Voyagers IV - The Return Read online

  “Interesting,” said Stoner. “In my earlier life we set up our project for contacting the alien starship on Kwajalein. That’s an atoll in the central Pacific.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Parallels,” Stoner muttered. “The two worldlines almost merge together, but not quite.”

  “You said you’d let me talk with Holly.”

  Nodding again, Stoner replied, “Yes. You’ve earned that much.”

  CHAPTER 10

  It was awkward trying to hold a conversation with a two-hour lag between “How are you?” and “I’m fine.” But once Stoner had left his apartment, Tavalera’s phone chimed and there was Holly on his wall screen, bright and pert and obviously happy to see him.

  This is real, Tavalera said to himself. I’m really talking to her. I think.

  He poured his heart out to Holly, telling her everything, including Stoner’s deception. Once he’d run out of words he waited, fidgeting in his apartment for nearly two hours before the phone chimed again.

  “He tricked you?” were her first words to him. “Why? What’s he up to?” Holly’s expressive face went from an annoyed frown to a happy grin. “Okay, never mind. We’re talking and it’s so great to see you, Raoul, hear your voice. I want to make arrangements to bring you here to the habitat soon’s we can; I don’t like the idea that those nutcases are gonna start throwing nukes at each other. I’ll send an appeal to the United Nations and ask to get you and your mother sent here. . . .”

  On and on Holly talked, saying just about what she’d said in the faked conversations that Stoner had rigged. He knows how she thinks, Tavalera told himself as he listened to Holly, watched her face, felt the warmth of her presence even though they were separated by a billion kilometers. He must’ve dug that out of my mind, my memories of her.

  “. . . and if that doesn’t work I’ll come back there myself and pry you loose with a crowbar, if I have to!”

  Tavalera grinned at her. That’s my Holly, he thought. She loves me. She wants me with her. She still loves me.

  Tavalera was whistling as he entered his office the next morning. Angelique heard him through the thin wall that separated their offices.

  He’s happy, she thought. She wished she could be happy, too.

  Most of the conference arrangements had been set. The public announcement would be made on worldwide news broadcasts in a few days. The secret meeting in New Mexico, though, was another matter altogether. Angelique had to get the chiefs of state of Greater Iran, China, and the United States away from the public conference on Tahiti and whisk them to New Mexico to witness the ritual dismantling of an American hydrogen bomb. The news media could know nothing of this. That wasn’t too difficult: the national governments and religious movements behind them had tight control of the news media.

  The tricky part was to make certain that Stoner would be there, in the precisely right spot for the hydrogen bomb’s “accidental” explosion to destroy him.

  Besides that, Archbishop Overmire was having some fresh thoughts of his own.

  He called Angelique into his office that morning for her regular progress report.

  “We need a reliable man to detonate the bomb,” the Archbishop said, perspiring as he sat behind his desk despite the office’s frosty temperature. Angelique thought he looked worse than usual, more tired, his eyes bloodshot, his hands trembling slightly.

  He’s anxious about this meeting, she told herself. He’s working harder than usual and it’s taking a toll on his health. Wondering what his blood pressure might be, Angelique thought that the stress of the conference just might kill the Archbishop and save her the trouble of removing him.

  “I’m searching for a suitable volunteer, Your Eminence,” she said. “It’s a bit tricky: the person must be technically knowledgeable yet willing to accept holy martyrdom.”

  Overmire closed his reddened eyes briefly, then asked, “Do you mean that no one with technical qualifications has the spiritual willingness to become a martyr?”

  “I’m sure there is someone,” Angelique replied. “It’s just that we haven’t found him yet. Or her.”

  “Her? A woman?”

  Suppressing the bitter smile that played on the corners of her lips, Angelique said, “There are women who are trained nuclear technicians, Your Eminence.”

  The Archbishop looked somewhat surprised. “Are there? I wouldn’t think women were interested in such things.”

  Angelique said nothing.

  “How far from the explosion will I be?” Overmire asked.

  That’s what’s worrying him, Angelique realized. “More than ten kilometers, Your Eminence. In a concrete shelter that’s blast proofed and hardened against the radiation pulse from the bomb.”

  “And the Iranian and Chinese leaders will be with me?”

  “Yes, Your Eminence. And the President, of course. You will watch the dismantling—and the accident—over a television link.”

  “Very good.” Archbishop Overmire squeezed his narrow eyes shut again, then said, “I’ve been discussing this with that Melillo person.”

  “The President’s chief of staff?”

  “Yes,” said the Archbishop with obvious distaste. “An unpleasant man. Demanding. Impatient.”

  “He seems hard-driving,” Angelique agreed.

  “He’s not a Believer. Not one of us. Brought up as a Catholic, I’m certain.”

  “Most likely,” she murmured.

  “But he’s been giving this matter considerable thought,” Overmire conceded as he pulled himself up straighter in his high-backed chair. “He thinks we should launch preemptive strikes at the Iranian and Chinese nuclear facilities at the same time as the demonstration in New Mexico.”

  Angelique felt a shock race along her nerves. “A preemptive strike?”

  “To knock out their nuclear capabilities.”

  “With their leaders in the same room with you? And the President?”

  “That’s the beauty of it,” Overmire said, breaking into a pleased smile. “When the, uh . . . ‘accident’ happens we can claim that it was an attack on us! Our preemptive strike will be seen as a justifiable counter-blow.”

  It took Angelique a moment to digest what the Archbishop was proposing.

  “But Your Eminence,” she objected, “the Chinese and Iranian leaders will both know that they didn’t order a strike on the United States.”

  Waving a pudgy finger at her, Overmire gloated, “Ah, yes, each one of them will know that he did not order a strike. But neither of them will know for certain that the other one didn’t order it!”

  “That’s . . . deceitful.”

  “To prevent those heathens from starting a nuclear war? To protect the New Morality and all that it stands for? A little deception is perfectly acceptable.”

  Angelique wanted to protest, but she saw that the Archbishop had made up his mind. Besides, she thought, if anything goes wrong he can blame it all on the White House.

  Overmire added, “Melillo thinks we can present them with a fait accompli. We’ll have nuclear weapons and they’ll have none. We can dictate our terms to them.”

  “Terms? What terms?” Angelique asked, her voice hollow.

  Overmire’s smile dimpled his flabby cheeks. “Rounding up all the jihadists. The end of terrorism. Putting China in its place. Ensuring that America is supreme for the next hundred years or more.”

  Angelique’s breath caught in her throat.

  “Think of it,” the Archbishop said as he clasped his hands on the desktop. “We will break the backs of our enemies with one blow. Crush them. We will begin the holy task of bringing all those heathens to Christ’s loving mercy.”

  CHAPTER 11

  The man made Angelique’s blood run cold. She wanted to turn her face away from him. Focusing on his dossier, displayed on her desktop screen, she saw that his name was Nagash Janagar; he was a top-rated technician who had worked for most of his life in nuclear power plants in India and the United States
.

  But as he stood before Angelique’s desk she thought he looked too frail and emaciated to carry out the vital task that needed to be done. Janagar was small, slight, his skin not dark so much as sallow, his rumpled shirt and shapeless slacks making him look bedraggled, as if he’d been hauled in by the police rather than coming to her office as a volunteer.

  It was his eyes that particularly troubled Angelique. Big, dark, sad eyes that stared at her almost without blinking. Desperate eyes. The eyes of a trapped animal, she thought.

  “You understand that this is strictly a volunteer position,” she said carefully from behind her desk. She almost felt as if she wanted to duck beneath it, use it as a protective barrier between herself and this gaunt, cheerless man.

  “I understand very well that I will become a holy martyr,” said Janagar in rhythmically accented English. “I understand completely, totally.”

  Angelique turned slightly in her swivel chair and studied Janagar’s dossier on her screen.

  “You’re a convert to Christianity?” she murmured.

  “Yes indeed. After the Biowar wiped out my family, my wife and children, my entire village, I was rescued by a salvage team from the United States of America. They brought me to a hospital that was run by the New Morality. It was there that I saw the light of the true faith.”

  “You remained in the United States.”

  “I became a citizen. I married an American woman, although she was of Hindu parentage. I fathered three children by her, one of them a boy.”

  Angelique nodded. Before she could ask another question, though, Janagar continued:

  “You wonder why a happily married man seeks martyrdom, don’t you? I will tell you. I have an inoperable brain tumor. My case is hopeless, the doctors tell me.”

  Without consciously willing it, Angelique thought of the old woman whom she and Stoner had helped to escape from the hospital. She was a hopeless case, too: hopeless because of the hospital staff’s rules of triage and the New Morality’s refusal to use secularist therapies. Stoner had saved her with banned, forbidden, sinful nanotechnology.

  Janagar went on, “My life insurance policy is small, too small to pay for my son’s education. But if my death is ruled an accident, the benefits to my family will be doubled.”

  Angelique stared into the man’s tragic eyes. He’s willing to die for his family, she thought. He’s willing to give up his life to help his children.

  In a voice that was barely above a whisper, she said, “So you are willing to . . . to die in this ‘accident.’ ”

  “For the greater glory of God,” Janagar said. He actually smiled, white teeth gleaming against his ashen skin.

  Angelique nodded. For the greater glory of God, she thought. Then she realized, He’s willing to commit murder to make life better for his children.

  A fragment of memory from her school days touched the surface of her mind. A quotation she’d read from some secularist writer who was on the list of prohibited authors. But Angelique had smuggled a tattered, broken-spined old copy of one of his books into her convent bedroom and read it by flashlight, beneath her ragged, frayed blanket.

  A fanatic who is willing to die for his cause thinks nothing of killing you for his cause.

  CHAPTER 12

  “This really was a tropical paradise, once upon a time,” said the Chinese physicist.

  Tavalera nodded as he gazed out on the old harbor of Papeete. It was filled with magnificent yachts jammed along the piers, practically gunwale to gunwale. Tavalera thought he could walk from deck to deck completely across the harbor, all the way out across the channel to the graceful green cone of Mooréa, standing peacefully against the bright blue sky, its top wreathed in cloud.

  The Chinese physicist took in a deep, exaggerated breath, then grinned at Tavalera. “That’s one thing they haven’t changed: the climate. Not even the greenhouse warming has affected the climate here very much.”

  “I guess,” Tavalera muttered.

  “No flooding here, to speak of,” the physicist went on. “Not like Shanghai and Singapore. Tahiti is at a nodal point in the Pacific. The rise in sea level is barely noticeable here.”

  The physicist looked youthful, but Tavalera knew that to be invited to this international meeting he had to be a scientist of some stature, some achievement. Tavalera had met the man as he was checking into the hotel just after arriving on the island. They had fallen to talking and quickly agreed to take a walk around the town and its jam-packed harbor.

  “You’re not a physicist, are you?” the Chinese asked. His name was Quan Zheng, and he was from the University of New Shanghai. He was a millimeter or two taller than Tavalera, with long legs and long arms and the kind of erect posture and slim torso that comes from dedicated daily exercise. His face looked almost European, despite the slight cast to his eyes.

  “How can you tell?” Tavalera asked.

  With a grin, Quan replied, “You’re not asking any questions.”

  Tavalera grinned back at him. “Neither are you.”

  “That’s because I’m giving you all the answers before you can ask.”

  They laughed together and decided to find the nearest bar. As they headed down a street that led away from the harbor, Tavalera realized that Quan was right. The one thing that hadn’t changed about Papeete was the climate. Otherwise, the city had been completely altered. According to the histories Tavalera had scanned, Papeete had been a sleepy little town huddled around its harbor. Shops lined its main street, and the merchants who owned them lived behind their stores. But that was long ago. Now Papeete rose in concrete and steel, just like the rebuilt Honolulu and Singapore and every other waterfront, tourist-dependent city.

  Hotels and shopping malls, Tavalera saw, each one gaudier than the next. It made him feel depressed. Might as well be in Vegas, he said to himself. Then he added, But Vegas is a lot farther from the beach.

  Tavalera had only that first afternoon for sightseeing. He had dinner that evening with Angelique, who introduced him to a half dozen of the bureaucrats she’d been working with to arrange this international conference. He sat there in almost total silence while they jabbered and chattered with each other, mostly in British-accented English, about seating arrangements and programming conflicts and scheduling the island’s limited number of limousines to pick up the VIPs as they arrived at the airport.

  Once the dinner finally broke up and he headed for his room, Angelique got into the glass-walled elevator beside him.

  “When will Stoner arrive?” she asked while the lobby atrium dropped away from them.

  Tavalera shrugged. “Who knows? He might be here already.”

  She looked surprised, almost alarmed. “He’s not in contact with you?”

  Feeling the resentment about Stoner’s trickery rising in him once more, Tavalera answered, “It’s strictly a one-way contact. He uses me like a telescope.” Before she could reply, he added, “More like a microscope, really.”

  “He’s got to be here,” Angelique said.

  “He will be. When he’s good and ready, not before.”

  “I have a plane standing by to take him to New Mexico. He’s got to be there. The whole reason for this conference depends on his being there to watch us dismantle a nuclear weapon.”

  Tavalera repeated, “He’ll be there, when he’s good and ready.”

  The elevator reached Tavalera’s floor. The doors slid open.

  “Good night, Raoul,” Angelique murmured.

  “Yeah,” he said as he stepped out and headed for his room.

  JO

  “You what?” Stoner demanded.

  Jo smiled coolly at her husband. She was standing in the starship’s control center, bathed in lights that changed colors with their moods. At this moment, the lights were shifting from restful aqua toward vibrant scarlet.

  “I helped Cathy to produce nanomachines that can alleviate the population problem.”

  Stoner tried to glare at his wife, b
ut he knew that wouldn’t work. He didn’t like what she had done, but he couldn’t be angry with her over it.

  “That’s the kind of interference I’ve been trying to avoid,” he grumbled. “I want them to solve their own problems.” Reluctantly he added, “If they can.”

  “They can’t,” Jo said flatly. “So we’re going to help them.” Before Stoner could object, she went on, “Besides, you’ve always said that we’re part of them, we’re part of the human race. So it’s not really interference, is it? It’s not a matter of us versus them.”

  Stoner nodded dumbly at Jo. There’s no use arguing about it, he thought. It’s already done. Besides, it might work.

  CHAPTER 13

  Stoner still had not put in an appearance on Tahiti by the time the conference formally opened. Angelique was getting close to panic, Tavalera realized as he took his chair at the long table reserved for New Morality staff in the rear of the huge conference room.

  It was the hotel’s ballroom, actually, but all its partitions had been rolled away to accommodate the more than six hundred delegates to the conference. People from every nation on Earth were included, even the usually aloof Swiss, who had suffered disastrous losses in tourist income from greenhouse melting of the Alps snowcap.

  The keynote speaker for the conference’s opening session was Archbishop Overmire, of course. Tavalera watched as the grossly overweight Archbishop made his painful way to the podium and leaned his bulk on both arms. Even from way back in the rear of the room Tavalera could see the man panting with the effort of walking a dozen paces. The Archbishop’s face looked shiny: perspiration, Tavalera knew. The man’s sick; this conference just might kill him.

  Tavalera began to get antsy as the morning wore on. One droning speech after another by religious and secular leaders from Europe, Asia, Africa, Latin America. The only bit of relief came from the Australian Prime Minister, who gave a brief and witty address that ended with, “We all know the problems. Too many people, too few resources. I’m here to find some bloomin’ answers.”