Voyagers IV - The Return Page 21

  “The Archbishop? Here? Himself?”

  “Yes. His office said it was an urgent matter.”

  “Probably about those damned Northern Lights,” muttered the chief of staff.

  “Yeah, what about the Lights?” the President asked. “Doesn’t anybody know why they’re shining every night?”

  The staffers glanced around at one another.

  “What do the science people have to say about it?” the President asked. Before anyone could reply, he added, “Say, who in the world is my science advisor, anyway?”

  “The position of science advisor was removed from your staff,” said the chief. “You don’t need a science advisor; you’ve got the head of the National Academy of Sciences, remember?”

  The President blinked, puzzled, then brightened. “Oh, yeah, that Jewish fella. What’s his name?”

  “Feingold.”

  “That’s right. Feingold.”

  “Should I call him to this meeting with the Archbishop?” asked the appointments secretary.

  The President waved a hand in the air. “Naw. It’s not that important.” Turning back to his chaplain, he said, “The Archbishop, huh? You’d better be in on that one, Reverend.”

  CHAPTER 12

  Startled, Angelique blurted, “You’re here!”

  “Yes,” said Stoner mildly. He pulled over one of the leather armchairs from in front of the Archbishop’s desk and dragged it to her side, then sat next to Angelique, close enough to touch her if he just leaned forward a little.

  “I understand that we’re going to visit the White House this afternoon.”

  “How did you—” Angelique caught herself and smiled. “Of course. You know what I know, don’t you?”

  “Surface thoughts,” said Stoner. “I don’t want to invade your privacy, but I need to know what’s going on.”

  She felt her pulse speeding up. Licking her lips, she said, “Yes, we’re scheduled to meet with the President of the United States this afternoon.”

  “He’s not highly regarded, is he?”

  Surprised, Angelique replied, “He won election by a very large majority.”

  “He had the endorsement of the New Morality. His opponent didn’t. That’s enough to gain a large majority these days.”

  She nodded thoughtfully, thinking that Keith Stoner could win any election he chose to run in. He could make himself Emperor of the world if he wanted to, she knew. And I could stand at his side, as close to him as I am now.

  Angelique watched, almost amused, as Stoner effortlessly moved through the White House’s security systems. She herself had sent all her identification and background information ahead. When their New Morality tilt-rotor touched down on the landing pad on the White House grounds, Angelique allowed the Marine Corps guard to check her retinal pattern with a handheld scanner.

  When the guard turned to Stoner, standing beside her, he said, “That won’t be necessary, son.”

  The Marine turned to his sergeant, who wore three rows of ribbons on his chest and a half-dozen hash marks on his sleeve. His face was granite hard, as blank and expressionless as a statue of an ancient Roman centurion.

  Stoner smiled at him. Pointing to the ribbons, he asked, “Is that for the Guatemala campaign?”

  Breaking into a pleased smile, the sergeant replied, “No, sir. The Sudan.” Touching the top row of his decorations, he added, “This one’s for Central America.”

  “And the Purple Heart,” said Stoner.

  “Yessir. That’s how I got my bionic leg.”

  Stoner nodded. “My military service was with the air force, a long time ago. I’ll never know if I could have made it as a Marine.”

  “Aw, hell, sir. If I made it, you coulda.”

  With that, the sergeant waved them through the checkpoint.

  And so it went. Angelique and Stoner walked under the blast-proof canopy to the next checkpoint, just inside the door to the executive mansion itself, and the final one, down in the basement corridor of the West Wing. Stoner sailed past metal detectors, retinal scanners, X-rays, and chemical sniffers with a smile and a few soft words.

  At last they were escorted by a tall, cadaverously thin woman in a skirted business suit to an intimately small anteroom. The woman gestured to the striped sofa against the wall opposite the door that led into the Oval Office.

  “Please wait here. It will be a few moments.”

  They sat.

  Almost immediately the door swung open and a stoop-shouldered gray-haired man in a tie and jacket stepped into the anteroom. Stoner noticed a tiny pin in his lapel: twined palm boughs. The man smiled warmly and put out his hand. “I’m Lawrence Yanovan, the President’s media secretary.”

  Stoner rose and took the man’s firm grip. “My name is Keith Stoner.”

  “We were expecting the Archbishop,” Yanovan said, his smile still in place.

  Angelique stood up beside Stoner. She said in an apologetic tone, “The Archbishop is slightly incapacitated, I’m afraid.”

  “Incapacitated? Nothing serious, I pray.”

  Biting her lip as if worried, Angelique confided, “He’s confined to hospital for a few days. I’m his representative for this meeting.”

  Yanovan’s smile faded. “And who are you, sir?”

  “A friend,” said Stoner.

  Yanovan frowned with puzzlement but slowly turned to the door and pulled it open. The three of them entered the Oval Office, where the President of the United States sat behind his desk, smiling genially.

  “How did you get here?” asked Holly Lane, her voice almost a full octave higher than normal.

  Tavalera had simply walked down the little hill and into the village, then picked up the first public phone he’d found and called the chief administrator of the habitat.

  Holly’s eyes popped when he told her he was in Goddard, more than a billion kilometers from where he’d been only yesterday. She came barreling out on an electric bicycle, down the village’s main street, and screeched to a stop at the kiosk by the fountain in the little plaza where Tavalera sat waiting for her.

  They rushed into each other’s arms, oblivious to the few pedestrians strolling along the village street and the driver of the electric truck full of freshly picked fruit who whistled at them from the cab of his vehicle as he drove by.

  “You’re here!” Holly gasped, once she and Tavalera came up for air. “You’re really here!”

  She was as bright and pretty and sparkling as he remembered her. She was warm and lively and full of questions.

  Tavalera told her about Stoner and what was happening Earthside as Holly parked her bike in a public rack and they walked slowly, arms wrapped around each other, back to the red-roofed building where the habitat’s governmental offices were housed.

  It was late afternoon in the habitat, which kept to Greenwich time, like all the human settlements throughout the solar system. As they walked toward the office building, talking incessantly to one another, Holly suddenly stopped in her tracks, made a left turn, and yanked Tavalera along with her.

  “My place,” she said before he could speak another word.

  CHAPTER 13

  As Stoner took the antique rocker in front of the massive mahogany desk, the President smiled pleasantly at him and Sister Angelique. But Stoner saw a wariness in those eyes and, beneath it, uneasiness.

  “The Archbishop couldn’t come himself, huh?” the President asked almost sulkily.

  “He’s in hospital for a few days, sir,” Angelique repeated. Then she quickly added, “No one outside his immediate staff knows about it. He would appreciate it if you held that information to yourselves and no one else.”

  With a glance at his chief of staff, the President murmured, “Of course. We understand.”

  He turned his troubled eyes to Stoner again. But before he could say anything, the chief of staff said mildly, “Perhaps I should introduce myself. My name is Oscar Melillo. I’m the President’s chief of staff.”

&nb
sp; Melillo was smiling, but there was no warmth in his expression. He was a short, round-faced man with light brown skin and thick dark hair. A barely visible scar ran along his right jaw. He must be proud of that scar, Stoner thought. Otherwise he’d have had it erased with cosmetic surgery. It’s his way of showing that he’s tough.

  Angelique spoke up. “Mr. President, this is Keith Stoner. He—”

  “The star man,” said Melillo. “You’re the one who sent that message.”

  “Now wait a minute,” the President said, pointing a finger at Stoner like a pistol. “You’re the guy who claims he’s been to the stars?”

  Stoner replied gravely, “I am. I have been.”

  The President’s light blue eyes narrowed and Stoner saw a flicker of fear in them. “You’re trying to tell me you’ve traveled to the stars? That’s not possible.” He turned to Melillo. “Is it?”

  “Not by any technology we know of.”

  Stoner said, “I’m the one who’s been causing the aurorae each night.”

  “You mean the Northern Lights?”

  “Yes.”

  “You can prove that?”

  With the barest of nods, Stoner said, “That’s easy. You won’t see them tonight. I’ll turn them off.”

  “You can do that?” Melillo asked.

  “Yes.”

  “You’ve got a starship?” the President asked, awestruck in spite of himself.

  “Yes.”

  “Like on the vid shows?”

  Stoner smiled. “Not quite like the shows you’ve seen. Rather different, in fact.”

  Stabbing a finger in the direction of his media secretary, the President commanded, “Get that science guy in here. Pronto! And Akino.”

  “The secretary of defense,” Angelique explained, leaning close enough to Stoner to whisper in his ear.

  Yanovan, seated on the wide sofa next to the empty fireplace, picked up the telephone from its end table and began speaking hurriedly into it.

  “You’ve got to tell us all about this starship,” the President said eagerly. “All about it!”

  “I’d be happy to,” Stoner replied. “As soon as you dismantle the nuclear weapons you’re building in New Mexico.”

  The President’s jaw dropped open. The Oval Office went absolutely silent. Stoner could hear birds chirping in the Rose Garden, outside the floor-length windows behind the President’s desk.

  “Who says we’re building nukes?” the chief of staff growled.

  “The Iranians know it. The Chinese know it,” Stoner said. “You’ve managed to keep it secret from the International Atomic Energy Agency, but they don’t really count these days, do they? And the American people, of course. They only know what they see on the news media, and you’ve got the media controlled very tightly.”

  “This is a security breach of the first magnitude,” said Melillo, his face reddening slightly.

  Ignoring him, Stoner said to the President, “Archbishop Overmire has decided that nuclear weapons are unacceptable. The New Morality is withdrawing its support of the effort.”

  “I’ll believe that when the Archbishop himself tells us,” Melillo growled.

  “I’ve been working with the Iranians and the Chinese. Both are willing to drop their programs if the United States does the same.”

  “And the Russians?” the President asked.

  “They scrapped all their weapons fifty years ago, when all the other nations did.”

  “And they’re not building new ones?” Melillo argued.

  “No, they’re not,” Stoner replied patiently. Then he added in a flat voice, “Not yet.”

  “How do you know all this?” Melillo demanded.

  Stoner looked into his dark, suspicious eyes, then said thinly, “You can’t hide from the kind of technology that I have at my fingertips.”

  “Super technology,” the President breathed. “Alien technology.”

  Melillo grumbled, “The Russkies would love to be the only people in the world with nuclear weapons.”

  “They’re unusable,” Stoner said. “Or rather, if you use them you’ll be killing yourselves. And everyone else on Earth.”

  “The nuclear winter scenario?” the chief of staff scoffed. “We’ve been through the numbers—”

  Suddenly they were no longer in the Oval Office. The five of them hung suspended a hundred meters above a blackened, airless, desolated land. As far as the horizon in all directions nothing moved. The ground was bare hard rock, broken by immense craters, scorched as if by the flames of hell.

  “What . . . ?”

  “Where are we?”

  “What have you done?”

  The President, Melillo, Yanovan, Angelique, and Stoner himself hovered above the barren terrain, floating as if in zero gravity. A bubble of energy encased them, holding air and warmth.

  “This was once an Earth-like planet, green with flowering trees, brimming with life. Great cities lifted their spires to the sky. Billions of intelligent creatures existed here.”

  Higher they rose. Angelique felt no sensation of motion, no hollowness in the pit of her stomach. She knew that Stoner was in control and there was nothing to fear. But the President and his two aides looked close to panic, their arms outstretched as if reaching for a safe handhold, their legs flailing futilely.

  The ground beneath them spread out, all of it blackened, lifeless. Still higher they ascended, and now Angelique could see the curve of the planet’s horizon. Nothing lived anywhere on that world. It was as bleak and shattered as the Moon. No, she corrected herself, thousands of human beings live on the Moon. This world is dead. Totally, utterly, completely dead.

  “What is this?” the President whimpered.

  “This is the fourth planet of a G-type star, a little more than fifty light-years from Earth,” Stoner explained. “A thousand years ago it would have looked almost exactly like Earth to you, although its inhabitants didn’t look very much like bipedal descendants of apes. Yet they were intelligent, as intelligent as you or I.”

  “What happened to them?” Angelique asked, staring at the devastation spread below them, knowing, fearing, what his answer would be.

  “They were intelligent enough to invent nuclear weapons,” Stoner answered grimly. “And stupid enough to use them.”

  Yanovan whispered, “Oh my god.”

  CHAPTER 14

  And abruptly they were back in the Oval Office.

  The President, still seated behind his desk, seemed to have the wind knocked out of him. He sat gasping, mouth open, eyes barely focusing. Angelique sat beside Stoner as before, but now she reached out for his hand. He took hers and squeezed it gently, reassuringly.

  Yanovan was still on the sofa by the fireplace, blinking with a combination of disbelief and barely contained panic. Melillo, though, was tougher. He strode to the side of the President’s desk and practically snarled, “A trick! A cheap hypnotist’s trick!”

  Stoner shook his head. “No trick. I’ll give your astronomers the coordinates of that star. They can confirm that there’s an Earth-sized planet orbiting around it.”

  “That doesn’t mean—”

  “You’ve got to stop your nuclear weapons program,” Stoner insisted. “If you don’t, Earth will end up like the planet we just saw.”

  “Now look,” Melillo said, still standing beside the President’s desk. “We know that the Iranians and the Chinese are both building nukes and missiles that can reach our cities. We’ve got to protect ourselves.”

  “The course you’re following now will lead to nuclear war,” Stoner said. “And nuclear war will destroy the human race, sterilize this entire planet.”

  “I don’t believe it,” Melillo said, shaking his head.

  “Now wait a minute, Oscar,” said the President to his chief of staff. “Why do we need nukes if we’ve got him?”

  Melillo hesitated, then turned to Stoner with a cold smile. “That’s right. The technology you’ve got is way beyond simple little nucl
ear bombs, isn’t it?”

  “Way beyond,” Stoner agreed.

  “So tell us about it.”

  “Wait until my science guy gets here,” said the President. “He’ll understand him better than we will.”

  Stoner said, “I’ll be happy to give you all the information you want—after you’ve dismantled your bombs.”

  Melillo pulled up a chair and sat facing Stoner. “You don’t seem to understand, Mr. Star Man. We’ve got you. You’re surrounded by the best security systems in the world. And several battalions of highly trained troops can be here in minutes. You’re in no position to bargain. You can’t get out of here unless we—”

  But he was talking to empty air. Stoner had disappeared as suddenly as a light winking out.

  Tavalera woke slowly, languorously, feeling completely relaxed and happy for the first time since he’d left the habitat and gone back to Earth. He turned, twisting the bedsheets wrapped around him, and saw Holly smiling beside him.

  “It’s true,” he murmured. “I’m not dreaming.”

  Holly’s smile widened. “If this is a dream, we’re both having it.”

  He pulled her naked body to his and kissed her gently. “I love you, Holly.”

  “I love you, Raoul.”

  “It’s great to be back,” he said.

  “Ummm.”

  Pulling himself up to a sitting position, Tavalera wrapped his arms around his upraised knees. “Earth’s a madhouse, Holly. They’re all nuts back there.”

  “It’s a zillion klicks away. Don’t worry about it. They can’t hurt us.”

  “They’re going to blow themselves to hell.”

  “Let them. We don’t need them.”

  He looked down at her. “My mother’s there.”

  “We’ll bring her out here. I’ll put in the request direct to the U.S. State Department.”

  “The New Morality,” Tavalera muttered. “They run everything now.”

  She shrugged a bare shoulder. “So I’ll talk to them.”