Voyagers I Read online

  “He’s sick,” Jo said.

  “But he’s with NATO, and he’s pretty well connected higher up, as well, from what I’ve heard.”

  “I don’t think he would be the man for us,” Markov said slowly.

  “And he’s sick,” Jo repeated. “He’s really in trouble, physically.”

  “I could still talk to him,” Stoner said.

  Markov objected, “But you must not approach him, Keith. You are too well known to be opposed to your Big Mac.”

  “Then how…?”

  “I’ll talk to him,” Jo said. “But I don’t think it’ll do any good.”

  “And I will approach Reynaud,” Markov said.

  They were strolling past the bungalows now. Far down the street, Stoner could see another couple walking slowly toward the beach.

  “Ah, there’s a light in my window,” Markov said. “My darling wife must be waiting up for me.”

  They walked him to his bungalow.

  “Would you care to come in for a nightcap?” Markov asked.

  Jo glanced at Stoner, who shook his head. She declined also.

  “Very well, then.” Suddenly Markov gripped Stoner’s right hand in both of his. Looking straight into the American’s eyes, Markov said, “There are enormous forces working against us.”

  “I know,” Stoner said.

  “More than you realize,” the Russian insisted.

  Stoner nodded slowly. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Yes. We will fight the good fight. Together. Against them all!”

  “Damned right.”

  “Keith…I am proud to be your friend.”

  “And I’m proud to be yours, Kirill. We’ll beat the bastards, you’ll see.”

  “Yes. Of course.” Markov turned to Jo, took her hand, put it to his lips. “And you, dear lady. Any man would gladly face the firing squad for you.”

  “You’re very sweet,” Jo said, grinning, “but much too dramatic.”

  “Ah yes, I know. It’s our national curse. We Russians are an emotional people. We feel things deeply.” He seemed slightly flustered, embarrassed. With a forced little laugh, Markov said, “Well, good night. Perhaps tomorrow our visitor will answer our signals and we won’t need to start a revolution, after all.”

  “Good night,” Stoner said.

  Markov trotted up the cement steps and entered his house. Stoner walked slowly with Jo back toward the hotel.

  “He’s a funny guy,” Stoner said. “I like him.”

  “I do too.”

  “Do you really think Reynaud would be any help to us?”

  “More than Cavendish,” she answered. “That poor guy ought to be in the hospital.”

  “But you’ll talk to him about helping us, won’t you? It’s important.”

  “More important than his health?”

  He looked down at her, walking along beside him. “Of course it’s more important than his health! It’s more important than anything else…”

  “For you, Keith,” Jo said. “It’s important to you. This is your dream, your obsession.”

  For a moment he didn’t reply. Then, softly, “No, you’re wrong, Jo. It’s my life.”

  * * *

  LIFE MAY EXIST ONLY ON EARTH, STUDY SAYS

  By Malcolm W. Browne

  A standing scientific assumption that the universe abounds with advanced, human-like civilizations is encountering a challenge from a small but growing number of astronomers.

  While most scientists continue to believe that extra-terrestrial intelligence must be common in a cosmos filled with trillions of trillions of stars, dissenters increasingly are calling this assumption into question. In fact, they say, it is quite possible that our earthly civilization is the only one of its kind….

  Dr. Michael H. Hart of Trinity University in San Antonio, Tex., has completed a computer analysis of hypothetical planets, sketching in the features they would seem to require to produce advanced civilizations like our own. His conclusion is that, far from being common, civilized life must be exceedingly rare and the one we have on earth may even be unique….

  New York Times

  April 24, 1979

  * * *

  CHAPTER 28

  The Officers’ Club bar was quiet, cool, shadowy. It was not yet six o’clock, but the place was slowly filling up with the after-work, before-dinner crowd. Stoner sat glumly in a corner booth, his back to the wall.

  Markov sauntered in, his head pivoting as he blinked and waited for his eyes to adjust after the burning glare of the street outside. He spotted Stoner at last and came over to the booth.

  “Better get yourself a drink first,” Stoner told him. “There’s no table service until after six.”

  Markov went to the bar, quickly negotiated a vodka-tonic and hurried back to the booth.

  “How was your meeting with Professor McDermott?” he asked as he slid in across the table from Stoner.

  Stoner pointed to the two empty beer glasses in front of him and the nearly empty condition of the third.

  “That bad?” Markov asked.

  “Kirill, we’re in the hands of fanatics,” Stoner said. “Big Mac is a paranoid and Tuttle is a religious nut.”

  Markov took a sip of his drink. “Tell me about it.”

  Stoner began to explain.

  Maria Markova sat in the cushioned chair in the front room of her bungalow. On her lap was a letter from Moscow, just in on the weekly flight from the U.S.S.R. She held an oblong black object in her hands, about the size and shape of a pocket calculator.

  The letter was handwritten in a neat, tight Russian script and signed, “Affectionately, Cousin Anna.” Cousin Anna was nonexistent. The pocket calculator was a cryptographic computer, and Maria was using it to decode her latest orders from Moscow.

  The message was brutally simple: Prevent the Americans from mounting a rendezvous flight to meet the visitor. Use all necessary means available.

  Maria cleared the computer’s little glowering red readout symbols and got heavily to her feet. She burned the letter in the kitchen sink, then went into the bedroom and put the computer back into its fitting inside the electronics suitcase.

  Use all necessary means available.

  That meant Cavendish. He was her only tool, her only weapon. She sat on the bed next to the suitcase. The mattress sagged and squeaked under her.

  Cavendish. She closed her eyes, but still saw the look of agony on the old man’s wretched face. And that was merely when she had been asking him for information. Now she had to use him somehow, and if he resisted, she would have to punish him.

  Maria shuddered.

  Behavioral psychology began with Pavlov’s work on dogs, Maria had learned. Western psychologists developed this into the principle of positive reinforcement: reward the subject when he does the correct thing, and withhold the reward when he fails to do the correct thing. It was a weakling’s approach to the problem, requiring enormous amounts of time and patience, for little return.

  Maria’s superiors had long ago discovered that the reverse principle works better, more surely. Punish the subject for failure, and only when he obeys you absolutely do you withhold the punishment. It was the same principle that Pavlov had discovered, actually. But by manipulating the punishment instead of the reward, you got better results, more quickly. The long-term effect on the subject was deleterious, of course, but that could not be helped.

  Maria fingered the control knobs on her suitcase of electronic gear. The microelectrodes had been implanted in Cavendish’s brain many years earlier, but they still worked, and they were so small that they had escaped detection all these years.

  Western psychologists would have put the electrodes into the brain’s pleasure center, to reward Cavendish for good behavior with a jolt of pure electronic rapture. The surgeons in Moscow, however, knew better. Maria could cause a variety of effects in Cavendish’s brain, ranging from sleeplessness to agony.

  If he refuses to help me, she though
t, with mounting apprehension, I’ll have to torture him.

  Markov gulped down his second vodka-tonic and put the glass precisely on the ring it had left on the Formica table when he’d picked it up.

  “As a revolutionary,” he told Stoner, “I would say that we have hit a stone wall.”

  “That’s your considered opinion, is it?”

  Sighing unhappily, “Yes.”

  Stoner slid out of the booth, walked unsteadily to the bar and got two more beers and two vodka-tonics.

  “You are anticipating a long siege,” Markov said as Stoner put the glasses on their table.

  “A true revolutionary must be prepared for long sieges,” Stoner answered gravely. “And for stone walls.”

  “We have enough of those,” said Markov.

  “In a good cause there are no failures, only delays.”

  Markov raised his glass. “To the revolution.”

  “We will gain the inevitable triumph,” Stoner quoted Roosevelt, “so help us God.”

  “Do you have any plans for dinner?” Markov asked once the glass left his lips.

  Stoner slowly shook his head.

  “Do you foresee eating a meal sometime this evening?”

  “I guess so. No hurry.”

  “Of course.”

  “Were you successful in rousing our good friar, Brother Reynaud?” Stoner asked.

  “If I had good news about that, would I be drinking here with you in this lugubrious mood?”

  “Lugubrious? You are a linguist, aren’t you?”

  “At times,” Markov said.

  “Lugubrious.” Stoner turned the word over in his mind. “Now is the winter of our discontent…”

  Markov raised his glass halfheartedly. “Our revolution is not going well, I’m afraid.”

  “Well, the American Revolution didn’t start off too smartly, either, friend. We’re in our Valley Forge period, right now.”

  Markov’s face brightened a bit. “That’s right. You were a revolutionary nation, too.”

  “Were? We are a revolutionary nation,” said Stoner. “We invented the telephone, didn’t we? Wasn’t that a revolution? And the airplane, the computer, the Mickey Mouse wristwatch—that was a real revolution, my friend.”

  “I thought we invented the telephone,” Markov said, scratching at his beard. “I’m sure I read that in Pravda once.”

  “Okay, you can have the telephone. But we invented TV dinners.”

  “A true revolution.”

  “And bubble gum.”

  They drank to bubble gum.

  Jo pushed her castered chair away from the computer console and glanced up at the big clock on the wall of the Pit. It was slightly past six.

  “I’ve had it,” she told the programmer sitting next to her. “Nine hours with no break except for a lousy sandwich.”

  “And nothing to show for it but chipped nails,” the programmer said.

  She grinned at her. It’s in a good cause, she said to herself. All the extra calculations of the spacecraft’s projected track, they’re more work but they’re necessary for the rendezvous mission. If it comes off.

  To the programmer, she said, “Listen, if they’re not paying you overtime you shouldn’t work overtime. Working through lunch hour was enough.”

  “I just do what I’m told,” she said, getting up from her chair and heading for the ladies’ room.

  A few minutes later Jo went out into the hot sunshine. She decided to stop off at the Officers’ Club before facing dinner.

  As soon as her eyes adjusted to the club’s dimness she saw Stoner and Markov over in the corner booth. Actually, she heard them before she saw them.

  “To the glorious October Revolution and all the revolutionary peoples of the world!” Markov was shouting. “I toast you all, wherever you are!”

  Stoner looked up as Jo walked over to their booth. She asked, “Is this a private celebration, or can anybody join?”

  Markov answered instantly, “Come! Sit down! Join our funeral.”

  “Funeral?” Jo slid into the booth beside the Russian.

  Stoner lifted his glass an inch from the tabletop and saluted her with it.

  “We are celebrating the Fourth of July a few months early.” His words were slightly slurred. “I think.”

  “But why call it a funeral?”

  “Russian melancholy.”

  “Then there is the glorious November Revolution,” Markov said, blithely ignoring their words. “Ah, my friends, that was the turning point. When the immortal Lenin appeared at the train station in Petrograd, the world changed.”

  An unhappy-looking Marshallese waitress, solid and square as a sack of cement, came to their table. “More drinks?” she asked.

  Jo ordered a piña colada. Markov had gone to straight vodka on ice. Stoner stayed with beer.

  When the drinks came, Stoner said, “I think we ought to toast the United States Marine Corps: the brave men who wrested this island from its fanatical Japanese defenders in nineteen forty-something.”

  Looking from one of them to the other, Jo asked, “What’s going on here?”

  “You really want to know?” Stoner replied.

  “Yes!”

  “Don’t ask.”

  For an instant, Jo looked as if she was going to be angry. But then she laughed, shook her head and picked up her frosted goblet. “Okay,” she said. “If that’s the way you want to play it. But at least tell me what we’re drinking to.”

  “To revolution!” Markov shouted.

  “The Copernican Revolution,” said Stoner.

  “The Revolution of Nineteen-Five,” Markov countered.

  “Whatever.”

  They drank.

  “What we need,” Markov said, slapping his emptied glass down, “is an orchestra. We should be playing Tchaikovsky’s ‘Eighteen-twelve Overture.’ ”

  “Not revolutionary enough,” Stoner argued. “How about ‘Stars and Stripes Forever’?”

  “Counterrevolutionary!”

  “It is not!”

  “What about ‘Me and Bobby McGee’?” Jo suggested.

  They both stared at her blankly.

  “Janis Joplin,” she explained. “She was a revolutionary singer in the…oh, forget it!”

  Stoner hunched over the table and the other two leaned toward him. “There’s got to be some way,” he said quietly, “of getting Big Mac to agree to a rendezvous mission. We’ve got to find a way.”

  “True revolutionaries are not discouraged by the stubborn opposition of reactionary elements,” Markov said with perfect diction. Then he burped.

  “We’ve got to find a way,” Stoner repeated.

  “Or make one,” said Jo.

  “Perhaps when they shine the laser on the alien,” Markov mused, “that will tickle him to react.”

  “Him,” Jo said. “You still think of the alien as a male.”

  “It,” Stoner compromised. “What did you mean, ‘Make one’?”

  “Huh?”

  “I said we’ve got to find a way to get Big Mac off his ass, and you said, ‘Or make one.’ What d’you have in mind?”

  Jo blinked at him. “Nothing. I was just…talking.”

  But Stoner’s mind was churning through the alcoholic haze. “Suppose…Kirill, listen…suppose we started to get a response from one of the radio telescopes. Nothing definite…just a few clicks and scratches…”

  Markov looked at him blearily. “You are suggesting that we fake such a response?”

  Stoner waved one hand slowly in the air. “Let’s say we…improve on the return signal a little. Just a teeny little bit.”

  “Very dangerous,” Markov said, shaking his head. “Very unscientific.”

  “Yeah. I suppose.”

  “But would it work?” the Russian went on. “Could you fool your Big Hamburger?”

  “If we had somebody at the radio telescope who knew how to do the trick,” Stoner said.

  “And,” Markov added with an
upraised finger, “if he knew how to keep his mouth shut.”

  A slow smile spread across Jo’s face. “What about Dr. Thompson? I think maybe I could get on his good side.”

  Maria Markova was sitting on her bed, drumming her stubby fingers on the lid of the suitcase. Kirill will be out for hours, she knew. As long as there is a bar open or a pretty girl to chase, he will be busy.

  That gave her the better part of the night to interrogate Cavendish. She had to find some way to use the Englishman to stop the Americans, to prevent Stoner from going through with his plan to rendezvous with the alien spacecraft.

  Stoner, she thought. It all focuses on him. If I can put him out of the way, I will have accomplished my assignment.

  Jaw clenched, she unsnapped the locks on the suitcase and opened its lid. The unit was powered by its own tiny radioisotope source, and the baleful red light that showed it was working glared back at her.

  Maria reached for the transmitter knob and turned it to beam out a hotter, more painful signal. But the face she visualized as she sent the agony on its way was not Cavendish’s. It was her husband’s.

  * * *

  8 OF 56 WP/JNL 1978-8-24 1531494/IDN WASHINGTON (DC) HAS BECOME FOCAL POINT FOR FEDERAL CRACKDOWN ON MANUFACTURE AND DISTRIBUTION OF PHENCYCLIDINE (PCP): FEDERAL AGENTS HAVE UNCOVERED 10 PCP LABORATORIES AND SEIZED MANUFACTURED MATERIALS WITH STREET VALUE OF ABOUT $2 MILLION SINCE JAN/78; SPECIAL AGENT DAVID CANADAY INDICATES MORE PCP HAS BEEN UNCOVERED IN DC THAN IN ANY OTHER US CITY; NOTES PCP ABUSE IS CONCENTRATED ON EAST COAST (M).

  9 OF 56 LAT/JNL 1978-8-20 1545492/IDN THREE LOS ANGELES TIMES ARTICLES DISCUSS EFFECTS OF THE USE OF SYNTHESIZED DRUG PCP, COMMONLY REFERRED TO AS “ANGEL DUST,” ON USERS, HEALTH AND LAW ENFORCEMENT PERSONNEL, AND CHEMICAL COMPANIES; PCP CAUSES UNUSUAL BODY STRENGTH AND IMMUNITY TO PAIN. OFTEN ACCOMPANIED BY BIZARRE AND VIOLENT BEHAVIOR, MAKING IT DIFFICULT FOR POLICE TO USE TRADITIONAL RESTRAINT METHODS; HEALTH OFFICIALS HAVE NOT ESTABLISHED STANDARD REGIMEN OF TREATMENT BECAUSE VERY LITTLE IS KNOWN OF HOW PCP WORKS; PCP IS INEXPENSIVE AND MADE FROM LEGALLY AVAILABLE CHEMICALS…

  * * *