Voyagers I Read online

  * * *

  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.”

  “U
nless…”

  “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 y
ou 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?”