out to meet the spacecraft,” Borodinski said firmly, “and the American will be aboard our Soyuz. Every precaution will be taken, of course, to see to it that he does not gain any information that we do not wish him to have.”

General Rashmenko grinned heartily at them all. “Not to worry. Our missiles can blow the alien out of the sky—and the American with it. All I have to do is make one phone call.”

Chapter 37

The Minister of Internal Security held the wine glass up to the light from the chandelier. The deep red liquid glowed within the crystal goblet. Slowly, cautiously, he took an experimental sip of the wine.

With a smack of his lips he put the goblet down on the damask tablecloth and pronounced, “Excellent. Truly excellent!”

His host, across the table from him, beamed with satisfaction. “It’s from our comrades in Hungary. They call it ‘The Blood of the Bull.’ ”

The Minister laughed. “A dramatic people, the Hungarians.”

“But they make good wine,” said his host, nodding to the servant standing behind the Minister.

The servant began ladling a stew of freshly caught rabbit into the Minister’s china plate. The Minister was a small, bald man, with the tiny, delicate hands of a watchmaker. But his face was heavy, almost gross, with thick lips, a bulbous nose and narrow deepset eyes that were often impossible to fathom.

His host, the director of one of Internal Security’s biggest bureaus, was by contrast an elegant figure: tall, suavely handsome with silver hair and an aristocratic, almost ascetic face, soft-spoken, with the polished manners of a born gentleman.

By the time dessert was served, the Minister was in a relaxed, almost happy mood.

“Ah, Vasilli Ilyitch, it’s difficult to believe that this magnificent home is actually in Moscow, here, today, now. I always feel as if I’ve been transported to some other time, when life was more gracious, easier.”

“Before the Revolution, Comrade Minister?” the bureaucrat asked mildly, a slight smile touching his lips.

The Minister’s look suddenly turned cold.

“Or perhaps,” the bureaucrat continued, “you are experiencing a premonition, a view into the future, when true communism rules the world and all the peoples everywhere can live in peace and luxury.”

“That’s better,” the Minister said sourly. “Your sense of humor will get you in trouble someday, Vasilli.”

His smile broadened. “I always thought that it was my sense of luxury that will someday be my downfall.”

Now the Minister grinned. “Come now, my old friend! Life is grim enough without us becoming morose.”

“True enough! Come with me into the library. I have a cognac there that will interest you.”

An hour later, the Minister was relaxed in a deep leather chair, snifter in one hand, cigar in the other, his face scowling.

“To talk to me like that,” he was muttering. “That academic pipsqueak. That…that…schoolteacher!”

“Academician Bulacheff?” his host asked.

“Bulacheff,” the Minister snapped. “In front of the others, too.”

“But the General Secretary did not attend the meeting.”

“He’s at death’s door. Borodinski sat in his chair.”

“H’mm. Borodinski.”

“Yes, I know what you’re thinking,” the Minister said.

His host became quite serious. “You, comrade, have the power of life or death over Borodinski. You realize that, don’t you?”

“I wouldn’t state it quite that way.”

“But it is true, nevertheless. Borodinski wants you on his side. If you agree, he is safe. If you join the others…”

“There aren’t that many others to join,” the Minister pointed out. “Borodinski’s being very thorough.”

“What will you do?”

The Minister puffed for a moment on his cigar, then, “What can I do, except go along with him? I have no desire to see the struggle deepen. We are safe. Borodinski won’t interfere with us.”

“You’re certain?”

The Minister smiled, but there was nothing pleasant to it. “You needn’t worry, my dear friend. Borodinski is clever enough to avoid a fight with me, if I don’t oppose him. I will keep the ministry, and you can keep your fine house, and servants, and wine cellar.”

“And you,” the bureaucrat added in a whisper.

“Yes, and me too.”

The bureaucrat smiled boyishly and took another sip of his cognac.

“But the alien,” the Minister said. “That’s another matter. I will not have Americans snooping around Tyuratam, not without teaching them all a lesson.”

“But Americans saw Tyuratam years ago, during the joint Soyuz-Apollo operation.”

“That was then. This is now. I won’t have Bulacheff or even Borodinski going over my head in matters of internal security.”

“But what can you do? The Americans are already on their way here.”

“Yes, I know. I can’t stop them from arriving in Tyuratam. But I can prevent them from achieving their goal. They will never make contact with that alien spacecraft. I will see to that, and Borodinski will know that I did it, and he will be powerless to oppose me.”

His host let out a long, low sigh. “You play for very high stakes.”

“Borodinski must understand that I will not oppose him, but he must not oppose me, either. This matter of the alien spacecraft and the American astronaut is a good way to teach him that lesson. Practically painless for him, but obvious.”

“Yes, I see. But how will you go about…eh, teaching him this lesson?”

The Minister took a long gulp of cognac, put down his emptied glass and said harshly, “How? Kill the American astronaut, of course. What could be simpler?”

Stoner spent his last afternoon on Kwajalein in a round of meetings with Thompson, Tuttle, the Russians, the full conference room of group leaders. Then, suddenly, he was back in his office alone.

He stood at his desk and surveyed the room. As impersonal as a telephone booth. One by one he opened the drawers of his desk. There was nothing in them that he needed, nothing that he wanted to take with him, nothing that was his.

Then his eyes lit on the absurd coconut resting beside the telephone. He broke into a slow grin.

“You,” he said to the shaggy brown lopsided sphere, “are going on a long, long journey.”

“I know it.”

Startled, he looked up and saw Jo leaning against the doorjamb.

His grin turned to embarrassment. “Uh…I’ve taken to talking to coconuts. Sign of nervousness, I guess.”

“You don’t look nervous to me,” Jo said, stepping into the office. She was wearing her usual cutoffs and half-unbuttoned blouse. Her skin was a deep olive brown. A quizzical smile touched the corners of her mouth.

“Iron self-control,” Stoner muttered.

“Are you all packed?” she asked.

“Just about. What about you? You’re not going aboard the plane in those clothes, are you?”

“Of course not,” she said. “I just thought I’d take one final stroll along the beach before dinner. Plenty of time to change and catch the plane.”

He nodded. “Well, I’m sure not going to miss the food here.”

She reached out for his arm. “Come on, take a walk with me. Let’s say good-by to the island together.”

They walked barefoot, arm in arm, along the wavelapped beach, toes digging into the warm sand, long shadows thrown ahead of them in the red glow of the dying day.

Out beyond the lagoon and the tiny fringe of islands rimming it, the sun was sinking into the ocean, turning the whole world the color of molten gold. Birds crossed the cloud-streaked sky, calling, calling.

“Our last sunset on Kwajalein,” Jo said, clasping Stoner’s arm in both of hers.

“We never got much of a chance to enjoy this beauty, did we?” he asked.

“There’s a lot we’ve never had a chance to do,” she replied. “A lot of living.”

“I know.”

“When this is over, Keith, when our lives settle down into something more ordinary…”

“Will they?”

“They’ve got to,” she said. “Don’t you think so?”

“I don’t know. The alien changes everything so much…who can tell what’s going to happen?”

She turned and put her arms around him and leaned her cheek against his shoulder. “Keith, please don’t go through with it. I’m scared of this rocket mission.”

He breathed in the scent of her hair. “Scared? You? I thought you wanted to be an astronaut.”

“I wouldn’t be afraid if I was going,” she said. “But I’m scared to death for you.”

He laughed, but she could feel his body tense. “Reynaud thinks the Russians are out to kill me.”

“You see?” Jo pulled away slightly and looked into his eyes. “I’m not the only one.”

“I’ve talked to Kirill about it. It’s nonsense.”

“Did he say it was?”

“Sort of.”

“What do you mean, sort of? Did he laugh it off or take it seriously?”

Stoner waggled a hand. “Kind of in between.”

“Keith, you are in danger from them. I can feel it.”

“I’m going to be a guest of the Russian Government. We all will be. They wouldn’t dare do anything.”

“You’re being stubborn,” she said. “And stupid.”

“Kirill’s going to look out for me.”

She raised her hands to the heavens. “Some bodyguard. He can’t even paddle a canoe!”

Stoner laughed.

“Don’t do it, Keith. Please. Let the Russians send their own cosmonauts to rendezvous with the alien. Stay on the ground with the rest of us.”

“No,” he said.

“Keith, I’m scared for you! I’m frightened!”

“I know you are,” he said, “but it doesn’t matter. I’m a heartless sonofabitch, okay? But this is more important to me than anything else. It’s my life. Can you understand that? More important to me than my kids, than you, than anything or anyone else. I’ve got to do it. I need to do it. I’d walk through fire to get to it.”

Jo said nothing. Her chin fell. She stared down at the sand at their feet.

“Am I wrong to feel this way? Am I some kind of monster?”

“Yes,” she answered softly. “You know you’re putting yourself in danger. But you turn your back on every human emotion, every human need. The only thing you want is to go out there and make this flight, even though you know they’re going to kill you over it.”

“What can I say?” he wondered. “So I’m a monster, after all.”

“Not a monster, Keith,” she replied. “A machine. An automated, self-programmed machine. I saw the way you battered Schmidt. He was an animal, but you were a machine. An inhuman, tireless, unemotional machine. Nothing can stand in your way. You drive over every obstacle, anything that gets in your way. Mac, Schmidt, the whole goddamned Navy…even your own children. None of us can hold you back.”

“That’s what you think of me?” Stoner’s voice was a strangled whisper. His insides felt cold and empty.

“That’s what you are, Keith,” Jo said, struggling to keep her own voice calm, untrembling.

For a long moment he said nothing. Then, “Okay. We’d better get back. I still have some packing to do.”

“Right. Me too.”

They walked in cold silence and Stoner left her at the entrance to the hotel. Jo watched him stride away, stiff with pride or anger or pain, and she realized that he did have emotions and vulnerabilities.

But he doesn’t care about me, she also realized. There’s no way that I can make him care about me.

Then she hurried inside, ran upstairs to her room and shut the door tightly behind her.

Chapter 38

The Ilyushin jet transport was noisy and uncomfortable despite the fact that only two dozen passengers rode in its cavernous cabin.

Stoner sat up front, staring out a window at the endless expanse of steppe: nothing but grass, as far as the eye could see. Not a tree, not a town, not even a village. This must be what the American plains looked like before the farmers covered it with corn and wheat, he thought.

The plane rode smoothly enough at this high altitude. If only the seats weren’t so crammed together, Stoner compained silently. The only rough part of the flight had been when they’d crossed the Roof of the World, passing close enough to Everest to see its lofty snow-plumed peak, then across craggy Tibet and the wild Altai Mountains. Stoner imagined that far off in the distance he could see Afghanistan, where the hill tribesmen still fought for the independence, as they had fought against the armies of Alexander the Great.

Across the cramped aisle from Stoner, Professor Zworkin snored fitfully. The others were scattered around the long cabin. Jo had taken a seat in the rear, he knew.

His stomach rumbled. Food service aboard the flight was nonexistent. They had been fed once when the jet had landed at Vladivostok, and then once again, many hours later, at the refueling stop near Tashkent. Neither time had any of the passengers been allowed to step off the plane.

They had crossed the wild hill country where Kazakh horsemen still dressed in furs and conical felt hats and rode stubby ponies after their herds of sheep and goats. Now the grassland, the eternal steppe, with the city of Baikanur coming up and beyond it, the rocket-launching base of Tyuratam.

Stoner sensed someone leaning over him and turned in his seat. It was Markov, an odd little half-smile on his bearded face.

“We enter the country the same way our revered Lenin did, in 1917,” Markov said, nearly shouting to be heard over the thundering vibration of the jet engines.

“Lenin flew in?”

Markov lowered his lanky body into the seat next to Stoner’s. “No, the Germans sent him into Mother Russia in a sealed train. No stops, no one allowed on or off until it reached Petrograd. We fly in from the other direction, in a sealed airplane.”

Stoner tapped the window with a fingernail. “It’s a big country out there, your Mother Russia.”

“Oh, this isn’t Russia,” Markov corrected. “It’s Kazakhstan, a Federated Republic, part of the Soviet Union. But not Russia. These people are Asians…Mongols. Russia is another thousand kilometers to the west, on the other side of the Ural Mountains.”

“But it’s part of your country.”

Nodding, “Yes, just as Puerto Rico is part of the United States.”

Stoner looked out the window again. “Pretty damned big. And it looks untouched…raw.”

“Much of the Soviet Union is still virgin land,” Markov said. “It was Khrushchev’s dream to cultivate such lands, make them yield rich harvests.”

“What happened?”

Markov’s grin turned sardonic. “He was outvoted…while his back was turned.”

“Oh.”

“They allowed him a peaceful retirement, though. He died of natural causes. Very unusual for a Russian leader. A sign of our growing civilization.”

Stoner asked, “Are you laughing or crying, Kirill?”

With a shrug, Markov said, “Some of both, my friend. Some of both. I feel like a life-sentence prisoner returning to jail after a brief escape. It’s hateful, but it’s home.”

“I should’ve talked to you into staying at Kwajalein,” Stoner said, lowering his voice even though the drone of the engines made it impossible to hear anything a few feet away.

“No, no,” Markov protested. “This is where I belong. This is where I should be.”

Stoner searched the Russian’s face. “You really believe that?”

Markov closed his ice-blue eyes and nodded gravely. “I have talked about it at some length with Maria. We are going to try to work things out between us. She will put in for a transfer to a…a less demanding job.” His boyish grin returned. “If I can make her more human, easier to live with, perhaps there is hope for the rest of the Russians as well.”

Stoner sensed there was much more going on in Markov’s marriage than the Russian was willing to talk about.

“In the meantime,” Markov went on, “all of us here will act as your bodyguard. You are part of us, and we are part of you. You will get to fly into space, never fear.”

“That’s all I ask,” Stoner said.

Markov’s face grew serious. “I know there has been talk about a Russian plot against you.”

“Kirill, I never thought that you or anyone among us…”

“Not to worry,” he said, raising a hand to silence Stoner. “I will be in communication with Academician Bulacheff the instant we land at Tyuratam. This project will go through without interference, I promise you.”

“Okay,” Stoner said. “Fine.”

“We are not pawns in some international power game,” Markov muttered darkly. “The government will treat us—all of us—with some respect.”

“Do you really think you can change the system that much, Kirill?”

Shaking his head slightly, Markov said, “It isn’t necessary to change the system, as much as it is to get the bureaucrats to return to the system, to use it honestly and fairly. The Russian people are a good, hard-working people. They have suffered much, endured much. We must return to the true principles of Marx and Lenin. We must return to the road that leads inevitably to a truly just and happy society.”

“That’s a big job,” Stoner said.

“Yes, but I have help,” Markov said. “Our alien is going to help me.”

“How?”

With an absentminded tug at his beard, Markov said, “Look at what the alien has already accomplished. Not merely for me, but for you as well. America and Russia are co-operating—in a limited way, to be sure, but co-operating in the midst of confrontations on almost every other front.”

Stoner countered, “Then why wouldn’t they let us off this airplane? They’re co-operating so well that they’re afraid we’d steal something if we set foot on their ground.”

“Do you realize how great a strain it is on our national paranoia to allow Americans to come to our premier rocket base? And two Chinese scientists?”

“I suppose so, but…”

“Our alien visitor has already forced all the governments of the world to change their habits of thought.”

“An inch,” said Stoner.

“Perhaps only a centimeter,” Markov granted, “but still it is a change. They can never think again of our world as the whole universe. They are being forced to work together to find out who this alien visitor is. Never again can we think of other human beings, other human nations or races, as being truly alien. Our visitor from space is forcing us to accept the truth that all humans are brothers.”

“Jesus Christ,” Stoner muttered. “Scratch a Russian and he bleeds philosophy.”

“Yes,” said Markov. “And pious philosophy, at that. But mark my words, dear friend. This alien will bring us all closer together.”

“I hope you’re right, Kirill.”

“It has already done so! It has made friends of us, hasn’t it?”

Stoner nodded.

“It has been a good friendship, Keith.” Markov’s eyes got watery. “I am proud to have you for a friend, Keith Stoner. You are a good man. If necessary, I would lay down my life for you.”

For several moments, Stoner didn’t know what to say. “Hey, Kirill, I feel the same way about you. But this isn’t the end of our friendship, it’s only the beginning.”

“I hope so.” Markov sighed. “But once we land, neither my life nor yours will be completely under our own control. Events will catch us up and carry us on their shoulders. And, certainly, I may never get the chance to leave Russia again, to see you or any other foreigners.”

The realization caught Stoner by surprise. He heard himself answer, “And I might never come back from the rendezvous mission.”

“Ah,” Markov said, “I hadn’t even thought about that possibility.”

Stoner took a deep breath.

“There is one thing I can promise you, though,” Markov said before Stoner could think of anything.

“What’s that?”

“You will get to go on the rendezvous mission. No one will stop you from going. That I promise.”

Stoner nodded and smiled and told himself, He means what he’s saying, but he’s got no way of keeping that promise.

Markov nodded back, eyes misting again, and wordlessly got up to head back to his own seat.

Turning back to the window to watch the endless empty steppe, Stoner soon drifted off to sleep. He was jolted out of the doze by the plane’s sudden lurching and the loud banging noise of the landing gear being lowered. The plane shuddered and banked hard over until the grassy ground seemed to tilt upward to meet them.

It sounded as if a gale was blowing through the cabin. As he pulled his seat belt tighter, Stoner saw that Zworkin, across the aisle, was very much awake now and clutching the arms of his chair with white-knuckled terror.

Then the plane straightened out, lurching and bumping through the early evening twilight as the pilot lined it up for the final approach to the airfield. Stoner looked out the window and his jaw dropped open.

Tyuratam.

It was like the skyline of Manhattan, except that these were not buildings, but gantry towers. Steel spiderworks for holding and launching rockets. Miles of them! Stoner saw, gaping. One after another, a whole city full of rocket-launching towers. It made Cape Canaveral look like a flimsy suburban development, modest in scale and temporary in endurance. This was built to last. Like Pittsburgh, like Gary, like the acres upon acres of factories in major industrial centers, Tyuratam was a solid, ongoing, workaday complex of giant buildings, vast machines, hardworking people.

Their business was launching rockets Their industry was astronautics. The place was a port, like fabled Basra of the Arabian Nights, like modern Marseille or New York or Shanghai. Ships sailed out of this port on long, bellowing tongues of flame, heading for destinations in space, bringing back new riches of knowledge.

And someday, Stoner knew, they’ll bring back energy, and raw materials, and they’ll start building factories up there in orbit.

But for now they probed the uncharted seas of space for knowledge, for safe harbors where satellites could orbit and relay information back to Earth.

The plane edged lower. Stoner could see spotlights blooming around one launch pad, where a tall silvery rocket stood locked in the steel embrace of a gantry tower.

That’s a Soyuz launcher, he realized. That’s the bird I’m going to fly on.

He did not notice, far off on the other side of the vast complex of towers and rockets, two other boosters standing side by side. They were painted a dull military olive-gray, and were topped by blunt-nosed warheads of megaton death.

Chapter 39

Stoner sat hunched over the gray sheet of paper, ballpoint pen hesitating in midair. So far he had written:

He put the pen down. What difference does that make? he asked himself. Doug wouldn’t be interested in it.

Stoner pushed his chair back and stretched his arms over his head.

What the hell is Doug interested in? he wondered. He realized that he didn’t know his own son; the boy was a stranger to him. And his younger daughter he knew even less.

With a snort of self-disgust he slammed the pen down on the wooden desk, got up and headed for the door. He walked slowly down the narrow hallway. All the other doors were closed. It was not late; dinner had ended less than an hour earlier.

But tomorrow’s the big day, Stoner told himself. The final countdown. The launch.

Everything seemed unnaturally quiet. His previous launches, in America, had been livelier, busier. There were constant meetings, press conferences, get-togethers even late at night, news photographers poking their cameras at you.

Not here, he realized. No reporters. No photographers.

He went downstairs to the common room, where they ate their meals. One of the Chinese physicists was sitting in the leather chair in the corner, under the wall lamp, reading a book in Russian. Stoner nodded to him and the Chinese smiled back politely. His interpreter was gone and they could not converse.

Stoner looked over the round table in the middle of the room, scanned the mostly empty bookshelves, prowled restlessly toward the door of the kitchen and pushed it open.

Markov was bending over in front of the open refrigerator, peering into it.

“You had two helpings of dessert,” Stoner said.

Markov straightened up. “So? Spying on me? Well, I can’t help it. When I’m nervous, I eat. I must keep up my blood sugar, you know.”

“It was damned good baklava,” Stoner admitted. “At least the cooking here is first-rate.”

“Do you want some? That is, if there’s any left?”

“No.” Stoner shook his head. “When I’m nervous I can’t eat.”

Markov looked at him. “You, nervous? You look so calm, so relaxed.”

“I’ve got the jumps inside.”

With a disappointed sigh Markov closed the refrigerator. “It’s all gone,” he said. “Strange, I could have sworn there was some left.”

“Like Captain Queeg’s strawberries,” Stoner said.

“Who?”

“Never mind.”

They drifted back into the common room. The Chinese physicist had left, but one of the Russians had taken the leather chair and turned on the radio on the bookshelf. Classical piano music filled the room.

“Is that Tchaikovsky?” Stoner asked.

Markov gave him a stern professorial glance. “That,” he said firmly, “is Beethoven. The ‘Pathétique Sonata.’”

Stoner refused to be cowed. “Tchaikovsky wrote a Pathétique too, didn’t he?”

“A symphony. It requires at least a hundred musicians and almost an hour’s time. Really, Keith, for a civilized man…”

“I just thought a Russian station would play only Russian composers.”

Markov began to reply, then realized that his leg was being pulled. He laughed.

“Come on,” Stoner said. “Let’s see if we can find some coffee.”

“Aren’t you supposed to refrain from stimulants tonight?” Markov asked. “I thought the medical…”

Stoner raised a finger to silence him. “That muscular fellow sitting in the corner is one of your medical team,” he said in a pleasant lighthearted tone. The Russian paid no attention to them. “He’s going to stick a needle in me the size of the Alaska Pipeline, right at eleven o’clock. But until then, I’ll eat and drink what I want.”

“I have vodka in my room,” Markov said.

“That’s going too far. Coffee won’t blur me tomorrow. Vodka could.”

They went back into the kitchen and Stoner started a pot of coffee brewing. The strains of Beethoven filtered through the kitchen door.

“I have been thinking,” Markov said as he sat at the kitchen table, chin in hand, “about a British philosopher—Haldane.”

“J. B. S. Haldane? He was a biologist, wasn’t he?”

“A geneticist, I believe. And a Marxist. He was a member of the British Communist Party in the nineteen-thirties.”

“So?”

“He once said, ‘The universe is not only stranger than we imagine; it is stranger than we can imagine.’ ”

Stoner frowned, turned to the coffeepot perking on the stove, then looked back at Markov.

“Don’t you see what it means?” the Russian asked. “You’re going to risk your life tomorrow and fly off to this alien spacecraft. But suppose, when you reach it…”

“If we reach it,” Stoner heard himself mutter. It surprised him.

“If and when you reach it,” Markov granted, “suppose it’s something beyond human comprehension? Suppose you can’t make head or tail of it?”

Stoner took a potholder and pulled the coffeepot off the stove. He stepped over the table and poured coffee into the two strangely delicate china cups that seemed to be the only kind the kitchen stocked. Beethoven’s Pathétique flowed into its second movement.

“Do you hear that?” Stoner asked, gesturing with the steaming coffeepot.

“The music? Yes, of course.”

“A human being created that. A human mind. Other human minds have played it, recorded it, broadcast it over the air so that we can hear it. We’re listening to the thoughts of a German musician who’s been dead for more than a century and a half.”

“What has that to do with the alien?” Markov asked.

“An alien mind built that spacecraft…”

“A mind we may not be able to comprehend,” said the Russian.

“But that spacecraft follows the same laws of physics that we do comprehend. It moves through space just like any spacecraft that we ourselves have built.”

“And sets off the Northern Lights all around the planet.”

“Using electromagnetic techniques that we don’t understand—yet. But we’ll learn. We have the ability to understand.”

“I wonder if we do.”

Stoner put the coffeepot down on the table.

“Don’t you see, Kirill? We do. We do! Why do you think I want to go out there? So I can be overawed by something I can’t fathom? So I can worship the goddamned aliens? Hell no! I want to see, to learn, to understand.”

“And if you can’t? If it’s beyond comprehension?”

Stoner shook his head stubbornly. “There is nothing in the universe that we can’t understand—given time enough to study it.”

“That is your belief.”

“That is my religion. The same religion as Einstein: ‘The eternal mystery of the universe is its comprehensibility.’ ”

Markov grinned at him. “Americans are optimists by nature.”

“Not by nature,” Stoner corrected. “By virtue of historical fact. The optimists always win in the long run.”

“Well, my optimistic friend, I hope you are right. I hope that this alien is friendly and helpful. I wouldn’t want to have to bow down to someone who isn’t even human.”

They walked back into the common room, coffee cups in hand. The Russian medical technician sitting in the corner looked up at them, pointed to his wristwatch and said something to Markov.

“He wants to remind you that you get your shot at eleven.”

Stoner made a smile for the technician. “Tell him I appreciate his sadistic concern and I’d like to take his needle and stick it up his fat ass.”

The technician smiled and nodded as Markov spoke to him in Russian.

Beethoven ended and the little oblong radio on the bookshelf started playing chamber music: gentle, civilized strings, abstract, mathematical.

“Bach, isn’t it?” Stoner asked, taking one of the leather chairs that flanked the room’s only couch.

Markov sighed. “Vivaldi.”

The outside door banged open and Jo stamped into the room, making annoyed brushing motions across her arms.

“Mosquitoes,” she said. “Big as jet fighters.”

“One of the joys of the countryside,” Markov said.

Jo wore jeans and a light sweater. She ran a hand through her hair as she complained, “They have those damned floodlights all around the building. You can’t see the sky at all, and they won’t let you walk past the lighted area.”

“But look on the positive side,” Markov suggested. “The floodlights attract the mosquitoes.”

She laughed, despite herself, and came over toward the sofa. “I don’t think I’ll be able to sleep tonight. Too keyed up.”

“Would you like some coffee?” Stoner asked.

“That’d just make it worse.”

“A glass of hot tea, perhaps?” Markov offered. “Or some vodka.”

“No alcohol. I’ve got to keep my head clear for tomorrow, even if they won’t let me actually get my hands on any of the hardware.”

“Perhaps we could get our medical friend here to give you the shot he’s going to give Stoner. It puts you into a deep, relaxing sleep and then lets you wake up the next morning clear as a mountain lake.”

“So they claim,” Stoner put it.

“No thanks,” Jo said. Looking at the technician, she asked, “Does he understand English?”

“No,” Markov said. “Only Russian.”

“Where’s he from?”

Markov asked the technician, who smiled hugely for her, revealing a picket fence of stainless steel inlays, and answered with a long string of heartfelt words.

“He comes from a little village near Leningrad,” Markov translated, “the most beautiful little village in all of Russia. He would love to show you how beautiful it is, especially in the springtime.”

Jo smiled back at him, asking, “He’s really a Russian, then? Not a Ukrainian or a Georgian or a Kazakh.”

Markov glanced at the overweight, red-haired, fair-skinned medical technician. “He is quite Russian, I guarantee it. But why this interest in our federated nationalities?”

Turning back to Markov and Stoner, Jo answered, “I’ve been talking with some of the people around here—you know, guards, clerks, ordinary people.”

“Not astronomers or linguists,” Markov murmured.

Ignoring him, Jo went on, “A lot of the Russians here are kind of worried about the Kazakhs, and other non-Russian ethnic groups.”

“Worried?” Stoner asked.

“The tide of Islam,” Markov said in a bored tone. “Ever since Iran and Afghanistan, the major topic of gossip is the possibility of a native uprising. It’s quite impossible, you know.”

“An uprising,” Jo said. “But what about sabotage? Suppose the people who used Schmidt use some Kazakh technician to tamper with the rocket booster tomorrow?”

Markov shook his head and raised his hands toward the ceiling. “No, no, no! Impossible. That’s one thing that our security people have checked quite thoroughly. No one but Russian nationals has been allowed near the boosters. That, I promise you.”

“Am I safe from all the Russian nationals?” Stoner asked.

For an instant, Markov did not answer. Then, one hand stroking his beard, he said very seriously, “Yes, you are. I am certain of it.”

The two men looked at each other, eye to eye, for a long wordless moment.

“I think I would like some of that tea,” Jo said, breaking their wordless moment.

“Allow me.” Markov was instantly heading for the kitchen. “I will make you a glass of tea that will soothe your nerves and invigorate your spirit. Not like that dreadful sludge they call coffee. Phah! How can anyone drink that stuff regularly?”

Stoner laughed as Markov went through the kitchen door. He’s leaving the two of us alone, he realized. Jo sat on the couch next to the shuttered window. The Russian technician stayed at his chair in the corner. Stoner went over and sat next to Jo.

“My last night on Earth,” he said. Then he added, “For a week or so.”

“Aren’t you nervous?”

“Hell yes.”

“You don’t look it. You look perfectly calm.”

“On the outside. Inside, everything’s twitching. If you took an x-ray picture of me, it’d come out blurred, unless you used a stop-action shutter on the camera lens.”

Jo laughed softly.

“I always get nervous before a flight, especially the last few minutes before lift-off. My heart rate goes way up.”

“That’s understandable,” she said. Her face grew somber. “You can still back out of it, you know. The Russians have cosmonauts in reserve who…”

“I know,” he said.

“You’re not afraid of them trying to—to stop you?”

“Kirill’s been watching over me like a St. Bernard.”

“That’s not enough…”

“And so have you,” he added. “I’ve been watching you poking around, getting mosquito bites while you’re checking out everybody around here.”

She looked surprised. “I haven’t…well, the two of us aren’t enough of a bodyguard for you.”

He reached out and clasped the back of her neck. “I appreciate it, Jo. I understand what you’re doing and I appreciate it, really I do.”

“Sure you do.”

“I do. I hope you understand why I’m being so stubborn about all this.”

Nodding, she answered, “Yes, I do understand, Keith. That’s what frightens me. I’d be doing exactly the same thing, in your place. But I hate the fact that you’re doing it, you’re taking the chances with your life.”

“That’s the way it is,” he said softly.

“And there’s no changing it,” she replied. “I know.”

Markov came back into the room, holding a steaming glass of tea in each hand. The glasses were set into silvered holders. He hiked his eyebrows at the sight of Stoner and Jo side by side on the couch.

“Star-crossed lovers,” he sighed. “How I envy you.”

Stoner pulled his hand away from Jo and she reached for the handle of the glass that Markov offered her.

“Thank you, Kirill.”

“For you, beautiful one, I would conquer China so that you would be assured of the best tea whenever you desired it.”

She grinned at his flattery.

As Stoner sipped at his cooling coffee, the medical technician studied his wristwatch, hauled himself out of his chair and clicked off the little radio. The three of them watched him lumber back into the tiny office on the other side of the common room. Through the office window they could see him unlocking a medicine cabinet.

“Your hour has come,” Markov said solemnly.

Stoner glanced at Jo. She was watching the technician as he removed a black plastic case from the cabinet.

“Nobody’s been able to substitute poison for the tranquilizer they’re going to give me,” Stoner heard himself say.

Jo flicked her dark, anxious eyes to him. “I’ve been checking the cabinet all day. They’ve kept it locked.”

Markov frowned but said nothing.

The four of them went up to Stoner’s room, the technician in the lead. Stoner sat in his creaking desk chair and rolled up his shirt sleeve while Markov and Jo hovered beside him.

With elaborate care the technician fitted the syringe together and tested it. Stoner stared down at the unfinished letter to his son. Hastily, he scrawled:

I’ve got to go now. You’ll probably see the flight on TV. I hope to see you and Elly soon. Please write, and ask your sister to write, too. I love you both very much.

He signed his name, folded the letter and stuffed it into the envelope he had already addressed. Handing it to Markov, he asked, “Would you mail this for me, Kirill?”

Markov nodded.

The technician came up, swabbed Stoner’s bare arm just above the elbow. Markov turned his head. So did Stoner. He felt the faintest prick of the needle, and then the technician was pressing a cotton swab on his arm.

“It’s all finished,” Jo said.

“Christ, I hate needles,” Stoner muttered.

The technician smiled at them, his smile growing especially big for Jo, and then left. Stoner got to his feet, tested his legs.

“Nothing. No effect at all.”

“It will hit you soon enough,” Markov said. “You had better get into bed.”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

Markov toyed with his beard. “Keith…tomorrow you will be surrounded by others, technicians, doctors…you know.”

Stoner nodded. Markov grabbed him by the shoulders and embraced him. Stoner pounded the Russian’s back with both hands and got the same treatment in return.

“Good night,” Markov said, pulling himself away. “Good luck, my friend.”

“Good night, Kirill.”

Markov hurriedly left the room. Stoner turned. Jo was still standing there, between him and the bed.

Stoner put out a hand to push the door shut, missed it, staggered a few steps.

“Whoa…!” The room swayed.

“Here, let me help you,” Jo said.

“I can manage.” He gripped the open door, clung to it for a moment to steady himself, then pushed against it. It swung shut and he swung around to face her.

“That must’ve been some shot he gave you,” Jo said. Her voice sounded far, far away.

“Kid stuff,” Stoner said. He tried to snap his fingers, but it didn’t work.

Somehow she was holding him, propping him up, walking him toward the bed. An infinite distance. Endless.

“My last night on Earth,” Stoner mumbled. “I want to spend it with you.”

“Sure you do,” she said.

He was falling, gliding slowly, effortlessly, weightlessly toward the bed that stretched out so invitingly, so far below him.

“My last night on Earth,” he repeated as he bounced on the squeaking, sagging mattress.

“Yes, I know.”

She was beside him and he held her close. She felt warm and the scent of springtime flowers buzzed through his brain.

“We are stardust,” he told her.

Her voice was a distant purr in his ear. “You told me that our last night on Kwajalein.”

“A million years ago. Yes, I remember.”

“Close your eyes, Keith. Sleep.”

“I want to make love with you, Jo. I want you to make love with me.”

Her soft laughter was like windchimes. He couldn’t hear the sadness in it. “Keith, you’re going to be unconscious in another minute.”

“No, I’m not. I’m going to…” The words faded away as his eyes closed.

Jo sat next to him for long moments, watching his face relax into deep, untroubled sleep. She kissed him lightly, and he smiled.

“Say you love me, Keith,” she whispered to his sleeping form. “Tell me just once that you love me.”

But he lay there sound asleep, smiling.

Jo got to her feet, straightened her clothes, and went to the door. With one final look at him sleeping peacefully on the bed, she opened the door and left his room.

Wichita

“Harry, come on! You’re missing Walter!”

“Walter? I thought he retired.”

“He’s on for this. Hurry!”

“Hold on. Hold on. Here I am. Turn up the sound.”

“I swear you’re getting deaf. I swear it.”

“If you’d shut up for a minute, maybe I could hear the darned TV!”

“Don’t yell at me, Harry! First time Walter’s on all year and you have to start an argument.”

“Just turn up the sound and sit down.”

“…and for that story, we switch to Roger Mudd, in Moscow.”

“It’s three A.M. here in Moscow, Walter, and the city is asleep. But the lights in the Kremlin offices where the upcoming space shot is being monitored are burning intensely…”

“Is that happening now, Harry?”

“Can’tcha see? It says, ‘Live by Satellite.’ ”

“…and in the Russian cosmodrome of Tyuratam, final preparations for the rocket’s lift-off are being made in the glow of floodlamps…”

“Is that a real Russian rocket?”

“Sure it is.”

“Gee, it looks just like one of ours.”

Chapter 40

Maria Kirtchatovska Markova watched the sky slowly brighten with dawn as she lay wide awake beside her husband’s sprawled, sleeping form.

Even with his beard and his hair turning silver, when he slept he looked like a baby: his face was unlined, except for the smile crinkles around the corners of his eyes, his mouth was open slightly, his breathing deep and regular.

Her eyes burned with sleeplessness. All night long she had lain in bed, rigid with tension, worrying about the future. The American was doomed, she knew that. He was nothing more than a pawn in the power struggle taking place within the Kremlin. But if Stoner was a pawn, Maria herself—and Kirill—were even less. They could both be swept away with the brush of a careless hand.

I must protect him, she knew. I must protect us both.

Slowly, carefully, she lifted the bedcovers enough to slip out of bed. The floor felt cold to her feet, but she barely noticed it. She went to the window, felt the summer sunlight warm on her face.

“Maria?” Markov’s sleep-fogged voice called.

She didn’t answer.

“What are you doing?”

Turning, she saw that he was sitting up in the bed. His faded green nightshirt was twisted ludicrously around his torso, but the sight brought no laughter to Maria’s lips.

“I’m watching the sunrise,” she said. “It’s quite beautiful.”

Markov reached for a cigarette from the pack on the bedside table.

“What’s wrong?” he asked, lighting it. “Why are you up at this ungodly hour?”

She shrugged. There was no sense talking to him about it. He would only get angry and climb up on his high horse and make silly pronouncements.

Markov got out of bed and came to the window beside her.

“You haven’t slept all night, have you? Your eyes are all red.”

“They launch the rocket this morning,” she said.

“Yes.” Markov puffed on the cigarette and gazed out the window. From this side of the building the launching pad couldn’t be seen.

“Strange to think,” he went on, “that Stoner will be safer once he’s in space than he’s been on the ground.”

Maria said nothing.

Her husband mused, “At least there are no assassins in outer space.”

She still said nothing.

He looked down at her, his eyes searching. “Maria Kirtchatovska, he will be safe in that rocket, won’t he?”

“Yes,” she answered automatically. “Of course.”

Taking her by the shoulders, Markov said in a near whisper, “Maria, he is my friend. I don’t want any harm to come to him.”

“There’s nothing I can do to harm him,” she said.

“But you can help him.”

“No, I can’t.”

“Is he still in danger, Maria?”

She pulled away from him.

But he grabbed her again, harder. “Maria! If there’s any chance at all for us to live together, you must be honest with me. Is he still in danger?”

“It’s not in our hands, Kirill,” she said, trying to avoid his eyes. “There’s nothing we can do about it.”

“About what?” His voice was becoming frantic.

“I don’t know!” she said, pleading. “The decisions that are being made—Kirill, we shouldn’t even be thinking about it! It doesn’t concern us!”

“Yes, it does!” His voice was so intense it cut through her. “If you let them kill Stoner you’re also letting them kill us.”

“Kir, I can’t…”

“What are they going to do?” he demanded.

“I don’t know.”

“But they are going to do something?”

“There are…factions, at the very highest levels of authority.”

“You must find out what they plan to do, Maria. Before we let him get into that rocket!”

“It won’t be the rocket,” she said. “That much I know. They don’t want the rocket launch to fail, not in front of worldwide television coverage.”

“Then what?”

“How can I know, Kir? If I even hinted at trying to find out, it could mean…I can’t do it, Kir. I can’t.”

He circled his arms around her and held her close. Instead of bellowing, his voice became gentle, almost passionate. “You must, Maria. It’s the only hope for us, for all of us. You must find out what they plan to do to him. And quickly.”

Their voices woke Jo. She couldn’t make out words through the thin walls separating the second-floor rooms, but she could tell from the rhythms of the voices that it was Russian being spoken. Heatedly.

Jo showered and dressed quickly. It wasn’t until she stood in front of the foggy mirror over her sink to put on lipstick that she realized her hands were trembling.

She was the first downstairs in the common room. The cook and her helper—both pale-skinned Russians, wives of technicians—had already set the table for breakfast and filled the kitchen with the steamy aroma of hot cereal, eggs, ham and the thin, limp local equivalent of crepes.

Markov came downstairs, looking as tense as a bow-string pulled taut, followed by his dumpy, sour-faced wife. Jo realized it was their voices that had awakened her. In a few minutes the two Chinese scientists came down, then Zworkin and two of his aides. No one spoke much. Anxiety crackled through the air like high-voltage electricity.

Jo couldn’t eat. She sipped at a cup of coffee as the team from the launch complex pulled up outside in their van. A half-dozen technicians in white coveralls clumped into the common room, spoke a few words in Russian with Zworkin, then headed upstairs.

Jo followed after them. As she climbed the stairs she realized that Markov was just behind her.

“My hands are shaking,” she said to him.

“Yes,” he replied. Nothing more.

Stoner was out in the hallway, also in coveralls that the Russians had furnished. The technical team surrounded him like a phalanx of bodyguards, like an escort of white-robed priests.

“I’m to go with him,” Markov muttered, pushing his way past Jo.

“Kirill!” Stoner said with a happy grin. “Good morning. Will you kindly tell these guys that I’m ready to go? What’re we standing around here for? Let’s get the show on the road.”

Markov spoke in Russian and the technicians laughed and nodded to one another. They started for the stairs. Jo started to move aside for them, then saw that Zworkin and all the others had clustered at the bottom of the steps, craning their necks upward.

The farewell committee, she thought.

Stoner stopped as he came next to her. “So long, kid. Thanks for everything.”

She froze, unable to move her hands, pinned against the wall by the crowd of technicians.

“Good luck, Keith,” she managed to whisper.

He leaned over, kissed her lightly. “I’ll be back,” he whispered.

Then he was gone, clattering down the stairs in his flight boots, Markov slightly ahead of him, the technicians following behind.

Jo stood there, suddenly alone in the upstairs hallway, and thought:

At least he’s on his way. They won’t try anything now. If they did, it would kill the cosmonaut who’s going up with him.

It was nearly midnight in Washington, but the Oval Office was brightly lit and filled with the President’s advisers.

“How long before lift-off?” asked the press secretary.

“Less than two hours now,” the science adviser answered. She was sitting rigidly upright on one of the straight-backed chairs that had been brought in from the secretary’s office.

“When do we start praying?” cracked Senator Jay. He was working on his third scotch of the evening.

“I started an hour ago,” the President said from behind his desk.

Their eyes were all riveted on the TV screen built into the wall of the Oval Office. It displayed the picture being relayed out of Tyuratam without the interruptions of the networks’ commercial coverage. The President could, at the touch of a button on his desk, switch on commentary from any network he chose, or from the NASA analysts who were monitoring the broadcast from the basement offices under the West Wing. At the moment, the CBS News commentary was being shown, printed on a smaller screen beneath the big picture. The President kept the sound off.

Walden C. Vincennes, tanned and handsome in his flowing, leonine gray hair, somehow had managed to get the old Kennedy rocker for himself and place it to the right of the President’s desk.

“If they pull this off, Mr. President,” he said, his rich baritone cutting through the other conversations buzzing around the room, “your stock will go up incredibly high.”

“Perhaps,” said the President. “We’ll see.”

The press secretary focused his attention on the two of them, even though he was sitting all the way across the room, wedged into the couch between Senator Jay and General Hofstader.

Vincennes smiled like a movie star. “You know, Mr. President, if all this goes well, the people might demand that you reconsider your decision not to run again.”

The President shook his head. “I doubt it.”

“There could be a draft at the convention.”

“No.”

“I’ve heard…talk.”

It seemed to take an effort for the President to pull his eyes from the TV screen. “Walden, if we make contact with this alien spaceship, and if it’s not hostile, and if there’s a lot to be gained from the contact—don’t you think I’ll have my hands full, between now and November? How could I campaign for re-election and do justice to all that?”

Vincennes put on a thoughtful look. His smile faded by degrees, but the press secretary thought his eyes looked even happier than they had when he’d been smiling.

“I suppose you’re right,” Vincennes said.

“And if this doesn’t go well,” the President went on, “if that young man dies or the alien turns out to be hostile or some form of monster…then I’m finished anyway.”

“That’s true. But I’m sure it will all go well.”

The press secretary laughed to himself. Vincennes is angling for the Chief’s endorsement as the party’s candidate. I’ll be damned! He really wants to run for it! Then he thought, more seriously, I ought to have a long talk with him about it. He’ll need an experienced staff, after all.

In California it was 9 P.M. and all the prime-time television shows had been pre-empted for the live coverage of the space shot.

Doug and Elly Stoner sat in their grandparents’ living room, watching the TV set. Their mother was out with friends. Their grandparents flanked them on the long sectional sofa as Walter Cronkite explained:

“This will be the most difficult and complex manned space mission ever attempted, demanding as it does that the astronaut-cosmonaut team fly four times deeper into space than any human being has ever gone before.”

Cronkite was sitting at a curved command console of a desk. Behind him a four-color chart showed the position of the Earth, the Moon and the alien spacecraft.

“Already, a team of Russian cosmonauts aboard the Soviet space station Salyut Six has assembled three modules rocketed up from Tyuratam over the past two weeks.”

Pictures of the space modules appeared behind Cronkite’s ear, replacing the chart. The modules were silvery cylinders with bent-wing panels of solar energy cells jutting out from each side. Each module bore the red letters CCCP stenciled on its side.

“These modules contain the air-recycling equipment, food and water for the two-week-long space mission,” Cronkite went on, “as well as the scientific apparatus with which the American astronaut and Russian cosmonaut will study the alien spacecraft, and—if everything goes very well—make a rendezvous in space with this visitor from a distant solar system.”

Doug fidgeted nervously on the sofa, wishing for a beer. His sister shot him a stern glance, then returned her attention to the television screen.

“Piloting the Soyuz spacecraft will be Major Nikolai Federenko, a veteran of three earlier Soviet space missions. The scientist-astronaut will be Dr. Keith Stoner, of the United States’ National Aeronautics and Space Administration—NASA. Dr. Stoner…”

For some ridiculous reason, tears sprang up in Doug’s eyes. He kept his face rigidly staring forward, toward the blurring TV screen, and felt thankful that the living room was too dark for his grandparents or his sister to see him.

Markov had no children and his only sibling—an older sister—had married and moved off to an industrial city in the Caucasus while Kirill was still in college. So the emotional swirl of walking Stoner through the long morning caught him unaware.

As the American’s translator, Markov went every step of the way with Stoner as they entered the launch control building, sat down for the final physical checkup (a simple blood test and EKG) and then went downstairs to suit up.

“It’s like a bridegroom putting on his tuxedo,” Stoner said as a pair of white-smocked technicians helped him climb into the bulky, cumbersome pressure suit.

Markov sat on a bench and leaned his back against a metal locker. “More like a knight putting on his armor,” he observed.

Next they went out to a minibus and drove to the launching pad. With four other technicians crowding into the rickety elevator cab, they rode to the top of the launch tower. Stoner looked to Markov as if some puffy white headless monster had almost completely swallowed him. Markov felt jittery, almost sick to his stomach, as if he had forgotten something vital, as if something terribly wrong was about to happen.

But these are all good, hardworking men. They have devoted their lives to our space programs. They wouldn’t deliberately sabotage their own work. They couldn’t!

Yet he felt far from reassured. It only takes one rotten apple, whispered a coiled cobra inside his brain.

The elevator opened onto a cramped enclosure teeming with technicians in the inevitable white coveralls. A featureless tube of smooth gray walls led out of the enclosure, ending at the hatch of the Soyuz spacecraft.

Stoner turned toward his friend. “This is as far as you go, Kirill. Launch crew only from here on.”

Markov saw that the cosmonaut, Major Federenko, was already partway down the access tube, waiting, his pressure suit zipped up and his fishbowl helmet under his arm.

“It’s okay,” Stoner said. “Federenko speaks English pretty well. I won’t get lost.”

Markov forced a smile. “Good luck, Keith. Vaya con Dios.”

Stoner grinned at him. “Et cum spirito tuo, old friend. I’ll see you when I get back.”

Markov stood there feeling empty and terribly sad as Stoner clumped down the tube toward the cosmonaut.

“Hello, Nikolai,” he heard Stoner say. “Looks like a good day for flying.”

“Yes, yes,” Federenko replied in a deep bass voice that echoed off the tube walls. “Good day. Very good day.”

Like two young knights sallying out for adventure, Markov thought. Then he realized why he was so sad. And leaving me behind.

He went back down the elevator and was driven in the minibus back to the launch control building. Maria was waiting for him as he stepped down from the bus. She wore her drab brown uniform now.

“I wish them well,” she said.

Markov nodded and put his arm around his wife’s shoulders. Incredibly, she let him get away with it.

“They have the future of the world in their hands, Marushka,” he said to her. “Our future, the future of Russia, of America—the whole world.”

Maria looked up at him. “They’ll be all right,” she assured him. “The launch will go well. Come, we can watch it from inside the control center.”

As the sun crept over the distant hills and the morning mists of Rome began to burn away, the Pope got up from his knees and walked slowly to the door of his private chapel.

Cardinal Benedetto would be out there, he knew. And Von Friederich and so many others. The television people. The paparazzi. He had to simplify it all, bring it down to a few strong words that all could understand. He spoke not merely to the cameras and the newspapers, but to hundreds of millions of believers and—strangely enough—to billions of non-believers, as well. The Papacy was a heavy burden, global in scope. Now it was about to become interstellar.

That is what I will tell them, the Pope thought, nodding slowly to himself. God in His mercy and wisdom has seen fit to reveal more of His creation to us. We are indeed fortunate to live in these times. This alien object reaffirms Christ’s truth, that all men are brothers.

Fleetingly, he wondered again what the consequences would be if the alien turned out to be evil, devilish.

It cannot be, he told himself firmly. That is something I cannot believe. God would not allow such an evil to fall upon us.

He reached out boldly and threw open the doors. Television lights glared around him and the crowd of news reporters strained against the velvet ropes that had been set up.

The dazzling lights even reached back into the chapel chamber, where, above the altar at which he had prayed, a Medieval mural of the Flood showed a sinful mankind being chastized by a wrathful God.

Halfway around the world, on Kwajalein, it was early evening. Reynaud sat by Schmidt’s bedside and watched the countdown’s progress on the hospital television set.

Cronkite was showing a view of Cape Canaveral. A NASA Space Shuttle stood gleaming white in the glare of floodlights, its nose pointing into the Florida sky.

“And at Kennedy Space Center, American technicians are preparing to launch the tanker that will refuel the Russian Soyuz, deep in space, as it nears the alien craft.

“The tanker itself is a Russian vehicle, flown to the United States six days ago as part of this intricate joint American-Soviet effort to make contact with the alien spacecraft.”

Schmidt, sitting up in his bed, asked through his wired jaw, “Do you think they’ll make it?” His voice was thick and slow.

“I believe they will,” Reynaud answered. “Stoner won’t let anything stop him.”

The General Secretary also sat propped up in bed, watching the final moments of the countdown on his private television set. Borodinski sat next to the big, heavily blanketed bed.

“It is going well, Comrade Secretary,” the younger man said without taking his eyes off the screen. “You must be very proud this morning. The whole world is watching Russia lead the way to a meeting with the alien.”

But the General Secretary had closed his eyes. His chin slumped to his chest. His final breath was a long, soft sigh of release.

Stoner lay on his back in the cramped spherical capsule of the Soyuz spacecraft. Helmet on, visor locked and sealed, gloved hands resting on his knees. And sweating. His legs dangled up above him. Like a turtle on its back, he thought. Useless and in danger.

He turned his head to see Federenko, in the left seat, but the helmet blocked his view. He could hear the cosmonaut, though, in his earphones, chatting happily with the launch control engineers in Russian. Stoner guessed at what they were saying.

“Internal power on.” A row of lights on the panel a few inches over his head winked on, green.

“Life support systems, on.”

“Guidance computer, on.”

“Air pressure, normal.

The cosmonaut’s gloved fingers flicked across the switches of his control panel like a pianist testing a new instrument. One by one, the banks of lights lit up.

“Shtoner,” Federenko’s bass rumbled.

“Yes?”

“You can pick up the countdown at Teh minus one meenute, at my mark…Mark.”

T minus one minute. Stoner heard the Russian words in his earphones. He appreciated Federenko’s taking the moment out to give him a translation. Now his own mental clock could click off the last sixty seconds in cadence with the Russian launch controller’s voice.

Stoner’s eyes flicked over the control panel. Every light and switch had been hastily labeled in English. He had crammed a year’s worth of orientation into a few weeks. But I can fly this bird if I have to, he told himself. They can maneuver it remotely from the ground, of course, but I can override them if I have to. I can fly her.

His hands were slippery with sweat inside the silvered gloves. He hoped he wouldn’t have to take over control of the spacecraft.

T minus thirty seconds.

Jo stood on the roof of their barracks building, peering into the brightening sky and the rocket booster, several kilometers away.

Don’t let anything go wrong, she prayed silently. Don’t let anything go wrong.

The loudspeaker boomed in Russian for several moments, then in English:

“A MESSAGE FROM THE PRESIDENT OF THE SOVIET UNION. GOOD FORTUNE TO THE TWO BRAVE MEN WHO GO TO MEET THE ALIEN SPACESHIP THE HEARTIEST ADMIRATION AND GOOD WISHES OF THE SOVIET PEOPLE FLY WITH YOU ON YOUR GALLANT MISSION.”

Before the echoes could die away, the voice added:

“T MINUS FIFTEEN SECONDS.”

T minus ten seconds, Stoner counted mentally.

He could feel his heart pounding wildly as he went on, Five, four, three…

The booster trembled beneath them. Pumps starting up.

“…one, zero…”

He heard the Russian word for Ignition! and felt the whole capsule shudder. A dull growl from somewhere deep within, exploding into an ear-shattering bellow as millions of demons howled their loudest and a heavy, implacable hand squeezed down on his chest, pressed him into his seat, shook him with bone-jarring violence.

Stoner felt the breath forced out of him. His eyeballs were pressing back in their sockets. The noise was overpowering, a solid wall that pressed his eardrums flat. He couldn’t lift his hands from the armrests. His spine was being crushed. And the noise, the noise and vibration rattling him…

Across the whole world hundreds of millions watched the gleaming rocket climb upward on its tongue of flame, straight and stately as if guided along an invisible taut wire, rising slowly, majestically, then accelerating, higher, faster, into the cloud-flecked blue, faster now, arcing over, flame bellowing from its rocket nozzles, racing across the sky, dwindling from view.

In Moscow a huge roomful of hardened correspondents broke into cheers as the booster hurtled across the sky.

In New York, Walter Cronkite stood up at his desk, startling the cameramen, who abruptly jerked their cameras upward to keep him in frame. Millions of viewers thought they heard Cronkite mutter, “Go, baby, go.”

Jo watched the rocket lift off, its exhaust flame brighter than anything she’d ever seen before. The booster rose in eerie silence, up and up, higher and higher, without a sound to be heard. Then the overwhelming roar reached her, washed over her rooftop perch, wave after wave of solid white noise, making the whole building shake. Jo imagined she could feel the heat from the rocket engines, knew it was all in her mind, but felt it anyway.

Good-by, Keith, she said to herself. Somehow she felt, deep within her, that she would never see him again.

Chapter 41

The mind-numbing roar eased away and finally died altogether. The pressure dwindled until Stoner saw that his arms were floating free of the seat rests. He felt light-headed, and for a moment his innards told him that he was falling. Squeezing his eyes shut hard enough to make them tear, he opened them and he was no longer lying on his back but sitting upright in the Soyuz capsule. Nothing had changed but his perspective.

“Shtoner,” Federenko’s deep voice rumbled in his earphones. “You okay?”

He nodded. “Okay, Nikolai. I’m fine. You?”

“All good.”

Stoner’s vision was blurred. “Okay to open my helmet?”

But Federenko was on the radio, checking back with mission control. Stoner waited until he was finished, then asked again.

“Yes, yes. Cabin pressure is normal. All systems are good, ground control confirms.”

Stoner slid the visor up, pulled his gloves off and wiped at his eyes. The gloves drifted out toward the control panel and he grabbed at them, grinning to himself.

“Zero gravity,” Federenko said. “You remember? Do not make crumbs when you eat.”

Stoner laughed and took a deep, easy breath. For the first time in nearly two years he was weightless. The pleasure of it was euphoric.

“Was a good launch, no?”

“Perfect,” Stoner said.

“Now we make contact with Salyut by radio, then go EVA to dock with equipment and supply vessels.”

Stoner pulled out the clipboard that was mounted on the panel to his right. In both Russian and English it listed every task they must do, the day and hour it must be started, and how long they had to complete each.

“You make the first EVA,” Stoner said.

“Da.”

“I’ll watch the store.”

Federenko peered from around the edge of his helmet. “Watch store?”

“It’s an American expression.” Stoner tried to explain it to him.

Federenko listened, frowning deeply. “But there is no one here to steal from store.”

Shrugging inside his bulky pressure suit, Stoner said, “Well, Nikolai, you know how it is in a capitalist society. So many thieves that we expect them everywhere.”

It made no impact on the cosmonaut. “But no thieves in orbit. No thieves aboard Salyut. They are both good Soviet citizens; officers in Red Army.”

Stoner grinned weakly and gave it up.

Borodinski was on the special picturephone that the General Secretary had set up in his quarters. The beefy-faced man in the viewing screen wore the collar of a soldier with the tab insignia of a major general.

“This line is scrambled and secure?” Borodinski asked in a near whisper.

“Yes, comrade. Of course.”

“I have heavy news that must not go beyond your ears until I call you again.”

“I have kept state secrets before, comrade,” the general said, a slight smirk twitching at the corners of his mouth.

“Our great friend is dead.”

“No!”

“Just a few minutes ago. The doctors have confirmed it. There is no hope of resuscitation.”

The general’s face fell. He seemed genuinely grieved. “He was a good man. A fine man. A strong comrade.”

“You understand why this news must be kept secret for the next several hours?”

“Of course, comrade. You have many calls to make, many…details to check on.”

“I have called you first,” Borodinski said, “because I want to impress on you the fact that the General Secretary’s policies are still in effect, still to be carried out exactly as he desired them to be.”

“Yes, comrade. Will the Presidium…?”

“That’s none of your concern at the moment. Of utmost importance is the question of the missiles. Are they ready to be fired if we should need them?”

“The strategic strike force is always prepared, comrade.”

“I mean,” Borodinski explained patiently, “the missiles that are being held ready for the alien spaceship.” Is the man being deliberately doltish? he wondered.

“Oh! Them! Yes, comrade, they are prepared for launching at an instant’s notice. The tracking radars have precise data on the alien’s position. The warheads are armed and ready.”

Borodinski nodded. “Very well. Keep the missiles in readiness. And yourself as well. I will call you, personally, if we should need them.”

“I understand, comrade. They will be ready, and so will I.”

As Borodinski clicked off the connection and the general’s face faded from the screen, he looked across the bedroom at the body of the General Secretary, arranged carefully on the bed, eyes closed, hands clasped on his chest.

“So much to do,” he muttered to himself. Now the real work begins, he knew. And the real danger. It was one thing to be handed the reins of power; it was quite another thing to hold onto them.

Borodinski shook his head. For a fleeting moment he almost envied the peaceful slumber of the General Secretary.

Stoner turned in his seat as Federenko opened the hatch that led from the orbital module and crawled back into the command section. The cosmonaut wormed his way into his own seat and gave a weary sigh of relief.

“It took longer than the schedule calls for, did it not?” He was breathing heavily, and his zippered coveralls were dark with perspiration.

Stoner glanced at the clipboard floating by his knee. “Eighteen minutes longer. Not bad. We still have plenty of slack in the schedule.”

Federenko passed a hand over his eyes. “It is so different out there…hard work.”

“I know.”

Outside the viewing port above his seat, Stoner could just make out the stubby outline of the Salyut space station. The two cosmonauts who had been living and working in the Salyut for the previous month had taken over the task of connecting the supply modules to their Soyuz.

My turn next, Stoner knew. Working in zero gravity sounded effortless, but he knew how easy it was to exhaust yourself. Every motion made in weightlessness had to be consciously, deliberately counteracted by a counter-motion. No friction to bring motions to a “natural” halt. No subliminal visual clues of distance or orientation. No up or down.

Years earlier, General Leonov, the first man to “walk” in space, had advised his cosmonauts, “Think ten times before moving a finger, and twenty times before moving a hand,” when working in space.

Still, Stoner felt eager as a puppy. Impatiently he waited and watched the two Salyut cosmonauts at work, while Federenko went back into the orbital module of their spacecraft for a squeeze bulb of hot tea and enough room to stretch his aching limbs. Stoner sat alone in the cramped command module, surrounded by the Soyuz’s instruments, his eyes on the crewmen working outside.

Finally the digital clock on the control panel showed it was time for him to suit up. A radio command from ground control confirmed the time.

Federenko came back into the command module and took the pilot’s seat as Stoner unstrapped and wormed his way weightlessly into the orbital module.

The orbital module was a globular, womb-shaped section that served as a workroom, bunkhouse and air lock. Stoner slowly pulled on his pressure suit, carefully testing each zipper and seal, forcing himself to be deliberate and patient. The module was a clutter of bunks, lockers, cabinets and two airtight hatches: one that connected with the command module, the other that opened onto vacuum.

Federenko came in to help him into the backpack of oxygen tanks and maneuvering jets. Finally Stoner lowered the fishbowl helmet over his head, sealed it to the metal collar of his suit. Federenko connected the hoses from the oxygen tanks to his helmet. Together they tested the suit’s radio, oxygen pressure, heater. Stoner flexed all the joints, then nodded to Federenko and slid the visor down over his face. The cosmonaut ducked back through the hatch into the command module, and closed the massive airtight hatch behind him.

Stoner was alone now in the metal womb. Reaching out with his gloved hand, he opened the safety latch and then pressed the button that started the air pumps. Through his helmet he heard the machinery stir to life, sucking the air out of the orbital module, into storage tanks.

The telltale panel light went from green to amber, and finally to red. Stoner slowly opened the outer hatch, then drifted out of the metal womb head first.

And gasped.

He had remembered all those months on the ground how beautiful it was in space, but the memory was a mental image, not the visceral passion. Now he saw it again, felt it in his guts again, and all the breath gushed out of him.

Before his eyes the ponderous bulk of Earth curved, glittering blue oceans streaked with dazzling white clouds, huge and overwhelmingly lovely. Turning slowly, Stoner saw the depths of infinity, utterly black but flecked with so many stars that it looked like diamond dust sprinkled across black velvet.

O Lord, I love the beauty of Thy house, and the place where Thy glory dwells.

The words welled up in him as he turned slowly, effortlessly, surveying the heavens. And then he saw the squat, bulky spacecraft sections that hung a few dozen meters from his Soyuz. Beyond them the Salyut space station rode calmly through the sky, its panels of solar cells looking vaguely like a gull’s bent wings, while the Earth passed majestically behind it like a slowly unreeling backdrop.

Work to do.

Using the maneuvering unit in his backpack, Stoner jetted over to the equipment and supply vessels. They had been joined to each other by Federenko and linked by rigid steel cables to the Soyuz by the Salyut cosmonauts. Stoner’s task was to check all the connections, make the final inspection. They had saved the least demanding job for him.

He moved like a man in a dream, slowly floating, each motion a long, deliberate, weightless glide. He didn’t fight the weightlessness, he enjoyed it. Better than skiing. Like floating out in the ocean, riding the heaving swells out beyond the breakers. Go with the flow, Stoner reminded himself. Enjoy it while you can.

He chatted with Federenko over the suit radio as he inspected one by one the connections that linked the Soyuz with its new equipment and supply modules. They checked out perfectly; the cosmonauts had done their work well. The Soyuz was ready to move outward toward its rendezvous with the alien.

And Stoner realized that he felt reluctant, rebellious, unwilling to leave the freedom of space and return to the metal confines of the spacecraft.

“Shtoner,” he heard Federenko’s voice in his earphones.

“Yes.”

“Checkout is complete. Return to air lock.”

He gazed at the Earth, huge and glowing and heart-achingly beautiful. Turning, he looked out into the depths of starry space. He knew what Odysseus heard when the sirens sang their beckoning call to him.

“Shtoner! Can you hear?”

With an effort he wrenched his gaze back to their tiny, lumpy spacecraft. “Yes, yes, I hear you. I’m coming back in.”

But even as he ducked into the air lock and swung its hatch shut, his eyes stayed fixed on the stars until the heavy metal hatch cut off all view of them.

Jo sat at the computer console and watched the numbers and symbols flashing across the glowing green background of its readout screen.

The Russian computer technicians tolerated her at the mission control center. They had given her a console to sit at where she could watch the progress of the mission, one of the hundreds of computer consoles that stretched in long rows across the vast, buzzing room. Up at the front of the control center were huge picture screens and an electronic map that showed where the various spacecraft—the Soyuz, the Salyut orbital station and the alien ship—were in relation to the Earth and the Moon.

The technical staff tolerated an American woman in the center, but the security authorities were clearly on guard. Jo was escorted by armed, uniformed policemen to and from the command center. Markov sat just behind her, nervously smoking cigarettes and tugging at his beard. Often his wife would come in and sit beside him. She also wore some kind of uniform, although Jo didn’t know which branch of the service she was in and didn’t really care.

The controls at her console were for readout only. Jo was here as an observer, and the Russian authorities had made it clear that she was not a participant in the mission. Even the way they said “observer” made it obvious that the word was semantically equivalent to “spy” in their lexicon.

She could watch, she could observe, but she could not help.

She looked around the huge control complex. The tension of the first few hours had worn away. There was a quiet, almost drowsy air to the center. Even Markov seemed more relaxed, in the seat behind hers. The Soyuz had passed the Moon’s orbit nearly forty-eight hours ago. Stoner and Federenko were farther from Earth than anyone had ever flown before.

Trailing behind them, she saw on the huge electronic map, was the unmanned tanker that had been launched from the United States. It was moving on a different track, one that would converge with the Soyuz a few hours before Stoner and Federenko came within sight of the alien.

They’ll be busy then, Jo knew. And so will we.

In another twenty hours the control center would be crackling with activity: first overseeing the link-up with the unmanned tanker, and then the actual rendezvous with the alien itself.

But now all was quiet. Half the consoles were unoccupied, and the technicians who were at their posts seemed at ease, almost nonchalant. Even the few who were speaking into their lip microphones or fingering the switches and dials of their consoles had no appearance of urgency about them.

It’s going well, Jo thought. He’s safe. And it’s too late to sabotage the mission. All the boosters have worked perfectly, all the vehicles are on their courses. Keith is safe, nearly a million miles from Earth.

Stoner scratched drowsily at his stubbly beard. It was starting to itch, and he longed for a hot bath. Federenko, just as grubby and tired-looking, sat calmly in his seat at Stoner’s left, checking the mission schedule. The command module smelled of sweat and body heat.

“Separating supply module is no problem,” Federenko was explaining. “Explosive bolts snap cable and push it away.”

“That’s the fourth time in the past hour you’ve told me,” Stoner replied. “It’s worrying you, isn’t it?”

“No, no. Is no problem.”

“Something’s bothering you, Nikolai.”

The Russian’s unshaven face sank into a dark frown. “Not worry, Shtoner. But I see problem.”

“The tanker?”

“Da. We must link with it before attempting to rendezvous with alien, according to flight plan.”

“I know.”

“But latest radar shows tanker is not in best position for us. Trajectory is deviating from plan.”

“We can still reach it, can’t we?”

Federenko nodded somberly. “But will take more maneuvering fuel than planned. Leaves less fuel for making rendezvous maneuvers with alien.”

Stoner thought a moment. “We could let the tanker go and save our maneuvering fuel for the rendezvous.”

“And have no propellant left for return to Earth,” Federenko said.

“They could send up another tanker.”

With a grim laugh, Federenko said, “In how long? Two days? Two weeks?”

“They’ve got a backup at Cape Canaveral; they were holding it in case the first tanker didn’t get off okay.”

“By the time backup tanker is launched we would be on same trajectory as alien—heading out of solar system. Second tanker not reach us at all.”

“Shit.”

“We must link with tanker,” Federenko said firmly, “even if it means no rendezvous with alien.”

“Christ, Nikolai! We’ve come all this way to make contact with that bird!”

“Is true,” the Russian replied calmly. “But I have no desire to meet alien and never return to Earth. Do you?”

Stoner did not answer.

“Don’t worry,” Markov said. “They can easily reach the tanker. They have plenty of fuel for that, according to the mission controllers.”

He was sitting next to Jo at the dining table in the common room of their barracks. Maria sat on his other side, spooning cold borscht to her lips. Across the table one of the Chinese physicists picked at his dinner.

“But they won’t have enough fuel left to make contact with the alien,” Jo said. Her bowl of borscht sat in front of her, untouched.

Markov shrugged and said lightly, “So they will get as close as they can, take a few thousand photographs and then return home. If that’s the best they can do, then that is what they will do.”

But Jo could feel cold tendrils of fear tracing along her veins. “Keith won’t settle for that. He wants to get aboard the alien spacecraft.”

“Federenko is an experienced cosmonaut,” Markov insisted. “He won’t allow anything that would jeopardize their safety.”

“But Keith…”

“What can he do?” Markov asked, gesturing. “Overpower Federenko and steer the Soyuz to the alien? That’s nonsense.”

“I wouldn’t put it past him,” Jo said.

“Besides,” Markov tried a different tack, “Federenko is a fine pilot. The pride of the Soviet cosmonaut corps. I’ll bet you that he links their ship with the tanker and still has plenty of fuel afterward for their rendezvous with the alien.”

“I hope you’re right,” Jo said, not believing a word of it.

Cocoa Beach, Fla.

“But why do you have to go?” she asked.

He gave another exasperated sigh. “For the twentieth time, Marge: I’ve been ordered to go.”

“But you’re not an astronaut. They can’t order you to fly into space!”

“The hell they can’t.”

“You’re a medical doctor, not an astronaut.”

“I’m a colonel in Uncle Sam’s Army, and when the orders come down from the White House, I salute smartly and say, ‘Yes, sir.’ ”

“You want to go!”

“I’m scared green to go! But I’m under orders. What can I do?”

“You’re too old to go into space.”

“Not on the Shuttle. I’ll just be a passenger, like a plane…. Look, Margie, it’s only for a coupls of weeks. We’ve got to set up a quarantine for those guys after they contact the alien…”

“You’ll catch alien germs! I know you will!”

“Don’t be silly. It’s all a lot of fuss over nothing. Alien organisms are alien. They can’t infect us. Just because the goddamned White House is jittery, we’ve got to go through the motions of a two-week quarantine. In orbit, yet!”

“I’m afraid, Sam.”

“It’s nothing to worry about, honest.”

“Alien germs…”

“I won’t even be in contact with the guys who make contact with the alien. We’ve got a whole sealed laboratory for them to stay in. All the tests will be done by remote control and anybody who goes into the lab will be wearing a space suit.”

“But why you, Sam? Why’d they have to pick you?”

“Don’t you worry, honey. When I come back I’ll be an important guy. They’ll want me on TV and everything. We’ll retire in style, Marge. Real style.”

Chapter 42

Markov sat by the bedroom window, smoking ceaselessly as he watched the long summer twilight give way to darkness.

It was cloudy out there, and would probably begin to rain soon. It made no difference. Even on a clear night the floodlights surrounding their barracks made it impossible to see the stars. And the spaceships were all so far away that they couldn’t be seen from Earth anyway.

The first drops hit the windowpane and trickled down across the reflection of Markov’s long, brooding face. He took a fresh cigarette and lit it with the end of the butt in his lips. The fire glowed bright red for a moment, reminding him instantly of the devilish machine that Maria had back on Kwajalein.

Where is she? he wondered. She had gone out right after dinner and hadn’t come back yet.

Restlessly, Markov glanced at his wristwatch. Six hours to go before they rendezvous with the tanker.

Jo was right, he knew. Stoner would never settle for anything less than physical contact with the alien spaceship. Not without a struggle.

He sighed, then pulled deeply on the cigarette. The rain was spattering down now in big, fat drops. In the reflection of the window Markov saw that he was tugging at his beard again. Annoyed with himself, he got up from the chair and paced across the little room, jamming his right hand into his trousers pocket.

He heard Maria’s clumping footsteps out in the hall and went to the door. Opening it, he saw that the rain had caught her. She looked soaked and bedraggled, hair dripping down across her face, uniform hanging soggily on her stocky body.

And then he saw her eyes.

“Marushka, what is it? What’s wrong? You look as if you’ve seen a ghost.”

She came into the room and shut the door tightly, then leaned against it.

“I have,” she whispered, her voice strangely harsh and breathless. “Two of them.”

“What do you mean?” Markov asked, lowering his own voice unconsciously.

“Federenko and Stoner,” she whispered. “They are both dead.”

“What?”

“Not yet,” she said, raising both hands to quiet him. “But they will be. In six hours.”

Markov felt as if a tiger had clawed out his guts. “What do you mean? What are you saying?”

“The tanker,” she said, glancing all around the room, as if she could see a microphone if one had been planted. “The one launched from America. It’s been rigged to explode…”

“The Americans did this?”

“No.” She shook her head impatiently. “Our own people, a faction, very high up…”

“They’re going to kill our own cosmonaut? And Stoner too?”

Maria looked frightened, terrified. “You don’t understand, Kir. It’s a power struggle. Inside the Kremlin, they are fighting for control. We’re only pawns to them, Kir. Less than pawns.”

“When will the tanker explode?” he demanded.

“When they make contact with it. The timer was set by one of our technicians just before the tanker was loaded aboard the American shuttle.”

Markov sank onto the bed. “Maria…to kill them, kill them both, because of their power games…it’s monstrous.”

“I didn’t think they would kill Federenko too,” she said. “I never thought they would do that.”

He buried his face in his hands. The cigarette fell from his fingers to the bare wooden floor, glowing in the shadows.

Maria went to him, knelt by his feet. “I’m sorry, Kir. I risked my neck to find out for you, and now I’m sorry that I did.”

“It’s not your fault, Marushka.” His voice came out muffled, tearful.

“There’s nothing we can do,” she said. “Nothing.”

But Markov put his hands down and straightened his back. He looked down into his wife’s eyes.

“Yes, there is,” he said firmly.

“Kir…”

“There is something we can do, Maria. We can warn them.”

“But then they’ll know that I…Kir, they’ll kill us both.” She was beyond terror; the absolute certainty of it made her voice flat with hopelessness.

“Then we’ll die together,” he said. “Better that than letting those two be killed in space.”

“You are sulking,” said Federenko.

Stoner pulled his attention away from the computer screen and looked at the cosmonaut sitting beside him.

“You don’t look so happy yourself, Nikolai.”

“How can I be? To come all this way and miss the alien…it is not happy.”

“I’ve been checking the computer figures against the latest data on the tanker’s trajectory. We can still make it—if you can dock us with the tanker on the first pass.”

Federenko closed his eyes for a moment, as if rehearsing the problem in his head. “Not easy, Shtoner.”

“You want me to try it?”

The Russian laughed. “You? You are not pilot; you are passenger.”

“Then it’s up to you,” Stoner said flatly.

The laugh died. “I see,” Federenko said. “You make trap for me, eh?”

“I want you to understand how important this is. You’ve got to dock us with the tanker on the first try. Otherwise we miss the alien.”

Federenko nodded unhappily. “Hokay, Shtoner. You make point. I dock with tanker on first pass. You watch!”

Breaking into a grin, Stoner said, “See? I wasn’t sulking at all.”

Blindly Markov raced through the rain, his long legs propelling him by instinct toward the command center. Zworkin. The old man had not been in his bedroom when Markov had pounded on his door. He must be in the command center, Markov told himself. He must be.

Maria was somewhere behind him as he raced along the gravel path that led to the command center’s massive windowless building. The rain lashed at him and he slitted his eyes against its cold sting.

Zworkin is the only one who can save them now, Markov thought as he ran. If I try talking with the security police I’m lost. Zworkin! And through him to Bulacheff.

Stoner couldn’t understand the babble of Russian coming through the radio speaker, but from the expression of Federenko’s deeply lined face he knew it was bad.

The cosmonaut spoke almost angrily back to ground command, and more urgent words burst from the radio.

Stoner turned to the radar screen, a small orange-glowing disk on the panel between their two seats. It showed a strong blip almost dead ahead of them. He stretched slightly to search through the observation port and—yes, there it was. A silvery crescent of metal against the starry blackness.

The tanker. Close enough to see it.

But Federenko’s gloomy frown sent a chill of apprehension through Stoner. He looks as if he’s just been ordered to attack the whole Chinese Army with his bare hands.

“What is it, Nikolai?”

Federenko turned toward him, defeat smoldering his eyes. “The tanker. We must not go near it. Malfunction.”

“What?”

“Very strange, they tell me. Malfunction in tanker self-destruct circuit. It can explode, they think.”

The cosmonaut’s hands reached for the stubby levers that controlled the Soyuz’s maneuvering jets.

“Wait!” Stoner yelped. “If we don’t link up with the tanker we can’t complete the mission!”

“If we do link with tanker—boom!”

Stoner sagged inside his restraining harness. “I don’t believe it. How could…?”

A flash caught his eye and they both craned toward the observation ports. In total silence the tanker blew apart, a trio of small flashes followed quicker than an eye-blink by an enormous fireball that nearly blinded them.

Stoner squeezed his eyes shut. Federenko growled something too low for Stoner to catch.

The fireball faded into darkness, leaving a burning afterimage against Stoner’s eyes. There was no shock wave, no noise, no debris pattering around them. It was as if they had been watching a silent picture. Stoner couldn’t believe it was real.

“Gone,” Federenko said heavily.

Stoner rubbed at his eyes, then looked out through the port again. Nothing but the unutterably distant stars.

“Gone,” he admitted. “And where does that leave us?”

“We are dead men, Shtoner. Without propellants from tanker, we cannot get back to Earth.”

It took a few moments for the realization to sink in. Finally Stoner heard himself say, “But we have enough fuel to make the rendezvous with the alien, don’t we?”

Federenko gave him a long, solemn look. “Da,” he said at last. “Plenty maneuvering fuel now.”

“Then let’s do it!” Stoner said. “That’s what we came out here for, isn’t it? Let’s do it!”

Federenko’s bearded face almost smiled. “I knew you would say that, Shtoner.”

“What else is there?” Stoner asked, feeling strangely excited. “Let’s go!”

Johnson Space Flight Center

“Hey, it’s quittin’ time, man!”

Hank Garvey planted his ponderous bulk on the computer analyst’s desk and leaned toward the skinny youngster.

“We got an emergency on our hands, boy,” Garvey said, his voice murderously calm and deep, like the throaty warning cough of a lion.

“The next shift…”

“Uncle Sam wants yew,” said Garvey. “Yer the best goddam’ computer jockey in the Center. I know, ’cause I’ve had to lissen to yew tellin’ me ’bout it a thousand times or two. Now yer gonna prove it.”

“But my ol’lady…”

Garvey laid a hand the size of a football on the analyst’s bony shoulder. “Our man Stoner and his Rooskie pilot are in trouble. Their tanker blew up on ’em.”

“Jeezus!”

“They ain’t hurt. Their spacecraft’s intact, no damage. But they can’t get back home—not unless some damn smart boy comes up with a new flight plan for ’em—damn fast.”

“Holy shit!” the computer analyst said. “Why didn’t you say that in the first place? Okay, okay, get your fat ass off my desk an’ lemme get to work.”

Garvey grinned like a Poppa Bear. “That’s mah boy.”

Chapter 43

The communications center on Kwajalein was in an uproar. Even the technicians at their consoles were yelling at one another in confusion.

Jeff Thompson, standing beside Ramsey McDermott’s chair, was hollering into the old man’s ear, “We can’t let them go on! The farther out they go toward the alien, the more impossible it’ll be to get them back!”

McDermott’s jowls sagged. He had lost ten pounds and aged a decade in the months since he’d first seen the aurora mocking him. His shirt collar gaped around his wizened neck. His hands shook uncertainly. His eyes had lost their fire.

Edouard Reynaud, his arm no longer in its sling, gripped Thompson’s arm. “You must call them back. You must make them come back!”

“Can’t…” McDermott croaked.

“But they can retrofire into a lunar orbit,” Reynaud insisted. “I have the numbers in my head. They should have enough fuel for that.”

Thompson brightened. “Right! If they can get themselves back into an orbit around the Moon we might be able to send something up there to ferry them back to Earth.”

But McDermott shook his head weakly. “Stoner won’t listen…”

“QUIET!” an amplified boice roared.

Everything stopped. People froze where they were. The room went silent, except for the electrical hum of the communications consoles and the buzz of the air conditioners.

Lieutenant Commander Tuttle was standing on a desktop, microphone in hand. He gazed around the room and, satisfied that all attention was on him, let the hand holding the mike drop to his side.

“This is a Navy project,” he said, voice sharp and loud enough to be heard across the stilled room. “And I am the Navy officer in charge.”

Thompson stared at the little lieutenant commander. For the first time since he’d met the man, Tuttle was making his uniform look good.

“The goal of this project is to make contact with that alien spacecraft. Stoner and the Russian are on their way to do just that. So you will all get back to your jobs and stop the yakking.”

“But they won’t be able to return to Earth!” Reynaud shouted, his chubby face going red with either anger or embarrassment, or perhaps both.

“That’s a problem that we’ll have to tackle,” Tuttle snapped. “Stoner is aware of it. He’s the only one of you who’s kept his head. If he’s willing to risk his life to make contact with the alien, the least we can do is see to it that whatever he discovers is received here and properly recorded so that the whole human race can study it. Now get to work!”

They moved. Numbly, sullenly, with grumbles and whispers they turned back to their jobs.

Reynaud, trembling in his perspiration-soaked white shirt, glared across the big room at Tuttle as the Navy officer climbed down from the desk. For the first time in many years, Reynaud knew real anger. He also knew that Tuttle was right.

“There it is!” Stoner shouted. “I can see it!”

Federenko took his eyes from the radar screen and leaned across to look through Stoner’s observation port.

“It glows,” he whispered.

They had come up on the alien craft with the Sun at their backs. The radar image had been fuzzy, almost nebulous, at the longer wavelengths. But when Stoner turned on the microwave radar the image cleared up and showed a smaller but much sharper blip.

Now he saw the spacecraft itself.

It glowed with a strange, eerie, golden light, like a shimmering aura that surrounded the solid craft. The spacecraft was imbedded in the glowing light. From this distance it was still too far away to make out details, but it appeared to be roughly oblong in shape, with a smooth surface and rounded corners.

“No wonder it looked like a comet to the ground radars,” Stoner realized.

“What is the light?” Federenko asked.

“A screen of some kind?” Stoner guessed. “A screen of energy like a magnetic field, maybe. To protect it against cosmic radiation. Maybe a shield against micrometeors, too.”

They were closing fast on it. Stoner floated out of his seat and wormed his way back to the orbital module of the Soyuz. Taking the stubby, compact telescope from its clips on the equipment rack, he focused on the alien ship through the nearest observation port.

“If it’s come all this way from another solar system it must have been in space for hundreds of thousands of years, at least,” he called, loudly enough for Federenko to hear him on the other side of the open hatch. “But its surface looks smooth and clean. No meteoric erosion. No pitting.”

“What is color?”

Squinting through the telescope, Stoner said, “Hard to say. The light around it makes everything look kind of golden.”

“Are cameras recording?”

Stoner glanced at the equipment monitor panel. The camera lights were on. So were the video transmitter lights. “Yes,” he called.

Stoner watched for what seemed like an hour as they glided closer to the spacecraft’s surface and Federenko spoke to ground control. The spacecraft’s surface was absolutely featureless, and as smooth as the skin of a supersonic aircraft. Not a rivet, not a seam, not even a line of decoration.

Then he realized that they were not getting any closer. Leaving the telescope hanging weightlessly, he ducked halfway through the connecting hatch.

“You can get us a lot closer, Nikolai. It won’t bite us.”

“No closer,” Federenko said firmly.

“Come on, we…”

“Orders from ground control. They are working on new course for us, get us back to Earth.”

“Terrific. But in the meantime we’re here!”

“Not to use maneuvering fuel,” Federenko said. “Take photographs, describe spacecraft for radio and tapes.”

“But we can rendezvous with the thing!” Stoner insisted. “For Chrissake, it’s only a stone’s throw away!”

“Too long a throw. You are Olympic champion, maybe?”

“Come on, Nikolai!”

“Must not use maneuvering fuel,” the cosmonaut replied stubbornly. “Orders. Our lives depend on this.”

Stoner pulled back into the ovoid orbital module and peered out the observation port at the alien craft. It was close enough now to make out clearly with the naked eye. It hovered against the stars, tantalizingly near, its golden energy screen glowing, pulsating slowly, like the deep eternal breath of God.

They seemed to be at rest now compared to the alien vehicle. They rode alongside, about a hundred meters off its flank, riding silently against the stars, close enough to touch, too far away to touch. Stoner knew that their placid, seemingly motionless encounter was an illusion. Both craft were hurtling away from Earth, flying farther from safety each second. The alien was heading out of the solar system, back into the the unthinkable gulf between the stars, and unless they broke away and took up a new trajectory, Stoner knew that he and Federenko would also leave Earth’s grip forever.

He stared hard at the alien spacecraft, knowing that a million miles away, men and women were working frantically to find a way to bring them back home safely.

“Fuck it,” Stoner muttered. He reached for his pressure suit, hanging limp and lifeless on the opposite wall of the orbital module.

“What you do, Shtoner?” Federenko called from the command module.

“I’m going out,” Stoner said, yanking on the pressure suit leggings. It was no simple matter in zero gravity. “I’ll use the backpack maneuvering jets to get to it.”

“Not enough fuel in backpack. Alien is too far away.”

“Nudge us a little closer, then. Close enough for me to reach it.”

“No.”

“You’ve got to, Nikolai!”

Federenko appeared at the hatch, his dark face set in a solemn frown. “I want to save our lives, not kill us foolishly.”

The exertion of wriggling halfway into the pressure suit made Stoner bob weightlessly across the orbital module. He put a hand against the ceiling to steady himself; his feet dangled inches from the floor.

“Sit down, Shtoner,” Federenko said. “Calm yourself.”

“Listen. I could take both backpacks—yours and mine. One to ride me out there, the other to get me back.”

“Foolishness.”

“But it’d work!” he said. “There’s enough fuel in the two of them to make it okay, isn’t there?”

Federenko turned away from him.

“Isn’t there?” Stoner grabbed him by the shoulders.

“Yes,” said the cosmonaut. “But I forbid it.”

Stoner went back to struggling into the pressure suit.

“Shtoner, I am in command.”

“And I’m a third-degree black belt,” he said, reaching down for his boots. “Are you going to help me or do we fight?”

“You will kill yourself.”

“Nikolai, if we get back to Earth I’ll have to live with myself. Do you think I could, knowing that we got this close and didn’t go the rest of the way? That sonofabitch has traveled light-years to reach us! The least I can do is cover the last hundred meters to meet him.”

Federenko said nothing. He solemnly watched as Stoner pulled on his boots and began zipping up the suit.

“Well, are you going to help me or are you going to just stand there and sulk?” Stoner taunted.

Scowling, Federenko pulled his own backpack from its rack and started adjusting its shoulder straps.

“You are killing me also,” he said. But he helped Stoner into the backpack.

The television screens at the front of the control center showed the alien spacecraft glowing against the star-flecked heavens. For long minutes now the Soyuz radio had been silent.

Jo sat at her computer console, every nerve tingling, stretched taut with tension, a headphone clamped over her glistening black hair.

“Go ahead, Houston,” she said into the lip microphone. “I can hear you clearly.”

Markov stood tensely behind her, and beside him Zworkin hovered like a protective mother hen. Uniformed security police armed with machine pistols stood a few yards off. Other men, bulky, hunch-shouldered, scowling men in dark suits prowled all through the huge command center, eying everyone suspiciously.

Jo watched her computer screen fill with data: numbers and symbols flashing across the tiny screen faster than any human eye could follow. She glanced up at the smaller wall screens flanking the main picture of the alien spacecraft. A new booster was being fueled hurriedly out on one of Tyuratam’s eighty working launch pads. A new tanker to be launched into a high-acceleration rescue trajectory. The Americans, with their faster and smarter computers, were working out the flight plan that would get the tanker to the Soyuz in time to save Federenko and Stoner. Jo had become the liaison link between Texas and Tyuratam.

The command center was astir with quiet, organized frenzy. Computers and humans were working their hardest. Markov gazed around the vast room and saw the security police, their steely eyes constantly moving, their hands never far from the guns they carried.

As if shooting up the place would help, he said to himself.

Zworkin had spent an hour on the phone with Bulacheff in Moscow. Great upheavals were taking place. Maria had been called off for questioning by her superiors. She’ll either be made a Hero of the Soviet Union for foiling the saboteurs or we’ll both end our days in prison, Markov knew. It all depends on who wins what in the Kremlin.

“Very good, Houston,” Jo said into her microphone. “The data’s coming through. Thank you.”

She yanked the headset off and let it clunk on the console’s desktop, then leaned back in her chair.

“They’ve got the big NASA computers working out the high-energy trajectory,” Jo said.

“Will that be enough?” Markov wondered. “Can they get the new tanker into position for them?”

Jo looked up at him, her dark eyes shadowed with fatigue and fear. “If they can’t, no one can.”

“What if ground command send up new orders, a new flight path that will get us back?” Federenko grumbled as he checked out Stoner’s suit. “You will be out there…”

“I’ll be in touch over the suit radio,” Stoner said.

“Da. And when I say to come back, you will say, ‘Not yet. One more photograph.’ ”

Stoner chuckled. Satisfied that the suit was sealed, Federenko handed him the helmet. Stoner pulled it on, locked it in place, slid down the visor and sealed it.

“I’ll come back when you tell me they’ve got us a new trajectory that’ll get us home,” Stoner said, his voice muffled inside the helmet.

Federenko looked unconvinced. He held up one finger, then squeezed back through the hatch into the command module and swung the hatch shut.

Stoner was alone now.

“Radio check,” the cosmonaut’s voice rumbled in his earphones. “Can you hear me?”

“Loud and clear.”

“Very good.”

Stoner glided over to the controls that pumped the air out of the orbital module. Nikolai’s giving me his backpack for this, he thought. If his rescue depends on going EVA, he’s just thrown his life away.

“Shtoner.”

“Yes?”

“Good luck, Shtoner.”

“Thanks, Nikolai. I appreciate…everything you’ve done.”

“Say hello to alien for me.”

Stoner laughed. “I will.”

He cycled the air out of the ovoid chamber and opened the outer hatch. Pushing the extra backpack out ahead of him, Stoner stepped out into nothingness. He drifted free of the Soyuz, then turned and surveyed the situation.

The Earth was far away. No longer a huge smear of awesome girth, it was now a crescent of blue and white hanging in the star-scattered dark. Stoner put out a gloved hand and covered the planet of his birth with an upraised thumb.

He could see the Moon, too, a smaller crescent. The Sun’s fierce blaze was over his left shoulder; he had no intention of looking in that direction, but he could see at the corner of his vision the glowing disk of the Sun’s zodiacal light: cosmic dust, rubble and debris left over from the formation of the planets, eons ago.

A slight soundless puff from the thrusters at his waist and he squarely faced the alien spacecraft. It floated serene and aloof inside its golden, pulsing aura of energy.

Slowly, tugging the spare backpack on its tether, Stoner approached the alien spacecraft.

“Nikolai, do you suppose that energy screen could do damage to a slow-moving object, like an astronaut?”

“Could be,” Federenko’s voice responded. “Keep talking…everything is relayed to Tyuratam automatically.”

“Okay.”

Describing what he was doing as he did it, Stoner pulled up the tether that held the extra backpack, reeled it up until the pack was in his grasp, then pushed it out ahead of him. The effort slowed his approach to the alien spacecraft as the backpack sailed out ahead of him, the long tether gradually, slowly unwinding.

“The tether’s insulated,” he said. “If the screen causes an electrical discharge it won’t run back up the line and zap me. I hope.”

He held his breath as the backpack glided into the glow of energy, then passed through it with no discernible effect.

“Did you see that, Nikolai?”

“Nothing happened.”

“Right. Good.” Stoner licked his lips. “Now it’s my turn.”

“Cameras are recording. Television transmission is working.”

Stoner touched the controls at his belt and felt the thrusters push against the small of his back, gently, for just a flash of a second, like the encouragement a schoolteacher gives a reluctant child. He glided toward the golden, pulsing light.

“Almost there…”

The glow seemed to be all around him for a moment, there was a brief sharp crack! in his earphones, and then he was clearly inside the screen. He twisted around for a view of the Soyuz.

“I’m through it! Can you hear me?”

“Da.”

“It’s like being inside a gold-tinted observation dome. I can see through it. Doesn’t obscure my vision much.”

“I see you also.” Federenko’s radio voice was as strong as ever, although a slight background hum now accompanied it.

Stoner could feel his heart pumping. “Okay,” he said. “I’m going to…going aboard it.”

“Be careful, Shtoner.”

The extra backpack, still drifting at the end of its tether, bumbped into the curved side of the spacecraft and bounced harmlessly off it.

“It’s cylindrical,” Stoner reported into his radio microphone, “with tapered ends. Sort of like a fat cigar. Light tan in color. Looks like metal. No protuberances, no antennas that I can see. Very smooth finish. About twenty, twenty-five meters long; five or six deep.”

He was coming close to it. The craft loomed before him, dominating his vision. Stoner’s lips felt dry. His innards burned.

“Kind of light brown in color…I said that already, didn’t I? Looks like metal. Definitely metal. Well machined. No sing of rivets. No seams. Like it was made whole, cast out of a mold or something. No markings. Hasn’t been pitted at all—like it’s brand new. That screen must eat up micrometeoroids and any other junk it’s encountered…”

As he reached the curving side of the massive spaceship, Stoner instinctively put his hand out. He touched it, rebounded slightly, and with his other hand pulsed the thrusters that gently pushed him against the craft’s hull again.

“Yeah, it’s got to be metal. Feels like metal.”

He planted his boots against the ship’s hull. They clung.

“Hey! I think it’s magnetized! My boots are sticking to it.” Stoner pulled one boot free; it took only a slight effort.

“Boots are non-magnetic,” Federenko said flatly.

“Well, something’s holding them,” Stoner answered.

He stood erect on the curving hull, a lone visitor on a world twenty-five meters long. He took one step, then another. It felt tacky, as if he were walking across a freshly painted surface that hadn’t quite dried.

“Going forward,” he said. “At least, I think it’s forward. Could be aft—this thing looks the same at both ends.”

Carefully, Stoner planted one booted foot in front of the other.

And felt the breath rush out of him.

A line of light suddenly glowed the length of the ship and his earphones gave out a low-frequency whining hum. Not loud enough to hurt, just loud enough to make certain that it could not be ignored.

The line of light flickered through every color of the spectrum. It was like watching a rainbow rippling under a stream of water.

“It’s color!” Stoner shouted, describing it. “Then it goes dark…I think it goes into the infrared and ultraviolet, beyond human vision.”

The whining in his earphones also wavered up and down in pitch and Stoner realized that he could only hear it during the few seconds when the line of light was off.

“It’s going through the whole electromagnetic spectrum! Visible light, radio frequencies…must be putting out pulses of x-rays and gamma rays, too. Can you hear me, Nikolai?”

The cosmonaut’s voice came through despite the background noise. “I hear you. The high-energy detectors on instrument panel are silent.”

Stoner watched the flickering light, fascinated, almost hypnotized. “It’s saying, ‘Welcome aboard,’ in all the colors of the rainbow.”

Federenko’s unruffled voice replied, “Switch to radio frequency two. Perhaps hum is not there.”

They went through all four channels on the suit radio. The whine persisted on all of them, running up and down the scale in contrapuntal rhythm with the line of light.

“Hold everything!” Stoner yelled. “It’s…something…”

Up at the nose of the craft the line of flickering light suddenly split into two parallel lines, then looped around to form a circle. The metal of the hull inside the circle seemed to brighten.

“Something up at the nose.” Stoner described the circle. “Maybe it’s a hatch.”

“Be careful, Shtoner.”

“I’m going up there.”

Trembling, throat dry, too excited to be afraid, Stoner stepped slowly toward the glowing circle.

He stood at its edge as the whine in his earphones worked its way up to a shrill screech and then cut off completely. The line of light cut off too. But the circle of metal continued to glow dully, almost as if heated from within.

“It’s glowing,” Stoner reported. “Could it be radioactive? A nuclear heat source? Maybe I’ve cooked myself.”

“No radiation counts from detectors here,” Federenko replied.

“Maybe the screen blocks it.”

Federenko said nothing.

But the glow was subsiding now and Stoner saw that the metal inside the circle was becoming milky, translucent. He strained his eyes at it.

“I think I can see something…”

Slowly he got down on his hands and knees and put the visor of his helmet against the hazy surface.

“You look like religious pilgrim,” Federenko called, “at prayer.”

Ignoring him, Stoner reported, “It’s clearing up. It’s becoming transparent. I can see inside…not much light down there, but…”

He peered through the glassy surface, forcing himself with sheer willpower to see what was inside. Then it hit him with the power of a physical blow.

“Oh, my god in heaven,” he whispered. “It’s a sarcophagus.”

Manhattan

Deep inside the windowless bowels of the ABC News building, the FCC official shook his head in wonder.

“A sarcophagus? What the hell’s he mean?”

The network vice-president, a bright, dazzlingly intense young black man wearing a maroon cashmere jacket, answered, “Whatever it is, we’ve got to get it on the air. Now.”

Hugh Downs was on the monitor screen, anchoring the ongoing coverage of the space mission. An image of the alien spacecraft as seen from the Soyuz’s cameras was displayed behind him.

“On the air? Live?” The FCC man blanched.

“Got to.”

“No! Too risky. Suppose he finds something…awful? The panic…”

The network VP jabbed a finger toward the monitor screen. “Half the country is already scared stiff of this thing and the other half don’t really believe it exists at all! We got to put it on live, man, let them see for themselves. Otherwise nobody’s going to believe it!”

“I’m not sure…”

“Well, I am.” He picked up the phone and gave the necessary orders.

The FCC man said gloomily, “If you do it, the other networks will go to live coverage too.”

“Good. Long as the Russians are feeding it to us live, we oughtta put it out on the air live. This delay crap is for the birds.”

“But I don’t have the authority to allow live broadcast! I shouldn’t be involved…”

“Listen,” the VP snapped. “Why do you think the network brass put me on this hot seat? Part of their affirmative action program? I get paid to make decisions, man! If this works, I’m a genius, I’m on my way to the top of the heap.”

“And if it doesn’t work? If there’s a panic or some kind of reaction from Washington?”

“Then I’m on my way back to Philadelphia, with my death certificate in my hand.”

Chapter 44

“I can see right through the metal,” Stoner said into his helmet microphone. “The metal’s become transparent.”

“He is dead?” Federenko asked.

“Must be. Or frozen. Maybe he’s just preserved…you know, cryonically.”

Stoner’s pulse was racing and he felt sweat trickling along his skin, inside the pressure suit. It was difficult to make out details of the alien’s form—he saw a long, very solid-looking body stretched out on a bed or bier of some sort. There was a head, shoulders, two arms. He couldn’t see the lower end of the body.

“Speak!” Federenko commanded. “What do you see? Your words go straight to Tyuratam.”

“Okay, okay…”

Stoner pressed his visor close to the transparent hatch again, to get a clearer view. And there was no hatch. His helmeted head sunk an inch or two below the rim of metal that framed the circular hatch.

“Oh no…” He pulled back, then ran his gloved fingers around the rim of the circle. It was open, as if the metal that had been there moments earlier had dissolved.

“Nikolai,” he called, fighting to keep his voice from climbing too high. “The hatch—first it went transparent, now it’s disappeared altogether.”

“Disappeared?”

“Gone. Vanished. Just an open hole where solid metal was a minute and a half ago.”

Federenko asked unbelievingly, “It is open?”

“Yes. I’m going inside.”

“Wait. I check with ground control first.”

Stoner shook his head inside the fishbowl helmet. At their distance from Earth it was taking nearly six seconds for Federenko’s messages to reach Tyuratam, and another six for their responses to get back to the Soyuz. Plus the time in between while they screw around trying to make up their minds, Stoner thought.

“I’m going in,” he said.

“Wait, Shtoner.”

But he already had his hands on the hatch’s rim and started gingerly lowering his legs through the opening.

“I’m halfway through. No problem.”

“Shtoner, it could be dangerous.”

“I don’t think so.”

He floated down inside the craft and touched his boots to the soft flooring. They stuck gently, just as they had on the outside of the hull.

He turned slowly in a full circle, taking in the interior of the alien spacecraft.

“I’m inside,” he said, his voice unconsciously hushed. “Can you hear me?”

“I hear you.” Federenko’s voice in his earphones was weaker, streaked with sizzling static, but clear enough to understand easily.

“It’s a lot smaller in here than the ship’s exterior dimensions. This must be just one compartment. All the machinery’s hidden behind bulkheads.” He shivered. “And it’s cold in here. Colder than outside. How can that be?”

“What do you see?”

Stoner turned to the elevated bier and the creature resting on it. He took a step toward it, then stopped.

The curved walls of the compartment were starting to glow. Not like molten metal, but like the soft radiance of a moonlit sky. As Stoner watched, slack-jawed, the hull turned milky white, then translucent, and finally as clear as glass.

“Shtoner! Answer!” Federenko was bellowing. “Can you hear me?”

“I can see you, Nikolai,” he answered, awed. “The whole damned hull has turned transparent. Just like the hatch did. I can see right through it!”

A pause. Then Federenko grumbled, “It is the same as always from here. Dark metal. Not transparent.”

“A one-way window,” Stoner mused. “Christ, what’d that be worth to Corning?”

“Who?”

Stoner giggled as he stood beside the bier and looked across the hundred or so meters of vacuum to the Soyuz. It looked squat and ugly to him now, a primitive artifact from a primitive world.

“They have one helluva grasp on materials sciences, I’ll say that for them.”

“Describe, Shtoner. All is being transmitted.”

He swallowed hard and looked down at his gloved hands. They were trembling.

“Shtoner, talk.”

“This whole section of the interior is about four meters long—say, twenty-five feet. Almost the full five meters wide, but only two and a half, three meters high. The floor is solid and opaque. So’s the back wall of the compartment. But the nose and side walls are perfectly transparent. As if there weren’t any hull there at all. I can see right through it.”

He stepped to the edge of the floor and put his hand out, timidly. The gloved fingers touched the invisible hull; it felt spongy, giving.

“Hull’s still there, though. Hasn’t vanished completely, the way the hatch did. And it’s very cold in here, as if energy can go out through the hull, but none can get in. This thing must’ve been designed by Maxwell’s demon.”

Turning back to the alien, Stoner took a long look in the dim starlight. Then he remembered the lamp hooked to his belt and turned it on.

He leaned over the alien’s body. It was very long, but thin, emaciated, desiccated.

“He’s more than two meters tall, I’d say. No clothing. Very slim, plenty of ribs showing. Body’s covered with some kind of orange-brown fuzz. Not hair, really. Looks more like a nap on velvet. Almost.”

“The figure is human?” Federenko asked.

“Sort of. Two arms, one head. Body’s much longer than ours…legs start where our knees would be. And there are four of ’em, four legs. Little knobby ones with round hoof-like pads at the ends.”

“Wait…” Federenko said. “Tyuratam reports, your words being broadcast all across Soviet Union, Europe, America, Asia, many other places.”

“I’m on live, Nikolai? In Russia?”

Federenko hesitated, then replied, “In U.S.S.R., broadcast is delayed fifteen minutes so censors can make certain nothing harmful is let out.”

“And in the States?”

“Live, I think.”

“I’d better watch my language.”

Federenko said nothing.

Stoner turned back to the alien. “Arms are longer than ours. The hands have only two fingers each and the ends of the fingers look like suction cups—suckers, like on an octopus.”

“The head? The face?”

“Seems to have two eyes, but they’re closed. I don’t see a nose of any sort, but there’s a mouth—lips, at least. Wide and thin.” Stoner couldn’t bring himself to touch the creature, although he badly wanted to see what was behind those lips, those closed eyelids. “Same kind of nappy fur covers the whole face, even the eyelids. The head is rounded, large-domed, very smooth. I don’t see what he breathed with.”

“Is it breathing?”

“No,” Stoner said. “He’s dead. I can feel it. There’s no atmosphere in here. This chamber’s been in vacuum for millennia. Cold, too. Frost is forming on my visor.”

“Turn up suit heater.”

“Right. I’m doing that.” The miniaturized fan in the helmet’s collar hummed a bit louder.

As the tendrils of frost cleared from the edges of his visor, Stoner saw that there was writing on the bier alongside the alien’s body. And artifacts: a metal cup, a translucent sphere the size of a child’s ball, a rod of something that looked like wood. He tried to pick up the rod but it stuck fast to the surface of the bier. As he described it all into his microphone he tried to dislodge the other objects. None of them would move.

“This is a sarcophagus, Nikolai. A tomb. I know it is. This guy died a million years ago and had his body sent into space—like an Egyptain pharaoh. He had himself sent out in a sarcophagus.”

“But why?”

“As an ambassador!” The answer hit Stoner’s conscious mind as he pronounced the words. “Of course! As an ambassador! What better way to make contact with unknown intelligent races scattered across thousands of light-years?”

“Ambassador?”

“Yes!” Stoner knew he was right. “He’s saying to us, ‘Here, I want you to see me, to know that I exist, my civilization exists. You aren’t alone in the universe. Take my body. Study it; study the artifacts I’ve brought along with me. Study my ship. Learn from me.’ What better way to share knowledge? To show that his intent is totally peaceful, benign?”

Federenko was silent, thinking.

Stoner went back to his description. “He’s got a jaw that looks like it hinges the same way our own jaws do. No ears, but there’s a couple of circular patches on the sides of his head…they look almost like outcroppings of bone. Not horns, they’re flat. Sense organs of some kind.”

“What sexual organs?” Federenko asked, then added, “Biologists want to know.”

Stoner grinned. “They would. Nothing visible in the usual place, but there’s some kind of protuberance halfway down his torso. And his fuzz is slightly different color around there, more yellowish.” Christ, it looks like he died with a hard-on, Stoner thought.

“Wait,” Federenko said. “We are getting a transmission from ground control.”

Stoner walked around the raised platform, bobbing in the zero gravity as his boots clung slightly to the spongy flooring. There were more artifacts on the alien’s other side. A straight edge, a square covered with dots that were connected by thin lines. An astronomical map? he wondered. This ark is a damned treasure house; he’s brought his whole civilization with him.

Federenko’s voice interrupted his musings. “Switch to frequency two, Shtoner.”

Stoner clicked the suit radio switch on his wrist and the Russian’s voice said, “Shtoner, this frequency is for private talk. Not for broadcast.”

“Okay.”

“Ground command is working out new course for us, to get us back. New tanker is being launched.”

“I knew they’d figure something out,” Stoner said.

“We will fire retro-rockets to break present course. Very soon.”

A tingle of alarm went through Stoner. “How soon?”

“Computers working on it. But you must be ready to return to Soyuz when I give command.”

“Sure,” Stoner replied.

“Photograph everything now,” Federenko said. “Time is short.”

“Yeah, okay. I’m switching back to frequency one now. I want everybody to hear what I’ve got to say.”

Federenko grunted. “Tyuratam estimates more than one billion people hear your voice.”

Good, Stoner thought. Now they’ll know.

Unhooking the bulky 35 mm stereo camera from its case at his belt, Stoner said for broadcast:

“I think it’s clear now that this alien has come in peace. He’s offering us his body and his treasured possessions, giving them to us, for us to study. He’s telling us that we have nothing to fear—that there are other intelligent races scattered among the stars. We’re not alone. The universe is filled with life, and it’s civilized, intelligent life.”

He was starting to babble and he knew it, but his hands clicked away with the camera while he chattered on:

“We have nothing to fear! This isn’t the end of our world, it’s just the beginning! Do you realize what that means? Intelligent civilizations don’t wipe themselves out with wars or pollution or overpopulation—not always, not inevitably. We have a future ahead of us as wide and bright as the stars themselves, if we strive for it, if we work together, all of us—the whole human race as a species, as a family, as one family unit in the great interstellar community of intelligent civilizations…”

In Rome, St. Peter’s Square was thronged with tens of thousands who stood in awed silence, watching the giant TV screens that had been set up there by the government. Finally the Pope appeared, not at the usual balcony, but at the head of the cathedral’s steps, flanked by red-robed cardinals and the colorful Swiss guards.

The mammoth crowd surged toward the Pontiff, its roar deafening. He smiled and nodded and gave his blessing to them all.

In Washington the President watched the rendezvous with the alien spacecraft in the privacy of his family room, with his wife and children clustered close around him. Downstairs in the West Wing the staff watched, too, and for at least a few hours all thoughts of the upcoming national conventions were suspended.

In Moscow, Georgi Borodinski phoned the commander of the Red Army missile forces and personally told him to deactivate the pair of hydrogen-bomb-tipped missiles that had been ready to intercept the alien spacecraft.

A few blocks away from the Kremlin, the Minister of Internal Security picked a small pistol from his desk drawer and, with a sardonic smile twitching at his lips, he placed its muzzle against his temple and pulled the trigger.

At the control center in Tyuratam, Jo’s face lit up as she watched the readout glowing on her computer screen.

Turning to Markov, who still stood by her side, she said, “It’ll work! We can get them back! They’ve got to break their current orbit within the next half hour. If they do that they can coast until the new tanker reaches them.”

Markov whooped and lifted Jo out of the chair and kissed her. One of the uniformed guards behind them twitched at the sudden noise and leveled his gun at them.

“I love you like a sister!” Markov proclaimed loudly, as the guard’s partner silently pushed the muzzle of the machine pistol down toward the floor, with a reproving frown.

Oblivious to what was going on behind him, Markov added in a whisper for Jo’s ear, “I never did believe in that silly taboo against incest, you know.”

Stoner was hoarse, his throat raw, but still he talked, minutely describing each artifact arranged along the alien’s sides as he snapped stereo photos. Questions were flooding up from Tyuratam and Kwajalein.

“No, no sign of other life forms,” Stoner answered, his throat rasping. “No plants or seeds or other animals. Maybe they’re in other compartments of the spacecraft.

“I’ve tried to get into the rest of the ship, but it’s no go. Just a smooth blank wall that won’t open up. It’s going to take a lot of study to figure out how they work their entrances and exits.

“The biggest discovery among the artifacts, I think, is this star chart. At least, I think it’s a star chart. I don’t recognize any of the constellations, but there’s writing on it…looks like writing, a lot of circles and curlicues.”

Federenko’s heavy voice broke in. “Shtoner, we have new trajectory data. Tanker is being sent to meet us. We must retrofire in eleven minutes.”

“Eleven minutes?” Stoner’s heart stopped in his chest. His voice nearly cracked.

“Ten minutes, forty-eight seconds, to be exact.”

Stoner’s gaze flashed to the alien resting on his bier. He’s spent thousands of years to get here and I have to leave in ten fucking minutes?

“No,” he protested. “We need more time. We can’t…”

“No more time,” Federenko said flatly. “Come back to Soyuz now. There is no other way.”

“Nikolai, I can’t! Not yet!”

“Now, Shtoner.”

He looked through the transparent hull of the sarcophagus, toward the distant stars. Then at the shrunken Earth, so far away, and finally at the stubby Soyuz.

“Nikolai, please…”

“We must go, Shtoner. Or die here.”

Stoner’s lips were dry and cracked. He felt the chill of death breathe on him, and he turned to stare once again at the alien. All the distance you’ve come, to offer us your body, your knowledge, everything that you are and you represent. So much to learn from you…

“Shtoner.”

“No,” he said quietly. “I’m not coming back with you, Nikolai.”

“Shtoner…”

“I’m going to stay here, with him. Maybe in another few million years some other civilization will find the two of us.”

And he turned off his suit radio.

Kwajalein

The noontime sun beat down on the silent, deserted street. Inside the air-conditioned offices, bungalows, house trailers, every man and woman on the island sat transfixed before their television sets. The same scene showed on every screen: the alien spacecraft floating in the void. The same voice came from the alien craft: Stoner’s.

“No, I’m not coming back with you, Nikolai.”

In the bustling communications center, everything stopped. Men and women froze at their jobs and stared at their screens.

Only Reynaud reacted.

“No! No, he can’t do that! He mustn’t, it’s not necessary!” The cosmologist rushed across the room, red-faced and puffing, toward Tuttle.

“Let me talk to him!” Reynaud screamed. “Give me a link to him! In the name of Christ, let me talk to him!”

Everyone tore their attention from the communications screens to the florid, screeching madman. Tuttle put his hands out in front of him, as if to protect himself from the wild-eyed Reynaud.

“You want to talk to Stoner?”

“Yes! Quickly! Before it’s too late! I can save him! I know I can!”

Chapter 45

Stoner felt strangely calm. All the big decisions were behind him now. There was no more need to struggle. No need to worry. All his life had pointed to this ending, he realized. He would finish life alone, untouched by anyone, away from them all, lost in the starry wilderness with his member of an alien race.

Another loner, he thought, gazing down at the alien’s strange, immobile face. Were you like that in life? Is that why you chose this way to spend eternity?

In New York the FCC monitor was screaming, “Get him off the air!” while the ABC News vice-president grabbed at his flailing arms to keep him away from the master control panel. In Moscow the Soviet censor, livid with anger and fear, slammed his heavy fist into the button that cut the Soyuz transmission off the worldwide broadcast. TV screens all around the globe still showed the picture of the alien spacecraft as seen by the Soyuz cameras, but suddenly there was no voice transmission coming from space.

Stoner had relaxed into an almost fetal-like curl, hanging weightlessly a foot or so above the floor of the chamber. Through the transparent walls of the ship he could see the distant crescent of Earth and the Soyuz, still parked about a hundred meters away. It seemed to be staring at him accusingly.

Stoner flicked on his suit radio.

“…you must return,” Federenko was saying, with frantic determination. “That is an order. Only seven minutes remain…”

“Nikolai, I’ve just realized something,” Stoner said. The cosmonaut fell silent. “This spacecraft—this tomb—must have been built to seek out G-type stars, I’ll bet. Our friend here came from a star that’s similar to the Sun.”

“No time for philosophy, Shtoner.”

“And once it reached a G-class star, it searched for planets with strong magnetic fields. That’s got to be right! That’s why it headed for Jupiter first: the strongest magnetosphere in the solar system. And then toward Earth, the strongest magnetic field among the inner planets.”

“Six minutes and thirty seconds,” Federenko growled.

“The strong magnetic fields are targets for two reasons,” Stoner went on, ignoring him. “First, the spacecraft taps electromagnetic energy to recharge its batteries…or whatever it uses for energy storage. But far more important, it’s likely that only planets with strong magnetospheres can support life. Life needs a strong magnetic field to act as an umbrella that shields the planet’s surface from cosmic radiations!”

“Shtoner, stop this foolishness. Come back.”

“Did you get all that, Nikolai? Was it sent to Earth? It’s important.”

“Yes, yes. Now come back.”

At CBS News, Cronkite was putting on a bravura performance, talking over the static image of the alien spacecraft, filling in with facts, conjectures, history, opinion, while his top aides phoned frantically to Washington to see if there was any way to pick up the live radio transmission from the Soyuz again.

In the White House, the President had rushed down to the communications room, where the radio transmission was coming in over the private link from Moscow. A wide-eyed aide told the President that Walter Cronkite was on the phone. The President took it immediately, and frowned with disappointment that it was actually only Cronkite’s producer screaming incoherently into the phone.

A few calming words and Cronkite himself came on. They chatted hurriedly and the President agreed to have his technicians relay the words being spoken in space to CBS. Cronkite hesitated a moment, then asked that the same favor be done for the other networks, as well. The President smiled and nodded.

“Barbara’s going to love you, Walter,” he said.

It sounded to the President as if Cronkite sputtered. “Thank you, Mr. President,” said that famous voice. “If you’ll excuse me now, sir, I should get back to the cameras.”

“Certainly, Walter,” said the President. “God bless you.”

Jo sat stunned at her computer console. All through the vast control center everything seemed to groan to a halt, as if each of the hundreds of men and women working there had simultaneously stopped breathing.

She looked up at Markov’s stricken face.

“He’s going to kill himself.”

“You must stop him,” Markov said. “You must!”

“How can I…?”

“No one else can,” Markov said, bending over her, gripping her shoulder, speaking urgently. “He loves you. You are his only link with life. Speak to him! Quickly!”

Numbly, Jo answered, “But this console isn’t wired for transmission…”

Markov turned to Zworkin, fidgeting nervously beside him. “Do something! Please! She must get through to him!”

Zworkin licked his lips and glanced uncertainly at the guards around them. “I’ll try…”

“You’re all going to have to work together from now on,” Stoner was saying. “All the nations of the world. It can never be the same for any of you. There are others out there, other races, other intelligences—and they’re just as curious and brave as we are.”

“Five minutes, Shtoner!”

“Five minutes, five hours…it doesn’t make any difference, Nikolai. It doesn’t.”

“Wait…communication from ground. On frequency two.”

“No,” said Stoner. “I don’t want to talk with them.”

“A personal message, from a woman. Miss Camerata. She sounds very upset, Shtoner.”

He debated within himself for half a moment, then pressed the button for frequency two.

“Keith! Can you hear me?” Her voice was shaking with anxiety.

“Yes, Jo, I hear you.”

Silence. Stoner realized it would take nearly twelve seconds for her answer to reach him. I’m already so far away that it’s impossible to hold a normal conversation with her.

“Please don’t do this! Don’t be a fool, Keith! Come back, please!”

“I can’t do that, Jo. Not now. If I stay here, I can send you more details about this ark, about our visitor. It’s a treasure house of knowledge. I can’t just leave it after a few lousy minutes and allow it to sail away from us forever.”

He stared hard at the distant blue-white crescent of Earth as his words sped to her and her answer came back.

“But you’ll kill yourself!”

“I’ll have more than an hour’s time before Federenko gets too far away to pick up my suit radio and relay it to you. I can describe everything in this chamber in detail.”

He waited, counting the seconds, preparing what he would say next.

“And then you’ll die!” Jo said. “You’ll die up there!”

“That’s not such a terrible thing. My life hasn’t meant very much to anyone.”

It was better this way. He had time to think, time to get ready for her voice, to freeze his emotions and guard against hers.

“Your life is important, you damned idiot! You can’t throw it away!”

“I’m content to die out here, Jo,” he said. “It’s not such a bad way to go.”

He noticed that frost was forming on the edges of his visor again, despite the suit heater’s highest setting. The cold was seeping into him; he could taste its metallic bitterness.

“No, Keith, no!” There were tears in her voice. “Come back! Come back to me! You have so much to live for…”

“No, I don’t, Jo. This is the climax of my life. This is what it’s all been leading up to. What would I do for an encore?”

“You can’t throw away your life like this! We have our whole lives ahead of us!”

“You have your life, Jo. You’re young, the whole world lies ahead of you.”

The time stretched, and then, “But you said that the world can never be the same now that we’ve contacted the alien.” Her voice was fever-pitched. “We’re not the same! I’m not and you’re not. It’s a new world, Keith. We need you here. I need you here, to be with me.”

“Three minutes, Shtoner.”

Before he could answer either one of them, a new voice spoke in his earphones:

“Switch to frequency three. Priority message from Kwajalein.”

Almost glad to get away from Jo’s voice, Stoner clicked on frequency three as if cutting an umbilical cord.

“Go ahead Kwaj,” he said flatly.

“Dr. Stoner!” The voice was breathless, familiar. “This is Dr. Reynaud, from Kwajalein.”

For a moment Stoner felt almost giddy. He wanted to laugh. Reynaud, our chubby monk. Is he going to try to save my soul?

“Listen to me, please!” Reynaud shouted in his earphones. “I’ve examined the plot the computer has made of the alien spacecraft’s course. It will not be irretrievably lost once you leave it. Do you understand me? It will not be irretrievably lost!”

“You mean we’ll be able to track it on radar?” Stoner asked. “What good is that?”

“That is very important! Vital!” Reynaud’s voice was shrill with excitement. “We can go out and reach it again. We can recapture it and bring it back into an orbit near the Earth!”

Stoner shook his head inside his helmet. “It would take years to build the hardware to retrieve this craft. We just barely got this far and it took six months of planning. And we screwed it up anyway.”

“But we have years!” Reynaud insisted. “The alien will slow down as it moves outward, away from the Sun. We have perhaps five years before it reaches the orbit of Pluto…”

“Five years,” Stoner echoed.

“We can recapture the alien,” Reynaud repeated. “There’s no need for you to stay there.”

Federenko’s heavy voice interrupted. “Two minutes, Shtoner. I must start automatic sequencer now.”

“Yeah…”

“Bring back camera,” Federenko commanded. “Must return photographs to Earth. They are too valuable to throw away.”

“We can recapture the alien ship,” Reynaud said again.

Jo’s voice broke in on the same frequency. “Come back to me, Keith. Please come back.”

And Markov’s. “Keith, dear friend. Don’t be so stubborn. Dead heroes are of no value to anyone. From what Reynaud is saying, you can fly back to our visitor within a few years.”

Shuddering from the growing cold, Stoner realized he still held the stereo camera in his hands.

“The photographs, Shtoner. Now.”

He reached out and touched the spacecraft’s bulkhead, pushing himself toward the hatch. Where the hell is it? he asked himself. The entire hull was so transparent…

He felt it, a circular rim, open to space. Clipping the camera to his belt, he started to pull himself up and out of the alien ship.

Markov was still talking, “We can build new rockets and train new crews. And you will be the natural leader of such a program. You must come back and lead us. We all need you.”

“Please, Keith,” Jo’s voice pleaded.

He was halfway through the hatch when he looked back at the alien, resting silently for countless ages. And his mind filled with the bickering voices and flint-eyed faces of all the bureaucrats he had ever known. And McDermott. And Tuttle. He saw Dooley in his mind’s eyes, the agents and policemen and politicians who didn’t understand, who feared, who resisted, who would not accept reality even when it was thrust at them.

And he saw Cavendish, twisted and destroyed by them. And Schmidt, smashed into a pulp with his own hands.

“Shtoner, retrofire is in one minute. All is automatic. I cannot stay.”

“It’s all right, Nikolai,” he said quietly, sliding back inside the spacecraft’s transparent hull. His boots touched the springy floor at the alien’s feet.

“You get back to Earth, Nikolai. I’m staying here.”

“Keith!” Jo’s strangled scream.

“Don’t commit suicide,” Markov pleaded.

“It isn’t suicide,” Stoner said to them all. “You think I’m killing myself, but I’m not. I’m giving you an incentive, a double reason to come out as quickly as you can and recapture this treasure house. Because I’ll be here—frozen. Maybe I’ll be dead. But just maybe…maybe, I’ll be preserved, suspended, waiting to be brought back to life.”

“What are you saying?”

“It’s a vacuum in here. No air. Temperature’s pretty close to absolute zero. It’s preserved the alien for god knows how many millennia. It ought to preserve me for a couple of years.”

He took a breath, realized their reply couldn’t reach him for many seconds, and went on, “It’s cold enough to flash-freeze me once I turn my suit heater off. I’ll ride with the alien for a few years. If you really care about me you’ll come out and get me before the two of us leave the solar system altogether.”

“Keith, you can’t…” Jo’s voice broke into sobs.

“I won’t be dead,” he told her gently. “I’ll be waiting for you, frozen, suspended between life and death, waiting for you to reach me and bring me back to life. Like the tale of Sleeping Beauty, only with our roles reversed.”

Markov’s voice was filled with grief. “She can’t speak, Keith. She wants to, but she can’t.”

“Kirill…Jo, listen to me. Make them work together. Create a global space effort, make the politicians do what needs to be done. Get the whole human race involved in this. We have the chance to reach the stars, all of us, to come out of the cocoon that we’ve been living in. Make them understand, make them look to the stars.”

The delay seemed to get longer with each exchange.

“How can we?” Markov’s voice pleaded. “We’re only ordinary people. We need you, Keith. You must return to lead us!”

“No, Kirill,” he said firmly. “You’ll have to lead them. It’s all up to you now. You and Jo.”

He waited for a reply.

“Ten seconds to retrofire,” Federenko’s glum voice tolled. “I can’t do it,” Markov answered at last. “You must come back. You must!”

“Too late, Kirill. It’s in your hands now. You’ve got to change them—all of them. Change the world for me, Kirill.”

Federenko broke in, “Farewell, Shtoner. You are a very brave and very foolish man. Good luck.”

“So long, Nikolai. Stay in training.”

“Keith!” Markov’s voice begged.

Stoner turned off the radio and watched the Soyuz. Its retrorockets puffed soundlessly, a brief flare against the dark, and the craft slid away, silently speeding off, dwindling until it was lost against the stars.

He turned back to the alien, swallowed hard against the rawness in his throat. He tried to rub his aching eyes, but his hand bumped against the sealed visor of his helmet. Shrugging, he went back to describing everything he could see.

And as he did so, he wondered, Could he be frozen too? Not dead? Can we revive him someday?

He knew that human medical science knew of no way to revive a frozen body, not without rupturing the cells and killing the person. That was for the future. With a grim smile, Stoner thought, Maybe I’ll shame them into making progress on that front, as well.

Jo sat stiffly in her chair before the communications console, the tears dried from her eyes, leaving no trace of emotion on her face except the smudges down her cheeks. The other technicians, row after row of them at their consoles, tried not to glance in her direction as they directed Federenko’s return flight toward the landing area at Karaganda, some six hundred kilometers to the east.

Markov sat beside her, blank-faced, his eyes a million miles away. Stoner’s voice was weaker as it rasped, static-streaked, from the console speaker. He was describing the spacecraft’s interior as emotionlessly as a lecturer detailing an archaeological specimen.

Markov seemed to shake himself into awareness. He reached into his pockets for a cigarette, muttering, “He’s made his decision. There’s nothing we can do about it.”

She looked at the Russian and saw that his eyes were filled with tears.

“He isn’t dead,” Jo said softly. “He won’t die…not unless we fail him. We can reach him, bring him back to us, bring him back to life.”

Glancing at the armed guards still surrounding them, Markov said, “We have much work to do, then.”

“Yes,” Jo agreed. “But we can do it. We can change the world.”

Markov nodded grimly. “I never thought I would become a crusader…an evangelist.”

“But you will be, won’t you?”

“For you,” he said softly. “For him.”

“No,” Jo corrected. “For yourself. For all of us. For Russia and the whole world.”

A slow smile spread across his lips. “You are just as bad as he is.”

“Worse,” Jo said. “I’m here on Earth. I can watch your progress.”

Markov got to his feet, drew himself up to his full height. “It will be an interesting battle. I’ve never been inside the Kremlin, you know.”

Jo smiled up at him. “We’ll win the battle, Kirill. I know we will.”

He nodded and put the cigarette to his lips.

Jo turned back to the console. Stoner was still patiently describing the contents of the spacecraft-tomb:

“…there doesn’t appear to be anything like a periodic table of the elements, or anything else that I can recognize. If there’s a Rosetta stone aboard this ark, it’ll be some piece of scientific information that the alien civilization has worked out similarly to the way we’ve worked it out…”

Suddenly Jo heard herself telling Markov, “I’ve got to talk with him. One more time. Before…before it’s too late.”

Markov nodded.

“Alone…just the two of us, with no one else on the frequency.”

He grinned down at her. “You expect Russians to allow you to speak in private?” With a tug at his beard, Markov said, “Well, if we’re going to change the system, we might as well begin here and now.”

The messages were coming in from all across the Earth now. Stoner hovered inside the alien crypt, utterly spent, feeling the eternal cold of infinity congealing around him, turning him to lead. He listened to the voices that called to him.

The President of the United States sent his thanks and prayers and an assurance that America would bend every effort to reach the spacecraft and bring him back to Earth.

The head of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, speaking on behalf of the peoples of the U.S.S.R., praised Stoner for his dedication to science and his bravery and promised that the Soviet Union would participate in any program to reach the spacecraft.

His Holiness, the Pope, spoke personally to Stoner, promised that he would work unceasingly to save his body and would offer daily prayers for the preservation of his soul.

The Secretary General of the United Nations, the Vice-Chairman of the People’s Republic of China, Jeff Thompson from Kwajalein, politicians from Britain and Japan, scientists from other lands, people Stoner had never heard of—all the voices of Earth spoke to him, one by one, growing fainter, farther removed, whispering against the crackling background radio noise of the cosmos.

And then a voice he recognized.

“Keith, Keith, this is Kirill. Can you hear me?”

“Yes, Kirill. Faintly.”

“Jo wants to speak to you…privately, on frequency four. No one else will eavesdrop, I promise you.”

A burst of static from some unseen star rasped in his earphones. Stoner waited it out, then answered, “I’m switching to frequency four.”

For long moments he heard nothing but background hiss and crackle. Then:

“Keith…oh, god, Keith, what can I say?”

Say you love me, he thought. But he replied merely, “I’m here, Jo. I can hear you.”

The time waiting for her response was an eternity. “Why, Keith? Why have you done this? Why didn’t you come back to me?”

He smiled sadly. “I’m a blackmailer, Jo. I’m holding a hostage to force them to come up here to the rescue. I’m shaming them into it.”

Silence, except for the sibilant whisperings of the stars. Finally:

“And what about me, Keith? Don’t you care about me?”

“Farewell, Roxanne,” he quoted lamely, “for today I die…And my heart, so heavy with love I have not told, cries out…” But he couldn’t remember the rest.

He flexed his gloved fingers as he waited for her reply. It was getting difficult to move. His blood was turning to ice.

“Did you mean that?” she asked shakily. “Do you love me, Keith?”

It was safe to tell her now. “Of course I do, Jo. I’ve loved you for a long time.”

He waited for response. The seconds ticked by, longer and longer.

“And I love you, Keith.” Her voice was faint, barely discernible above the background static in his earphones. “I love you.”

He had nothing else to say. His lips were growing numb.

“We’ll come for you, Keith! We will!”

“I know you will, Jo. Don’t let them stop you, kid. Don’t let them forget. I’ll be here, waiting for you.”

With a final shuddering breath, he clicked off the heater in his suit.

Chapter 46

Jo stood alone in the twilight shadows on the roof of the barracks building. She had gone up there to cry.

The floodlamps weren’t on yet, and an evening star hung low over the horizon, shining brilliantly. For a moment she fantasized that it was the alien spacecraft bearing Keith inside it.

The breeze sighed down from the hills, dry and warm. She could hear the faint, tinny noise of a radio somewhere off in the gathering darkness. With a startled shock of understanding, she realized that the voice on the radio was speaking English. An American broadcast, she said to herself. They’re letting an American broadcast through!

It was a news broadcast, of course. “Reaction” stories to the long day’s events, now that Stoner was permanently out of reach.

Jo listened, despite herself. The announcer was reading an item about a flying saucer organization in Missouri that indignantly maintained that the alien aboard the spacecraft was not of the same race as the aliens who had been sending UFOs to Earth.

“According to the Missouri saucer experts,” the announcer said archly, “we have found the wrong aliens.”

Instead of crying, Jo smiled. There are so many fools in the world, she thought. So many. She lifted her face to the heavens, to the stars that were starting to appear in the darkening sky.

“Thanks, Keith,” she whispered into the night. “They’ll have to send a team of astronauts to pick you up and bring you and your friend back to Earth. It’ll take a few years to put it all together, but when they go out after you, I’ll be with them.”

Then she turned and headed downstairs, dry-eyed, head high, determined to get to Houston as quickly as possible to begin her training.