The Best of Bova: Volume 1 Read online

  “Then why . . . ?” Jeremy hesitated, thinking. “If you did all that for us, it would ruin us, wouldn’t it?”

  Rungawa beamed at him. “Ah, you truly understand the problem! Yes, it would destroy your species, just as your Europeans destroyed the cultures of the Americas and Polynesia. Your anthropologists are wrong. There are superior cultures and inferior ones. A superior culture always crushes an inferior, even if it has no intention of doing so.”

  In the back of his mind, Jeremy realized that he had control of his legs again. He flexed the fingers of his left hand slightly, even the index finger that still curled around the trigger of the dart gun. He could move them at will once more.

  “What you’re saying,” he made conversation, “is that if you landed here and gave us everything we want, our culture would be destroyed.”

  “Yes,” Rungawa agreed. “Just as surely as you whites destroyed the black and brown cultures of the world. We have no desire to do that to you.”

  “So you’re trying to lead us to the point where we can solve our own problems.”

  “Precisely so, Mr. Keating.”

  “That’s why you’ve started this World Government,” Keating said, his hand tightening on the gun.

  “You started the World Government yourselves,” Rungawa corrected. “We merely encouraged you, here and there.”

  “Like the riots in Tunis and a hundred other places.”

  “We did not encourage that.”

  “But you didn’t prevent them, either, did you?”

  “No. We did not.”

  Shifting his weight slightly to the balls of his feet, Keating said, “Without you the World Government will collapse.”

  The old man shook his head. “No, that is not true. Despite what your superiors believe, the World Government will endure even the death of ‘the Black Saint.’”

  “Are you sure?” Keating raised the gun to the black man’s eye level. “Are you absolutely certain?”

  Rungawa did not blink. His voice became sad as he answered, “Would I have relaxed my control of your limbs if I were not certain?”

  Keating hesitated, but held the gun rock-steady.

  “You are the test, Mr. Keating. You are the key to your species’ future. We know how your wife and son died. Even though we were not directly responsible, we regret their deaths. And the deaths of all the others. They were unavoidable losses.”

  “Statistics,” Keating spat. “Numbers on a list.”

  “Never! Each of them was an individual whom we knew much better than you could, and we regretted each loss of life as much as you do yourself. Perhaps more, because we understand what each of those individuals could have accomplished, had they lived.”

  “But you let them die.”

  “It was unavoidable, I say. Now the question is, Can you rise above your own personal tragedy, for the good of your fellow humans? Or will you take vengeance upon me and see your species destroy itself?”

  “You just said the World Government will survive your death.”

  “And it will. But it will change. It will become a world dictatorship, in time. It will smother your progress. Your species will die out in an agony of overpopulation, starvation, disease and terrorism. You do not need nuclear bombs to kill yourselves. You can manage it quite well enough merely by producing too many babies.”

  “Our alternative is to let your people direct us, to become sheep without even knowing it, to jump to your tune.”

  “No!” Rungawa’s deep voice boomed. “The alternative is to become adults. You are adolescents now. We offer you the chance to grow up and stand on your own feet.”

  “How can I believe that?” Keating demanded.

  The old man’s smile showed warmness. “The adolescent always distrusts the parent. That is the painful truth, is it not?”

  “You have an answer for everything, don’t you?”

  “Everything, perhaps, except you. You are the key to your species’ future, Mr. Keating. If you can accept what I have told you, and allow us to work with you despite all your inner thirst for vengeance, then the human species will have a chance to survive.”

  Keating moved his hand a bare centimeter to the left and squeezed the gun’s trigger. The dart shot out with a hardly audible puff of compressed air and whizzed past Rungawa’s ear. The old man did not flinch.

  “You can kill me if you want to,” he said to Keating. “That is your decision to make.”

  “I don’t believe you,” Jeremy said. “I can’t believe you! It’s too much, it’s too incredible. You can’t expect a man to accept everything you’ve just told me—not all at once!”

  “We do expect it,” Rungawa said softly. “We expect that and more. We want you working with us, not against us.”

  Jeremy felt as if his guts were being torn apart. “Work with you?” he screamed. “With the people who murdered my wife and son?”

  “There are other children in the world. Do not deny them their birthright. Do not foreclose their future.”

  “You bastard!” Jeremy seethed. “You don’t miss a trick, do you?”

  “It all depends on you, Mr. Keating. You are our test case. What you do now will decide the future of the human species.”

  A thousand emotions raged through Jeremy. He saw Joanna being torn apart by the mob and Jerry in his cot screaming with fever, flames and death everywhere, the filth and poverty of Jakarta and the vicious smile of the interrogator as he sharpened his razor.

  He’s lying, Jeremy’s mind shouted at him. He’s got to be lying. All this is some clever set of tricks. It can’t be true. It can’t be!

  In a sudden paroxysm of rage and terror and frustration Jeremy hurled the gun high into the rain-filled night, turned abruptly and walked away from Rungawa. He did not look back, but he knew the old man was smiling at him.

  It’s a trick, he kept telling himself. A goddamned trick. He knew damned well I couldn’t kill him in cold blood, with him standing there looking at me with those damned sad eyes of his. Shoot an old man in the face. I just couldn’t do it. All he had to do was keep me talking long enough to lose my nerve. Goddamned clever black man. Must be how he lived to get so old.

  Keating stamped down the marble steps of the Sacred Way, pushed past the three raincoated guards who had accompanied Rungawa, and walked alone and miserable back to the pensione.

  How the hell am I going to explain this back at headquarters? I’ll have to resign, tell them that I’m not cut out to be an assassin.

  They’ll never believe that. Maybe I could get a transfer, get back into the political section, join the Peace Corps, anything!

  He was still furious with himself when he reached the pensione. Still shaking his head, angry that he had let the old man talk him out of his assigned mission. Some form of hypnosis, Keating thought. He must have been a medicine man or a voodoo priest when he was younger.

  He pushed through the glassed front door of the pensione, muttering to himself. “You let him trick you. You let that old black man hoodwink you.”

  The room clerk roused himself from his slumber and got up to reach Jeremy’s room key from the rack behind the desk. He was a short, sturdily-built Greek, the kind who would have faced the Persians at Marathon.

  “You must have run very fast,” he said to Keating in heavily accented English.

  “Huh? What? Why do you say that?”

  The clerk grinned, revealing tobacco-stained teeth. “You did not get wet.”

  Keating looked at the sleeve of his trench coat. It was perfectly dry. The whole coat was as clean and dry as if it had just come from a pressing. His feet were dry; his shoes and trousers and hat were dry.

  He turned and looked out the front window. The rain was coming down harder than ever, a torrent of water.

  “You run so fast you go between raindrops, eh?” The clerk laughed at his own joke.

  Jeremy’s knees nearly buckled. He leaned against the desk. “Yeah. Something like that.”

/>   The clerk, still grinning, handed him his room key. Jeremy gathered his strength and headed for the stairs, his head spinning.

  As he went up the first flight, he heard a voice, even though he was quite alone on the carpeted stairs.

  “A small kindness, Mr. Keating,” said Rungawa, inside his mind. “I thought it would have been a shame to make you get wet all over again. A small kindness. There will be more to come.”

  Keating could hear Rungawa chuckling as he walked alone up the stairs. By the time he reached his room, he was grinning himself.

  BORN AGAIN

  Assuming the UFO believers are right, and we are being infiltrated by a generally benign race of intelligent extraterrestrials, why have they come to Earth and what do they want of us?

  In “A Small Kindness,” we saw the first meeting between Jeremy Keating and the alien Black Saint of the Third World, Kabete Rungawa.

  Now we see the result of that meeting, and how it changes Keating’s life. Changes it? In a literal sense, it ends his life.

  Which leads to the title of the story.

  * * *

  The restaurant’s sign, out on the roadside, said Gracious Country Dining. There was no indication that just across the Leesburg Pike the gray unmarked headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency lay screened behind the beautifully wooded Virginia hills.

  Jeremy Keating sat by force of old habit with his back to the wall. The restaurant was almost empty, and even if it had been bursting with customers, they would all have been agency people—almost. It was the almost that would have worried him in the old days.

  Keating looked tense, expectant, a trimly built six-footer in his late thirties, hair still dark, stomach still flat, wearing the same kind of conservative bluish-gray three-piece suit that served almost as a uniform for agency men when they were safely home.

  Only someone who had known him over the past five years would realize that the pain and the sullen, smoldering anger that had once lit his eyes were gone now. In their place was something else, equally intense but lacking the hate that had once fueled the flames within him. Keating himself did not fully understand what was happening to him. Part of what he felt now was excitement, a fluttering, almost giddy anticipation. But there was fear inside him, too, churning in his guts.

  It had been easy to get into the agency; it would not be so easy getting out.

  He was halfway finished with his fruit juice when Jason Lyle entered the quiet dining room and threaded his way through the empty tables toward Keating. Although he had never been a field agent, Lyle moved cautiously, walking on the balls of his feet, almost on tiptoe. Watching him, Keating thought that there must be just as many booby traps in the corridors of bureaucratic power as there are in the field. You don’t get to be section chief by bulling blindly into trouble.

  Keating rose as Lyle came to his table and extended his hand. They exchanged meaningless greetings, smiling at each other and commenting on the unbelievably warm weather, predicted an early spring and lots of sunshine, a good sailing season.

  When their waitress came, Lyle ordered a vodka martini; Keating asked for another glass of grapefruit juice. The last time Keating had seen Jason Lyle, the section chief had ordered him to commit a murder. Terminate with extreme prejudice was the term used. Keating had received such orders, and obeyed them willingly, half a dozen times over the previous four years. Until this last one, a few weeks ago.

  Now Lyle sat across the small restaurant table, in this ersatz rustic dining room with its phony log walls and gingham tablecloths, and gave Keating the same measured smile he had used all those other times. But Lyle’s eyes were wary, probing, trying to see what had changed in Keating.

  Lyle was handsome in a country-club, old-money way: thick silver hair impeccably coiffed, his chiseled features tanned and taut from years of tennis and sailing. He was vain enough to wear contact lenses instead of bifocals, and tough enough to order death for his own agents, once he thought they were dangerous to the organization—or to himself.

  Keating listened to the banalities and let his gaze slide from Lyle to the nearby windows where the bright Virginia sunshine was pouring in. He knew that Lyle had carefully reviewed all the medical reports, all the debriefing sessions and psychiatric examinations that he had undergone in the past three weeks.

  They had wrung his brain dry with their armory of drugs and electronics. But there was one fact Keating had kept from them, simply because they had never in their deepest probes thought to ask the question. One simple fact that had turned Keating’s life upside down: the man that he had been ordered to assassinate was not a human being. He had not been born on Earth.

  Keating nodded at the right places in Lyle’s monologue and volunteered nothing. The waitress took their lunch order, went away, and came back eventually with their food.

  Finally, as he picked up his fork and stared down at what the menu had promised as sliced Virginia ham, Lyle asked as casually as a snake gliding across a meadow:

  “So tell me, Jeremy, just what happened out there in Athens?”

  Keating knew that the answers he gave over this luncheon would determine whether he lived or died.

  “I got a vision of a different world, Jason,” he answered honestly. “I’m through with killing. I want out.”

  Lyle’s eyes flashed, whether at Keating’s use of his first name or his intended resignation or his mention of a vision, it was impossible to tell.

  “It’s not that simple, you know,” he said.

  “I know.” And Keating did. Lyle had to satisfy himself that this highly trained agent had not been turned around by the Russians. Or, worse still, by the fledgling World Government.

  “Why?” Lyle asked mildly. “Why do you want to quit?”

  Keating closed his eyes for a moment, trying to decide on the words he must use. Each syllable must be chosen with scrupulous care. His life hung in the balance.

  But in that momentary darkness, alone with only his own inner vision, Keating saw the man he had been, the life he had led. The years as an ordinary Foreign Service officer, a very minor cog in the giant bureaucratic machinery of the Department of State, moving from one embassy to another every two years. He saw Joanna, young and loving and alive, laughing with him on the bank of the Seine, dancing with him on the roof garden of the hotel that steaming-hot Fourth of July in Delhi, smiling at him through her exhaustion as she lay in the hospital bed with their newborn son at her breast.

  And he saw her being torn apart by the raging mob attacking the embassy at Tunis. While Qaddafi’s soldiers stood aside and watched, grinning. Saw his infant son screaming his life away as typhus swept the besieged embassy. Saw himself giving his own life, his body and mind and soul—gladly—to avenge their deaths. The training, where his anger and hatred had been honed to a cutting edge. The missions to track and kill the kind of men whom he blamed for the murder of his wife and child. Missions that always began in Lyle’s office, in the calm, climate-controlled sanctuary of the section chief, and his measured reptilian smile.

  Keating opened his eyes. “You let them take me, that first mission, didn’t you?”

  The admission was clear on Lyle’s surprised face. “What are you talking about?”

  “My first mission for you, the job in Jakarta. You allowed them to find me, didn’t you? You tipped them off. Those interrogation sessions, that slimy little colonel of theirs with his razor—he was the final edge on my training, wasn’t he?”

  “That’s crazy,” Lyle snapped. “We shot our way in there and saved your butt, didn’t we?”

  Keating nodded. “At the proper moment.”

  “That was years ago.”

  But I still carry the scars, Keating replied silently. They still burn.

  Lyle fluttered a hand in the air, as if waving away the past. Leaning forward across the table slightly, he said in a lowered voice, “I need to know, Jeremy. What happened to you in Athens? Why do you suddenly want to quit?”
r />   Keating did not close his eyes again. He had seen enough of the past, and the shame of it seethed inside him. “Let’s just say that I experienced a religious conversion.”

  “A what?”

  “I’ve been reborn.” Keating smiled, realizing the aptness of it. “I have renounced my old life.”

  For the first time in the years Keating had known the man, Lyle made no attempt to mask his feelings.

  “Born again? Fat chance! I’ve heard a lot of strange stories in my time, but this one—”

  “Is the truth.”

  “Just tell me what happened to you in Athens,” Lyle insisted. “I’ve got to know. It’s important to both of us.”

  “So that you can decide whether to terminate me?”

  “We don’t do that,” Lyle snapped.

  “No, of course not. But I just might happen to have a car accident, or take an overdose of something.”

  Lyle glowered at him. “You hold a lot of very sensitive information inside your skull, Jeremy. We have to protect you.”

  “And yourself. It wouldn’t look good on your record to have a trained assassin going over to the other side.”

  The section chief actually smiled with relief, and Keating could see that Lyle was grateful that the subject had finally been brought out into the open.

  “Have you, Jeremy?” he asked in a whisper. “Gone over?”

  “Which side would I go to? The Russians? But we’re working under the table with them these days, aren’t we? Neither the Russians nor the Americans want the World Government running things. We’re both trying to bring the World Government down before it gets a firm control over us.”

  “The World Government,” Lyle said slowly, testingly.

  Keating shook his head. “If I admit to that, I’m a dead man, and we both know it. I’m not that foolish, Jason.”

  Lyle said nothing, but looked unconvinced.

  “There’s the Third World,” Keating went on. “They love the World Government, with its one-nation, one-vote system. They’re using the World Government to bleed the rich nations white; you told me that yourself. But then, the rich nations are almost all white to begin with, aren’t they?”